In late 2007 an attempt was made to reassemble and preserve these strips, at least in digital form. One of the Tarzan strips, the one most exposed to the air, had crumbled into innumerable small fragments and was impossible to salvage.Īfter Roland's death the various parts of the collection had been dispersed to three different cities. The strips left in a cardboard box were exposed to the air and had aged and deteriorated significantly.
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In some places it became brittle, in some places it had become a sticky goo. Over the years, the rubber cement used as a adhesive to affix the strips to the pages of the maintenance manuals, aged and discolored.
#COMICS DETROIT FREE PRESS MANUAL#
The excess maintenance manual pages that wouldn't fit into the two binders had been wrapped in newsprint from a February 11th, 1957 edition of the Detroit News. With the added thickness of the comic strips, all the pages of the maintenance manual would not fit back into the original binder so some of them were put into a second binder. There were too many Tarzan comic strips to be contained on the pages of the maintenance manual and the excess strips were placed in a cardboard box. This bundle remained unopened for twenty years.Īccording to some notations found on one of the pages, the Tarzan comic strips had been cut up and reassembled in book form in 1955 by pasting the cut-up comics onto the pages of a B-29 maintenance manual (The B-29 was a World War II bomber). Thirty years later, several years after Roland's death, the booklets had been wrapped in newsprint from an August 11th, 1988 issue of the Detroit Free Press, sealed with tape, and marked "Careful/Study" in a woman's handwriting. The Buck Rogers comic strips had been cut from the newspaper pages with a wide margin on the left hand side and fastened together in the form of booklets of 200 pages each during the summer of 1957. The Sky Roads comic strips had been wrapped in newspaper taken from an Augissue of the Detroit News, sealed with tape and remained untouched until almost exactly half a century later. He collected three different comic strip series: Sky Roads, Buck Rogers and Tarzan.īy the time that this material had been gathered together for scanning and presentation on the Internet in 2007 this collection had almost become irrevocably scattered. Other employees of the newspaper helped him accumulate a rather complete collection. In 1933 he delivered only the sunday editions of the newspapers, but started to work as copy boy in the Display Advertising Department at the Worcester Evening Post. They were collected during the period 1929-1933 while he worked as a paperboy, delivering the Worcester Evening Gazette and the Worcester Evening Post in Worcester Massachusetts. These comic strips were collected by Roland N. He also did genealogical research to provide context through the family histories of the artists.Some comic strips from the 1920's and 30's I started going to Black newspapers of the 1930s and '40s and '50s, and there was a lot of information on these guys.” Quattro began reading what he describes as thousands of past issues of publications written by and for African Americans. “There was nothing in the white media, in newspapers or magazines at all, about Black comic book artists. “He wrote me a beautiful four-page letter about not only Matt Baker, but about all these other Black cartoonists, and it stunned me at the time,” recalls Quattro, who wasn't familiar with the other names that were included. Quattro was having a hard time tracking down information about Baker until someone suggested he reach out to Samuel Joyner, an influential cartoonist, teacher and illustrator from Philadelphia who died last year at age 96. The idea for “Invisible Men” started 20 years ago, when Quattro was writing an article about Matt Baker, the Black artist who in 1945 created Voodah, a character that is considered the first Black hero in a comic book aimed at white audiences.