Found a link to the Digital Funnies today from the Drawn! blog. The attempt of the Digital Funnies is to perserve collections of very early comics. There’s definitely some great treasures in there – worth you time.
Welcome to Digital Funnies, dedicated to preserving the history of this most neglected of art forms and reintroducing it to scholars and new readers alike. While several well-known titles such as Krazy Kat, Gasoline Alley, and Peanuts are being given their proper due in published form, there is still much of the rich history of comics and cartooning that will more than likely never see print again and worse, fade away with time.
Understandably, a publisher would be hesitant to take on the huge financial risk of publishing an obscure title or cartoonist, but digital reproduction offers no risk at all and allows for a terrific means of restoring, preserving, and making available again the vast amounts of material that have been unseen and unappreciated for far too long.
Quality is the priority, and sacrifices will not be made in this field to cut corners. Although the image files are jpegs for easy viewing, they originate as uncompressed (and thus much larger) print-quality TIFF files. If an intrepid publisher would ever want to take to print any of the material held within, it will all be readily available.