A few months ago, I acquired over 200 flongs from a fellow in Sweden who had purchased them at a thrift store that, in turn, had bought them from an estate. These were all comics intended for publication in a Swedish newspaper, some in English and some in Swedish. The vast majority, 191 of them, were Sunday Peanuts comics flongs in English as color separations (see below).

Each Sunday comic required four flongs to produce the strip. Of the 191, there were 26 complete sets (104 plates); the rest are all loose plates, none of them the black or key plate (explained below). My suspicion is that people perusing the thrift store bought some of the black plates, as they have most of the detail of the strip, as a bit of interest, leaving the other plates behind.

After many hours of scanning, clean-up, rotation, cropping, labeling, and linking, all 191 scans are now online at my Flickr account, collected in this album. A few of the images are below.

I made these scans and uploaded them for viewing and download as part of my ongoing mission to document a missing, meaningful, and aesthetically pleasing aspect of print production and comic syndication that’s largely forgotten today.

I thought a few years ago that nearly all flongs had been burned or trashed immediately after creation and few remained. As I continue my investigations, I keep finding that people stashed flongs in particular—and some stereotype plates—because they held some interest for them. Though the people who retained them largely never figured out what to do with them—most left them in boxes and most seem to have never looked at them again after collecting them from work or elsewhere—they served as a valuable link for rediscovery and digital sharing.

Color Separation

Newspapers, like most printing, produce a full range of color by separating the initial colors into CMYK: cyan (sometimes labeled blue), magenta (sometimes labeled red), yellow, and “key,” almost always black, but referred to that way as it holds the detail and is the plate against which they others are aligned.

A color photograph went through a series of tinted screens to produce the halftone separations required for printing in the days before digital scanning and output. However, cartoons were typically marked for color by the cartoonist or cartoonist’s production staff, and then converted into the necessary elements for each plate manually. This was done through using opaque overlays and with Ben Day dots.