Miss Cellany’s Wednesday Roundup
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with Dr. Sheena C. Howard, The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, King Features Syndicate Production Chief Frank Chillino, Daryl Cagle Selfies, and Professor Sterling Haynes Awarded Emerging Artist Honor.
Dr. Sheena C. Howard, Black Comics Writer and Researcher
Dr. Sheena C. Howard is an author and researcher of Black culture. Here she is known and appreciated for her Encyclopedia of Black Comics (2017), a highly recommended book profiling Black cartoonists. Lois Elfman for The EDU Ledger recently interviewed Dr. Howard:
“Even if I’m writing comics, I still feel it’s part of my research,” she says. “As a comic book writer, I have the benefit of studying comics from the inside out and not the outside in. It’s one thing to research something, it’s another thing to actually be part of creating it. Those are oftentimes different perspectives. I wanted to be closer to the perspective of what the creators actually thought. … Writing comics gives me more authority to study them.”
The History and Mission of The Billy Ireland, library and museum
Remaining on the subject of research Elisa Shoenberger details the history, the mission, and the resources available at The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.
BICLM plays an important role in preserving and sharing a medium read by millions of people, in numerous formats, every day. “It’s how people communicate,” [Jenny] Robb explained. “It’s how artists are telling their stories. [Comics] also reflect what’s happening in society.”
Since opening, BICLM has grown exponentially to hold some 300,000 original cartoons; 107,000 comic books, magazines, and journals; 63,000 books and graphic novels; 6,300 boxes of archival materials; and 2.5 million newspaper comic strip pages and clippings. It collects many types of comics, including gag cartoons, alternative and underground comics, original art, editorial cartoons, professional records, and manga.
The mission of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (BICLM) at Ohio State University (OSU) is to collect, preserve, and encourage the study of comics. It’s considered one of the largest collections of comics and cartoon materials in the world.
The collection began with a founding gift of artwork and papers by OSU alumnus and cartoonist Milton Caniff…
Frank Chillino, King Features’ Production Chief
For 45 years he kept the pressure to meet deadlines on the far-ranging cartoonists who created the comic strips for King Features Jim Keefe remembers Syndicate Production Chief Frank Chillino. Jim describes what may be Mr. Chillino’s biggest contribution to the Sunday Funnies:
He also devised and implemented a standardized system to format strips for newspapers that’s still used today – a template where a strip drawn in a half page format could be reformatted to a third or quarter page quickly and efficiently. It helped streamline the process saving countless hours of production time (and money) for King.
And the tab format, don’t forget the tabloids.
Daryl Cagle Haunts His Own Past
Also reminiscing is Daryl Cagle, editorial cartoonist and manager of Cagle Cartoons, while he goes through his past selfies because “France Cartoons is collecting self portraits of cartoonists” :
Lately I’ve been haunting my own past, rummaging through drawers stuffed with self-portraits that stretch back 50 years—from a wide-eyed 19-year-old college kid in 1976 to the bearded, battle-scarred cartoonist I became, dodging hackers, raising a family, and even fielding endless questions about my long-gone Trump-era beard.
Sterling Haynes, Emerging Artist Award
Sterling Haynes is a cybersecurity and computer networking professor, he is also a cartoonist and a member in good standing of the National Cartoonists Society and its Great Lakes Chapter.
He was recently awarded the Ohio Arts Council Emerging Artist Award for Fiscal year 2026. For a Black History Column and Diverse Comic Strip he writes for several newspapers: The Cincinnati Herald, Omaha Star, and Kansas City Call.
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