Show HN: I used ML to find public domain Krazy Kat comics in newspaper archives

So, driven a desire to obtain the “unobtainable” and mostly by curiosity to see if it was possible, I set out to see if I could find public domain Krazy Kat Sunday comics in online newspaper archives. In short, I wrote some programs in Python that downloaded thumbnails from various newspaper archives, manually found about 100 Sunday comic strips from the thumbnails, used Microsoft’s Custom Vision service to train an image classifier to detect Krazy Kat comics in thumbnail images, used that classifier to find several hundred more thumbnails, then wrote some more code in Python to download high resolution images of all of the thumbnails that I found. After many hours of frustrating research, I was finally able to narrow determine that Krazy Kat Sunday comics are available from the following sources:

In the process of looking for Sunday comics, I was also able to find several newspapers in various archives that also have copies of the daily Krazy Kat comics.

Source: joel.franusic.com