The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum announces
Motion Lines: How Cartoonists Draw Movement Exhibition
Columbus, OH – The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Motion Lines: How Cartoonists Draw Movement, opening Saturday, May 24, 2025.
Since comics first appeared in American newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century—at a time when trains, cars and cities were accelerating everyday life—cartoonists have faced the challenge of depicting motion on a static page. From the earliest strips to contemporary graphic novels, artists have developed a wide range of inventive strategies to capture movement, speed and energy.
Motion Lines: How Cartoonists Draw Movement explores the visual vocabulary of motion in comics, from classic motion lines to techniques like motion blur, repeated figures, exaggeration, visible paths of travel and panel-to-panel action.
Featuring over 100 examples from the late 1800s to today, Motion Lines: How Cartoonists Draw Movement examines how cartoonists across generations have shaped the artistic devices used to depict motion in comics.
The exhibition highlights works by artists including Winsor McCay, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Herriman, Rube Goldberg, Alex Raymond, Edwina Dumm, Hilda Terry, Al Jaffee, Larry Gonick, Lynn Johnston, Ray Billingsley, Fujio Akatsuka, Richard Thompson, Edie Fake, Raina Telgemeier, Bill Watterson and many more. Their creative approaches reveal why motion is such a powerful storytelling tool in the medium of comics.
Motion Lines: How Cartoonists Draw Movement is curated by Anne Drozd and Ben Towle. The exhibition will be open May 24–November 9, 2025 in the Robinson Family Gallery at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. The museum is open to the public and admission is free.
Image Credit: Camera Kid 5 by Fujio Akatsuka (1935–2008), circa 1970s. International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection.
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