Tag Archives: International Museum of Cartoon Art

Congratulations to Meredith Spano!

We’re tickled to highlight student employee Meredith Spano on the blog today, who has recently hit the 100 mark in processing originals of continuing feature comic strip titles from our International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection (IMCA)! The IMCA collection was transferred to us in 2008 from Mort Walker, for whom one of our galleries in the new Sullivant Hall facility will be named. The collection contains thousands of priceless original cartoons from around the world, as well as books and artifacts related to all of the genres of cartoon art.

Student employee champion, Meredith Spano.

Since Meredith’s start date here in October, 2010 Meredith has been hard at work in building finding aids for continuing features in IMCA, and the 100 titles that she has now processed have included over 40,000 pieces that have passed through her hands for cataloging.

The process starts with physical sorting- Meredith, as seen in the image below, pours through the hundreds upon hundreds of daily and weekly strips, and arranges them physically in chronological order, neatly and safely in our acid free archival storage boxes.

Student employee Meredith Spano, sorting IMCA originals into chronological order.

After arranging the series, she gets to work on building a spreadsheet for the individual title that is later turned into a finding aid. You can see what the end result looks like here. Each individual strip has been assigned a finding number, and is listed by its publication date.

Below, a small slice of the rows upon rows of the IMCA collection boxes once they have been processed!

International Museum of Cartoon Art processed features by finding number

Meredith is double majoring in Arabic and International Studies, and is a proud and prominent member of the OSU Ukelele Club. Although her favorite series to work on so far has been Dick Tracy, the other 99 titles she has tackled include Bringing Up Father, Blondie, Henry, The Gumps, Katzenjammer Kids, Tillie the Toiler, Steve Canyon, Smitty, Rip Kirby, Polly and Her Pals, Moon Mullins, L’il Abner, Jungle Jim, and many many more.  The Cartoon Library simply would not run if it weren’t for our incredible student employees- thank you so much for all of your hard work, Meredith!

Found in the Collection: The Stamp Wholesaler

The  International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, which resides here at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum and contains approximately 200,000 pieces of original cartoon art, consistently proves to be full of strange surprises for our dedicated workers who have been processing it.

One of those odd finds is the Stamp Wholesaler cartoon collection, a group of 1,003 humorous cartoons pertaining to stamp collecting which were published in the Stamp Wholesaler magazine. The magazine, published by Lucius Jackson until the late ’70s, was (from what we can gather) much beloved in the philatelic community and ran articles on stamp collecting, as well as cartoons, among their ads for dealers. Contributing cartoonists included Bill Bobb, Joseph Serrano, Bert Gore, John Dunnett, Roy O. Carling, John Dawson, Cairo Sturgill, Lowell E. Hoppes, Bill Newcombe, Brad Anderson, C. K. Weil, Joe Bresch, Jim M’Guinness, Tony Saltzman, George L. Stewart, Bob Rieker, Doug Baker, and H.B. Harn.

Below, three of our favorite cartoons from the collection- done by cartoonist Jim M’Guinness to incorporate the collectable stamps themselves into the gag.

Jim M'Guinness original art for "Stamp Wholesaler" magazine. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art collection, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Jim M'Guinness original art for "Stamp Wholesaler" magazine. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art collection, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Jim M'Guinness original art for "Stamp Wholesaler" magazine. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art collection, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

[Special thanks to Ann Lennon for help with this post.]