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Tuesday 1pm - 5pm Wednesday 1pm - 5pm Thursday 1pm - 5pm Friday 1pm - 5pm Saturday 1pm - 5pm Sunday 1pm - 5pm

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

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The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is the world’s largest collection of American printed cartoon and comics material. cartoons.osu.edu
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We are open to the public, please visit us soon! The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum was established in 1977 at Ohio State University in two converted classrooms in the Journalism Building, with the founding gift of the Milton Caniff Collection. Its collections of original art and manuscripts include the works of Winsor McCay, Will Eisner, Billy Ireland, Walt Kelly, Bill Watterson, Jeff Smi

th, George Herriman, among hundreds of others. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is now the largest and most comprehensive academic research facility documenting printed cartoon art! Our current holdings include more than:
45,000 books
67,000 serials (including 29,000 comic books)
450,000 original cartoons
3,000 linear feet of manuscript materials
2.5 million comic strip clippings and newspaper pages

Please visit our website to explore our collection!

05/19/2026

Congratulations to Raina Telgemeier and our colleagues, Anne Drozd and Jenny Robb for receiving a 2026 Eisner Award nomination for Best Comics-Related Book for their book, Facing Feelings: Inside the World of Raina Telgemeier!!

Facing Feelings: Inside the World of Raina Telgemeier is a companion catalog for the Facing Feelings exhibition that was on display at BICLM in 2023.

We are so proud of Raina, Anne, and Jenny! And we are thrilled that their hard work has been recognized.

And a big thank you to all our staff and student staff who helped make the Facing Feelings exhibition a success!

05/18/2026

Last week, we were delighted to have Chris Ware visit to help with the installation of his upcoming exhibit, Life is Complicated.

Chris Ware and our exhibit team have been working hard to transform the gallery space into an eye-catching and immersive experience for visitors.

You will not want to miss this exhibit!

And join us on Saturday, October 17, 2026 for an in-person event with Chris Ware! More details to come.

Life is Complicated will be on display from May 23, 2026 through January 3, 2027.

The museum galleries will be open Tuesday-Sunday from 1pm-5pm; Closed on Monday. Admission is FREE.

05/15/2026

Summer Saturday workshops kickoff on June 6th with ! Come visit the museum and join the workshop! Register on our website or visit go.osu.edu/summersaturdays.

05/14/2026

We can't wait for you to see what we’ve been working on👀

Our exhibit team has been working hard on installing our new permanent collections exhibition, The Story of Comics!

Drawn from the collections of the Billly Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, The Story of Comics explores comics as an art form, how they work and how they are made, and how they reflect and shape the world around us.

This is an expanded redesign of our permanent collection gallery and is unlike anything we have done before.

This permanent collection exhibition will open on Saturday, May 23, 2026!

The Museum Galleries are open Tuesday-Sunday from 1pm-5pm; Closed on Monday. Admission is FREE.

04/28/2026

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum will reopen to the public on Saturday, May 23, unveiling a newly designed museum experience that invites visitors to explore the art, history and cultural impact of comics in new and engaging ways.

Headlining the reopening is a major international exhibition, Life is Complicated, by acclaimed cartoonist and designer Chris Ware, on view until January 3, 2027. The exhibition marks the only U.S. presentation of this collection of Ware’s work and features an immersive, design-driven installation created specifically for Billy Ireland’s gallery, showcasing original drawings, objects and rarely seen materials.

Read more on the blog:
https://library.osu.edu/site/cartoons/2026/04/28/billy-ireland-cartoon-library-museum-reopens-may-23/

04/23/2026

A big thank you to Grace Ellis for leading BICLM’s Girl Scout’s Day workshop earlier this month!

The Girl Scouts got to learn how to develop stories and characters, and create a four-panel comic strip. This all helped them to earn their Comic Artist Badge!

Photos by Emma Halm.

04/10/2026

We had so much fun last month during Mini-Comics Day!

Thank you to everybody who attended. We hope you enjoyed expressing your creativity through mini-comics.

And a big thank you to our Museum Educator, Rebecca Richardson, for putting this together!

03/24/2026

Meet the staff of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum ✨baby edition✨

03/16/2026

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (BICLM) is pleased to announce the winners of the annual Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award for 2026: Dr. Stanford Carpenter and Sebastian Martinez!

Carpenter will use the award to research contemporary notions of Afrofuturism, the ethnogothic/conjure culture, colonial counter narratives, and heroism as they relate to Black Press comic strips; Black comic creators; and Black creative communities from the Civil Rights and Pre-Civil Rights Eras.

Martinez will use the award to analyze novelty product advertisements in 1960’s and 70’s comic books from a sociological and visual rhetorical perspective, interpreting what these advertisements reveal about the sociocultural climate at the time of their circulation, and how these product advertisements helped construct Cold War ideologies, gender norms, and popular conceptions about childhood.

This award provides $2,500 to support researchers who need to travel to Columbus, Ohio to use the BICLM collections materials on site. The next call for applications will take place in autumn 2026.

Congratulations, Stanford and Sebastian!

To read more about their projects, visit our blog:
https://library.osu.edu/site/cartoons/2026/03/16/2026-lucy-shelton-caswell-award-winners-dr-standford-carpenter-and-sebastian-martinez/

03/13/2026

Happy Friday the 13th!

To celebrate the day, we thought we would share a creepy doll we photographed this week.

This Yellow Kid Mechanical Doll was recently added to the collections and will be on display in our upcoming new permanent collections exhibition, The Story of Comics.

The Yellow Kid Mechanical Doll stands about nine inches tall and is dated to be from 1896. This doll was created as merchandise for the popular comic strip character, Mickey Dugan, or, better known as the Yellow Kid.

The Yellow Kid was featured in Hogan’s Alley by Richard F. Outcault, which started in 1895 and is considered the first commercially successful newspaper comic strip.

There were two competing versions of the Yellow Kid in New York papers for more than a year as George Luks drew Hogan’s Alley for Pulitzer’s World from October 11, 1896 until December 5, 1897, and Outcault created the Kid for Hearst’s Journal at the same time. This competition between papers is the origin behind the term, “Yellow Journalism.” Which is a style of reporting that uses sensationalized exaggerations and headlines for increased sales.

Keep watching until the end of the video to see how our Public Services and Digitization Coordinator, Emma Halm, photographed this doll.

Yellow Kid Mechanical Doll, Bell-Ringer from 1896. Forms part of The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. Finding number: CGA.OBJ.17.001.

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Address

1813 N. High Street
Columbus, OH
43210

Opening Hours

Tuesday	1pm - 5pm
Wednesday	1pm - 5pm
Thursday	1pm - 5pm
Friday	1pm - 5pm
Saturday	1pm - 5pm
Sunday	1pm - 5pm

Telephone

+16142920538

Website

http://cartoons.osu.edu/

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