A Collection of Heroic Proportions

KU museum gallery director’s passion is super-fantastic!

By Jennifer Kepka

When Jason Wolvington's mother bought him an “Uncle Scrooge” comic book to entertain him on a day he'd stayed home sick from second grade, she had no idea of the monster she was creating.

Now Wolvington, gallery director at the Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center, has more comic books than sick days.

“ I have a lot,” he says. “I have about 10,000 of them.”

Wolvington's collection is so large, in fact, that when he and his wife were shopping for their first house, they looked for one with at least three bedrooms: one for them, one for guests and one for the comic books.

“ She'd rather have a comic-book room in the house than have comic books all over the house,” he says.

Inside the room, Wolvington, who has a master's degree in museum studies, keeps his comic books with the same care he might devote to a paper collection at the museum.

He keeps track of the issues on a computer database and stores them in alphabetical and numerical order on acid-free boards in polypropylene bags.
“ I've been able to use my museum knowledge to improve my comic-book collection,” Wolvington says. “Without even really knowing a lot of this, my museum studies degree parallels the comic-book collecting.”

Wolvington collects both new and old mint-condition comic books. New issues of his favorite series, “The Fantastic Four” and “The Avengers,” are still coming out, but coveted older issues, some from as far back as the 1960s, also are available.
Wolvington goes to comic-book stores to buy new issues on Wednesdays, but he also finds good buys at conventions in Kansas City or, increasingly, through online auctions.

Interest in comic books and graphic novels, which are long-form or novel-length comic books, has been on an upswing recently. Hollywood has released a spate of movies based on characters from comics and graphic novels, beginning with the “Superman” series in the 1970s and continuing through “Batman,” “Spider-Man,” “The Fantastic Four,” “The X-Men” and the “Men in Black” films.
Even the Tom Hanks drama “Road to Perdition” is based on a graphic novel, Wolvington noted.

“ It's kind of fun seeing people enjoying movies based on comic books, without even knowing they come from comic books or graphic novels,” Wolvington says. “It's great for the industry.”

For every good comic book-based movie, though, “two or three” bad films are put out, which Wolvington says diminishes what good comic books are really about.
“ A lot of comic books are character-driven, story-driven, not just about people in tights saving cats from trees,” he says.

The story is the important part for Wolvington. Although he pays close attention to keeping his comics in order and always has, from that very first Scrooge comic, his collection isn't something he keeps just to watch the market values rise.
“ I collect comics for my enjoyment,” he says. “For me, it's all about the fun of reading them.”