Mission Our mission is to collect, preserve, and exhibit animation and cartoon art. Our goals include entertaining the public, serving as an educational resource, and broadly promoting public awareness of the art form. History First opened in 1974, The National Cartoon Museum was the first museum established to preserve and exhibit cartoon art. It possesses the largest collection of comic books in the world and the only cartoon Hall of Fame. Highlights of our collection include the very first drawings Walt Disney made of Mickey and Minnie Mouse for his first film "Plane Crazy", which have been appraised at $3.7 million. The Museum's collected works contain many other rare examples of this pop culture art form. Included are over ten thousand books and one thousand hours of film, tapes, CD's and DVD's. Hundreds of pieces of framed art, a number of traveling exhibits and many large display figures round out the collection. The Museum's management conservatively estimates the value of the collections to currently be worth at least $20 million. The Museum has built its collection entirely through donations of artwork by friends and supporters in the cartooning industry. For instance, the estate of Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy, made a bequest of 7,000 of his comic strips. The Museum hopes to continue receiving generous support from such donors. Mort Walker, the creative force behind Beetle Bailey, opened the Museum in 1974 in a converted mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Two years later, the Museum relocated to a renovated castle in Rye Brook, New York, which displayed our collections until 1992. As the collection surpassed 100,000 pieces, a larger and more permanent home became necessary. At that time the city of Boca Raton, Florida invited the Museum to construct a 52,000 square foot facility as part of an effort to attract cultural institutions to Palm Beach County. Although we mounted many successful exhibitions and programs to critical acclaim in Florida, the south Florida area could not generate enough visitors to support the Museum and combined with the inability of several major donors to fulfill their pledges, the decision was taken to re-locate to a major urban center. We are pleased to be returning to the New York City and the Tri-State area because we believe it is the heart and geographic hub of the media and cartooning industries. The region is also home to the largest concentration of active cartoonists anywhere in the world. International Cartoon Art Cartoon Art is a worldwide phenomenon, bridging cultural boundaries through their universal appeal. The National Cartoon Museum has collected internationally and has developed a representative collection of the best of such art throughout the world. Themes relevant to the rapidly changing world scene and differing cultural perspectives are of particular interest. Collection Statistics The Museum possesses the largest collection of publicly accessible cartoon art in the world. The collection consists of over 200,000 original drawings from all genres of cartoon art - comic strips, comic books, animation, editorial, advertising, sport, caricature, greeting cards, graphic novels, illustration, sculpture and other related disciplines. We have the largest collection of comic books in the world , 10,000 books, 1,000 hours of film and tape, CD's, DVD's and many unique display figures, toys and collectibles. Our Cartoon Hall of Fame is unique in the world, and our traveling exhibitions have been on display as far away as Hong Kong. The highlights of the collection are the very first drawings of Mickey Mouse, made by Walt Disney and his associate Ub Iworks, that they created for Walt's planned film "Plane Crazy". They were appraised, after their provenance was established, at $3.7 million. The Museum's management conservatively estimates the current value of the collections to be worth at least $20 million. Living and Archive Collections Many works in The National Cartoon Museum collections are by living artists. A great deal of information is available on the lives and ideas of these artists and the cultural and/or political contexts in which they worked. In order to provide fuller background information about the art in our collections, we actively collect archival and library material about represented artists in the form of tapes, manuscripts, film, published books, articles, trade journals and biographies. Archival and library materials are stored and managed separately from the cartoon art collections. Acquisition, cataloguing, and storage of such material follow an archival model. The Library Archives will offer facilities for the public to research cartoon art and artists using all types of communications media.