EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Tucked behind a wooden door in the basement of Michigan State University’s Main library is the Special Collections division which is home to, among many things, the largest comic book selection in the world.
Behind the door is a small reading room. A middle-aged woman hovers over a large Peruvian manuscript that takes up the majority of the table and a student multitasks on his laptop, nodding to the beat in his headphones while he mulls over a handful of comics printed in Arabic.
No one besides a few specialists in the special collections division are allowed in the back room which houses all of the rare and valuable material. What started as a rare book collection of manuscripts and archives now contains a radicalism section filled with items like leaflets from protests. There’s also the popular culture section which houses around 200,000 comics published since the 1840s. The library has copies of about 60 percent of all U.S. comics printed during the past 75 years.
The comic collection was inspired by MSU professor Russel Nye in 1970. A Pulitzer Prize winner and cofounder of the Popular Culture Association, Nye was a pioneer of American culture studies.
“He wanted to define what was popular art,” said Randy Scott, the assistant head of special collections at the MSU Main Library. “He wanted an aesthetic. He wanted a division between what was and what wasn’t popular art.”
Nye was the first person in academia to have students watch soap operas and write essays about it. He was the one who introduced popular culture as an area of study at universities.
In order to aid in popular culture research, Nye wanted libraries to collect items like comic books.
With Nye’s request, MSU Library’s head of special collections, Peter Berg, said the department started collecting, “the stuff of everyday life.”
Nye, along with Bowling Green State University professor Ray Browne, started the popular culture movement in the United States said Gary Hoppenstand, an MSU professor and student of Browne.
“Very few movements start in the Midwest of the United States.” Hoppenstand said. “Typically they start on the east coast or the west coast.”
Hoppenstand taught classes in graphic novels and comics in the Department of American Studies at MSU before the program was cut. He considered Michigan State the world’s leader of popular culture studies before Michigan’s economy plummeted.
Nye’s approach to studying popular culture was used to analyze popular culture mediums like television, film and literature and seeing how societies were represented. Within the study of popular culture, it was a turning point in academia and veered away from studying the elite and unknown and instead explored everyday life and people.
“What the Midwest scholar suggests is sort of the democratization of culture and that’s what popular culture is.” Hoppenstand said. “In other words, instead of looking at elite culture—which reflects at most maybe 10 percent of the population—you look at the vast majority of culture and how people are interacting with it. It empowers us to study people who otherwise have been ignored in human history.”
Hoppenstand said his Comics and Animation in America class explored characters in comic books and how they represented society during the time. Examining popular culture and how society affects it and how popular culture affects society is very important, Hoppenstand said.
“If [students] can do that, then they can remain positive critics in their lives and not just be blown along in terms of what the media producers do, but actually become informed media consumers,” Hoppenstand said.
The Comics and Animation in America class was always full with 150 students enrolled. The class was cut along with the American Studies program. Now a professor in the Department of English, Hoppenstand hopes to reinstate the classes there.
Hoppenstand said he was sad when the comic class was cut. With such a great resource like the comic section in the library and the legacy of Nye, cutting the American Studies program was “a loss for the university,” he said.
“I think there’s a value in terms of students understanding their popular culture from a critical perspective,” Hoppenstand said. “If you don’t understand it, if you’re not critical of it, then yes it can manipulate you. So our courses are very much not sort of watching TV shows or watching movies, but also, we look at what’s going on in terms of what are the mythic structures, what is the culture that is behind this, where did it come from, where is it going, how does it influence people, how does it reflect people and those are important questions and I hate to see Michigan State not have courses in those areas.”
The comic section at MSU’s Main Library was noted in the July issue of Fast Company Magazine.
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