Collections Website and Kirby Digital Archive

What is the Collections Website?

The Museum curates the world’s largest Jack Kirby digital archive, with over 16,000 digital objects. We’re designing a new online experience to share it worldwide and need your support to bring it to life. Please help us and donate what you can on our fundraising page: kirbym.us/e/coll

Design for the new Kirby Museum Collections website is underway. We have thousands of images and catalog data in our Catalogue Raisonné. Our mission is to encourage the study of Jack Kirby – the Collections site is a way to meet that mission. Once funded and built, the site will be available for historians, researchers, the media, and every Kirby enthusiast worldwide.

What will the site include?

Catalogue Raisonné
The Catalogue will be a searchable database of Jack Kirby’s works. It will start with his comic book work and expand over time to include comic strips, animation and more.

The Digital Archive
Since 2006, the Museum has scanned and cataloged thousands of pages of original art, photocopies, documents, and other historical objects. This archive preserves Jack Kirby’s wonderful works in a lasting archive of high-resolution scans to standards set by museums and libraries worldwide. The website will feature a searchable listing of all the art and objects we have scanned, with medium-resolution images of some of the pieces. This section will expand over time. We will start with original art, then add photocopies and more.

For the Collections website, the Archive section will feature a selection of historically significant pages. Items will be searchable and cross-referenced to the Catalogue Raisonné. These images will be high-resolution, with the ability to zoom into the smallest details

What is the Kirby Digital Archive?

The Archive database

In 2006, the Jack Kirby Museum started its Kirby Digital Archive (KDA) with the ambitious goal of archiving every available piece of Jack Kirby’s art. The KDA preserves Jack Kirby’s wonderful works in a lasting archive of high-resolution scans to standards used by museums and libraries around the world. Not only does this archive provide amazing images for the Jack Kirby Museum website, but it also helps scholars and historians in their research.

Why is archiving original art important?

The KDA project’s primary purpose is to create a lasting record of Kirby’s art for everyone to study and enjoy – now and long into the future. With time, any original art not in museums or galleries risks deteriorating or being destroyed in natural and man-made disasters. The Kirby Museum is dedicated to preserving Kirby’s legacy by building this digital archive—approximate breakdown figures as of February 2025:

6,100
Comic Book
Pages		200
Comic
Strips		7,700
Pencil
Photocopies		600
Commission & Sketches

The KDA’s efforts are ongoing. Rand Hoppe, co-founder of the Jack Kirby Museum, and President Tom Kraft attend many U.S. comic conventions with wide-format Epson Expression 13000XL professional scanners to get the highest-quality scans. In addition, both travel to the homes and offices of private collectors with these scanners to archive their Kirby art collections.

Current total archive size: approximately 15,000 artifacts totaling over 6 Terabits of data.

Have your Kirby art archived!

Please contact Rand Hoppe and Tom Kraft of the Jack Kirby Museum at info@kirbymuseum.org  to have your art archived.

Owners who allow scans of their original art to be included in the Kirby Digital Archive have the option to receive a courtesy credit or to remain anonymous. They can also specify whether only scholars may view the scans under Museum control and whether they can or can not be published anywhere.

Options for having your art archived

1. Upcoming conventions

We bring our scanners onsite to scan and archive your art at many of the larger comic conventions throughout the United States, where you can bring your Kirby art. Bechara Maalouf of Nostalgic Investments generously provides a table and space for us to scan and archive art.

Please see our list of upcoming events here and contact us if you have art you’d like us to scan.

2. Your location

We can scan your art or arrange a visit to have your art scanned at your location. Museum Trustees, Rand Hoppe is located near New York City and Tom Kraft near Boston. We both have professional scanners. You can arrange to have us travel to your home and scan your art at your location. Many collectors do not want their art to leave their homes for insurance and security purposes. Please contact info@kirbymuseum.org to arrange a visit.

In addition, we plan several yearly visits to the Los Angeles area to organize visits. We post trips on our Facebook page, but if you are in the LA area, please contact us so we can add you to our next visit.

3. Your Scanner

If you can access a wide-format scanner, you can also scan your art. Here are the specifications for providing archival-quality scans:

  1. 100%
  2. 1200 DPI or 600 DPI
  3. RBG (24 bit color)
  4. Scan front and back
  5. Try to keep the art as straight as possible
  6. No unsharp masking or auto adjust settings
  7. Include space in between edges of paper and scanned image (don’t crop the scan to the edge of the paper, let us see the actual paper edge and some non-paper space)
  8. If available, save in Digital Negative (DNG) format or as TIFF with LZW compression. We use Hamrick Software’s VueScan software.
  9. If you want to stitch the pieces together, go ahead, but send the pieces (halves) as well as the result of your stitching. We prefer to archive “raw” scans, before any rotation or adjustment of any kind. File size varies between 150-210 MB each. We prefer you use our Hightail dropbox, but feel free to use services such as Dropbox, WeTransfer or we can arrange for an FTP file transfer, upon request. Please contact Rand Hoppe or Tom Kraft.

Other scans and photos welcome!

That’s right! Even though we’re building a fantastic scholarly reference with archival-quality scans, the Kirby Museum is also interested in compiling scans or photos of Kirby’s original art at any quality. See the information above about how to send them to us.

Thanks to Contributors!

We offer our heartfelt thanks to those who have contributed to or otherwise helped the Kirby Digital Archive:

3 Replies to “Collections Website and Kirby Digital Archive”

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