A pretty significant piece of sequential art history is quite literally falling into my lap this weekend. A friend of the family's father passed away, and while going through his belongings they found a well-preserved cache of comic strip originals, dated 1924. It turns out he was a failed syndicated comic strip hopeful: he had drawn the strips when he was only 16, but they rejected him outright because of his young age. He gave up on the dream, but kept the comics safe and preserved for over 80 years.

If that's not a love for the medium, I don't know what is.

I've been asked by his daughter (now in her 60's) to scan and restore the comics. I'm also going to be registering a site specifically to publish them online and share their story, hopefully to bring them to the audience he always wanted to reach.

It's just mind-blowing, really. The only comics we get to read from this time period -- at the dawning of the newspaper comics -- are the classics that were published and saved in the archives. We never get to see any remnants of the hopefuls, the rejected submissions, or the ones that might have been in those "History of Comics" books if some editor had just said "yes."

If you guys like, I can post the comics here once they're scanned in and cleaned up. Like I said, I'll also be registering a URL and building a site to share them all for free online. I just want to get this rare piece of history out to as wide of an audience as possible.

That is amazing. I totally want to see those. I can't think of a better comic stripper to do this project

Seriously, I am stunned by this news and I can't wait to see the finished project. This is a wonderful thing you will be doing. His dream will finally get the chance to be appreciated and those that loved him will get to see that happen.

Golf Clap.....

TomAndEdComic.com

Bookmark this site if you would like to follow my progress on the restoration of this comic. Right now it's just a holding front page, but later this week I will have the whole thing up and running, including initial rough scans of all 21 strips in the series.

To everyone here, please repost this on Twitter, Facebook, etc. if you would like to spread word about the project. I think this could be a pretty significant piece of comic history that could shed some additional light on the creative minds of that time period. Also, it's my desire to officially publish these comics for free online once they are restored in order to bring Al Ryan's work to the audience he was denied almost 100 years ago.