These are not the scholarly idols most commonly associated with academia, however.
In addition to learning from Ernest Hemingway, students at UNL can look forward to learning from Spider-Man or the Flash, thanks to a project led by UNL assistant professor and media services librarian Richard Graham.
“In all respect,” Graham said, “comic books are indeed worthy of scholarly research.”
Through funding from Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experiences and the Pepsi Foundation, Graham worked since fall 2007 to compile a database of more than 180 comic books and related items such as congressional hearings dealing with comics. He said most of the material in the collection is government related, but there are plenty of popular titles as well.
Just about everybody can find a use for the database, Graham said.
“(We’re) taking an obscure primary source and putting it into a database,” he said. “Most of these are materials people have not been made aware of.”
After two years of collecting and scanning comics, Graham finished the database last spring. But the collection continues to grow as Graham scours the world for comics to add.
Graham said he uses “a myriad of different ways” to find interesting and informative comics from both near and far.
“I talk to documents librarians, comic book stores, lurk on eBay,” Graham said. “It’s a lot of ear-to-the-ground talking to people.”
Graham said with comics, as opposed to more traditional scholarly mediums, he gets to spend more of his time talking with “blue collar scholars” on the street in his quest to expand the database.
While the development of this project may be an exciting prospect, the day-to-day job of compiling it was tedious in nature.
“It takes forever,” said Matthew Conway, a senior architecture student and UCARE worker who was Graham’s student assistant on the project. “But, I got to read every (comic) that I scanned.”
Conway said the project suffered a setback almost immediately after it started: Graham and Conway entered the comics into the database incorrectly for nearly a month, and all the misfiled documents had to be rescanned.
Conway said the work took place in the media center in the Love Library.
“It took a long time, but it wasn’t stressful,” he said. “I enjoyed going in. I was reading comic books for a living.”
Although it seems like a light subject, Graham said the comics he’s interested in are not a laughing matter. In fact, they may serve as a window into past cultures, both American and otherwise, for students to peer into.
Graham said most of the materials he has gathered were created by governments and given to citizens or soldiers as a sort of crash course in foreign culture and relations during uneasy times, such as the onset of World War I.
He has collected documents from state and federal governments in the United States as well as comics created by the United Nations, European Union, Canadian government and even Ghana.
“Comics have been a big part of American culture,” Graham said, “and other cultures as well.”
evancotten@dailynebraskan.com
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