|
Most librarians track down old works of William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens to expand their collections.
Richard Graham finds comics.
Richard Graham runs the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's online Government Comics Collection. Photo: Adam Ziegler, NewsNetNebraska
The idea for the database started with a display about government-made comics at Northwestern University and the U.S. military's decision to make new comics for its operations in Iraq. This created a renewed interest in government comics among comic book scholars, which inspired Graham to begin researching them.
"It was like a perfect storm of different contributing factors," he said.
Work on the database began in 2007 after Graham received funding from the Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experiences Program. Graham started with items in the UNL Libraries government documents collection, which accounts for about half of the database.
The rest of the collection has been compiled from outside sources such as comic book stores and government document collections at other libraries. Graham has received help from other comic collectors and scholars in finding and borrowing comics to expand the database.
"It's something that grows as the word gets out there," he said.
The database currently has more than 180 comics, covering topics from the inner workings of the Federal Reserve System to the history of Apartheid. The majority of the comics in the database were created so government employees and citizens would have easy-to-understand guides on sometimes complex or uninteresting topics, Graham said.
During World War II, the Army began producing comics to teach soldiers how to for their equipment and to act as guidebooks for foreign countries. The visuals in comics were more appealing to readers than other manuals, Graham said, and made sometimes boring topics like preventative vehicle maintenance a little more interesting.
"From a visual design perspective it makes sense," he said. "It's a dreary topic."
Lately, government comics have mostly been aimed at educating children around the world, such as a Unicef-produced comics featuring Superman and Wonder Woman warning about the dangers of land mines.
Comics have often been used for such programs because of the perception that they're simpler than other literary genres, Graham said, so
Graham created the Government Comics Collection using material from UNL's government documents collection. Photo: Adam Ziegler, NewsNetNebraska
"No one teaches you how to read (comics)," he said. "It takes a lot of visual literacy to read comics."
As comic books have become a more mainstream art form, Graham said, they've began to receive more attention from literary and cultural critics. Although they've often been ignored because of their perceived simplicity, Graham said works like the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Maus" show comics can hold up to literary criticism.
"There's always been a prejudice against comics because it's pop culture," he said. "But people are slowly starting to look at comics as alternative texts and neglected texts."
Creating digital copies of comics that are sometimes half a century old provides a snapshot of different periods in the world's cultural history, Graham said, and also preserves key primary documents for future comic scholars to research and analyze.
"Shakespeare has survived because he's evolved through different waves of scholarship," Graham said. "And it's no different for comics."
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
