Center for the Humanities Comics Collection

The Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, founded in 2003, is dedicated to “the promotion and preservation of humanistic thinking and the pursuit of letters as essential activities in the intellectual, political, and artistic life of this university, the community it serves, and the world.” It aims to support faculty and student research in the humanities through programming, teaching support, and collecting relevant library materials.

The Center for the Humanities Comics Collection is comprised of comic books, periodicals, pulp magazines, graphic novels, manga, foreign-language comics, self-published magazines and comics, LPs, and miscellaneous materials.

Comic books make up the bulk of the collection, with a particular emphasis on superhero comics published by Marvel and DC during the second half of the 20th century. The collection also contains a particularly strong selection of titles featuring African American superheroes or protagonists, female superheroes, and work by women cartoonists.