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December 20, 2003
OSU Cartoon Research Library Celebrates Ohio Natives
By Kevin ParksSuperman was born in Cleveland in 1934.
All right, technically, Kal El, who would become Superboy who would grow into Superman who would disguise himself as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, was born on the doomed planet Krypton.
But he was conceived in Cleveland. By two teenage boys. Writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster were high school students when they came up with the idea.
The creation of the Man of Steel would, by itself, be enough to put Ohio on the map of the cartoon art world, but the Buckeye state’s contributions to the field goes well beyond Superman.
"The number of incredible cartoonists with links to Ohio is truly astonishing," says Lucy Caswell.
Caswell, a professor in the Ohio State University School of Journalism and Communication, is also curator of the OSU Cartoon Research Library. Since its inception in 1977, the library has accumulated 250,000 original cartoons and approximately 40,000 volumes.
As part of Ohio’s Bicentennial celebration this year, the Cartoon Research Library put up two exhibits celebrating the work of influential cartoonists with connections to Ohio.
A prime example is Richard Felton Outcault, born in 1863 in Lancaster, Ohio, whose "Yellow Kid" is generally credited with being the very first newspaper comic strip.
Outcault’s jug-eared, vacant-eyed street urchin (below) became wildly popular in the late 19th century. The Yellow Kid and the strip in which he appeared, "Hogan’s Alley," became the subject of a monumental bidding war between newspaper industry titans Joseph Pulitzer, owner of The New York Journal, and William Randolph Hearst, owner of The New York World.
The artist’s services were sought by the publishers the way superstar athletes are by professional sports team owners today, Caswell said.
The color of the nightshirt Outcault dressed his creation in lent itself to the term "yellow journalism" to describe the sensational excesses of Hearst and Pulitzer’s newspapers.
At least six Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists have Ohio ties: Tony Auth, Jim Borgman (right), Walt Handlesman, Ed Kuekes, Charles Macauley, and Mike Peters. Robert Crumb, Cathy Guisewite, and Bill Watterson furthered the legacy of Ohio cartoonists, as did the works of Tony Cochran, Jeff Smith, Ted Rall, and P. Craig Russell.
And then there’s Milton Caniff.
Born in Hillsboro on Feb. 28, 1907, he graduated from Ohio State in 1930. Four years later he launched "Terry and the Pirates," which became an immediate smash hit. In 1947, after getting into a copyright dispute with the Tribune Syndicate in Chicago, Caniff created a new strip that became just as popular, "Steve Canyon."
Caniff in 1977 presented a collection of his life’s work to his alma mater, and that became the "seed" through which the Cartoon Research Library grew, according to Caswell. Caniff, who was still working on "Steve Canyon" when he died in New York City on May 3, 1988, lived long enough to persuade others in the field that OSU’s Cartoon Research Library was the place to deposit their collections, the curator said.
Those so persuaded included the widow of Walt Kelly, creator of "Pogo."
Another major shot in the arm for the Cartoon Research Library, Caswell indicated, was the 1997 acquisition of a large portion of the extraordinarily extensive collection held by the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. The life’s work of academy founder Bill Blackbeard consists of 2.5-million clippings and tear sheets from American newspapers dating from 1894 to 1996.
The portion of the collection sold to OSU weighed 75 tons. It required six moving vans to transport it from California to Ohio, and the collection is still being cataloged to this day with the help of a grant from the Getty Foundation, Caswell said.
"It’s sort of like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon," she added.
But why collect any of this stuff in the first place?
Why not? would be an easy answer, but Caswell has a better one.
"Shakespeare was pop culture," she asserted, "and somehow that fact has been lost as we have elevated these plays. It’s important to understand that in terms of preserving current popular culture."
When Caswell, a native of Texas who has lived in central Ohio for many years, was a student, the field of popular culture was virtually all self-taught. It was not possible, she said, to do the kinds of research OSU’s Cartoon Research Library permits because such facilities did not exist.
"It’s a chicken-and-egg situation," she said.
OSU’s facility has "set a standard of academic excellence," in the opinion of Gene Kannenberg Jr., an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston whose Ph.D. dissertation in May 2002 at the University of Connecticut was on comic book art.
OSU is also in a consortium with a number of other universities, including Bowling Green and Kent State here in Ohio, to spread out the collecting of popular culture, Caswell said.
"We talk about trying to preserve the popular cultural heritage because there’s too much out there for any one collection."
Michigan State, for example, concentrates on collecting Western European cartoons, Caswell said, while the facility for which she is curator has an extensive collection of "manga."
Subject matter addressed in these comic books for all ages, according to a Web site at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, includes adventure, cops and robbers, humor, romance, sex, science fiction, veterinary medicine and video games.
Caswell feels something similar to this widespread acceptance of the graphic novel may be in the offing for the United States.
"Words and pictures together can really communicate meaningfully to adult readers," she said.
The OSU Cartoon Research Library is an archival facility, and as such, items in the collection are only available on-site.
Web surfers won’t find many images from the extensive collection, as much as Caswell would love to make them available.
"Copyright is something of a challenge for us," the curator admitted. "We take copyright very seriously."
In 2004, the Cartoon Research Library will host the eighth triannual Festival of Cartoon Art. The conference will be held October 15 and 16 at the Blackwell, a new hotel and conference center on the OSU campus, and the theme will be "Deletions, Omissions and Erasures: Censorship, Self-censorship, and Editorial Control."
To receive a registration form for the festival, please write to The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library, 27 West 17th Ave. Mall, Columbus OH 43210-1393 or send it via e-mail to cartoons@osu.edu.
–ThisWeek, August 14, 2003.
J.P. Trostle contributed to this article.