Although founded in 1897, San Diego State University is often overshadowed nationally by such academic heavyweights as Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and the Universities of California in both Los Angeles and Berkeley. In recent years, however, SDSU has crafted a reputation unique amongst its fellow institutes of higher learning, emerging as one of the leading educators and advocates in the field of comic studies, comics in the classroom, and comics as a medium for social justice on the collegiate level. And like with most things in life, that transformation was the result of being at the right place at the right time.
In November 2021, members of Comics@SDSU gathered at the San Diego Comic-Con Special Edition for a panel discussion exploring the program. The story began two years earlier, when Elizabeth Pollard of the history department and popular culture librarian Pamela Jackson wrote a “white paper” outlining their plans.
“It’s very short – it was just an attempt for us to define what we wanted to make happen at San Diego State around comics,” Pollard explained. “As you can imagine, lots of professors were already researching comics, teaching comics, maybe through a class, a reading, so there was a lot of work already being done on comics. But what Pam and I wanted to do was find a way to bring all those people together who were working on comics in disparate ways and focus that in order to make something bigger happen.”
San Diego was the perfect location for such an endeavor. While the first San Diego Comic-Con attracted a mere seventy-five attendees in 1970, that number increased to over 130,000 annually shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century. SDCC’s close proximity to Los Angeles enticed Hollywood to become regular exhibiters, turning the event into the premier comics and pop culture convention in the country.
In 2021, the non-profit expanded its reach even further by launching a Comic-Con Museum in Balboa Park. IDW Comics – one of the top five publishers in the United States – is likewise located in San Diego, as are smaller comic book studios like Little Fish. Add a smaller Comic Book Fest that compliments SDCC, and it’s not hard to understand why San Diego was the ideal city for what Elizabeth Pollard and Pamela Jackson envisioned.
It turned out to not only be the right place, however, but the right time as well. “Back in 2010, our original single-issue comic book collection totaled just under eighteen hundred titles,” Pamela Jackson told SDCC attendees. “Mostly underground, and the graphic novels we had probably brought the total collection up to about three thousand. So it was very small.” The year 2010 was also the fortieth anniversary of San Diego Comic-Con, and Richard Alf – one of the original co-founders of the event – decided to donate his archives from the early years of the convention to San Diego State University.
Around that same time, two local comic book aficionados likewise decided to donate to SDSU, specifically their collection of comic books that numbered in the tens-of-thousands. “We saw an untapped potential for a large academic library collection of comics, and we went for it,” Jackson said. Over an eight-year period, San Diego State University amassed sixty thousand single issue comic books, with graphic novels bringing the total collection to 100,000 – the largest academic comic book collection in the United States.
“As I was developing this collection, largely from donations, I started to see the power of the comics medium to encourage critical thinking and scholarship on issues of identity, social justice, human rights, economic equality and so much more,” Pamela Jackson explains of the next logical step. “One of the ways that I think librarians play a role – in addition to our collection – is we teach classes about research and the collection, and that’s one way to bring social justice to the forefront of our comic arts collection and to the curriculum. Another way for libraries is through exhibits, doing exhibits to challenge our students to think about social issues as they are reflected in comics.”
Comics@SDSU refers to itself as “a grass-roots cross-college initiative whose goal is to cultivate innovative teaching, pursue transformative research, and foster vibrant community interaction, especially with regard to the unique power of the comics medium to bring about social change,” and the program is already making strides in each of those areas.
In terms of the classroom, an entire curriculum on comic books is currently under development at San Diego State University. Two classes – one centered on “Comics and History” and the other on comic art – have already launched, while courses on the graphic novel for both the literature and history departments, as well as another spotlighting Native Americans and comics, are on the horizon. It won’t be long before Comics@SDSU has enough courses to offer a certificate to enrolled students, with a minor and then major to follow. While Elizabeth Pollard hopes the latter can be accomplished in five years, Pamela Jackson is shooting for three.
Research already underway by various faculty members at San Diego State University, meanwhile, is being collected into a series of essays for publication under the title, Call to Action: Comics and Social Justice.
Then there’s the community and academic outreach projects of Comics@SDSU. “We sponsor collaborative academic conferences that leverage local, regional and international talent and resources, and we seek to bring scholars here to SDSU’s comics collection and community,” Pollard explained. “With additional funding, we can grow those complexes and increase the number of visiting scholars visiting our collection to demonstrate how comics can bring social change.”
“It seems kind of egotistical to say this wouldn’t exist without the collection, but it is an example of that,” Pamela Jackson said at SDCC in November 2021. “Libraries don’t always get to do that, but we have something very unique that created an identity for San Diego State through a collection, and a lot of this has grown out of having that identity and that collection.” She then added, “To have a curriculum and all that synergy grow off of what we have in the library is really awarding.”
Elizabeth Pollard agreed, telling attendees at the Comics@SDSU panel, “This collection that she curates is able to bring scholars nationwide, hopefully, and brings students into the archives working with these materials as well.”
It’s also the major reason why San Diego State University is focusing on comics and social justice as part of its curriculum, making Comics@SDSU a perfect example of the right idea coming together at the right time and place.
Anthony Letizia