Comics and Their Archives

doi:10.1017/9781009255653.018

Chapter 13 - Comics and Their Archives

from Part III - Uses

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2023

Benoît Crucifix

Edited by

Maaheen Ahmed

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Maaheen Ahmed: Affiliation:
Universiteit Gent, Belgium

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Summary

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.

Keywords

archives collections cultural memory document materiality amateur heritage fandom drawing intermediality reproduction

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Comics , pp. 267 - 286
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009255653.018 [Opens in a new window]
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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