The Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) collects archives relating to comics creators, editors, and publishers, with an emphasis on New York-area professionals, in keeping with RBML’s larger focus on the history of publishing. RBML also collects materials related to comics fan culture, especially convention material, fanzines, and fan mail.  The collection welcomes all types of creators in the comics medium, including those who produce single-panel cartoons, comic strips, comic books, or graphic novels. Materials of interest include manuscripts, drafts, original art, roughs and tracings, correspondence, contracts, records, fanzines, artifacts, and other formats in support of research and teaching in comics studies as an interdisciplinary field.

Major collections currently held in this area are the Chris Claremont (X-Men) papers, the Al Jaffee (Mad magazine) papers, the Wendy and Richard Pini (Elfquest) papers, the Charles Saxon (New Yorker) papers, the Dennis Ryan editorial cartoon art collection, and the Kitchen Sink Press records, the last of which features over 40,000 letters between Denis Kitchen and every major underground cartoonist of the 1970s and 1980s. We also hold a small collection of Silver Age and underground comic books, comic-con programs, and, in the Pulitzer Prize Board archives, Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoons. The collections complement RBML’s holdings in American history and the history of publishing, as well as the Graphic Arts artist books collection and the Historical Children’s Literature collection.