On the second floor of the Knight Library is a temperature-controlled room filled with original manuscripts and photographs, some dating back to medieval times and some from just last year. In this mixture of rare and valuable documents lie about 750 comic books from its Golden Age – 1939 through the mid 1950s. Welcome to Special Collections.
In 1967, the first flow of comic book legend Gardner “Gar” Fox’s manuscripts came to the University of Oregon, with the collection being completed in 1980 with fan periodicals, Fox’s own periodicals, comic books he scripted and paperback books. Fox is famous in the comic book world for writing the original Flash, inventing the Batarang and having a significant imprint in creating other comic books like The Green Lantern and The Justice League of America. This collection of 700-plus comic books would have cost around $70 in 1940 (10 cents per issue). Now, the total cost of the Gar Fox collection is now well over $150,000.
Despite the high cost and the high risk of damage, James D. Fox, the head of Special Collections and University Archives, invites faculty and students to check out the collection of comic books and other manuscripts.
“We have to be careful with (the comics), because they are very fragile,” Fox said. “In some ways, they’re more fragile than some of our medieval manuscripts. We have to work a little bit with people to show how to handle them properly, but students have free and equal access to them.”
The comics are important to UO because the university is the only school in the country to offer an undergraduate minor in comic studies. This is why the collection has had notable donation like Gar Fox’s.
“When Gar Fox donated the collection, he understood his personal collection would have research value in the future,” Linda J. Long, the manuscripts librarian in Special Collections said.
Ben Saunders, the program director of the comic studies program, believes that UO students and faculty are beyond lucky to have these comic books on reserve at the library.
“A lot of the material in these comics has never been reprinted,” Saunders said. “The phenomenological experience of holding, reading and even smelling these comics generates an almost magical, time-capsule effect that no reprint or digital scan could ever replicate.”
However, until recently, many universities ignored pop culture like comic books because they didn’t believe it was worth their time to study it.
“We had to study high culture, Shakespeare and alike,” James Fox said. “But over time people started realizing we can learn as much about ourselves and our culture from popular culture than we can from high culture.”
Saunders agrees that comics have a lot of academic value.
“We are talking about a global art form with historic roots that are as old as print culture,” he said. “So there really are lots of opportunities for further scholarship.”
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