Drawing on a landmark’s lure

IT’S wandered from Connecticut to Westchester County to Florida over the last three decades, but now, it seems, the National Cartoon Museum will finally have a permanent home. At least, that’s how the founders envision the collection scheduled to take up residence early next year in New York’s Empire State Building.

“The space is street level,” says Brian Walker, a curatorial advisor to the project and a co-curator of the “Masters of American Comics” show on view here at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the UCLA Hammer Museum. “It’s not like you take this elevator up and then have to search around for it. Millions of people will be walking by.”

The museum’s first incarnation was founded in Greenwich, Conn., in 1974 by Walker’s father, Mort, the “Beetle Bailey” cartoonist. Over the years, with various names and locations, the collection grew. Its strength is in newspaper comic strips, but it also contains examples of comic book art, animation and political cartoons.

The new space, designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, will be 14,000 square feet over three floors.

Brian Walker is pleased at the way “Masters of American Comics” is displayed in the church-like L.A. galleries. But exhibiting comics in the Empire State Building, he says, will be “a different kind of challenge.”

“There has to be some attractive entertainment value to it, without losing the seriousness. I think the comics have the humor and whimsy to them -- you don’t need to have Superman crashing through the wall, or kids crawling on Snoopy’s doghouse.”

Walker says that funding for the museum is still being worked out but that the task has been made easier by a sympathetic landlord.

“I’ve always thought this is where the museum belonged,” he says. “I’ve thought that from the beginning. This is the capital of cartooning, from the New Yorker to comics publishers. It sort of begins and ends in New York City.”

-- Scott Timberg