[beabaker]

I feel like this may be an older rule carryover, but why is Little Orphan Annie still banned from this website? Her comic strips have been entering the public domain in the U.S. every year since the Sonny Bono unfreeze of 2019, and several of her compilation books are also now freely available--however, no legal website currently hosts any of these public domain comics, and Comic Book Plus won't allow them, so there's no place to read the first 5 (soon to be 6) years of the comic.

For something like Popular Comics, where Annie and Dick Tracy comics are removed, I understand that those are often reprints of the 30s comics which are possibly still protected. However, I haven't ever been able to find any renewals for any pre-1950 Annie comics anywhere in the records. At first, I thought it might be that if Chicago Tribune was renewed, the strips from that syndicate were also renewed, but all the other Popular Comics stories are also Tribune comics, and they're on here just fine. Am I just missing the renewals for Annie that comics like Gumps and Gasoline Alley didn't get that allow them on here?

I'm not as clear on later Annie comics, but the Four Color Comics Annie stuff at least appears to me to be original stories, not pure strip reprints, and those were also not renewed that I could find. (But I can't say with any certainty!)

I really like the old public domain era Annie comics, and I hope more people can discover them. If there's a good reason they still shouldn't be on this site though, I understand!