A decade ago, my wife and I started to clip out from the newspapers we subscribed to (the New Hampshire Keene Sentinel and The Boston Globe) cartoons and comic strips related to our academic interests in art history and archaeology. In 2017, after we retired and moved to Spain, I started to organize those clippings, which led me down the rabbit holes of comic studies and humor theory. Three years ago, I finished Art and Archaeology in the American Funny Pages, a series of essays about, well, art and archaeology in American comics. I sent it out to several publishers, and only heard back from a sympathetic editor at the University of Mississippi Press (which is the main academic publisher of comic studies in the US). But that kindly editor suggested that UMP would only be interested in publishing my work if I divided it into two books, cut out 9/10ths of the comics in it, and obtain (i.e. pay for) permission to quote all copyrighted material I included in it.
While I did seriously consider taking UMP up on its offer, I ended up putting my Art and Archaeology in the American Funny Pages on the back burner while I turned to other projects (mostly exploring Asturias, a marvelous, and largely undiscovered, part of northern Spain). Now, as 2023 is drawing to a close, I have come to realize that I don’t have it in me to try to rework this study into a form that a publisher may find acceptable. So, for the few people who might be interested in what I had to say on this topic, here it is, over a thousand pages long with nearly a thousand, six hundred, comcs! (Because of its size, I have had to upload it to this website in eleven parts.)
Murray C McClellan 