The University of South Carolina received a library of 180,000 comics from a lifetime collector

The University of South Carolina recently received an unusual gift: the entire collection of an Ohio collector of comics, totaling over 180,000 comics, books, magazines and other items, valued at approximately $ 2.5 million.

Some of the comics in the collection will be on display at the Thomas Cooper Library on August 29. The beginnings of the collection will also be accompanied by a series of events at the school, such as comic book and artist talks.

The collection includes a number of rarities, including Avengers # 1, which featured Stan Lee's first creative crew in 1963, as well as titles featuring characters such as Spider-Man, Batman, Black Panther, Iron Man, etc. The university says it is "one of the largest collections of its kind" and is a "phenomenal transformational gift," according to the Associate Dean of Special Collections of University Libraries, Elizabeth Sudduth.

Caroline from the south Post and mail says that university archivists have begun to browse the collection, a process that should take years. The collection was the work of the life of an Ohio collector, Gary Watson, who started buying comics in 1958 and pursued it until his retired in 2010. He had resisted the idea of ​​breaking the collection or selling it privately. University of South Carolina. He told the newspaper he was "happy that someone can take better care of them now".

The university notes that while it seems odd that such a collection ends up in the hands of a special academic collection, it is "exactly what the special collections consist of," according to Sudduth. David Shay, a cataloguer of Irvin's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, said that "comics really reflect the interests and concerns of Americans" and that researchers can learn a lot about contemporary attitudes to race, politics and gender.