MSU Libraries: World Capital of Comics Scholarship
Near Lansing, Michigan
Michigan State University sits just off US One Twenty-Seven on the eastern edge of East Lansing, and inside its library system lives a collection that is, without serious competition, the largest publicly accessible archive of comic books and comic art in the world. That is not a local boast. It is a straightforward description of what has been assembled here over fifty years.
The Comic Art Collection at MSU Libraries began in the early nineteen seventies, when a handful of librarians recognized that comic books were being discarded or ignored by institutions that should have been preserving them. While most universities treated comics as ephemera beneath their notice, MSU started collecting systematically. The collection grew decade by decade, acquiring not only American superhero comics but the full range of the medium: newspaper strips, underground comix, manga, European graphic albums, alternative and art comics, fanzines, and the academic literature produced about all of it.
Today the collection holds hundreds of thousands of items. That number includes at least ten thousand books, periodicals, theses, conference papers, and scholarly works about comics as a form. The range is global: American, Japanese, French, Belgian, British, Brazilian, and many other national traditions are represented. The collection functions as a genuine research library, drawing scholars from around the world who come to study the history and aesthetics of sequential art.
Michigan State University has built an academic infrastructure around the collection. The university offers undergraduate minors in Comic Art and Graphic Novels and in Popular Culture Studies, providing formal frameworks for the kind of scholarship that the collection makes possible. Comics Studies Society, a major professional organization for researchers in the field, is now hosted at MSU. What began as a preservation instinct in the early nineteen seventies has become the defining institution for a field of academic inquiry that most universities still regard as marginal.
