THE STORY OF LIFE IN THE FUNNY PAPERS

Friday, Nov. 15, 2013 News 3
Orange County Register
1
Focus | COMICS
IF YOU GO
Rows of
books on
cartoons sit
at the Billy
Ireland Cartoon Library
& Museum
in Columbus, Ohio,
which opens
Saturday.
BILLY IRELAND CARTOON LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
cartoons.osu.edu
● Where: Sullivant Hall, Ohio State University
1 8 1 3 N. High St., Columbus, Ohio (6 1 4-292-0538)
● Hours: Saturday and Sunday (Nov. 1 6-1 7) 1 0 a.m. to 5
p.m.; then, Tuesday through Sunday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Closed Monday.
● Opening exhibits include “Treasures from the Collection” and “Substance and Shadow: The Art of the Cartoon”
KEY DONATIONS
It’s partly because of Mort Walker and his son, Brian, that
the museum is what it is today. They held thousands of original
comics and artifacts donated to the Mort Walker-founded International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Fla. When
the museum ran into financial trouble during the recession, the
Walkers were persuaded in 2008 to donate the entire collection, which included 200,000 original strips, to Ohio State.
●
About a decade earlier, the museum got the entire collection of the defunct San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, which
included 2.5 million clipped newspaper comic strips.
●
THE STORY
OF LIFE IN
THE FUNNY
PAPERS
New museum at Ohio State boasts
the largest collection of cartoons
and related artifacts in the world.
S t o r y b y M I T C H S TA C Y
Photos by TONY DEJAK
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | FROM COLUMBUS, OHIO
here is a place where Snoopy frolics carefree
with the scandalous Yellow Kid, where Pogo
the possum philosophizes alongside Calvin and
Hobbes. It’s a place where Beetle Bailey loafs
with Garfield the cat, while Krazy Kat takes another
brick to the noggin, and brooding heroes battle dark
forces on the pages of fat graphic novels.
That doesn’t even begin to describe everything that’s
going on behind the walls of the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum on the Ohio State University
campus, opening to the public Saturday.
“This is the stuff that makes me drool,” says Jim Borgman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who
now draws the “Zits” newspaper comic strip. “I enjoy art
of all kinds, but it’s as if cartoons were segregated for
many years and not allowed into such hallowed halls.
And this is kind of a moment of setting things right, I
think, giving cartooning its due when it has been in the
wings all these years.”
Jeremy, the kid from “Zits”? He’s in there, too, since
Cincinnati native Borgman donated most of his art and
papers to the museum.
T
AN ARCHIVE AT FIRST
The whole thing started with Milton Caniff, the influential comic artist whose beloved “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon” adventure strips lived in the
nation’s funny papers for a half-century.
Caniff graduated from Ohio State and loved the place
so much that he wanted his original art and other papers
to be kept here forever. He handed it all over to the university in 1977. Along with
library curator Lucy
Shelton, Caswell then began urging his cartoonist Cartoons and comic books
friends to do the same. have a rich history in the
Two classrooms in the fabric of American society
journalism building soon and culture. The museum
began to fill with the new at Ohio State will be a
place for scholars and encomics archive.
“Prior to that, most thusiasts alike to track
universities ignored that the nation’s history of hutype of popular culture,” mor and graphic novels.
says current curator Jenny Robb, noting that for many years original comic strips
were just thrown out with the trash and animation celluloid sheets – known as “cels” – were routinely wiped
clean and reused.
Today, the museum collection includes more than
300,000 original strips from everybody who’s anybody
in the newspaper comics world, plus 45,000 books,
29,000 comic books and 2,400 boxes of manuscript material, fan mail and other personal papers from artists.
The university says it’s the largest collection of cartoon
art and artifacts in the world.
The museum has originals from everyone from
Richard Outcault – whose “Yellow Kid” in a 19th-century
comic strip spawned the term “yellow journalism” – to
Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”), classic “Pogo” story lines
WHY IT MATTERS
Caitlin McGurk displays “Terry and the Pirates” by Milton Caniff at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
from Walt Kelly, Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy,” early “Blondie” strips from
Chic Young and the entire collection of Jeff Smith, an
Ohio State graduate who created the hugely popular
“Bone” series of comic books.
It’s all been moved to a new 30,000-square-foot home
in a high-profile corridor of the sprawling Columbus
campus, into a space renamed for Ireland, the former editorial cartoonist for The Columbus Dispatch who was
one of the pioneers of the art form. His family donated a
big chunk of money for the project.
GALLERY SPACE
The new place has also got what’s been missing at the
museum’s two previous campus locations: a large gallery space for permanent and rotating exhibitions of
comics and cartoon art that will finally give it the air of a
proper museum.
Brian Walker, who collaborates on the “Beetle Bailey”
and “Hi and Lois” newspaper strips created in the 1950s
by his 90-year-old father, Mort, is putting together one of
the first exhibits.
“I told my father, this is what we’ve all be working for
for 30 years,” says Brian Walker, who has written or contributed to three dozen books on the history of comics.
“It’s kind of like the ultimate dream that we hoped would
happen someday, where all this great artwork is being
kept safely and archived and made accessible to the public.”
Robb is especially proud of the collection of original
strips and other papers donated by Bill Watterson, the
reclusive creator of the “Calvin and Hobbes” strip.
“We think this will be a destination for comics fans
from around the country and around the world,” Robb
says. “We hope that Ohio State is synonymous with cartoons in the way it is synonymous with football.”
The cover of the New York Journal from Oct. 1 8, 1 896,
is another relic found at the Columbus, Ohio, museum.
The grand opening of the museum is timed to the
Festival of Cartoon Art, which every three years brings
artists and others in the creation of comics to the university to talk about the craft.
H A P P Y S P O R T A U T O M AT I C
H a p p y B i r t h d a y, H a p p y S p o r t
November 9th-16th • South Coast Plaza • Jewel Court
C e l e b ra t e 2 0 ye a r s o f C h o p a rd ’s i c o n i c t i m e p i e c e a t a
special exhibit. Create your personalized Happy Sport at
t h e e x h i b i t , C h o p a r d B o u t i q u e o r o n l i n e a t U S. C H O PA R D. C O M .
For information, call 714.432.0963