‘How Comics Were Made: A Visual History of Printing Cartoons’

Glenn Fleishman:

If you love newspaper comic strips, you will love my new book How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. I’ve combined years of research and the diligent collection of unique comics printing artifacts with dozens of interviews with cartoonists, historians, and production people to tell the story of how a comic starts with an artist’s hand, and makes it way through transformations into print and, more recently, onto a digital screen. I need your help to make it happen!

The book will be a glorious full-color celebration of the art form, heavily illustrated from the 1890s to the present day with materials that you’ve never seen before, drawn from my personal collection and museums, cartoonists and their estates, and institutions around the United States. It will also feature never-before-published strips and versions of some popular comics.

I’m a sucker for labor-of-love books, and remain fascinated by the history of printing technology. So of course I’m backing Fleishman’s Kickstarter campaign. But I’ll bet a lot of you might share the same interest. Here’s a brief taste: “The Week in Doonesbury That Wasn’t” on YouTube.

The campaign is just over 75 percent funded with three days to go.

★ Monday, 25 March 2024