PrintIt’s a chilly Saturday morning, and Butler’s book-packed halls are as inviting as ever. I’m in no hurry, so I take my time glancing down the rows and rows of books in the stacks on the 10th floor. Like any Columbian I have highbrow tendencies—but this time, I’m not after a deeply psychological novel, a work of esoteric philosophy, or a collection of obscure Georgian poetry. I happen to be browsing the shelves of Butler’s comics collection.
Yes, Butler has a comics collection. With roughly 1,200 titles and counting, it’s the latest and fastest-growing addition to our university’s literary hoard. And despite the early hour, I’m not alone on the 10th floor—at the desk a few rows away from me, another comics fan is absorbed in the technicolor glory of Osamu Tezuka’s “Astro Boy.”
That same morning I meet with Karen Green, the founder of the collection. Green could run a small comic book store from behind her desk—our interview is conducted between mountains of comics and graphic novels, all culled from the uniformly packed shelves that surrounded us. The first book she turns my attention to is the “New Yorker 25th Anniversary Cartoon Album,” a collection of classic illustrations that were published from 1925 to 1950. It’s clearly one of her favorites. “It’s what introduced me to the way comics were told,” she reminisces warmly. “A bit later, when I was 10 or 12, I discovered Mad Magazine and Archie, but it was the New Yorker cartoons that first sparked my interest in comics.”
Cultivating comics is not Green’s only responsibility: “Actually, the collection is only a secondary part of my job. It’s not what I was hired for,” she says. As if starting a new collection from scratch isn’t daunting enough, Karen Green is also Butler Library’s Ancient and Medieval History and Religion librarian. She maintains and develops a multitude of collections: Classics, Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval History, Christianity, Comparative Religion, Linguistics, and Modern Greek.
Green sees no contradiction in her dual interests. In fact, as she says, they’re directly related. “It’s all of a piece. From very early on, I became fascinated with this time in history—the Middle Ages—in which the visual was absolutely central to storytelling,” she says. “In that time period I discovered a deeply visual culture which, in its way of communicating stories, employed techniques and tropes much like the ones used in comics.”
Green is a big believer in the artistic value of the comic book. After a few hours of browsing the stacks on the tenth floor, there’s no way I can argue with her. Among the collection’s many acquisitions is a broad range of works from the early days of American newspaper comics, decades before Superman had even touched down on planet Earth. Green has dropped the names of a few greats of that era, so I decide to take a look at them. Soothing as the cream-colored walls and countless dull brown book covers of Butler can be, my eyes are hungry for the kind of dazzling modernist fantasy worlds Green has assured me I will find. I pull out two titles that she recommends: “The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” and “Little Nemo,” both by Winsor McCay, an early 20th-century illustrator whose legacy has helped shape the course of American illustration.
I open “Little Nemo” to a random page, and in the nanosecond it takes for the color to hit my eyes, I’m floored. In each strip, an innocent-looking child wanders through wild, intricately detailed landscapes, as dizzying and surreal as a Dalí painting. “Rarebit Fiend” is darker and more disturbing, and clearly aimed at an adult audience. Its illustrations are as strange, menacing, and elaborate as the ones a traumatized, grown-up Alice might make in art therapy years after her descent into Wonderland. Comics fan or not, you couldn’t label these low-brow.
But although I’m convinced, the artistic and cultural value of the comic book is not exactly taken for granted in academic circles. Green braced herself for a battle when, in 2005, she pitched the idea of an organized comics collection housed in the general stacks to a coalition of library heads that included the Director of the library’s History and Humanities Division, the Anglo-American Literature and History librarian, the Fine Arts librarian, and the Rare Book and Manuscript librarian. Among other points, she noted the explosion of graphic novel output in recent years, which has not gone unnoticed in the mainstream press. “They’re calling this the new Golden Age of comic books,” she tells me. And although New York City has always been the crucible of American comics, no other institution in the city was making an effort to collect and document the comic art of its past and present. In Green’s eyes, this was a role that Columbia should play.
As the rows of comics on the 10th floor of Butler attest, Green won over her fellow librarians. “Some of my colleagues have been amused at what I’ve been doing,” she confesses. But she believes that the collection is an undeniable success: “It’s getting used quite heavily, actually. Whenever I’m up there I always see at least one person browsing, which is not something you see in the stacks so often anymore.”
And she’s not just talking about students. “Since the collection began I’ve discovered plenty of academics who themselves are interested in graphic novels and have become heavy users of the collection,” she says. And though Green could mention no details, she noted that a class on comics will join Columbia’s course list next year.
Among the more conspicuous of the new collection’s users is academic heavyweight Richard Bulliet. The former director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute was one of the first academics to come to Green’s aid when she proposed the collection. Bulliet himself had been trying to get a comics course approved for the School of Continuing Education. To Bulliet, comics represent a remarkable and unspoiled historical tool. “What made action comics distinctive was their very specific demographic: teenage boys. And one of the things you knew as a consumer”—as Bulliet admittedly was in his youth—“was that adults were not reading your comics. It was a kind of children’s literature not being vetted by professional publishing companies and ignored by parents and teachers because of its perceived low literary value,” he says.
Bulliet has a theory that posits comic books as keenly accurate depictions of the inner lives and imaginations of the teenage boys of that particular era. “What distinguished the comic book industry of the 1960s and ’70s from the book publishing industry was that it was more demand-driven than supply-driven,” he says. “Stores were very cautious about what they stocked. Owners knew their stock very well, and they paid attention to what boys were buying.” The output of the industry became totally reflective of the desires, fears, and dreams of the boys who were fueling it. “You can watch, in the comics of the era, the evolution of a sensibility that is specific to a demographic,” continues Bulliet. In Bulliet’s view, comics provide a window onto an otherwise undocumented history.
“Like any field of literature,” Green told me, “comics can be read for entertainment, but they can also be mined for social history, for cultural history,” as Bulliet proves. But unlike novels, memoirs, or any other purely textual work, comics offer a deeply intimate and visceral link to another time. A single panel can encapsulate the fears, social tensions, artistic styles, slang, and sense of humor of any particular era. Comics communicate panel by panel, and it’s the reader’s job to go back and forth and weave together the strings of text and image.
“Drawings have this incredible materiality to them,” says award-winning graphic novelist Ben Katchor, who teaches a class on illustration at Parsons. “They have the power to express so many extra-linguistic things that a line of text never could.” In the best comics, each panel is just a piece in a larger puzzle, a fragment of a bigger idea or theme, and the reader has to construct that idea from the materials on the page—a violent battle scene, for instance, must be conjured from nothing more than a multicolored “pow.”
“Comics are where storytelling lives,” insists Bulliet, “and it’s taken so long for the academic world to accept that this has been a medium that has been artistically and culturally significant. It’s about time the university paid attention to the form.”
Green knows that her work is far from over. The collection still has plenty of room to expand, and she is working constantly to identify new must-haves and respond to requests for more acquisitions. With more and more of her colleagues behind her, the tides that for so long kept comics out of the academic library have clearly turned. “The battle for the legitimacy of the comic is not one I have to fight,” Green tells me. “But if I had to,” she adds with a subversive grin, “I definitely would.”