300,000 original cartoon strips…
67,000 serials and comic books…
45,000 books of, on, or about cartoons…
2.5 million comic strip clippings and newspaper pages…
Together, this massive collection of comic artworks comprises the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and it’s all just up the road in Columbus.
The 30,000-square-foot museum of archives, located on Ohio State University’s (OSU) campus, contains collections of work by Will Eisner (creator of The Spirit comics and the man credited with popularizing the format of the graphic novel), Pulitzer Prize-winning political Washington Post cartoonist, Nick Anderson, Walt Kelly (creator of Pogo), and Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin and Hobbes). There’s also an extensive collection of Japanese manga comics and an online blog just for that particular collection.