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 second of three. 

The first slate of Alley Oop books was licensed and ready to go:  six years of Graue from 1974 through 1979, and six years of Hamlin from 1933 through 1938.

But I knew something was missing. I knew the Bonnet–Brown strips were unaccounted for.

Prior to the strip’s official launch in 1933, one hundred twenty daily Alley Oop strips had been published by the small syndicate Bonnet–Brown. A document of Alley Oop’s first year would be incomplete without these 120 strips. But they are exceedingly rare. Bonnet–Brown was a tiny little syndicate; the original Alley Oop strip appeared only in a handful of papers, and we don’t know what most of those papers were. I was able to uncover the names of five papers that carried it:  the Fairbault, MN Times; the Alva, OK Daily Record; the Waynesboro, VA News Virginian, the Washington, NC Daily News, and the McAllen, TX Daily Press. I hoped that this list might help me track down the strip.

But the problem wasn’t in finding the strip. The problem was finding it in a reprint-worthy quality. These strips had been reprinted once before, in 1997, by Alley Oop Magazine; heroically restoring the microfilm archive from Fairbault, and these images were already available for download from the Newspaper Comic Strips blog. If I were going to reprint the Bonnet–Brown run, it would have to be a substantial step up in quality. After all, thanks to Alley Oop Magazine anyone could see what the strips looked like, so the only point of reprinting them again would be to showcase Hamlin’s art.

And how could I possibly do that? What source could I possibly find with a high enough quality to see the artistry of it? Proof sheets and original art were, of course, out of the question. The syndicate and its clients were many decades gone and, according to the magazine, V.T. Hamlin himself had barely remembered creating these strips. The low quality of the two microfilm archives I was able to find online (Alva and McAllen) made it seem that the restorations in the magazine were as good as a digital source could get. The only way to get a better image, I supposed, would be from an actual printed newspaper… but what are the chances anyone saved these papers? I came across a news article suggesting that the Northwestern Oklahoma State University library, in Alva, might have paper copies of the Daily Record—but when I contacted that library I learned that, sure enough, they had long since digitized them and tossed the originals. Given the age and obscurity of the papers that carried Bonnet–Brown strips, and libraries’ ongoing need to clear out old, decaying materials, it seemed wildly improbable that any of these papers hadn’t been microfilmed and disposed of many years ago. And, without a better quality than microfilm to work from, the idea of reprinting the pre-NEA run was, for me, a non-starter.

Yet I couldn’t make myself give up completely on those Bonnet–Brown strips. I wasn’t optimistic that I’d unearth any new source in the few months I now had to produce the first book, but I gamely kept searching, thinking I might find some other papers that carried the BB strips, hoping that maybe, just maybe, I would find another paper whose microfilm archives were at least somewhat better quality so that I could potentially consider the possibility of reprinting them.

One of my desultory searches brought me to WorldCat. When I saw that the page was merely another mention of the McAllen Daily Press, I was about to close the window when a word in the listing suddenly arrested my attention:  PAPER. Wait!  What?!  Paper?! As in actual paper newsprint newspaper? Not microfilm? I couldn’t be interpreting this correctly. Maybe WorldCat was simply recognizing that the Daily Press was, categorically, a newspaper. Even so, I contacted the institution named in the listing, the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I fully expected that they would tell me, as the university in Oklahoma had done, that they once had the paper copies but were now fully digital. But the librarian checked their collections and determined that yes, they had actual paper copies of the Daily Press. I still couldn’t quite believe it. But the Center’s policy allowed new inquiries to have a single sample scan, so I asked them if they could please send me an image of one of the Alley Oop strips. I was able to direct them to a specific edition and page because the McAllen paper is available on newspapers.com; for my sample I deliberately chose one of the strips that, in microfilm, had been murky and impenetrable. And when they sent me that sample image, my heart leapt into my throat, because this is what I saw (placed here next to a microfilm image for comparison):

Next was the matter of cost. A hundred twenty separate images, at the Briscoe Center’s usual scanning fees, seemed large enough to be prohibitive (that is, unrecoverable through book sales). I inquired and found that, as a “bulk” project, the Center’s administration offered a generous discount, but the amount was still large enough that I was uncertain. However, when I showed the sample scans to Rick Norwood he didn’t hesitate a moment. He instantly recognized that the historical importance of bringing these strips to light far outweighed the risk of financial loss and, as such, he immediately offered to sponsor the scanning. I accepted Rick’s offer, with the sole condition that restoring the strips would fall to me.

The librarians took great care to provide the best quality scans. They used an overhead scanner, rather than a flatbed, so some images were initially out of focus and had to be re-done. But they carefully laid weights on the pages so that each image would be flat and not suffer any distortion from the binding:

and they used good judgment in determining what scanner settings would most accurately capture the art. As each new batch came in I cooed and gushed over them, comparing them to the microfilm archives, exulting in the extraordinarily fine detail that we’d never been able to see in these strips before. We were disappointed to discover that the Briscoe Center was missing five editions of the Daily Press, but for these we were okay with using the microfilm images because, as they say, a hundred fifteen out of a hundred twenty ain’t bad.

There has been some confusion, I believe, about when the Bonnet–Brown run started and ended. Between the Alley Oop Magazine and the McAllen Daily Press we do have an answer. Alley Oop launched with an “announcement” strip, dated Monday, December 5, 1932 (reprinted in the Magazine):

The Daily Press did not print Monday’s announcement but started with Tuesday’s strip on December 6. The first six story strips are numbered, rather than dated, but the seventh strip is dated Tuesday, December 13, and appears on that date, exactly one week after the first, confirming that the strip was launched on Monday, December 5, and proceeded with six daily strips per week. At the end of the third week, though, something went wrong. The strip for the 23rd ran as scheduled, but the strip dated December 24 wasn’t printed until the 27th. From that point until the February 10th edition of the paper, the strip’s date was anywhere from three to five days behind the paper’s actual date. We can’t be certain whether the syndicate was failing to distribute the strips in a timely manner or if the newspapers didn’t bother to print them on the intended dates—but, in either case, after February 10th (strip date February 6th), the strips were no longer dated but numbered. It seems reasonable to suppose that the change from dates to numbers meant that, whatever the cause, V.T. Hamlin knew the strips were being persistently published on the wrong dates. The Daily Press continued its erratic scheduling throughout the run, randomly skipping one to four days in between strips and, on one occasion, printing two strips together. Fortunately, we can be certain that no strips are missing; the strips that are dated represent complete six-day weeks, and the subsequent numbering from 55–120 is uninterrupted. The final strip, numbered 120, was printed in the Daily Press edition of May 7, 1933. However, if the strip had been printed regularly, in six-day weeks without interruption, then the final strip would have appeared on April 13. That is to say: the newspaper’s erratic publishing schedule caused Alley Oop to appear in print as late as May 7, but, technically, the Bonnet–Brown strips should have run from December 5, 1932, through April 13, 1933.

Restoring the strips was tedious and meticulous, as it required mostly manual tracing and filling. My goal was to transform these images from their yellowed, faded condition into crisp, duotoned line art. It persisted in being a manual process. Photoshop experts kept recommending different time-saving tools to me, like Curves and Threshold and different kinds of filters, but none of these were helpful. For one, where the ink was faded, it was actually just gone:

With our human eyes we can easily infer from context when streaks are supposed to be white and which should be black, and we can clearly see lines’ smooth contours in the jagged residue of a newspaper texture. The graphics tools, however, can make no such distinction. There were no actual differences in color between where the ink had flaked off and the background; therefore, these qualitatively opposite spots were adjusted exactly the same by whatever tool I attempted to apply. In that strip which I’d requested as a sample, I ended up having to manually trace every one of the hundreds (thousands?) of tiny little white spots on the trees, in the grass, and on the dinosaurs, because I had found that any fill level that was light enough to correctly recognize the figures’ shapes and lines was not dark enough to blacken the backgrounds; when I tried to apply a fill, there were at least as many unwanted spots and speckles left over as the actual white spaces themselves, so it was just as much effort (and a better result) to just trace all the true white spaces and then wipe the rest to black. Fortunately, not every strip was badly faded, and on those strips I was pleased to use mostly fills rather than traces, but I still had to be careful because even those images were not consistent across their entire length. A fill setting that successfully restored one area would make a mess of another. And then, regardless of fading, very thin lines always had to be traced, because the paper texture guaranteed that they would be broken into pieces and therefore could not be filled. I have a drawing pad, but I only used that for small curved lines; for longer lines, I always used the mouse so I could be pixel-accurate to what was on the screen and not inadvertently transform Hamlin’s strokes into my own. Because Hamlin was so fond of drawing so many extremely thin lines for motion and shading, there were more than a few panels where I had to carefully trace every single line:

For each strip I saved the original scanned image and, during its restoration, I’d flip back and forth between the new and the original, making sure that the new one appeared visually identical. Then, finally, the McAllen paper also had the unfortunate characteristic of having cut off the sides of many strips, but, because there was rarely any significant detail at either end, I found that I could take the edges of the Magazine’s microfilm images and append them fairly seamlessly. The entire process was time-consuming, but ultimately not difficult. It was principally a matter of being careful and patient.

I found all the motivation I needed just by thinking to myself how wonderful it would be to share these with Alley Oop fans; after restoring each strip, I compared it to the microfilm image and marveled at what people would now be able to see. As tedious as it was to make sure that every line and every shape was accurately realized, I knew that none of us had ever had the chance before to see these lines as they truly were. I am pleased and proud to have been able to bring these strips to their proper light after all these years.

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM