COLUMBUS, Ohio — There is a place where Snoopy frolics carefree with the scandalous Yellow Kid, where Pogo the possum philosophizes alongside Calvin and Hobbes. It’s a place where Beetle Bailey loafs with Garfield the cat, while Krazy Kat takes another brick to the noggin, and brooding heroes battle dark forces on the pages of fat graphic novels.

That doesn’t even begin to describe everything that’s going on behind the walls of the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum on the Ohio State University campus, opening to the public Saturday.

“This is the stuff that makes me drool,” says Jim Borgman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who now draws the “Zits” newspaper comic strip. “I enjoy art of all kinds, but it’s as if cartoons were segregated for many years and not allowed into such hallowed halls. And this is kind of a moment of setting things right, I think, giving cartooning its due when it has been in the wings all these years.”

Jeremy, the kid from “Zits”? He’s in there, too, since Cincinnati native Borgman donated most of his art and papers to the museum.

The whole thing started with Milton Caniff, the influential comic artist whose beloved “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon” adventure strips lived in the nation’s funny papers for a half century.