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Sites with old Public Domain comics?

Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 21:52 -0700
by Jet_Jaguar
Does anyone know of any sites with old comics/comic strips from around 1910-1930 that are in the public domain and free to download? I just got an Amazon Kindle, and I'm looking for free stuff to put on it (if you want free ebooks, manybooks.net is a great resource). I've downloaded a few webcomics and figured out how to format them for the Kindle fairly easily; the images are a little small (and of course, it doesn't do color), but I'm pleased with the results. Of course, it might be a while before a really satisfactory ebook reader for comics and graphic novels comes along, but the Kindle works pretty well with comics that are in B&W and don't have extremely complex artwork.

I thought that it would be cool if there was a site with old public domain comics that I could put on my Kindle. I found a few sites with old comics you can download, but they weren't quite what I had in mind. Of course, there are some old comics that just aren't going to work on the Kindle like lots of the old Winsor McCay stuff, but I think that it would work pretty well as a reader for lots of old comics.

Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 9:38 -0700
by indestructibleman
the only good site i know is http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/.

that has Winsor McKay stuff and Krazy Kat. i'd think the formate of Winsor McKay's stuff would actually work well for the E-reader, since it's taller than it is wide.

Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 10:08 -0700
by Jet_Jaguar
indestructibleman wrote:the only good site i know is http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/.

that has Winsor McKay stuff and Krazy Kat. i'd think the formate of Winsor McKay's stuff would actually work well for the E-reader, since it's taller than it is wide.
I think that I saw that site and decided that it wasn't really what I had in mind. If I had the bigger type of Kindle, some of the McCay stuff might work pretty well, but I think it would just be too small on the one that I have. When I was talking about McCay's stuff not working well on the Kindle, I was thinking about the full-size Little Nemo in Slumberland pages reproduced in the book So Many Splendid Sundays.

Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 10:33 -0700
by indestructibleman
figured you might have seen that one already. i can see how the newspaper sized Little Nemos might not read well on a smaller screen.

Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 14:30 -0700
by Jet_Jaguar
I actually found a site that's pretty close to what I was looking for:

http://goldenagecomics.co.uk

Most of the comics are from a slightly later era than what I initially had in mind, and at first glance, most of these seem to be color comics (I was more interested in B&W comics to read in my Kindle), but this site is still a pretty neat discovery. It's a little bit buggy right now, though. If you get an error message when you try to download something, you might have to refresh the page and try downloading again a couple of times (regardless of what it says in the site, you don't actually need to register for the forum to download stuff).