A Technophile's Doubt

It is so obvious, but I will say it anyway: periodical scholars must remain vigilant regarding the history of the archive from which we work. The American Periodical Series, which is the foundation of much archival work in the field, did the bulk of its own collecting in the early 1940s, as part of a larger drive in American Studies to collect and highlight an "exceptional" American heritage that might serve as an antidote to the threats of foreign Fascism and Communism. Americanists have worked hard in recent years to question and challenge the assumptions inherited from the foundational work of the Cold War period, and to recognize the ways in which it systematically excludes voices and texts in its desire to present to the world a "unique" face for American culture. We need to be equally vigilant in periodical studies.

Although the current managers of the APS have worked to bring new periodicals and recover missing issues, the backbone of the collection remains committed to certain definitions of both periodical and cultural values—definitions about which we should always remain skeptical. As we all know, many periodicals were determined not suitable for APS—including some popular illustrated nineteenth-century periodicals. But of equal concern is the limited definition of "periodical" the series enforces and, in its new digital form, disseminates more broadly than ever at precisely the time when the field is most in need of expanding its boundaries.

Indeed, my larger concern is not the obvious one that we need to greet the brave new world of electronic archives with a critical eye as to what is excluded, but that these new resources might stand in the way of opening up the field at a vital moment in its development. I have been working almost full-time for the past two years in studying the history of American serial comics from the early nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. This is an area of inquiry singularly neglected by not only American Periodical Series, but by most research libraries. Fortunately, I am blessed by the coincidences of academic hiring with daily access to what is almost certainly the richest special collection devoted entirely to this form: the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University.

It was here, not so very long ago, that I had an experience that reminded even an old technophile like me of the manifold reasons to be cautious of becoming too dependent on electronic archives. After a year of reading everything I could about the rise of newspaper comics at the turn of the last century and feeling very confident in my ability to describe these strange and exciting texts, I checked myself in for a period of working through the tear sheets from the earliest Sunday comics supplements. I was in search of illustrations for an essay I was publishing on the subject, and surely, or so I thought, I would be able to find what I was looking for in a few days—a week at most. Instead, I spent the next year relearning everything I thought I knew. In the "flesh," these early comics supplements were different than anything I could imagine: they were huge, to start with, and the colors, even a century later, were vibrant and complex in ways that did not reproduce in even the most lushly illustrated volumes. And they were intertextual, speaking to each other both serially and across the individual supplements in ways that could not be recovered by studying them individually. To make things more complex and exciting, there was the dynamic play between the supplement and the rest of the paper—play that the comics themselves often called specific attention to. In short, when I least expected it, comics—perhaps the most culturally and intellectually neglected of periodical forms—reeducated me into the demands and rewards of the traditional special collections archive.

But even as working with this strange and exciting periodical form has brought me back to the traditional archive after what had been a period of increasing drift into the world of electronic research, it has also reminded me of the inevitable gaps and...