An oldie but hopefully still useful
by Ian Gordon
TLDR: I have uploaded my 1992 PhD complete with 219 images here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20521217 This is the first time it has been publicly available.
I completed my PhD Envisioning Consumer Culture in 1992. The manuscript was duly sent off to UMI (now Proquest Dissertations) and microfilmed. Although I could buy copies at the time, UMI did not make it publicly available due to the large number of images (219), and I imagine concerns about intellectual property. The resolution of the images in the printed version of the microfilmed copies is terrible. Some 34 years after being completed Proquest lists the dissertation as embargoed. I decided to do a PDF version of my PhD.
My book Comic Strips and Consumer Culture is a reworked version of the dissertation with an additional chapter, but I could only reproduce 28 illustrations. I think the rich visual record of my PhD is worth sharing for the way the images drove the argument. Unfortunately, when I moved out of my office, having hit the compulsory retirement age, I tossed my bulky copy of the submitted PhD since I have two copies of the UMI version.
I also tossed the “original" photocopies of material I used. I do not have room in my apartment for the vast bulk of my books or the two filing cabinets of research material. I scanned some material, but unfortunately, I didn’t think of scanning this material from my PhD.
When I looked through my 219 figures from the PhD, I thought it would be hard to locate the advertising material I had used from an archive. But I found published versions of all but one of those images. Using software, I was able to clean up this one image from my UMI copy (a printout of a microfilmed, photocopy, of a photocopy) and get a clear image. Not all the images were so readily recovered in this manner. But much to my surprise I managed to find or obtain scans of everything else by begging a favor here and there and using various online resources.
In the process of obtaining material I found I had a few incorrect dates. Those have been corrected in this version. I have attached a list to the PDF copy of Comic Strips and Consumer Culture that is available online here (many of my articles are on zenodo): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18253782
Several of these errors were the result of the research process. In 1990-1991 I held a Swann Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship and was based at the Library of Congress. I shared a four person researchers’ room and had a stack pass. Stack passes for researchers were discontinued a year or two later. For my research in magazines like Judge, Life, Puck, and Truth I would go to the stacks and sit on the floor with the hefty volumes. I would identify material I wanted copies of and then put it on a library cart and take it to the photocopier. In this process I misdated a few figures a week later than their publication. Sitting on the floor with the volumes was a way of not breaking their spines because of their size and the need for a flat surface. Photocopying the volumes was not easy and I think I might have been stopped once or twice.
It is a vastly different experience to sit at home in Singapore and download images from the online versions of these illustrated humor magazines. Unfortunately, Truth hasn’t been digitized but I could find the few images I wanted from that magazine in other sources. It took me about a month working 4-5 hours a day to track down and assemble the images from my PhD. Online sources would probably have halved the research and writing time I took for my PhD from two years to a year, but the greater availability of material would probably have caused me to expand the research. The chapter that I added for the book would also have been easier to do and less expensive given that the cost included a massive $300 speeding fine when I was driving back to Sydney in 1994 from a week’s research at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, which had the only copy in Australia on microfilm of the San Francisco Chronicle. Looking at this material again I would not have included Frank Nankivell’s, "Mr. Johnson” comic without some comment about his use of racist imagery. The issue becomes even more relevant when I include the image.
I wrote my PhD on an IBM clone with an Intel 286 chip. It was a DOS system and could process 16MB of memory. I used WordPerfect. Some years ago, I moved my files to Word versions. The dissertation was printed on Letter paper, and I have kept that paper size here. But this version has a different pagination probably because of the shift in word processors. I have retained the font I was required to use even though another font might be easier to read.
Ian Gordon
Singapore, May 2026.
