It’s been nearly 30 years since Oglaf‘s Trudy Cooper & Doug Bayne teamed up with Danny Murphy to create the indie comic book-turned-webcomic Platinum Grit. The series was written and illustrated by Cooper, co-written by Murphy, with Bayne inking and contributing to the scripts through Episode 11.
The series began with an (officially non-canon) entry entitled “Friendly Rivalry” in the 1993 issue of Australia’s Issue One Magazine, followed by 10 issues self-published under the Dead Numbat imprint from 1994-1998.
Episodes 11-20 were released sporadically online from 2000-2009, with updates occasionally reaching nearly George R.R. Martin levels of time between installments (ok, maybe not QUITE), before being put on a permanent hiatus after #20. Additionally—and maddeningly to the archivists among us—though #1-16 eventually received physical reprints in 3 print-on-demand volumes (with #12-16 getting individual releases as well), a fourth and final book collection never materialized, leaving issues #17-20 unavailable in printed form.
To add yet another obstacle, the way that Platinum Grit appeared in its online state was atypical, requiring Shockwave (and then Flash) to scroll through the comic panels one-by-one, which had the unfortunate effect of becoming practically inaccessible once those programs were no longer available.
There had been talk since 2010 of revamping the Grit website to make it more in line with typical page-at-a-time webcomics, but nothing ever came of it, as Cooper and Bayne switched their focus to Oglaf instead. The Platinum Grit website itself finally expired in 2020, and just as Flash had been removed from our internet browsers, so too had Platinum Grit.
The idea that such a fantastic series would be lost to time solely due to a technology format becoming obsolete is something I couldn’t let happen. Platinum Grit deserves to be seen by future generations, so I took it upon myself to track down any missing issues from the original run and scan the lot of them for archival purposes.
As for the web-only installments, I had managed to snag the original Flash/Shockwave files (thanks Wayback Machine!) with the intent to piece them together into full-page comics, only to discover an archive of .gif versions of them (and in full-page spreads, no less!), which I have assembled into handy .cbr files.
I hope to have a full and complete archive of the comic series here in short order, and until the day arrives that an official re-release takes place, the adventures of Jeremy, Kate and Nils will hopefully live on in perpetuity.
-kp
(I should also note that as this is a fan restoration project. I do not claim any ownership of the material on this website. Platinum Grit is solely owned by Trudy Cooper, Danny Murphy, and Doug Bayne.)