The Cartoon Art Museum was established with a mission that sounded simple and proved radical: treat cartoon art as art. The permanent collection, which by 2015 had grown to some 7,000 pieces, spans the full range of the medium -- original animation cels from classic cartoons, hand-inked comic book pages, editorial cartoons, comic strips, and sculptures. The collection represents not a niche enthusiasm but a comprehensive survey of one of America's most original contributions to visual culture. From the political cartoons of the 19th century to the graphic novels of the 21st, the museum argues that sequential art deserves the same curatorial attention as painting or sculpture.

The museum has moved through San Francisco like a character in one of its own comic strips. For years it occupied a space in the Yerba Buena Gardens cultural district in the South of Market neighborhood, surrounded by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the other institutions that anchor SoMa's cultural corridor. In September 2015, it closed that location, and after a two-year search reopened in October 2017 in the Fisherman's Wharf area. The move placed the museum in one of San Francisco's most visited tourist corridors, trading the art-world adjacency of SoMa for the foot traffic of the waterfront.

What makes cartoon art distinct is the line. A single inked stroke must convey emotion, motion, character, and narrative all at once. The Cartoon Art Museum's exhibitions reveal this craft in ways that reproductions cannot. Seeing an original Winsor McCay page from Little Nemo in Slumberland -- the intricate linework, the hand-lettering, the correction fluid over second thoughts -- is a fundamentally different experience from reading a printed reprint. The museum makes visible the human hand behind mass-produced images, reminding visitors that every character who ever appeared on a screen or in a newspaper began as someone's pencil sketch on paper.