“Buckeyes in France” by Billy Ireland, World War Cartoons, November 4, 1917 Milton Caniff Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University

The mission of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (BICLM) at Ohio State University (OSU) is to collect, preserve, and encourage the study of comics. It’s considered one of the largest collections of comics and cartoon materials in the world.

The collection began with a founding gift of artwork and papers by OSU alumnus and cartoonist Milton Caniff (1907–88) in 1977. He was the first person in his family to attend college, but soon realized he needed to make money to afford tuition and expenses. He liked cartooning and so went to the Columbia Dispatch, a newspaper covering central Ohio since 1871, to meet with the paper’s resident cartoonist Billy Ireland, who gave Caniff his first job and also served as Caniff’s mentor. Thanks to Ireland’s tutelage, he dedicated his life and career to comics. Caniff is best known for his newspaper comics, Terry and the Pirates (1934–46) and Steve Canyon (1947–88).

In the 1970s, Caniff offered his collection to OSU’s University Libraries, which turned him down despite his being a famous OSU alumnus. “My guess is that they weren’t particularly interested in collecting popular culture materials, including comic strips,” said Jenny Robb, BICLM curator of comics and cartoon art and associate professor. “This was true of a lot of universities and museums and archives at the time.” Many people then thought the comic industry was on the verge of full collapse, and the medium was perceived by popular society as lowbrow entertainment.

Caniff tried a different tactic. He was a journalism major, so he offered it to the journalism school—now housed in the School of Communications—which accepted the collection. The first installment arrived in 1974. Not only did the school take the collection, it even renamed a classroom as the Milton Caniff Reading Room and hired Lucy Shelton Caswell as the founding curator to catalog the collection in 1977. (The journalism school’s library integrated with University Libraries in 1984.)

To add to the collection, Caswell decided to find out what university-held comic book collections already existed, but quickly learned that few institutions were collecting in that area. Caswell reached out to Caniff to ask his fellow cartoonist friends, luminaries such as Walt Kelly and Will Eisner, to donate their collections, even though they did not have direct connections to OSU.

Caswell, now professor emerita, is credited for building the collection; she also taught classes and wrote scholarly work on newspaper comics and editorial cartoons. The Will and Ann Eisner Family Foundation established the Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award Endowment in 2017, which grants up to $2,500 to support a U.S. citizen or permanent resident to travel to Columbus to use the collections.

GROWING THE ARCHIVE

BICLM plays an important role in preserving and sharing a medium read by millions of people, in numerous formats, every day. “It’s how people communicate,” Robb explained. “It’s how artists are telling their stories. [Comics] also reflect what’s happening in society.”

Since opening, BICLM has grown exponentially to hold some 300,000 original cartoons; 107,000 comic books, magazines, and journals; 63,000 books and graphic novels; 6,300 boxes of archival materials; and 2.5 million newspaper comic strip pages and clippings. It collects many types of comics, including gag cartoons, alternative and underground comics, original art, editorial cartoons, professional records, and manga.

Caswell built the trust of people in the comic book community, regularly attending major industry events held by the National Cartoonists Society and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and spreading the word that OSU would respect and preserve their work, explained Robb. Many cartoonists have donated their papers and work, including such notables as Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes and the late Trina Robbins, who was an underground comic artist and comic book historian.

In 1997, BICLM acquired the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art (SFACA) Collection, which includes work printed in U.S. newspapers from 1893 to 1996. Author and collector Bill Blackbeard started the collection in the 1960s because he had originally wanted to study the history of the newspaper comic strip. He conducted his research using large bound volumes of newspapers at local libraries. However, Blackbeard discovered that the libraries were planning to discard the physical copies, which often used color, and replace them with black and white microfilm.

Blackbeard was alarmed at the situation and wanted to do something about it, said Robb. He created the nonprofit SFACA and collected the bound volumes from libraries that were deaccessioning them. He stored them in his home for decades, but lost his lease and needed to find another home for them in the 1990s. He reached out to Caswell, who raised funds to move the collection to OSU.

The collection comprised 75 tons of material, with 2.5 million newspaper comic strips and clippings. “It took six semi-trucks,” Robb said. “We’re still inventorying, rehousing, and cataloging it—and it arrived in 1998.” BICLM received a grant from the Hearst Foundation to hire dedicated archivists for the project. The Museum also mounted a crowdfunding campaign to raise additional funds for the massive undertaking.

The archive “would be impossible to reproduce today, and it contains material that you can’t access anywhere else in the world,” Robb explained. “It’s heavily used by researchers and it has some real gems in it.” She noted that they recently found a box of newspaper comics from the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender that included Bungleton Green by Jay Jackson, considered to be the first Black superhero, created in 1945.

In 2008, the museum acquired the collection of the International Museum of Cartoon Art, originally founded in 1974 in Stamford, CT, by cartoonist Mort Walker, best known for Beetle Bailey and Hi & Lois (cocreated with Dik Browne). Before donating the collection to BICLM, the museum had moved to several locations, the last in Boca Raton, FL. Eventually it was determined that the museum was not financially feasible, and it closed in 2002. The contents were put in storage, with hopes to open a museum in New York. When Walker eventually decided gave the collection to BICLM, it included 100,000 original cartoons and other materials.

FROM HOGARTH TO HOBBES

BICLM has had several names over the decades, including the Cartoon Research Library, starting in 1989, and then the Cartoon Library and Museum in July 2009. In September 2009 the Ireland family gave $7 million to the library and museum, which was renamed in Billy Ireland’s honor.

While the bulk of the collections are focused on the 20th and 21st century, some prints date to the 1600s—“precursors to today’s cartoons and comics,” noted Robb. The older works are typically British and are called “caricatures,” not cartoons. The collection contains a few works by 18th-century printmaker and satirist William Hogarth, who is considered the father of modern caricature.

One of BICLM’s most popular and requested collections is the original art for Calvin & Hobbes. which ran from 1985–95. Watterson gave away some of his work, but for the most part the library has the complete collection. “It still holds up to this day,” said Robb, noting that in addition being requested by the strip’s original readers, younger generations are asking for it as well.

Robb curated an exhibition, “Exploring Calvin & Hobbes,” in 2014; it is now traveling across the United States, most recently at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY.

“The Female Philosopher Smelling Out the Comet” by R. Hawkins, The Hale Scrapbook, p.16, February 1790 Draper and Sarah Hill Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University

Another notable piece of the collection, the Hale Scrapbook. Not a lot is known about the Boston-based Hale family behind the scrapbook, which was donated to BICLM by editorial cartoonist and historian Draper Hill in 2001, said Robb. Hill had acquired the scrapbook in a Massachusetts auction in 1965. It features social and political satirical material—engravings, letters, clippings, woodcuts, broadsides, sketches, paintings, and other miscellaneous items—dated from 1740 to 1830.

“They’re just a fascinating way to look at the culture at the time and what was going on in history,” said Robb. “There’s a lot of cartoons about Napoleon, but there’s a lot of cartoons about making fun of the way people dressed and the costumes at the time.” She imagined the scrapbook as having been put together to serve as evening entertainment.

One of her favorite images mocks Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), a German-British astronomer who discovered several comets and helped map the stars. She was a fascinating woman, ahead of her time, explained Robb, and one of the first women the British government paid as a scientist. The caricature depicts a comet or meteor passing gas at her. “This is evidence of how she was looked at by society at the time,” Robb said. “Obviously she was stepping out of her domestic sphere and doing man’s work.”

While the collection focuses largely on print or drawn comics, it contains some items from the world of animation, including animated drawings from cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay’s (c. 1867–1934) Gertie the Dinosaur, which featured as part of his vaudeville act in 1914. McCay is best known for Little Nemo in Slumberland, a weekly full-page comic strip that influenced many 20th- and 21st-century cartoonists, including Art Spiegelman, best known for the award-winning Maus.

BICLM also has one of the largest collections of Japanese manga outside of Japan. Since the 1990s it has been collecting items in collaboration with a University Libraries Studies subject specialist, a role currently held by Ann Marie Davis, Japanese Studies librarian and associate professor.

Robb noted that the library is also developing a collection of graphic medicine—comics that intersect with the world of health, illness, and health care—which has become increasingly popular in recent years.

UNDERSTANDING COMICS

Many OSU classes have made use of the BICLM’s holdings. In Spring 2025, Associate Professor of History Dr. Thomas McDow brought his History/Microbiology class to explore the role of HIV in political cartoons, educational comics, and graphic novels.

In both spring and autumn 2025, Dr. Nicole Nieto, assistant vice provost, office of outreach and engagement, had students explore cartoons about women and women leaders for her “Gender, Race, and Leadership” class. Other students studied caricatures in 18th- and 19th-century Europe for Dr. Elizabeth Bond, associate professor of history, and her Revolutionary & Napoleonic Europe class.

Adrienne Resha, a recipient of the 2022 Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award, wrote her dissertation about Arab and Muslim American superheroes in comic books for her PhD in American Studies at College of William and Mary. Fellow 2022 awardee Eike Ezner recently published his dissertation Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History in 2021. Dr. Margaret Galvan, assistant professor of visual rhetoric at the University of Florida and a 2023 recipient, wrote In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s .

Cartoonist Frank Santoro, one of the first award recipients in 2018, spent time at BICLM to research his self-published Caniffer, which explores the works of great cartoonists such as Caniff, Ireland, and others.

In addition to books and classes, BICLM has gallery space to showcase themes or artists. Prior exhibitions include the aforementioned Calvin and Hobbes exhibit; “See Anyone You Know? The New Yorker Cartoons and Covers of Edward Koren,” shown from 2024–25; and the most recent, “Write It Down, Draw It Out: The Comics Art of Carol Tyler,” which explored the work of the autobiographical cartoonist.

There are also digital exhibitions, including “Drawing Blood: Comics and Medicine,” and “The Double V Campaign: Black Editorial Cartoons and the Struggle for Democracy.”

While BICLM has extensive holdings, there are some gaps. Robb noted that since it focuses on print and still comics, it often has to turn down special collections on animation. There are some fanzines and representative works of fan culture, but it’s not comprehensive, Robb said. She also acknowledged wanting to diversify the collection to make sure that more voices are represented, such as women and people of color.

Fortunately, more university libraries and other institutions have begun collecting cartoons and comics. While BICLM does not tend to collect single issues, Michigan State University and the Library of Congress do.

Currently, BICLM’s exhibition spaces are under renovation and are closed until May 22. When they reopen, the permanent collection exhibit “The Story of Comics” will be revamped, and there will be a special exhibition on American cartoonist Chris Ware, best known for Acme Novelty Datebooks and Rusty Brown, called “Life is Complicated.”

The public can also attend events such as Between the Panels: A Graphic Book Club, which started in fall 2025, and workshops like “Comics Critique Night” or “Once Upon a Panel: Telling Stories with Music, Drama, and Comics.”

BICLM is open for research. For those interested in visiting, they should contact cartoons@osu.edu to schedule an appointment. Some materials are available online in the Digital Collections.