I'm an amateur historian with an interest in newspaper comics, and have been paying attention to, through not necessarily participating in, the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics.strips for a while now. From what I've been able to see, the group dates back to around 1992. I would love to be able to somehow download all the messages from the group and read them offline at my leisure, but I'm not sure how to do that.
I can find mbox archives at archive.org, but they only date back to the early 2000s. The Usenet archive Narkive only goes back that far as well (though that site has no built in search function and is horrible for trying to browse to find anything older than about a month, so it's not even a good option for online reading). Google Groups appears to have the whole thing, but none of the solutions for downloading messages seem to work anymore after it changed to using Javascript. There's also UsenetArchives.com which goes all the way back, but I haven't found a way to download messages from there either.
Is there either a current, up to date way to download a newsgroup from Google Groups, or a way to download from UsenetArchives.com that anyone knows of? Or perhaps a better place to look for a more complete archive?