Superheroes take flight between the stacks

Somewhere between The Canterbury Tales and The Merchant of Venice in Van Pelt Library, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are making an appearance in comic book form.

Mickey and Donald were featured in some of 1975 alumnus Steve Rothman's favorite comics when he was growing up and now make up some of the 22,000 comic books and graphic novels he donated to Van Pelt's Special Collections Library.

The collection was put on display in the library in December and will continue to be available for viewing until March.

Rothman said this donation is just one of a number he has made over the past few years, though it is the largest donation of comic books ever made to the library.

His comics "were striving as a collection but took up a lot of space at home," Rothman said. He added that he knew Van Pelt would be the perfect place to house his collection - and Rare Books and Manuscripts Library exhibition designer Andrea Gottschalk agreed.

"The comics are enormously popular amongst a variety of faculty and disciplines," she said.

In addition to browsing the collection leisurely, students use the comics as supplemental texts in various film and writing classes, like Folklore and Folklife professor Linda Lee's writing seminar "Heroes and Monsters."

Rothman added that his collection is useful across disciplines.

"Design and fine arts classes could use comics to get ideas about layouts, and film students could benefit from the way comics are plotted since comics are similar to film in that both focus on pictures rather than words to convey a sense of what is happening," he said.

But it is among avid comic book fans like Engineering freshman Eliot Kaplan that the collection has received the most enthusiasm.

"Comic books aren't really represented enough as art. People are very dismissive because over the years they have built up a reputation as a kiddy genre," he said. "It's nice to see that an adult institution such as Penn is choosing to take the genre seriously because it does have an appeal to a mature audience as well."

Rare Books Library curator Lynne Farrington said the library is in the process of making more comics from the stacks available in the collection but "because of the large volume of the collection, only a fraction is on display."

College junior Joe Romito, who works in the Rare Book and Manuscript library and is writing his senior thesis on comics, mentioned that a new collection - smaller than Rothman's but comprising older comics - will be donated to the library.

Farrington would not comment further about the new donation.

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