Introduction:

Webcomics are rapidly making the transition: from curiosity to trend, from trend to tradition, from tradition to heritage. Ten years of evolution have left behind numerous milestones of artistic achievement, and also a fair share of "lost works." It's not too soon to start thinking about webcomics as an art form worth preserving, and planning for its conservation for future generations.

We spoke with Andrew Farago, curator of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum, about the curating of webcomics and the unique challenges any future webcomics museum will face.

First, can you briefly give our readers some background on curating? I gather that a curator preserves artwork for three different audiences-- the scholarly audience, the general public, and future generations.

Currently, I’m serving the Cartoon Art Museum as its curator, collections manager and gallery manager. This keeps me very busy, as I plan upcoming exhibitions, maintain our collection, install exhibitions and maintain upkeep of our gallery space along with various other duties as they arise.

My primary duty with the Cartoon Art Museum is assembling exhibitions for gallery display. This can involve extensive phone calls and e-mails, cross-country road trips, searching through poorly-organized archives in lender’s homes, following leads that don’t really go anywhere…any number of things can happen along the way. Exhibitions need to be accessible to viewers who know nothing about a particular cartoon or subject, engaging enough to stimulate a patron who might not care about a particular subject and interesting enough to hold the attention of a scholar who’s already “seen it all.” It’s often an uphill battle, but I think that we pull it off, more often than not.

The Cartoon Art Museum has no acquisitions budget, unlike larger museums, so we aren’t aggressively seeking out new additions to our permanent collection. For the most part, donors seek us out, or our staff and board members will drop hints to artists that we know that we’d appreciate adding an original of theirs to the collection. The pieces we do have are stored in flat files in a climate-controlled locked collections room that is only accessible to our staff. Scholars are allowed access to specific pieces on rare occasions, but only under the direct supervision of the staff. By and large, the artwork that we bring to the public is the work that we display in our galleries.

How long have comics had the benefit of curating, and how widespread is it?

As far as I can tell, there have always been at least a few individuals out there collecting comic art for their personal collections, at least dating back to the early days of newspaper comics when artists would routinely trade strips or present them as gifts to their peers, friends, family and fans. In the mid-1970s, Mort Walker established the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Connecticut (which moved to New York, then Florida, then closed, and is scheduled to re-open in New York next year), and they proceeded to establish a major collection of original comic art to be preserved and displayed to the general public.

Roughly ten years after Mort Walker’s Museum was founded, Malcolm Whyte and some fellow collectors established the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. In the 21 years since, a number of universities and fine arts museums have established significant cartoon art collections. The Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library houses tens of thousands of original comics and vintage comic and cartoon books, and also houses the massive and comprehensive comic strip collection of Bill Blackbeard, one of the major pioneers in treating comics as a major artform. Major fine arts museums across the country are currently scrambling to establish collections of original artworks by Robert Crumb, Ben Katchor, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Art Spiegelman and other major 20th/21st century comic artists.

Do webcomics fall under the mission of your institution? Do any other art institutions currently try to preserve webcomics?

We have a few webcomics archived in our permanent collection, but only as the original artwork that was created for the final online product. Occasionally, webcartoonists will provide us with discs containing their works, but actively creating and maintaining a digital archive of webcomics would require a much larger staff and a lot more funding than we currently have. The number of computer history museums in the world is slowly increasing, so it’s only a matter of time before someone manages to get funding for an internet-based archival project.

One of the difficulties, it seems, of curating webcomics is that they are not collectible objects. There may be original artwork for them, but the comics themselves are streams of electronic data. How are curators addressing the challenge of preserving something like that?

Presently, it’s up to artists and their fans to establish a permanent archive of their webcomics as they’ve appeared online. A large number of abandoned strips, whether the artist quit after a week or gave up after five years, are already lost to the ages. An artist may not save his original artwork, the artwork may change substantially from the original page to the final online version, software upgrades, poorly-stored discs, other interests on the part of the artist…any number of things may lead to the complete disappearance of an online comic. Right now, it’s up to the artists themselves to take an interest in archiving their own materials, since there isn’t yet an institution in place taking on this challenge.

Another difficulty may be in the presentation. To have an exhibit of webcomics, you'd need to have dozens of monitors set up in the gallery, which would be rather costly. Are there ways of getting around this?

There have been webcomics exhibitions in the past, and the Cartoon Art Museum has displayed computer animation before, and will probably do so again. In our case, we used a single spare computer from our office that we could spare for several months at a time.

Large-scale exhibitions of web-based materials are typically the result of a major grant-writing campaign, in which an institution succeeds in acquiring funding for dozens of computers for short-term usage. The cost involved adds months or years to the planning time, and there’s not really any practical way of getting around the fact that computers are necessary for viewing webcomics.

It's likely that many significant works in webcomics have been lost, as websites are taken down and the artists move on to other things. For example, artist Tristan Farnon apparently shut down his highly-lauded website, Leisure Town, for a lengthy period, and only recently has revived it. Are you concerned that we may be losing pieces of art history?

There is a definite concern regarding the loss of major webcomics as a result of improper archiving. Given that there are dozens (possibly hundreds) of extinct strips that can no longer be found online anywhere, there may be some great webcomics that will never be seen again by anyone. Without an institution out there keeping tabs on these comics and establishing a permanent archive of the best of them, the responsibility falls squarely on the individual creators to maintain their own archives.

Long term, there is the likelihood that the software to display current webcomics will become out of date and eventually cease to exist. Old versions of Flash animation may eventually be inoperable on new machines, and even basic formats like Jpeg and Gif may eventually lose support. Is it possible that the roots of a massive cultural phenomena like webcomics may someday be impossible to study?

There’s no immediate danger of this happening, but even if major programs and file formats fall out of favor, we can probably count on supporters of the old stuff just as we’ve still got collectors out there with their first vinyl records, 8-tracks, laserdiscs, beta tapes and the means to listen to them. It’s hard to predict where technology’s going (I’d barely heard of the internet ten years ago, and was just starting to phase out my cassette tapes in favor of CDs), but I know plenty of tech people who hang on to outmoded operating systems and old versions of programs just in case they’ll need them someday, and we just may have a proper webcomics archiving system in place when it comes time to say goodbye to jpegs.