Masters of American Comics highlights fifteen key artists who helped define American comic strip and comic book forms across the 20th century. The exhibition includes over nine hundred objects, displayed across both MOCA and the Hammer Museum, including original drawings, proofs, vintage-printed Sunday pages, and comic books by Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, E.C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, and Charles M. Schulz (presented at the Hammer Museum); and Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware (presented at MOCA). Curators established this canon of American comic artists to trace the historical development of the medium from early, mechanized printing and distribution; to the rise of Sunday magazines; through the Cold War and countercultural movements and their impact on popular art.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue.
Masters of American Comics organized by scholars John Carlin and Brian Walker, MOCA, and the Hammer Museum.