As a librarian, I must say the CNBDI is very impressive. We've plenty of great advocates for comics in the Anglophone world, but most of them come from a business or entertainment background. To get something like this off the ground over here, we'd need a strong public voice coming from academia, but damned if I can think of any likely candidates. Given its history, surely there should be a UK national comics library at Dundee?
Anyway, I went to the library there and asked for their Chris Weston section. They must have been watching Fawlty Towers on their monitors, because they started laughing and saying "qué?" a lot.