Hello,

I am a library science student (and webcomic artist) and I am currently writing a paper on the issues and activities surrounding the long-term preservation of webcomics. By long-term, I mean ensuring their existence, hopefully online, for 50 or more years. While there is plenty of literature on preserving websites and digital media in general, I’m interested in what individual or groups of artists are currently doing or thinking about with regards to long-term preservation. I’m hoping that you can help me. I’m interested in any thoughts you may have on this subject and/or efforts that you are aware of. Below are a few questions to help lead you in the right direction, but feel free to move around outside of them. I will not use any identifying information in my paper without your permission.

1) What do you think of preserving webcomics over the long term? Are there some that should definitely be preserved?
2) What are you doing to keep your comic safe for the future?
3) If an archive or art museum offered to preserve your webcomics, what parts of your comic, website, forums, production work, etc. would you be interested in sharing with that institution?
4) Do you know of any attempts to preserve webcomics either by individuals or groups?
(Naturally if Drunk Duck or Platinum Studios wants to make a statement on this issue, I'm interested in that too.)

I really appreciate your help in this endeavor. I may attempt to get this paper published in a library journal, but I will do my best to share the results with you regardless.

(Please pardon cross posting between here and Comic Genesis.)

We can click a button in our comic accounts which archives our comics into a handy zip folder and downloads it to our hard drive. -more for backup...

Personally I just keep may work on about 4 or 5 different sites. Long term there are no guarantees with the web, even with the most popular webcomics, the nature of the web is such that any site could disappear tomorrow! You just have to accept that.

Some web comics get turned into paper comics and you can buy others print on demand or saved onto CD or DVD.

You can check on a comic's past in a limited way by looking at web archival sites like the Way Back machine.

And finally, some comics will offer you a full download zip file of their entire content when they're about to go. Marine's "penis" comic here did that and Squidi of the very popular A Modest Destiny did that too a couple of years ago.

That's interesting. I didn't know that Drunk Duck had a back up function. I don't have a comic here, but I'll poke around and see if I can look at any of those functions.

If you were to try to formally preserve your comic (say, so it could outlast you or the internet), do you think you'd try to save the comic itself, or the entire page structure as well?

Thank you!

hahaha
i did a comic with that kind of plot
http://www.ryanestrada.com/wcca07/ceremony/newcomer.htm