Keep Circulating The Tapes / Comic Strips

• Many of the works of Garfield creator Jim Davis:
  • The comic Garfield: His 9 Lives has been out of print for several years and the Garfield website barely acknowledges the book's existence, if at all, even as the animated specials (plural — Babes and Bullets is a standalone adaptation of one of the stories) that adapted it remain in print.
  • Gnorm Gnat, Jim Davis's first comic, has never been republished. For many years, the only trace of the strip was a single comic included in the Garfield anthology 20 Years & Still Kicking! Garfield's Twentieth Anniversary Collection. The rest existed solely in the archives of the Pendleton Times, having not been unearthed until 2019 by Quinton Reviews.
  • Jon, a proto-Garfield that also ran in the Pendleton Times for a couple years before Garfield took off, was so completely unknown that its mere existence was not acknowledged until the aforementioned search for Gnorm Gnat strips led to Quinton Reviews posting those as well.
  • Between 2001 and 2003, Davis and his assistant Brett Koth (who also helped him on Garfield and U.S. Acres, albeit uncredited on the former) made a comic strip based on Mr. Potato Head. Only one trade paperback was published and it quickly went out of print. The Garfield Wiki, luckily, has come to the rescue.
  • A 1986 book of original Garfield one-shot gags, The Unabridged Uncensored Unbelievable Garfield, has been out of print for a very long time.
  • U.S. Acres had several trade paperbacks covering nearly the entire run (except the last couple months), but these went out of print in the early 1990s and can fetch up to $1,000 online. Platypus Comix archived most of them via scans. The strips were reprinted on Garfield.com until June 2020, when that website was merged into Nickelodeon's Nick.com. Thankfully, the Garfield Wiki archived all of them.
• Dick Tracy has few reprints available, and in the case of the Max Collins era strips (which were critically acclaimed) few have ever been reprinted, save the various sequences collected in the Anniversary editions. Fantagraphics is releasing The Complete Chester Gould Dick Tracy archive editions however, and The Collins Case Files are currently on their third volume.
• The earlier strips of FoxTrot, which began in April 1988, are falling into this. The GoComics website has every comic beginning with July 29, 1996, but it is highly spotty before that date. The only way to access the rest of the strip is to buy the first six anthologies.
• Although Mother Goose and Grimm has been in print since 1984, no archive seems to exist for any of the strips from the 20th century outside a few paperbacks.
• In the late 80's children's book author Daniel Pinkwater and editorial cartoonist Tony Auth collaborated on a newspaper comic called Norb, concerning the lighthearted adventures of a scientist, his dwarf woolly mammoth (who can destroy things by trumpeting his trunk and loves pizza) and an unkempt teenage girl. It ran for 52 weeks before getting canned due to low readership, and the one collected edition has been out of print since the early 90's and is ridiculously expensive online.
• The Perishers was only ever reprinted in paperback collections. Worse, the early volumes didn't reprint the strips in chronological order. Classic 60s strips are currently being reprinted in the Daily Mirror, resized somewhat to fit, with new colour, and occasional textual revisions for topicality. One can only hope the original versions are being safely preserved somewhere.
• Pooch Café's archives on Gocomics only go back to April 27, 2003. Want anything before that? You'll have to buy the book collections.

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