The New York Working Cartoon Library
Comics are having a powerful artistic moment.
There is a wave of artists, young & old, both new to sequential art & deeply familiar with it, innovating without institutional support. Cartoonists are working on their own terms, & the form is richer for it. This momentum has led a group of us in NYC to envision a community resource space in the city, open to the public, for comics readers & artists of all kinds.
The New York Working Cartoon Library will encompass the following:
-A free & open-to-the-public lending library. Over the years, we have accumulated thousands of self-published zines & limited-print-run art comics, as well as a sizable collection covering every aspect of comics history. This includes proto-cartooning (James Gillray to Wilhelm Busch), turn-of-the-century newspaper cartoons (George Herriman to Windsor McCay), every era of commercial superhero comics (Jack Kirby to Tatsuki Fujimoto), manga (Osamu Tezuka to Kazuo Umezz to Oshimi), the entire history of alt-comics (Julie Doucet to Dame Darcy to Dan Clowes & Chris Ware), & obscure avant-garde cartooning from the last 150 years (Anke Feuchtenberger, Edmond Baudoin, Henry Darger, Charlotte Salomon, & beyond).
We want to make this collection available to the public to see what people new to comics, or merely interested in the form, can do with this material by simply browsing it rather than needing to own it. There's no way of knowing what a long-forgotten work can do when encountered anew, & how this might influence comics' role as a force for communication & interaction outside of corporate distribution structures.
-A non-commercial event space for readings, book releases, & art shows. Having a place to workshop ideas in front of an audience & release new comics of any scope, without worrying about the price of admission, is essential.
-A workspace for drawing, printing, assembly, & collaboration. So many cartoonists in NYC make their books by hand, in limited editions, on their own. These are works of art in which the creators have total control of production. The only impediment many of us face is not having a reliable workspace. The New York Working Cartoon Library will make an effort to house & maintain printers, silk screens, a photocopier, desks, paper cutters, & other resources for producing books on-site.
-An online archive of self-published material. We will scan & upload our collection to a comprehensive, searchable digital archive of predominantly rare & unseen work.
Setting up a resource like this will involve a lot of effort over time. We are making these plans public now because our first goal is finding a storefront that is affordable enough to be sustainable. We have announced a benefit reading and this GoFundMe campaign. We are asking for $100,000 to fund what we have calculated to be a realistic expectation for the first 18 months of rent (including the cost of build-out, furnishings, & day-to-day operations). Our plan is to first provide a working model of the library, & then pursue institutional funding. We acknowledge the challenges that a project of this scale may face, & we hope you see the import of our vision.
Location-scouting begins this summer. We welcome any information you can share regarding spaces that could house this project! Please reach out if you have a lead, or if you would like to contribute in another way.
If we fail to secure & open a space by May 2027, donations to this campaign will be refunded.
On behalf of everyone in the expanded field of comics, & those who have yet to enter the fold, thank you for your support.
-Angela Fanche, Ashton Carless, Austin English, Dan Welch, George Olson, Katie Lane, Kevin Fong, Liza Kotlar, Lydia Mamalis, Max Burlingame, Susan Kaplan and Tana Oshima