Milton Caniff was a saver, and he was the son of a saver.  As a result of this, the Milton Caniff Collection, which was the founding collection of The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library, is enormous—nearly 12,000 original artworks by Caniff, 85 boxes of memorabilia, and more than 450 boxes of manuscript materials, fan letters and business records.

This exhibition celebrates the richness of the Caniff Collection and provides insights into the work, friendships, and influence of one of the twentieth century’s great cartoonists. In addition to work by Caniff, several drawings of Caniff by Noel Sickles, a fan letter from Mort Walker when he was 13, and an oil painting of General George Patton by Bill Mauldin are among the items on display.

Will Annie be reunited with Daddy Warbucks? Will L’il Abner ever marry Daisy Mae? Will Pogo win the election? Find out in tomorrow’s paper! To Be Continued: Comic Strip Storytelling presents compelling continuity stories from a century of newspaper comic strips. The exhibition features ten examples of stories from the funnies that kept Americans talking, speculating, and, most importantly, buying newspapers.

Will Eisner was one of the great cartoonists of the twentieth century.  He created the comic feature The Spirit, wrote the early graphic novel A Contract with God, and taught succeeding generations of cartoonists for many years at the School of Visual Arts.  Eisner also produced two seminal works of comics theory: Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling,.  In the last decade of his life, he wrote or adapted a dozen graphic volumes, culminating with The Plot:  The Secret History of the Protocols of Zion which was published shortly before his death in 2005.

Will Eisner: Storyteller draws from the Cartoon Research Library’s Will Eisner Collection to celebrate highlights of his life and career through rare photographs and original art.  The exhibit opens with samples of Eisner’s early work and includes two complete Spirit stories from the 1940s as well as art from his recent books such as Sundiata and Last Day in Vietnam.

The sleek lines and sci-fi plots of Japanese anime have generated a large following, but until now, few comics connoisseurs have known about Korean cartoons. No more. The Korea Society presents Korean Comics: A Society Through Small Frames, the first substantial survey of Korean comics to be exhibited in the U.S.

The exhibition features 83 framed works by 21 of Korea’s most talented cartoonists, drawn over a period of 40 years. It includes work by artists from both South Korea and North Korea.

The second day of Peanuts featured Patty happily walking down a sidewalk reciting the familiar nursery rhyme, “What are little girls made of?  Sugar and spice, and everything nice…”   She meets Charlie Brown, smacks him in the face, and continues her verse, “That’s what little girls are made of!”  Charles Schulz knew about little girls because he was the father of three of them.  Once when he was asked if Peanuts was based his children, he replied that the strip was based on memory, not observation.  Schulz used the wellspring of his memory to create the repertory company of Peanuts characters that included little girls with realistic personalities.  As in several other aspects of the history of the American comic strip, Charles Schulz was innovative and influential in the type of little girl characters he conceived; and as a result of his innovation, post-Peanuts comic strips feature different types of girl characters.

Sugar and Spice is a sampling of girl characters who are comic strip protagonists, girls who are sidekicks of leading boy characters, and comics families with daughters. How girls were depicted in comic strips before and after Schulz created the Peanuts girls is the question asked by the exhibit.  The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center hosted this exhibition from February 2 through June 30, 2006.  The exhibit was guest-curated by Lucy Shelton Caswell, professor and curator of Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library.