As popular print ephemera, comics hold a complex and precarious relationship to preservation and duration, which has marked their status as “archivable” (or “non-archivable”) materials. This chapter sketches some of the different ways that institutions, producers, and audiences have coped with this fragility and have defined practices of preservation and collection. The chapter subsequently analyzes comics in libraries and archives, collecting practices by readers and fans, uses of archives in comics production. At each step, it pays particular attention to the importance of materiality, senses, formats, manipulation in the preservation of comics, connecting them to matters of copyright, library policies, and commercial interests. The importance of these parameters is set out against changing notions of archives and archival practice, especially under the impulse of their digital transformation. The broader picture considers the importance of medium specificity in an age of online archival plenitude.

The contemporary fascination with comics archives also revolves around imaginary collections of invented “forgotten” comics. This chapter is not about forgeries of actual cartoonists but about imaginary constructions, fictive comics objects, and pseudo recoveries – whose transmissive function can be as important as the recirculation of actual archives. It details the stakes of this retro reflexivity by looking more closely at paratextual elements in Seth’s graphic novels and then in a more detailed close-reading of Cole Closser’s Little Tommy Lost, which presents itself as a playfully anachronistic work, mobilizing all the conventions of the 1920s comic strip within the publishing framework of a contemporary graphic novel. Productively fed by the many reprints of newspaper comics of the mid-2000s, Little Tommy Lost also offers an indirect critique “in practice,” reminding us of the complexities in reviving these serial objects, but also perhaps failing to take up the digital publication opportunities where such forms might find a new context.

Reissuing old comics as books has become a chief process of transmission in the graphic novel. In the mid-2000s, alternative comics publishers Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly released a series of extensive reprint projects, drafting “their” cartoonists to visually repackage past comics. This chapter provides an in-depth inquiry into the idea of the “archival reprint” that has become a mainstay of twenty-first-century graphic novel publishing through its various interconnected issues: preservation technologies, collecting culture, copyright, publishing economy, graphic style, book design, and reception all constitute a dense set of constraints that variously shape reprinting today. In this context, cartoonists have become a vital asset in reprinting strategies and their book designs confer new ways of reframing comics history, as clearly evidenced in the graphic contributions by Seth for Charles Schulz’s The Complete Peanuts and Chris Ware for Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. These two case studies offer key insights into the challenges of reprinting long-length serials and the role played by book design in framing contemporary understandings of comics history.

The conclusion recaps the various chapters by considering what the backward look of contemporary graphic novelists can mean for comics studies today. This archival impulse in the graphic novel inevitably confronts us with our own practices as comics scholars and the extent to which we are also indebted to a range of vernacular archivists and historians of the form. It highlights both the possible blinkers that we repeat from that heritage and how these various gestures of transmission can make comics scholars more cognizant about the materiality of their own engagement with historical archives, possibly paving the way for different forms of academic research.

This chapter considers “uncreative” appropriations of comics archives. Uncreative comics go a step further in presenting the result of collecting as the product itself, further unsettling the lines between archiving, curating, and drawing. In fact, these comics tend to shift toward undrawing and the “uncreative” cartoonist often avoids making their own mark visible. Instead, the tactics that come to define these avant-garde works are détournement, erasure, collage, digital editing, reprinting, cutting-up, and crowdsourcing. This chapter looks at proto-experiments with uncreative practices and considers their expanded continuities in the era of digital remixing, particularly as they are facilitated by the online archives of comic books. It considers more particularly the multifaceted works of Ilan Manouach, who has adopted radical approaches to appropriation by privileging mechanical, automatized, or distributed forms of comics production.

The introduction starts with a concise discussion of three capsule examples (Chris Ware’s McSweeney’s anthology, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, and Seth’s design for The Complete Peanuts, all published in 2004) as different markers of the archival impulse in the graphic novel. From there, and relying on these examples, the chapter sets out the methodological problems that come with historicizing the graphic novel by analyzing the backward look of contemporary cartoonists. It tackles three core issues: definitional and media-historical questions around the graphic novel, canonization and what gets forgotten in today’s cartoonists’ limited embrace of the past, and the archival turn in comics studies. It finishes by introducing the notion of gestures of transmission as a way of approaching comics memory as a visual material culture that is variously reframed, reshaped, and redrawn into the present.

A synonym of “stealing,” swiping is a vernacular term in the comics industry and fandom used to identify and designate redrawn or traced copies of particular images and panels. As such, swiping constitutes a surprising mode of graphic transmission that implicates the gathering of particular images and their hand-drawn reproductions. The chapter recovers a history of the practice at the hand of a few smaller cases that highlight the variability of swiping as an appreciation and evaluation of copying, only to move to the central case study focusing on Charles Burns’s appropriations of “old” comics panels, mostly from pre-Code romance and horror comic books to Tintin. It is interested not only in how Burns redraws comic book images but also in how he constructs and publicly shares archives of reusable images that are constantly redistributed in his work, especially in his small-press publications. The chapter argues that Burns’s citational tactics function less as postmodern rewriting than as an adaptation of swiping practices from comic book culture, a transmission of a way of redrawing images.

This chapter focuses on exhibitions of comics history curated by contemporary cartoonists. It maps out the stakes of this curatorial gesture in a context of comics museification and the narrative, aesthetic, and cultural challenges that it raises. Drafting in cartoonists as curators has been a way for some museums to navigate these issues, by commissioning a “cartoonist’s eye” to select and present material from archives. Two specific cartoonist-curated exhibitions are central case studies for this chapter: Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman in 2012 and Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History in 2014. The exhibitions frame “their” histories in quite specific ways, relative to their material and institutional contexts. Both cases present visitors with completely different versions of comics history, based not only on the material that is exhibited but on how it is presented, framed, and organized. Based on interviews and archival research, the chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the layout strategies and museological discourses around the two exhibitions, describing how curating shapes a particular visual transmission of comics history.

Collecting and collector culture remain important aspects in the contemporary graphic novel, sustaining a relationship to the past that is tangible in material objects. While the representation of collectors is well known, this chapter charts a somewhat different aspect of collectors and the archives they assemble: it is less interested in graphic novelists as collectors than in their indebtedness to previous collections and the new uses they invent for them. This chapter attends to an earlier moment in the history of comics, one that precisely framed collecting as part of a media-historical conversation and in a context of changing ideas about cultural value, preservation, reproduction, and access, studying its long-term implications for understanding the archival impulse in the graphic novel today.