The Newspaper Comics section of the SFACA Collection consists of 2.5 million clippings, tearsheets, and comic sections from American newspapers, dating from 1893 to 1996. Materials in the collection include clipped comic strips, single comic pages, complete Sunday comic sections, and entire newspapers. The focus of the first two years of work on this collection, supported by grants from the Getty Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the Charles D. Farber Memorial Foundation, has been to establish a chronological run of each comic feature, either by amassing a group of clippings, or by identifying each feature's location in the collection of Sunday comic sections.

The distinction between comic clippings and comic sections is significant. The collector's original intent was to establish a complete run, from beginning to end, of every comic feature to have appeared in an American newspaper. In most cases, this meant clipping examples of each feature from various newspapers, for two reasons. First, no single newspaper could have run every comic feature. Second, any given newspaper might print a feature for a certain length of time, and then drop it, either temporarily or permanently. Newspaper strikes and mail strikes could also interfere with the continuous run of a feature in a given publication.

However, some features were never clipped from the original comic sections in which they appeared. The collector recognized that many of the early comic sections, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s, were extremely rare, and should be kept intact. In addition to the comic art they contain, many feature elaborate headers, marginal illustrations, and illustrated advertisements, all forming part of the overall design of the publication. The archivist's division of the two formats into separate series is described below, under "Arrangement."

The goal of the SFACA project has been to present complete listings of comic strip holdings to interested researchers. To achieve an integrated presentation, a tabular format for Series I was designed in the form of spreadsheets, each representing one year and containing a month-and-date grid, created in Excel and presented on the Web in PDF. Researchers can use the spreadsheets, in PDF form, to ascertain whether the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum has holdings of a comic feature for particular dates. However, our collection is not comprehensive, but as time passes more material will be processed. In these spreadsheets, each cell value is a letter-and-number combination, which represent the item's physical location in the library, and is used by staff to retrieve materials.

Series 1, Comic Features, includes the comic features clipped from newspapers by the collector. Series 2, Comic Sections, includes the entire Sunday comic sections kept intact by the collector. Series 3, Individual Artists, includes boxes and files of tearsheets and clippings assembled by the collector, focusing on particular artists. The records in Series 1 will be most useful to researchers focusing on a particular comic feature. Those in Series 2 will be of use primarily to those who want to study a chronological run of Sunday sections from a particular newspaper or syndicate. Series 3 will be useful to those researching a particular artist; frequently there is early work that is difficult to find elsewhere.