Comic Art Museums

Behind the Scenes at The Billy Ireland

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D. D. Degg February 13, 2024 1 minute 2 comments

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum claims to house the world’s largest collection of cartoon- and comics-related materials, including a range of inked paper, artifacts, newspaper clips, magazines, scrapbooks, and even the drawing board used by Chester Gould, who created the Dick Tracy comic strip.

But it is much more than an archive: it is at once a museum, center for scholarship, and venue for events, all of it surprisingly accessible.

_{photos by Nora Hickey/ Hyperallergic}

Caitlin McGurk of The Billy Ireland tells Nora Hickley at Hyperallergic about the beginnings and takes her, and by extension us, on a tour of the library and museum. Inside the World’s Largest Comics and Cartoons Collection.

Below the exhibition spaces are the archives themselves. “Since OSU is part of a land grant institution, our archive is completely open to the public, which is pretty rare,” McGurk explains.