When you've drawn enough cartoons to need a good filing system, it's also time to think about long term storage. I found out the hard way that they can get discolored with age when left out in the open. Besides spilling coffe on them and finding tea glass rings, I've also had the pleasure of trying to remove cat puke from a cartoon. Basically, it can't be done.
After reading up on this subject, I invested in a package of acid free paper, so I could put a blank page of acid free between each cartoon. But I didn't realize that a) this gets really bulky in a short time, doubling what you must store, and b) it's a major annoyance to remove and put back the acid paper every time you need certain cartoons. Even though I'm a detail person, I ended up stacking the acid paper, because I kept forgetting to put it on top of the cartoons when I pulled them from the inventory. Good thing I didn't spend much on that experiment.
Traditional file cabinets didn't work very well for me, either. It seemed like a lot of work to me to flip through folders, taking them out and putting them back all the time. Besides that, the edges of the cartoons got a big dog-eared. Eventually I discovered stacking plastic drawers. I bought a number of them at Walmart, the kind that contain three drawers each. Each drawer will hold a ream of paper. They work fine, but after only five years, they have a few cracks and a bit of sagging (because they're all very full).
A few years ago I invested in two free standing, rolling cart units that have the same plastic drawers. These came from a housewares catalog and cost quite a bit more than the ones from Walmart. They're good quality, though, with ten brightly colored plastic pull out drawers each, contained in a metal frame on rollers. I keep these two units close to the computer/drafting table area, and they hold the current year's work and whatever else I use in the way of bookkeeping and filing. Just recently I transferred the first five years' worth of daily cartoons, both black and white originals, good copies, and colored copies to the Walmart bins for permanent storage. All those bins are now full to the brim. In five more years, I'll have to fork out for some more drawers. But it keeps them clean and pristine, and that's worth all the trouble it takes to set it up that way.
Some years back a well meaning person took it upon himself to nag me about keeping the cartoons in a bank vault. While I was flattered that he thought they were that valuable, it would be a nightmare to try and work that way. I do make two digital copies of all the cartoons and burn them to a cd when each batch is completed, including drawing, copying, coloring, filing, and processing in Photoshop. I can't imagine not doing that. But these cd's contain only the images that I have processed for the web, so they would not work to make books or merchandise. But we'll get into all that later.
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