#the billy ireland cartoon library and museum

[hamshamwitch]

Had a great time at Nancyfest at OSU's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum yesterday

[copcomco]

The Nancy Show in on!

This book's full title, The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller – A Catalogue Accompanying the Exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum – pretty much sums it up.  For those of you who don't expect to be able to visit the exhibition in person, this horizontally formatted, 12" x 9", 152 page, flexicover volume does a great job of presenting it to you in the comfort of your reading chair.  It features 72 big pages of high resolution scans of the original Bushmiller art along with 36 pages of full color reproductions of Nancy Sunday pages, plus plenty of pics of Nancy memorabilia and ephemera, an essay by exhibition curator Brian Walker amd more – including a Special Bonus Gift: inserted in the rear of the book is a fold-out sheet of Nancy gift-wrapping paper, composed of a collage of dozens of classic Nancy panels, suitable for wrapping the book itself or anything else one might give to a Nancy lover, yes – BUT, you're more likely to want to frame it and hang it on the wall!  So, with all that on offer – and for a quite reasonable price, we might add even those who managed to make it to the exhibit in person are likely to want to take a copy home with them.

Now in stock at Copacetic and available HERE.

[virtualmemoriespodcast]

Episode 614 - Caitlin McGurk

Comics librarian and curator Caitlin McGurk returns to the show to celebrate her amazing new book, TELL ME A STORY WHERE THE BAD GIRL WINS: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund (Fantagraphics). We talk about Caitlin's shock at her 2012 discovery of Barbara Shermund's incredible gag-comics and illustrations in the archive of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, how her interest in Barbara evolved from blog posts to a museum exhibit to a book, the challenge of writing about someone who did no interviews or press and had no close relatives, and how easily women get erased from history. We get into the gestalt of Barbara's fantastic linework and washes and her wry sense of humor, why Caitlin wound up writing an academic press version of the book before rewriting it for a trade publisher, the challenges & rewards of designing a book to showcase so much art, how Barbara helped create the look of The New Yorker in its early years, why Caitlin speculated (but not too much) about Barbara's sexuality. We also discuss the malleability of history, how the Billy Ireland has changed in the 10 years since Caitlin & I last recorded, the pep talk she wished she could have gotten from our late friend Tom Spurgeon, time Al Capp (!!) advocated for allowing women into the National Cartoonists Society, the incredible story of tracking down Barbara's remains and giving her a proper funeral 35 years after her death, and a lot more. Follow Caitlin on Instagram and the Billy Ireland blog • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

Check out the new episode of The Virtual Memories Show

[bluearchivedrive]

Free Online Archives

There’s a number of free (and legal!) online databases. Here’s just a few I use frequently:

BILLY IRELAND CARTOON LIBRARY AND MUSEUM: focused on comics and a bit of animation, much of their vast archive is digitalized and available to the public. Link here

MAYDAY ROOMS: focused on history of marginalized/underground cultures. Takes donations! Link here

THEOI: database on Greek mythology. Link here

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY: Focused on philosophers (as the name would suggest). Link here

GOOGLE SCHOLAR: a great way to look for specifically scholarly research. Link here

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS DIGITAL COLLECTIONS: Much of the Library’s digitized collection is available to the public even without a library card. Link here

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: Much of thier collection is available to view online, and there’s over 1000 essays on the artworks and their history. Link here

FOR MORE RESOURCES, CHECK OUT THE GOOGLE DRIVE IN OUR PINNED POST!

[tsunflowers]

after otherworld we went to the billy ireland cartoon library and museum! another highly recommended columbus destination. the osu library's collection has

with free exhibits showcasing "treasures of the collection" and a reading room where you can view cartoons and comics from their archives

[tootern2345]

The Harrison-Gould staff animating on a Krazy Kat cartoon circa 1928

Left to right: Ben Harrison, Manny Gould, Sid Marcus, Al Rose and Art Davis

From the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum website. I DO NOT own any of the stuff here. If someone wants me to take this down, I will!

[saw08]

Something from my newspaper days has found its way into the archives of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum!

[rosscountyhistoricalsociety]

In honor of Chillicothe native and longtime Columbus Dispatch editorial cartoonist, William Addison “Billy” Ireland, we would like to welcome Head Curator Jenny Robb from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.  Jenny will be here on October 16th to give a presentation on political/editorial cartoons.  This will coincide with our Historical Presidential Campaign Exhibit in the McKell Library.  

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum houses the world’s largest collection of comics and cartoon materials.   Jenny will present highlights from the collection, including work by Chillicothe’s own Billy Ireland and cartoons from Presidential elections of the past.  

Billy Ireland grew up just down the block from RCHS, on Sixth Street. After graduating, he began working for The Columbus Dispatch at the age of 18.  He worked for the paper for 37 years.  

Please join us for this presentation on Wednesday, October 16th and view items from Billy Ireland’s original collection in the McKell Library.  

[plasticbabyhead]

It’s “The NANCY Show”!

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-dzmec-15fc075 May is “Nancy “ month at Blockhead and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum with “Nancy Fest” and “The Nancy Show” a two-day celebration  and exhibition celebrating Ernie Bushmiller’s comicstrip masterpiece! Festival organizers, Brian Walker, Tom Gammill and Caitlin McGurk join Geoff to discuss the events, the exhibition and just what…

[frankenmouse]

@junipercalle Close! It’s a political cartoon by Keper Udo casting Standard Oil as the octopus that has its tentacles wrapped around the Capitol and reaching for the White House.

ETA:

A slightly better version held by Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum

Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome

Last August, a federal judge convicted Google of being "a monopolist" and acting "as one to maintain its monopoly." The judge concluded that key to Google's monopoly was the vast troves of data it collects and analyzes and asked the parties to come up with remedies to address this.

Many trustbusters and Google competitors read this and concluded that Google should be forced to share its click and quer y data. The technical term for this is "apocalyptically stupid." Releasing Google's click and query data into the wild is a privacy Chernobyl in the waiting. The secrets that we whisper to search engines have the power to destroy us a thousand times over.

Largely theoretical answers like "differential privacy" are promising, but remain theoretical at scale. The first large-scale live-fire exercise for these should not be something as high-stakes as Google's click and query data. If anything, we should delete that data:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

The last thing we want to do is use antitrust to democratize surveillance so that everyone can spy as efficiently as Google does. In theory, we could sanitize the click and query data by limiting sharing to queries that were made by multiple, independent users (say, only sharing queries that at least 30 users have made), but it's unlikely that this will do much to improve the performance of rival firms' search engines.

Google only retains 18 months' worth of click and query data, thus once we cut off its capacity to collect more data, whatever advantage it has from surveillance will begin to decay immediately and fall to zero in 18 months.

(However: the 18 months figure is deceptive, and deliberately so. Google may only retain your queries for 18 months, but it is silent on how long it retains the inferences from those queries. It may discard your "how do I get an abortion in my red state" query after a year and a half, but indefinitely retain the "sought an illegal abortion" label it added to your profile. The US desperately needs a federal consumer privacy law!)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

And just to be clear, there's other Google data that would be very useful to rival search engines, like Google's search index – the trove of pages from the internet. Google already licenses this out, and search engines like Kagi use it to produce substantially superior search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

The DOJ has just filed its proposal for a remedy, and it's a doozy: forcing Google to sell off Chrome, on the basis that both of these are the source of much of Google's data, and no rival search engine is likely to also have a widely used browser:

https://9to5google.com/2024/11/18/us-doj-google-sell-chrome/

This represents something of a compromise position: the DOJ had initially signalled that it would also demand a selloff of Android, and that's been dropped. I think there's a good case for forcing the sale of Android as a source of data, too.

In competition theory, these selloffs are referred to as "structural separation" – when a company that provides infrastructure to other firms is prohibited from competing with those firms:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

For example, it used to be that banks were prohibited from competing with the companies they loaned money to. After all, if you borrow money from Chase to open a pizzeria, and then Chase opens a pizzeria of its own across the street, you can see how your business would be doomed. You have to make interest payments to Chase, and your rival doesn't, and if Chase wants to, it can subsidize that rival so it can sell pizzas below cost until you're out of business.

Likewise, rail companies were banned from owning freight companies, because otherwise they would destroy the businesses of every freight company that shipped on the railroad.

In theory, you could create fair play rules that required the bank or the railroad to play nice with the business customers that used their platforms, but in practice, there are so many ways of cheating that this would be unenforceable.

This principle is well established in all other areas of business, and we recoil in horror when it is violated. You wouldn't hire a lawyer who was also representing the person who's suing you. Judges (with the abominable exception of Supreme Court justices!) are required to recuse themselves when they have a personal connection with either of the parties in a case they preside over.

One of the weirdest sights of the new Gilded Age is when lawyers for monopoly companies argue that they can play fair with their customers despite their conflicts of interest. Think of Google or Meta, with their ad-tech duopoly. These are companies that purport to represent sellers of ads and buyers of ads in marketplaces they own and control, and where they compete with sellers and/or buyers. These companies suck up 51% of the revenue generated by advertising, while historically, the share taken by ad intermediaries was more like 15%!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

Imagine if you and your partner discovered that the same lawyer was representing both of you in the divorce, while also serving as the judge, and trying to match with both of you on Tinder. Now imagine that when the divorce terms were finalized, lawyer got your family home.

No Google lawyer would agree to argue on the company's behalf in a case where the judge was employed by the party that's suing them, but they will blithely argue that the reason they're getting 51% of the ad-rake is that they're providing 51% of the value.

Structural separation – like judicial recusal – comprehensively and unarguably resolves all the perceptions and realities of conflict between parties. The fact that platform owners compete with platform users is the source of bottomless corruption, from Google to Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

In other words, I think the DOJ is onto something here. That said, the devil is – as always – in the details. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome, rather than standing it up as its own competing business, things could go very wrong indeed.

Any company that buys Chrome will know that it only has a certain number of years before Google will be permitted to spin up a new browser, and will be incentivized to extract as much value from Chrome over that short period. So a selloff could make Chrome exponentially worse than Google, which, whatever other failings it has, is oriented towards long-term dominance, not a quick buck.

But if Google is forced to spin Chrome out as a standalone business, the incentives change. Anyone who buys Chrome will have to run it as a functional business that is designed to survive a future Google competitor – they won't have another business they can fall back on if Google bounces back in five years.

There's a good history of this in antitrust breakups: both Standard Oil and AT&T were forced to spin out, rather than sell off, parts of their empire, and those businesses stood alone and provided competitive pressure. That is, until we stopped enforcing antitrust law and allowed them to start merging again – womp womp.

This raises another question: does any of this matter, given this month's election results? Will Trump's DoJ follow through on whatever priorities the current DoJ sets? That's an open question, but – unlike so many other questions about the coming Trump regime – the answer here isn't necessarily a nightmare.

After all, the Google antitrust case started under Trump, and Trump's pick for Attorney General, the credibly accused sexual predator Matt Gaetz, is a "Khanservative" who breaks with his fellow Trumpians in professing great admiration for Biden's FTC chief Lina Khan, and her project of breaking up corporate monopolies:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-nominates-khanservative-matt

What's more, Trump is a landing strip for a stroke or coronary, which would make JD Vance president – and Vance has also expressed his approval of Khan's work.

Google bosses seem to be betting on Trump's "transactional" (that is, corrupt) style of governance, and his willingness to overrule his own appointees to protect the interests of anyone who flatters or bribes him sufficiently, or convinces the hosts of Fox and Friends to speak on their behalf:

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/comprehensive-review-revolving-door-between-fox-and-second-trump-administration

That would explain why Google capo Sundar Pichai ordered his employees not to speak out against Trump:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-memes-poke-fun-company-rules-political-discussion-2024-11

And why he followed up by publicly osculating Trump's sphincter:

https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1854207788290850888

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[jerzydrozd]

Music & Comics Duets

Last Monday I attended the Feeling Heard concert performance at the Ohio State University. A partnership between the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, and the OSU School of Music, this concert explored the overlaps between musical and comics storytelling through some “duets” where the musicians performed pieces in response to cartoon art, and art responded to music being played. Here’s…

[lumber]

[Repost from Jan 2021. This was/still is the coolest feeling.] ❤️❤️❤️ This made me feel, surprisingly, not like a jerk. 😏 In the words of the great Navin R. Johnson, "THE NEW PHONE BOOK'S HERE! THIS IS THE KIND OF SPONTANEOUS PUBLICITY I NEED. MY NAME IN PRINT. THAT REALLY MAKES SOMEBODY. THINGS ARE GOING TO START HAPPENING TO ME NOW!"- #TheJerk, 1979 (dir. #CarlReiner). But seriously tho- what a ludicrous honor to be listed amongst such immense #Cartooning giants and legends. I don't know who screwed up on their paperwork there, but thank you to whomever it was at the prestigious, some would also say #Holy, @cartoonlibrary/#BillyIrelandCartoonLibraryAndMuseum! ❤️😇💕 As soon as this #Covid19 nonsense is safe and relatively done with, Xaviera/@xavisaurus and I would love to take a road trip to visit the #Library/#Museum and pinpoint just what of my #ArtsyFartsy stuff is all up in there chillin'. It's an honest to goodness #CartoonMystery! 🔎👀🕵️‍♂️ Completely truly honored and flabbergasted. ❤️💯❤️ #Thankful #Grateful #SwipeThru #SwipePost #SteveMartin #JeauxJanovsky #JeauxJ #JeauxJanovskyArt #BillyIreland #Comics #Comix #ReadMoreComics #ComicArt #Cartoons #Animation #CartoonArt #AnimationArt #Calarts #CalartsAlumni #OhioStateUniversity The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

[worldrandom]

Ohio state facts

came form the ohio river

the great river 981 miles, 24ft deep

7 presidents were born there

1908 1st professional fire department

1865 1st ambulance service

largest comic books billy ireland cartoon library and museum

cedar point

cincinnati zoo 2nd oldest

cleveland metro parks system largest urban parks 23,000

buckeye state- buckeye tree

rock and roll fame

avon ohio duck tape capital of the world

state capital columbus

state size 44,825 sq miles

population 11.1756.058

state hood 3-1-1803

highest point campbell hill 1549ft

lowest point 455ft ohio river at indiana burder

length 220 miles width 220 miles

national parks cuyahoga valley national park

state motto with good all things are possible

state nick name buckeye state

nobel prize 8

famoius people 5

state song hang on sloppy

state fossil isotelus

state flower scarlet carnation

state wildflower white triltium

state bird cardinal

state reptile black racer snake

state gemstone ohio flint

state tree buckeye tree

state fruit tomato

state native fruit paw paw

state groundhog buckeye chuck

state aritfact the sdena pipe