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Thursday, October 26, 2023 

South Carolina university has huge collection

The Post and Courier of Columbia wrote about the University of South Carolina's comics archives:
In the last four years, literary classes and library exhibits at the University of South Carolina have had a novel edition: the comic book.

Since 2019, the state’s largest university has built its collection of superhero, funnies and graphic novels to be one of the most comprehensive in the country.

“We are now a national, arguably even international, center for studying comic books at a university,” said Michael Weisenburg, associate director of rare books and special collections for USC libraries. “We’re definitely a top-five school for comic books.”

Gary Watson started the collection in 2019 with a donation of 150,000 comics, magazines and pulps he had amassed since 1958. The donation, valued at about $2.5 million, spread the word that the USC Library was a home for comics.

Other donors have given thousands of comics they’ve been storing, filling the gaps of Watson’s original donation to create a comprehensive view of the art form’s history. Derrek Royal, an academic in comic studies, contributed more than 18 tons of indie comics in 2019, which the library is still counting. Roy Thomas, the former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, gifted boxes of his personal collection to the university this year.

“We went from zero to 60 immediately and we’re not stopping,” Weisenburg said.
This may sound great, but then, they sour the milk by putting what sounds like a forced reference into the report:
The comic book collection is so vast that every exhibit in the Hollings Library has had a comic book in it, he said. An exhibit on the university’s LGBTQ+ history this month displayed gay pulp comics.
Just what the world needs, to say nothing of universities. But no comics or anything has ever been written up and donated to the college about Armenian history, and they don't put any emphasis on Israeli history, or even Italian history, for that matter. And if the university did, something tells me the press would turn their backs. LGBT ideology seems almost like the only issue they're willing to highlight, outside of skin color, which on its own doesn't amount to much at all. No wonder universities in the USA must have the most negative reception as an institution these days, from a political perspective.

Building an archive of old comics is great, but putting emphasis on divisive subjects like LGBT ideology at the expense of much else ruins everything.

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