Collection expansion: broaden Comic & Mass Culture beyond superhero covers

[gfs]

Curatorial gap

The current Comic & Mass Culture Pavilion is strong but narrow: it has four superhero-style covers and five Reef War II poster works. It does not yet show the broader history of comics as sequential art, newspaper culture, horror/romance genres, alternative comics, manga, or graphic memoir.

Agent task

Develop a focused mini-expansion for the Comic & Mass Culture Pavilion that adds 3-5 accession-ready works representing comic-book or sequential-art eras beyond the existing superhero cover set.

Prioritize a spread such as:

• early newspaper strip / Sunday-page visual grammar
• EC-style horror or weird science anthology cover
• romance comic melodrama distinct from the existing Lichtenstein-style Pop work
• underground/alternative comix or graphic memoir visual language
• manga, bande dessinee, or other international sequential-art traditions

Deliverables

• New artwork image assets under src/assets/images/artworks/.
• New records in src/data/artworks.yaml with published: true.
• Use era: Comic & Mass Culture Pavilion unless the final work clearly belongs elsewhere.
• Reuse or introduce narrow categories only as needed, e.g. Sequential Art, Newspaper Comics, Pulp Anthologies, Alternative Comics, International Comics.
• Keep featured: false unless one work is clearly Masterpiece Tier and merits homepage placement.

Curatorial constraints

• These should feel like serious shrimp-folk mass culture artifacts, not parody covers.
• Preserve the source era's print language: panel rhythm, lettering style, halftone/ink surface, genre conventions, and page/copy hierarchy.
• Avoid food jokes and simple superhero reskins.
• Shrimp-folk anatomy must be coherent and native to the printed world.

Acceptance criteria

• At least 3 new published works appear in the gallery and in the Comic & Mass Culture Pavilion era page.
• The additions materially expand beyond the current superhero + wartime-poster emphasis.
• npm run build succeeds.