As some of you may have guessed, all the micro-fiche sopies I have been showing here the last few weeks, are from a pay website called newspaperarchive (singular). This newspaperarchive lets you search millions of newspaper pages in microfiche form. It is marketed as a tool for heritage research, but all photo sections and comics pages are included. You do have to pay for it and seraching for comics and downloading them isn't as easy as it may sound, but it has offered me the opportunity to find lots and lots of rare material from the fifties. As I have said many times before, the fifties are an underrated period of American newspaper comics and there is still a lot to be found, that has simply been forgotten or smoothed over in most history books. Given my interest in B.C. it was only a matter of time before I would look for the earliest samples of that strip. I am sorry a complete reprint of this tsrip has still not been announced, but here you can see some of it's beginnings. In a later interview, Johnny Hart stated that he tried to give his characters a unique design, but he soon found out that their strange shape made it impossible for them to bend over and do other simple tasks, so he adepted it ater the first year. You can also see his original signature, which he had also used in his cartoons.
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