Does your library have a comic book collection? Trinity College in Connecticut does! And thanks to a generous donor they are able to share them with the world.

“For more than 150 years, Hartford’s Watkinson Library has been a research hub. Today, the collection housed at Trinity College includes 200,000 volumes dating back 10 centuries, including an 11th-century Greek Bible, a first edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” a book about Egypt commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte, John James Audubon’s “Birds of America.”

Now a few more legendary characters fill the shelves at Watkinson: the Silver Surfer, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The library recently received a donation of about 10,000 comic books, 200 graphic novels and several comics reference books from a Minnesota collector. Richard Ring, Watkinson’s head curator and librarian, said these are the first comic books in the library’s collection.

“This is a nice starter set for us. It’s exciting. We hope it’s the tip of the iceberg,” Ring said. “I hope they inspire people connected to the college to think, if they have a collection, what they are going to do with it. … If they don’t, it’s still a nice thing to dig into.”

Ring said another promised gift, of several thousand science-fiction novels from a Connecticut collector, will enhance the comic-book collection. “Comic books and science fiction have similar reading cultures,” he said. “I view these as documents of the pop culture of its time.”

Other universities have noteworthy comic-book collections, including the University of Iowa, Indiana University, the University of Georgia, Brigham Young University, Duke, Brown, the University of Tulsa, Drew University, Southern Methodist University, Bowling Green University and Texas A&M.”

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