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In the 1970s, many libraries discarded the physical copies of their newspapers after microfilming: the collector Bill Blackbeard assembled his archives by recovering these discarded copies and opened a public institution dedicated to newspaper comics. This archive served as the basis for many reprints and new circulations, building a cultural memory for a particularly ephemeral medium. By looking at both the constitution and the circulation of these archives, this article studies this cultural memory of American newspaper comics, which involved various generations and actors, delineating the material properties of a vernacular history of comics.