This year marks the 80th anniversary of Chester Gould’s celebrated comic strip, Dick Tracy. From 1931 to 1977, Gould (1900-1985) wrote and drew the popular continuity strip about a tough, intelligent, and incorruptible police detective who battles a parade of increasingly strange and grotesque villains.

The items in the exhibition were chosen by artist and author Art Spiegelman, a Wexner Center Residency Award recipient, with Jenny Robb, curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. According to Spiegelman, Dick Tracy “brought the front-page violence of the prohibition-era tabloids to the back of the newspaper. In today’s blood-soaked entertainment culture it’s hard to realize just how extravagantly brutal the original Dick Tracy must have seemed to its tens of millions of daily readers in the 1930s and 40s. It was The Sopranos of its day, but without the moral ambiguity.”

Mark J. Cohen, 1942-1999, started collecting cartoons when he was fourteen. His interest in self-caricatures by cartoonists grew from the chance discovery of an exhibition catalogue of artists’ self-portraits in a used book store. The collection of cartoonists’ self-caricatures that resulted, thought to be the largest collection of its kind, was bequeathed to The Ohio State University by Cohen.

For many years, portions of Cohen’s self-caricature collection toured in three different national exhibitions, including one organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for The Face Behind the Laugh, Cohen wrote, “Some of the cartoonists’ self -caricatures offer an interesting glimpse into how they see themselves relating to their work.” Visitors to this exhibit are encouraged to look carefully to find these connections in the self-caricatures that are displayed. Among the cartoonists whose self-caricatures are included are Charles Schulz (Peanuts), Jim Borgman (Zits), and underground cartoonist R. Crumb.

The title for this exhibit was provided by Milton Caniff in a letter to Cohen after he had seen an exhibit of the self-caricatures in 1976: “I greatly enjoyed my look at the self-portraits. All of us rogues in one gallery!”

More than 50 sports cartoons will be on display as part of the exhibition Let the Games Begin:  A Century of Sports Cartoons.  The exhibition features original drawings by some of the most prolific and influential cartoon artists of the past century and includes likenesses of a wide variety of sports figures including Jack Dempsey, Dizzy Dean, Ted Williams, Willie Shoemaker, as well Ohio State athletics.

Editorial cartoons have a long history but the sports cartoon, as we know it now, evolved as a fixture on the sports page as athletic endeavors became more and more of a ubiquitous form of popular entertainment.  Before television and higher-speed photography, sports cartoons were an important way for a commentator to communicate to the public the personalities on the field or to sum up an achievement or brewing controversy.

Exactly one hundred years ago, George Herriman drew a little mouse “beaning” a black cat at the bottom of his comic strip, The Dingbat Family.  This simple little comic-within-a-comic marks the birth of Krazy Kat, considered one of the greatest newspaper comic strips ever created. In honor of Krazy’s centennial, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum will feature the exhibition Scenes of My Infint-hood: Celebrating the Birth of Krazy Kat.

The exhibition will explore the world of newspaper comics at the time of Krazy’s birth and “infint-hood,” including examples of the Herriman’s early cartoons and those of his friends and colleagues. It will also document the evolution of Krazy, from a fixture at the bottom of The Dingbat Family to a vertical daily comic strip to a full-page Sunday masterpiece. Examples of Herriman’s original art will be featured, along with historical newspaper pages and clippings from the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection that show Herriman’s work. Viewers will be able to see the comics in their original format and context, as they were actually consumed by their contemporary audience.

During the first three decades of the twentieth century, cartoonist Billy Ireland enjoyed a national readership from his home base at the Columbus Dispatch. He was known both for his editorial cartoons and for “The Passing Show,” an illustrated full-page color Sunday commentary on current events. Ireland supported environmental concerns before being “green” was in vogue and he was influential in the development of what is now Civic Center Drive in Columbus. Another major contribution was his generous mentoring of young cartoonists such as Milton Caniff. This exhibit documents Ireland’s career through original cartoon art, photographs, correspondence and related materials.