Comic Art Collection

The Comic Art Collection holds over 300,000 items. Most of these items are comic books, but also included are over 2,000 books of collected newspaper comic strips, and several thousand books and periodicals about comics. Although some archival material and a few dozen pieces of original comic book and comic strip art are held, the focus of the collection is on published work, in an effort to present a complete picture of what the audience has seen over the years of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Local students and advanced scholars from around the world find this collection to be the primary library resource for the study of U.S. comic book publications.

The most important categories of material in the Comic Art Collection, based on current completeness and emphasis, are the U.S. comic books, the international comics collection, the newspaper strip books, and the historical and critical materials. Smaller sub-collections include animation-related material, Big Little Books, books illustrated by comic artists or written by comics professionals, propaganda comics, tie-ins to comic-related movies, coloring books (especially thematic or in narrative style), the Eclipse Comics archive, and clipping and ephemera files.

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Michigan State University Libraries
Special Collections Division

Last updated: June 16, 2022
, Page editor: Randall W. Scott

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