Forever home for Footrot Flats

Five thousand Footrot Flats comic strips have been donated to the National Library by the family of the late cartoonist Murray Ball.

Yesterday, 50 carefully wrapped packages containing 100 comics, all in date order from 1976 through to the 2000s, were officially handed over to the Cartoon and Comics Archive.

‘‘I am just absolutely thrilled that they are in a safe place,’’ Ball’s wife, Pam, said.

The collection of comics, read and enjoyed across the world for decades, began after the first strip appeared in The Evening Post in 1976.

Over nearly 20 years, they appeared in more than 2000 newspapers across New Zealand, Australia and the world.

The popularity of the comics led to more than 40 books, merchandise, a stage musical, an amusement park, statues and New Zealand’s first animated feature film Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tail, which made Ball a household name.

He wasmade an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002 and died in 2017 at age 78, after suffering from Alzheimer’s for some time.

After Ball passed away his son, Gareth Ball, scanned and uploaded his father’s work online, to be enjoyed widely for free.

‘‘We had the entire body of his work, not just Footrot Flats, to sort though. I bought an A3 scanner and went about digitising it,’’ he said.

‘‘It is another way for people to access it, which is important to us.

‘‘Once that was done, we didn’t really have a need for the originals any more and just to know that they are safe is really important.’’

National Library assistant curator cartoons and comics Sam Orchard said the breadth of Ball’s work represented one of the key reasons for expanding the cartoon archive at the library in 2019.

‘‘This acknowledged the role comics have played in documenting New Zealand histories and lives, and the archive now holds strip comics (like Footrot Flats) as well as graphic novels, web comics and comic books,’’ Orchard wrote in Off The Record, the magazine of The Friends of Turnbull Library.

‘‘It is a real thrill to me as a cartoonist to get to see Murray’s work in the paper formand to see the literal lines he has made on paper,’’ he told the Ball family during a small ceremony yesterday, where they signed the deed to donate the comics.

‘‘The love and care that you have obviously put into taking care of these precious objects and putting them in order ... We are really delighted to look after them forever,’’ he said.