Please enjoy the world premiere of my video “From Artist’s Board to Newspaper Page: How Comics Were Made in the Age of Metal Printing, 1910s–80s,” made for the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum & Library at the Ohio State University. I produced this video to explain the many, complicated steps between an artist drawing a strip through syndicate production of the materials sent to newspapers and newspapers’ adding those into their own layouts and printing newspapers. It’s elaborate, but shown here in a crisp six minutes using public-domain archival footage and images and video from my own collection.

I was asked to make this video by curators Ann Lennon and Caitlin McGurk for an incredible exhibition opening today, “Man Saves Comics! Bill Blackbeard's Treasure of 20th Century Newspapers,” which opened today! This is the first time I’ve had anything included in a museum exhibition, much less been involved with curators to produce something bespoke. I hope you enjoy the video; I plan more along these lines, explaining forgotten, but visually fascinating, parts of printing’s past.

Giant props to Rick and Megan Prelinger of The Prelinger Library for the remarkable footage now at Internet Archive as part of the transfer of the Prelinger Archives to that institution. A chunk of the film I use in my video comes from Trees to Tribunes, a 1937 film produced by the Chicago Tribune showing the entire process of newspaper productions from lumber to distribution. Other public-domain movies and art were vital as well and credited in the end titles.