Comic books
Gifts propel comics collection at VCU Libraries
Comic books. The phrase conjures images of muscle-bound superheroes, friendly cartoon ghosts and word balloons: kids’ stuff, right? Not at Virginia Commonwealth University. Here, comics are serious business.
The university’s extensive Comic Arts Collection is housed in Special Collections and Archives at James Branch Cabell Library on the Monroe Park Campus. The VCU collection is one of the five largest in the country, said Cindy Jackson, archival assistant for Comic Arts and Digital collections at VCU. The collection, which VCU Libraries began amassing in the early 1970s, now comprises more than 100,000 items, including more than 30,000 single-issue comic books, Jackson said.
About 95 percent of the collection is composed of donated material, with supplemental reference materials and journals purchased by VCU’s Special Collections and Archives.
“Comic arts” is an umbrella term that covers a range of materials, such as editorial cartoons, newspaper strips, graphic novels and memorabilia. VCU’s Comic Arts Collection consists mostly of comics, especially in the superhero genre, from the 1960s and later, and contains some rare pieces, including the first books featuring now-familiar heroes such as Captain Marvel and Wolverine.
The oldest item in the collection is a Little Orphan Annie decoder pin from 1935, which some might remember from its appearance in the 1983 movie “A Christmas Story.”
The collection is also home to a variety of fanzines, reference books and other more scholarly materials including newsletters, journals and related periodicals detailing the history and art of comics.
Since 2005, the collection has also served as the repository for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Archives. The Eisner Awards, considered the “Oscars of comics,” honor the best and brightest in contemporary comic arts. The archives include more than 1,200 nominated and award-winning items.
Through recent donations as well as the addition of the Eisner archives, Jackson said, the collection has grown significantly in the realm of more recent independent and underground comics, as well as manga, a Japanese comic art form.
Likewise, the introduction of the collection on the Web in the late 1990s spawned another growth spurt, said Alex Lorch, interim head of Special Collections and Archives. Donors searching for a place where their comics will contribute to a larger collection come to VCU from all over the country after discovering the collection online, he said.
Kevin Winter, a 26-year-old undergraduate student of history at Sacramento State in California, found out about VCU’s collection via the Internet. He recently donated about 1,500 items to the collection.
“I had run out of room for my comics at home; they were gathering dust and not being read. I figured I might as well give them to a library with a collection already in place,” he said. “I felt that the comics would make a bigger impact at VCU.”
Winter’s donation consisted mostly of Japanese manga, which was exciting news for collection manager Jackson.
“Manga is the hot thing in comics right now. We have so many students ask for it, and before [Winter’s] donation, we had very little to choose from. Now we have a very healthy collection of manga for patrons to choose from,” Jackson said.
Many VCU students are interested in or influenced by comic arts, Jackson said. One such student, recent graduate Celina Williams, works with Jackson in Special Collections and Archives to maintain and preserve the collection. As a student of English and women’s studies, she has used the collection a number of times in her own academic research, and each day she aids other interested students in utilizing the collection as well.
“I see a lot of students taking an interest in the collection,” Williams said. “We have our regulars who … will visit periodically to read, sometimes multiple times in one day. We get a lot of art, history and English students who are utilizing the collection for academic purposes.”
The idea that comics even have a valid place in academia is a fairly new one.
“Up until recently, comics were viewed as children’s books. Only in the past 10 to 20 years have historians seen them as part of societal history. Now they are studied as a literary art form,” Lorch said.
More and more, comics are being recognized as significant indicators of the cultural status of the times and places in which they were created.
“Comics and manga give us a glimpse of what is important to the society and culture,” collector Winter said. “They tell, in a roundabout way, the problems, issues and solutions to the problems that a society is facing.”
For more information on the VCU Libraries’ Comic Arts Collection, please contact Cindy Jackson at (804) 828-1108 or hcjackson2@vcu.edu.