Are you a fan of comic books, comic arts, and their intersection with Black history? Then this is a collection worth checking out!
The Richard Wright Collection (MS 00317) was compiled by Richard Wright and focuses on the evolution of the Black American image in print media, cartoons and comics. This fascinating collection contains a wide variety of items including books, comic books, magazines, prints, reference books, slides, photographs, CDs, DVDs, sheet music, newspaper strips, lithographs, and artwork. The materials comprise both originals and reprints dating from 1806 to 2017.
Richard Wright (1946-2019) was a Black American collector who lived and worked in Connecticut as a court officer in the social services Department of Child Support until his retirement in 2013. In his free time, he was an active member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., served as the president of the Stamford Chapter of the NAACP, was a practicing Baptist, a choir member, and volunteer and mentor for a substance abuse rehabilitation program called Liberation House.
Wright took on comic collecting as a passion project. He saw the images that he collected over the years as a way to better tell the story of the depiction of Black Americans in visual media. He began crafting and researching a timeline of artists who dealt in the subject matter. His notes and series of binders with artist biographies and period summaries can be found in Series 1: Research files.
Wright donated his collection to William & Mary in 2019 so that it might be "a helpful resource to students" in the future. Thanks to a collaborative effort between Special Collections and Cataloguing, there are now 46 boxes of collection materials, and over 400 comic books available for researching. All materials retain original titles as given by the artists, publishers, or Wright, respectively.
Start your research by going to the finding aid for the collection.
The catalogued comic volumes can be found under the location tag “Swem Special Collections Research Center - Rare Book - Richard Wright" or find them by searching comics in our catalog.
