iSkirball Cultural CenterSepulveda Pass / Brentwood
Inventing America: The Comic Book Revolution
Original comic art and rare artifacts trace how comic books shaped 20th-century American identity, from WWII through hip-hop and civil rights movements.
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Captain America punches Hitler on the cover of Captain America Comics #1, which came out a year before the US entered the Second World War. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, two young Jewish Americans, made it, and it's the only piece the Skirball owns. Everything else is borrowed, from more than 40 lenders.
The route runs in order, from Superman's birth through MAD magazine and Robert Crumb's Zap Comix to the 1990s indie pages of Lynda Barry, Chris Ware and Dan Clowes. You get to see an original Action Comics #1 out of its plastic slab, closer to how a reader held it in 1938. The curators also make room for names most fans don't know, like Lily Renée, who fled the Nazis and drew comics in the 1940s.
Time Out gave it four stars and called it accessible for comic lovers and history buffs alike. Admission is $20 and free on Thursdays, parking is free, and docent tours start at 1pm on every open day, plus 11am at weekends.
Editor's pick
An unslabbed Action Comics #1 and Captain America Comics #1 share the rooms with working pages from Maus and original Love and Rockets art, drawn from more than 40 lenders. Time Out gave it four stars.
Look for
Captain America Comics #1
Look for the cover where Captain America lands a punch on Hitler, published a year before the US joined the war.
Action Comics #1, unslabbed
Superman's 1938 debut issue sits out of its usual protective plastic case, so you see it roughly as its first readers did.
Spiegelman's Maus working copies
Facsimiles of the artist's own working pages show the same Maus page redrawn over several iterations, from early short versions to the finished book.
Love and Rockets original art
Pages by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, brothers who grew up Chicano in Los Angeles and drew stories like those set in the fictional town of Palomar.
The Lily Renée display
A dedicated case of original artwork by the Austrian-born Jewish artist who fled the Nazis and became one of the few women drawing comics in the 1940s.
Good for
- Nerding Out
- Out-Of-Town Guests
- Teenagers
With kids
Children 2 to 17 pay $15 and under-2s are free, and everyone gets in free on Thursdays.
Also at Skirball Cultural Center
On now nearby
Image credits
5
- Inventing America: The Comic Book RevolutionCourtesy of Skirball Cultural Center
- Sculpted Portraits from Ancient Egypt© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
- Charles Ross: Spectrum 14Courtesy of Getty Center
- Stories from the Library: The Mirror of the MoonCourtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
- Skirball Cultural CenterCbl62 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0