Rebecca Ortenberg
As part of Penn Libraries’ Strategic Communications team, Rebecca is editor and lead writer for the Penn Libraries News blog, and she leads content-sourcing, creation, planning, monitoring, and daily posting to the Libraries' institutional social media channels.
Before coming to the Penn Libraries, she worked at the Science History Institute, where she held the role of social media editor and served as project manager for digital public humanities projects. Previously she conducted research and presented programs at historic sites in Oregon, New York, and Delaware. She is also the managing editor of Lady Science, a magazine and podcast about the history and popular culture of science.
Rebecca received an M.A. in History Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program (SUNY Oneona) and a B.A. in history from Lewis and Clark College.
A quick perusal of recent course offerings in Penn’s English Department reveals the growing importance of comics and graphic novels as objects of academic study and critical attention. For instance, Julia Alekseyeva taught a graduate seminar, “Graphic Memoir,” in the fall of 2020 and Jean-Christophe Cloutier has offered a number of varied undergraduate courses: “The Contemporary Graphic Novel” (Spring 2021), “Making Comics” (Fall 2020), and “Comics & Graphic Novels” (Spring 2020). Though they began as a decidedly popular if critically-undervalued form, comics and graphic novels have emerged over the past three decades as significant forms of literature, communication, and visual art.
Penn Libraries’ recent acquisition of Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels responds to this scholarly movement, and grants Penn students, staff, and faculty with a PennKey login access to over 100,000 pages of important, rare, and hard-to-find comics and primary source materials about comics. Beginning in the 1950s, the collection documents the first “underground comix,” small-press or independently-published comics characterized by satirical and/or subversive themes, and continues on to cover the works of contemporary sequential artists from around the world.
Notable content includes works by Basil Wolverton and Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, and Los Bros. Hernandez; comics-related theory, criticism, and commentary from sources like The Comics Journal; and publications from EC Comics, whose efforts to blend progressive themes with horror, romance, sci-fi, or crime fiction partially instigated one of the largest censorship efforts in American history.
Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels: Volume 1
Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels: Volume
Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels grants Penn students, staff, and faculty access to over 100,000 pages of important, rare, and hard-to-find comics and primary source materials about comics.