The Cartoon Museum is the United Kingdom’s only museum dedicated to cartoons, caricatures and comic strip art. It is located in Wells Street, just off Oxford Street, London. There are around two hundred original artworks on display featuring cartoonists from the Regency period up to the modern day.
The museum’s Clore Learning Studio plays a central part in daily operations, housing school workshops, evening lectures, and community activities. When not occupied for these purposes it is open to visitors where they can practice cartooning themselves on step-by-step worksheets, or relax and read some comics.
The Cartoon Museum’s autism programme began with a conversation between the museum’s director and a volunteer that runs a blog called ‘Autism in Museums’, who had specifically wanted to volunteer with the museum because of the established use of cartoons and comics in helping neurodiverse children engage with and understand the world. Seeing an opportunity to encourage new audiences, the director secured funding from The Foyle Foundation for a trial year of cartoon activities aimed at autistic pupils and families with autistic children. This funding also allowed a new member of staff to be hired, a community engagement officer who reaches out to groups and schools that work with autistic children and promotes our offer of free activities. She also spent a year meeting with groups and schools to learn about autism and discover ways to make sure the projects would have a genuine benefit for the local community.
The museum’s learning coordinator developed several cartoon activities with an autism specialist and these form the backbone of the three main strands of our autism provision.
In early 2022 The Cartoon Museum piloted ‘This Is Us’, a two-hour workshop for schools in which pupils each contribute in their own unique way to a large-scale poster depicting themselves as cartoon characters in a cartoon world, with speech bubbles allowing them to add their voices. They also have the opportunity to look around the museum’s main gallery with a ‘trail’ of simple questions aimed at getting them to engage with the cartoon art on display, such as ‘how many characters are in this picture?’, ‘what three items are written on the noticeboard?’, ‘what colour are Judge Dredd’s boots?’. The Clore Studio’s dimmable lights are kept at a lower level than usual and when possible the workshops take place when the museum is closed to the public on Mondays, to help minimize over-stimulation. There are also ear-protectors available and special visual signage is in place around the museum. Feedback from the school involved in the first session was very positive, so the offer was made more widely. To date, there have been seventeen school bookings.
Relaxed Mondays began at the same time, and they have been running roughly every two months. Families with autistic children can visit while the museum is closed, so the galleries are not crowded. There are cartoon activity sheets devised with the aid of our specialist, including a collage activity for those that might not feel capable of drawing. Age-appropriate comics are available to read, and there’s plenty of plain paper for those that are more confident in expressing themselves visually. We also have drinks and light snacks for everyone. Whilst the children tend not to mingle with others they don’t know, parents enjoy chatting and sharing their experiences with each other, with the learning coordinator and the outreach officer. Two hundred and eighty people attended between March 2022 and October 2023.
Also in March 2022 we began our Young Artist in Residence programme for autistic students with seventeen year-old Jadore Nicholas. Already a self-taught cartoonist, Jadore came to the museum once a week to get inspired by the collection and develop some extra skills from the learning coordinator (himself a professional cartoonist). Over six months he created four carefully-crafted cartoon responses to works in the main collection that are now on display next to the original versions.
Jadore also created colouring sheets featuring his characters that are available for visitors on the ‘Jadore Table’ that has become a permanent and popular fixture in the museum’s main gallery. In July that year, Jadore ran his own workshop for his fellow students in our Clore Studio and has since gone on to run them elsewhere. Postcards and socks featuring Jadore's characters are sold in the museum shop, and we have been in regular contact with him since his residency finished.
Disability history-month zine comic-book workshop
At the end of the trial year, John Lyon’s Charity offered The Cartoon Museum a further three years of funding to continue our work with neurodiverse young people, and in May 2023 we were delighted to win the Museums Heritage Award for Best Community Programme. Since then the programme has gathered pace, with return visits from schools and families alongside new participants. Our second artist in residence, Alice Frost, has been learning how to colour her work digitally as she produces a comic-book that will be available in the museum shop. The museum is also developing a new access film and sensory loan boxes. The film will show the journey from the nearest tube station all the way to the museum and around all the exhibitions, allowing autistic visitors to watch the video ahead of visiting to reduce any stress of being in unknown places. The loan boxes are being developed with another specialist so that schools will be able to hire a box containing a sensory comic story with props that can be touched, heard and smelled, and there will be some fun cartoon activity sheets that can be used in the classroom. In this way we hope to engage with schools that are not able to visit the museum due to their level of need.
By working with other professionals in the field, The Cartoon Museum’s goal is to have an autism programme that works for every family or school, with no hierarchy to the different aspects, all afforded the same importance and respect.