The Digital Comics Museum claims to be “the best site for downloading free public domain Golden Age Comics.” Its archive holds thousands of scanned and sorted specimens starting from the late 1930s and running roughly through the 1960s, all of them copyright free and in the public domain, so you won’t find famous titles and characters from publishers like DC and Timely/Marvel. What you will find are wonderful early specimens of the medium’s naïve, hyperbolic and often hysterical vision of the world, with names like “Men Against Crime,” “Out of This World Adventures” and “Crackajack Funnies.”

The downloads are available in the CBZ comic book archive format, which is easily read by a number of low cost or free applications (I use Biolithic’s Comic Zeal on my iPad). The scans are large and detailed, but they’re not quite the quality of John Hilgart’s fantastic 4CP blog. Still, they’re plenty of fun.