Comic strip clippers are helping to preserve collections

LOS ANGELES — "A nightmare," Joe Matt sighs. "All those years, all that money, all that work. None of which I'll ever get back."

Matt, the graphic novelist best known for his absurdly self-centered autobiographical comic "Peepshow," is sitting in a prefab booth at Daily Donut in Los Feliz, a neighborhood spot favored by quiet elderly customers and infrequent rushes of teenagers seeking after-school snacks. He is speaking of his quest for the perfect collection of Frank King "Gasoline Alley" comic strips, from 1921 to 1960. Matt, who owns no home, car, computer or cell phone, estimates he has spent upward of $15,000 on his mission since 1994.

"I found dealers in comics magazines and ordered the years I wanted," he says. "A year runs about 312 dailies, of which you can get about 290 or more. Times that by 40, at $50 each. And there's always missing strips. I'd have to order the same year again and again just to get a few missing days. God help you if you drop them, because you have to sort 300 undated strips by story line. Then I found that different papers ran the strip at different sizes, or with better printing presses. It was maddening."

It's a habit Matt has had for some time. He clipped his first strip, a "Li'l Abner," at the age of 9, in 1972. He now seeks out obscure work with little chance of getting reprinted, and King is a prime example. His collection forms the bulk of "Walt & Skeezix" (retitled from "Gasoline Alley" for licensing reasons), a decade-long, multivolume reprinting of King's complete works published by D&Q (Drawn & Quarterly). (Volume 3 arrives in June.)

Matt is not unique among collectors. Peter Maresca, whose day job is creative director of GoComics/uClick Mobile, self-published his own collection of "Little Nemo" Sunday tearsheets as "So Many Splendid Sundays." Fantagraphics' "Popeye" and "Krazy Kat" series are made possible by the archivist Bill Blackbeard, and IDW's "Complete Dick Tracy" relies on a legion of fans, since no single run is known to exist.

Their compulsion to own an artist's every strip — sometimes 15,000 or more — and to clip, preserve and organize them all, has helped rescue a disappearing corner of American popular culture. After decades in which comic-strip syndicates and libraries have been purging themselves of paper archives for microfilm, their collections are often all that's left.