Phenomenal fans: brothers Terry, left, and Edwin Murray with some of their cache of comics Photo: Jim Wallace

or the record, Edwin and Terry Murray would probably not consider their childhood asthma anywhere near as debilitating as Daredevil's blindness or Iron Man's bad heart. Still the brothers' health was bad enough to restrict their activities and require weekly trips to the doctor. On the way home, their mother stopped at the neighborhood pharmacy and gave them each a quarter to spend. That's where they discovered their true vulnerability: an incurable weakness for the cosmic lure of comic books.

Through the late Fifties and into the Sixties, while other kids were riding bikes up and down the street outside or playing catch, the Murray brothers were taking rocket ships to Mars, fending off man-eating lions with nothing more than a sharp knife and their wits, testing the limits of X-ray vision, cruising in the Batmobile, and otherwise living lives altogether outside the confines of the bedrooms and basement of the modest brick ranch house where they spent most of their time. The comic books that took them light years away were read and reread until the pages were bent and wrinkled, and the covers wore loose from their staples.

" We started with Dell Comics," recalls Edwin Murray, the elder brother. "At one time, Dell was the largest publisher of comics: They had all the Disney; they had the Warner Brothers--Bugs Bunny and Daffy and them; they had Hanna-Barbera--Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone; they had Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry; they had Tarzan; they had comics for all the popular Westerns from the time--Zorro, Cheyenne, Maverick, Lone Ranger. We got interested in whatever we saw on TV and then went out and bought the related comics. That was the start.

" And then later on we started to branch out. We saw strange covers--science fiction and superhero--and we'd pick up a sample or two. And we graduated into DC science-fiction and superhero comics and eventually into Marvel and everything else."

Batman: one of the Caped Crusader's early appearances, in 1944

Nearly fifty years later, what started as an escape from illness and boredom has evolved into one of the country's largest collections of comic books and related materials. This year, Edwin Murray '72 and Terry Murray, who attended Duke for two years, donated the collection to the university's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. It comprises more than 55,000 comic books, representing most major American genres, including super-hero, westerns, sci-fi, fantasy, crime, romance, and horror; a representative sampling of alternative comics from the Sixties and Seventies; original comic art, including work by Jack Kirby, the "King of Comics"; 500 role-playing and board games; and books and magazines about comics and games. It also includes a variety of materials that document the fascinating, esoteric subculture of comic-book fans, including hundreds of fanzines and materials related to "mini-cons" or small conventions that the donors would host in their Durham home.

When the offer was made, recalls Tim West, the library's former director of collection development, "it didn't take much thinking. Consumer-related and popular culture is one subject in which there is an increasing interest at Duke and all over the place." The collection "will be a boon to scholarship in many fields," he said in an article in Duke University Libraries. Comic books and related genres are "revealing manifestations of prevailing social, cultural, and political attitudes."

Although news about the collection has not yet traveled far beyond the confines of the special-collections library, scholars informed of its arrival were warm in their appraisal of its importance. "It's very good timing," says Paul Buhle, a senior lecturer in American civilization and history at Brown University and the author of an article, "The New Scholarship of Comics," which appeared in the May 16 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. The field is ripe for scholarship, he says. "If there's something called 'comic scholarship' in the United States, it just started--following on the heels of film studies and sports history, which no serious historian wrote books about until fifteen years ago."

While some might question the propriety of introducing comic books into an academic library, Randall W. Scott, assistant head of special collections for the Michigan State University Libraries, points out that fiction used to be in the same position. "It wasn't until the end of the nineteenth century that fiction was allowed into libraries. It was considered too flakey. Nonfiction was what academic libraries were for." Michigan State's library has been collecting comics since 1970 and has amassed some 150,000. "In the entertainment we all enjoy is embedded the information about our culture that we're going to want to study in the future," Scott says.

Though not as large as Michigan State's, the collection at Duke is still among the top three or four in the country, West says. And, ultimately, it's not just size but "the collection's comprehensive nature that makes it special," says Megan E. Lewis, who is in charge of the immense task of cataloguing the materials. "We have virtually complete runs of everything Marvel and DC Comics have published from the Sixties on through 2001, as well as almost complete runs of Superman going back to the 1930s. So we have a lot of early material, which is another thing that makes the collection special." (An index to the DC comics, which have been catalogued, is available online; an index to the rest of the collection will be available early next year, after cataloguing is completed.)

The oldest comic book in the collection is More Fun Comics No. 31, 1938, a collection of adventure stories. There's also Detective Comics No. 27, 1939, in which Batman makes his debut; All-Star Comics No. 8, 1941, which features the introduction of Wonder Woman, who gets her start as a secretary for the Justice League Society; and Daredevil No. 1, 1940, which pits the "Man Without Fear" against the ultimate evil: "Hitler stacked the cards against humanity--BUT--DAREDEVIL deals the ACE OF DEATH to the MAD MERCHANT OF HATE!"

" The core of the collection is superheroes," says Edwin Murray. "DC was our favorite company. Just like you've got Duke loyalists and Carolina loyalists, at that time you were a DC fan or a Marvel fan. It's what it came down to."