Getting Started with Graphic Medicine in Academic Librarianship
Liaison: Scott Walter
My name is Scott Walter and I am the Dean of the San Diego State University Library and a long-time LIS educator, having taught courses in reference, instruction, management, and research skills at places like the University of Illinois, San Jose State University, Dominican University, and, most recently, Southern Connecticut State University.
I began collecting comics in 1975, around the time that I attended my first convention, the Mighty Marvel Comic Convention in New York City. I was an active collector through the mid-1990s, and returned to it (more selectively) once my daughter got interested in comics and manga. Comics were not broadly recognized as a legitimate topic of study during my undergraduate education and it was a very happy surprise when I began to see academic libraries collecting comics and graphic novels and featuring them in the research, instruction, and strategies for student engagement. As Associate Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois, I supported the collection of comics and other popular culture resources, and, in 2012, I donated my personal collection of almost 10,000 comics to the library. I thought that was my last real engagement with comics in academic libraries. I was wrong.
In 2020, I joined San Diego State University, which was already developing an extraordinary comics collection, now numbering over 120,000 items. Working with my colleagues, I was very excited to establish the library as a founding partner in SDSU’s Center for Comics Studies and to see library collections and services recognized as a critical component supporting distinctive teaching, learning, and research programs in “America’s Finest City” for comics collectors and community members. In Spring 2025, we hosted the International Comic Arts Forum and, in Fall 2025, we hosted our first Comics Scholar and Artist in Residence. And, with San Diego also an extraordinary place for the life sciences community, it was only a matter of time before we started thinking about graphic medicine, an area in which we are now actively collecting and featuring as part of our collaboration with academic and public libraries throughout San Diego County.
I’m excited to deepen my knowledge and engagement with the international graphic medicine community and to help selectors make the case to administrators about the value of investing in graphic medicine collections in academic libraries.
Getting Started
Graphic medicine may be a (relatively) new area for academic library collections, there are some fantastic resources available to help you get started with an academic collection (and to make your argument for why investing in graphic medicine can support teaching, learning, and scholarship across multiple academic fields). To start, let me suggest the “LibGuides” section of the National Library of Medicine’s Graphic Medicine Resources site.
Contact
You can find me through the San Diego State University Library web site and on BlueSky. Also, I live in San Diego, so you can always find me at Comic-Con.