A stop at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum is like paying a visit to old friends. Hanging on the museum walls are huge framed cartoons of Lucy tormenting Charlie Brown, Beetle Bailey working his way under Sarge's skin, and Hobbes crouching under Calvin's school desk, whispering that the sum of 7 + 3 is 73.
In adjacent display cases, you'll also find a Steve Canyon lunchbox, a Little Orphan Annie board game and decoder ring, and B. Kliban cat hats. Pull out some drawers beneath them to find copies of Mad magazine, a Captain Marvel comic book, and a cartoon correspondence course complete with a “Gag Master Wheel.” In yet another case, editorial cartoons of the 19th-century master Thomas Nast show how he created the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party.
There's no telling what treasures you'll uncover at this unique institution located on the campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus. Quite simply, it's the largest repository of cartoon art in the world, with 300,000 original cartoons, 45,000 books, 67,000 serials and comic books, and a whopping 2.5 million comic strip clippings. Name any cartoonist, even ones that aren't widely known, and the vast collection will almost surely have representative samples of their artwork. And in some cases, BICLM has the entirety of the artist's work, including the collections and ), Walt Kelly (), and Bill Watterson (). Huge holdings of underground comic books and even Japanese manga are also among BICLM's treasures.
