Stripper's Guide

 

Chris Aruffo is producing a new extensive series of Alley Oop reprint books, a labour of love project that has presented him with many challenges. I prevailed upon him to share some of his fascinating stories about the project with Stripper's Guide readers. This essay is the first of three. 

If you are interested in reading the wonderful Alley Oop strips in high-quality but reasonably priced reprints, Aruffo's books are available directly from him, through your friendly neighbourhood bookstore or comic shop, Bud Plant, or Amazon.

 

 I’ve been an Alley Oop fan since I was eleven years old.  I vividly remember encountering the strip in my local paper on October 22, 1983; there, among the banal levity of Priscilla’s Pop, Winthrop, and Short Ribs I found this panel of a fisherman… discovering a dead body?! 

 

I was immediately hooked.  Five years later, I spent the entire summer at the library, spooling through their microfilm archives to read every daily strip from 1937 to the present. Being able to read all the old stories was a marvelous experience; even so, I lamented that I was unable to copy and keep each strip as I read it.

I did clip and keep the newspaper strips from 1984 through 1989, when I left for college. United Media began offering their strips online in mid-1995; I downloaded the strip each day and, inspired by the new digital format, I scanned all of my clippings and sold them on a nascent eBay.  I couldn’t have known, of course, that by creating files small enough to store on a floppy disk I was essentially destroying the strips’ artistic detail:

During the pandemic I saw the chance to repair some of these past sins. I created a newspapers.com account and got every Alley Oop strip from 1933 through late 1996. I sifted through every archive of every paper to be sure I was capturing the very best quality available. The challenge for Sundays was finding complete strips, because so many editors dropped panels to fit their pages. I typically found an incomplete strip in higher quality and then fit in lower-quality dropped panels from different sources. Having finished this project, I shared these strips with the Newspaper Comic Strips blog (and you can still find them there). And that, I thought, would be the end of it.

And then I happened across an eBay listing offering “proof sheets” of Alley Oop from 1975 through 1979.  I didn’t know what proof sheets were, but I quickly found out; and, having learned that these would be of even better quality than the digitized images I’d been downloading, I immediately bought the eBay listing. Curiously, I soon received a message from the seller asking if I was genuinely buying these sheets. They informed me that proofs of unreprinted strips often sold to people who just wanted to read them, and who, having done so, came up with various excuses to return them for a full refund. I assured the seller that I really wanted to own the sheets. When I opened the package and saw the pages, I was astonished; these were, of course, the best possible quality short of the original art itself. And, as the purpose of proof sheets is to be reprinted, I began to wonder … would I be able to reprint Alley Oop, and finally have them on my bookshelf, as I have wanted all these years? I sent an e-mail to United Media and waited for what seemed a very long time.

The rights were available! And, to my great relief, they were affordable enough to make me believe that the project could break even. Having signed the contract for these five books, I needed to decide how many copies should be printed, so I wrote to Rick Norwood, who had, years ago, produced Alley Oop Book Four following the three Kitchen Sink reprints. Rick was excited to learn about this project and offered to support reprinting the first six years of the strip, which he’d been wanting to see in book form for a long time. I was delighted to accept his offer and so expand the project. I then wanted to make a total of twelve books, so as to fill out a year’s monthly scheduling, so I added 1974 to my own slate. Because I had by now donated my proof sheets to the V.T. Hamlin collection at the University of Missouri, they kindly provided in return images of the daily proofs they had which, by whatever cosmic coincidence, were from 1974; I was then able to round out what they didn’t have of that year with scans from The Menomonee Falls Guardian, which were printed in higher-than-usual resolution on some kind of magical newsprint paper that has never yellowed. The United Media licensing contract was amended and we were ready to go: six years of Graue from 1974 through 1979, and six years of Hamlin from 1933 through 1938.

And then I had to wonder: what next? Would this be the end of it? Adding the six Hamlin books to the licensing agreement had left the door open to reprinting even more, but I wouldn’t want to unless it could be done from proof sheets.  Rick and I knew that, for the earliest years, restored newspaper clippings would be the best possible quality, and Rick had already begun feverishly restoring the early Hamlin strips from his personal collection.  For later eras, though, it didn’t make sense to make books of restored clippings.  If proof sheets for those years were eventually found, then the previously printed books would have been a waste.

But where on earth could proof sheets be found? Coming across that eBay listing was pure luck; now that I began actively looking for more I couldn’t find them anywhere. Heritage Auctions showed one listing that had ended years ago [That was my collection! -- Allan]. I found independent vendors with clippings and tearsheets but no proofs.  It occurred to me to contact Jack and Carole Bender and, in a circuitous manner, I was able to get a message to them… in mid-winter, so I had to wait a few months before they were able to venture into their non-insulated attic to check. When they finally did, alas, there was nothing. Whatever had been there was now gone. There didn’t seem to be much hope.  

There was one bright spot during this search, though. Responding to my question on the Facebook Alley Oop fan group, Germund Von Wowern volunteered that he had proof sheets for the latter half of 1938. Germund would have been happy to donate them to the project, but Rick insisted on buying them. They arrived in a gigantic box. In the 1970s, proof sheets were slightly larger than legal-size paper, with six daily strips on a page:

 

But these 1930s proof sheets were massive.  Each sheet was a gigantic page of all the strips and features for a given day:

 

What Germund had sent me were two bound volumes with each enormous “book” containing three months of daily pages.  Fortunately I was able to use my Avision tabloid-size book-edge scanner to capture them all, in four passes per page, without damage or warping.  And this made Rick’s job easier, because he wouldn’t have to restore strips from that half of ’38. But no other replies were forthcoming.  Nobody else stepped up to say they also had proofs. I started to believe that I’d just have to wait and hope.

But then Jonathan Lemon, the current Alley Oop artist, reminded me that the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum existed. I remembered that I’d contacted the Museum at the very start of this process, but their reply had seemed unpromising—they’d sent me a spreadsheet of what Alley Oop strips they had, but I hadn’t been looking for newspaper clippings. I wanted proof sheets. So I had let that ball drop.  Now that I was thinking again about the Museum, though, I looked back at that e-mail from half a year prior, and for the first time I read the title of the spreadsheet file. The title of the spreadsheet, you ask?

UNITED MEDIA PROOF INVENTORY.XLSX

I blinked—and then I blinked again. Had I been wearing Dorothy’s silver slippers all this time? This spreadsheet listed nearly every year of the strip’s existence, which is why I had assumed they had to be newsprint clippings. Was it possible that the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum possessed proof sheets for all these years listed on the spreadsheet!?

Short answer:  yes.

Our subsequent conversation confirmed that all of these holdings were indeed proof sheets and, furthermore, that the Museum would be willing and able to support this reprint project. Part of that arrangement was that, for such a massive project of thousands of pages, the only way to get it done in any timely manner would require me to come do the scanning myself, but it didn’t take me even a moment to agree to that condition (oh, go ahead, twist my arm)! We made the arrangements for my visit, I arrived to find all the requested boxes and folders ready to go, and for one week solid I just scanned scanned scanned scanned. I wasn’t able to get all the pages in one go—there were that many proof sheets, to begin with, yes, but, as soon as I looked in that very first box, I learned that the spreadsheet rows that had listed the same year twice weren’t indicating duplicate folders of daily proofs for those years. They were indicating folders of Sunday proofs. Between that discovery and the daily sheets I didn’t have time for, we arranged before I left that I should come back again one day to get the rest. And that “one day” has now arrived. It is looking more and more like we are, finally, going to see a complete run of Alley Oop reprints, from sources of the highest possible quality—thanks to special arrangement with (and the wonderful support of) the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum.

You can find these books either at http://www.aruffo.com/alleyoop or on Amazon.  All of the first twelve books from the ’30s and ’70s are already available.  The next twelve are Graue’s ’80–85 and Hamlin’s ’54–’59, alternating each month through 2023.  After that I expect to produce a couple oversize volumes of the wartime dailies, alongside all the regular volumes of all the other years, up through ’96, which is where the GoComics archive picks up. Complete Sundays v3 is also released, picking up where Dark Horse left off, and Complete Sundays 1982–1984 is completed and on the schedule (but how those Sundays books came about and how many more of those there’ll be is a story for another day).  I don’t expect to be reprinting any of the books after the first printing of each is exhausted, but the inventory I have should last at least another couple of months, so you can still get 'em brand new!