Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz from the Billy Ireland archives (photo by Nora Hickey Hyperallergic)
Archie, Terry and the Pirates, Calvin and Hodges, Dick Tracy, Nancy. Some of the iconic cartoon strips found in the archives of the Billie Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University. As a young person I remember seeing Dick Tracy talking into his watch to contact fellow cops. Would I ever be able to do that…… decades later we can.
The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University is an ultra-accessible shrine to the genre. It is much more than an archive. It is at once a museum, center for scholarship, and venue for events. Plus it is surprisingly accessible. It costs nothing to attend. The materials and displays are easy for anyone to understand, comics aficionado or not. It claims to house the world’s largest collection of cartoon- and comics-related materials, including a range of inked paper, artifacts, newspaper clips, magazines, scrapbooks, and even the drawing board used by Chester Gould, who created the Dick Tracy comic strip (1931—77).
Nora Hickey of Hyperalleric sat down with Caitlin McGurk, curator of Comics and Cartoon Art and associate professor at OSU to talk about this amazing library and museum. “Since OSU is part of a land grant institution, our archive is completely open to the public, which is pretty rare,” McGurk explains.
For the ENTIRE STORY and IMAGES on this amazing library and museum.
Political Cartooning
*** The late Anthony Mourek, past president and long time member of the society was a collector of political cartoons. In 2019 Anthony joined Tim Benson and Scott Stantis for a discussion of political cartooning. He also wrote a chapter in To Laugh That We May Not Weep. See our blog post: https://manuscript.org/2019/11/political-cartoons-then-and-now/ for links to the discussion and his chapter!
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