Barbara Slate Archive
Barbara Slate is a renowned comic artist, teacher, and writer. The Dowd Illustration Research Archive (DIRA) acquired the Barbara Slate Archive in 2024, and the archive will continue to grow as Slate remains an active teacher and creator.
The Barbara Slate Archive contains original works of art, books, process materials, scripts, objects, scrapbooks, photographs, clippings, and professional papers documenting Slate’s career, including Slate’s first illustration, which appeared in 1976 as a line of feminist greeting cards. The character, Ms. Liz, appeared as a strip in Cosmopolitan and New Woman and later became an animated segment on The Today Show.
Included in the archive are scripts and layouts for comic book titles, Barbie and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, published by Marvel Comics, along with Betty and Veronica, published by Archie Comics. Slate also created Angel Love, Sweet XVI, and Yuppies from Hell. Throughout her career, Slate became a pillar of modern girlhood, with works published across Archie Comics, DC, and Marvel.
The archive provides research opportunities for multiple areas of study, most notably the history of comics and the relationship between text and image. The archive’s inclusion in DIRA supports long-term preservation and access to Slate’s materials.
An Architect of Girlhood
The “Barbara Slate: An Architect of Girlhood” article takes a deep dive to understand the depiction of modern girlhood in Slate’s comic works. “Ms. Liz was the it girl of the early 1980s and was a product of second-wave feminism… Most of the plot lines in Ms. Liz revolved around the woman’s everyday life in a blend of irony and vulnerability.”
Contact
- Department
- Preservation, Processing, and Exhibitions, Special Collections, Special Collections, Preservation, and Digital Strategies
- Name
- Andrea Degener
- she/her/hers
- Job Title
- Curator for the Dowd Illustration Research Archive
- Email Address
- andread@wustl.edu
- Phone Number
- (314) 935-9382