History, Theory & Criticism
Detail from Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (2003) by Chester Brown.
...comics are a medium of extremes. They often simplify and stereotype their subjects, partly in an attempt to make our complex world understandable, partly as a means of efficient short-form communication. In the process, of course, they also highlight their surrounding societies' trends and attitudes, making them easily available for observation and study.
— Fredrik Strömberg, Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History
This page contains material on the history of comics, as well as theory and criticism of the art form. For researchers looking for an accessible overview of both the history and theory of the medium, we recommend pairing Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey's Comic Book History of Comics with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.
Journals
The Comics Journal
Founded in 1976, The Comics Journal is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic art and graphic novels, featuring interviews, editorials and reviews.
ImageTexT
Seeks to advance the academic study of an emerging and diverse canon of imagetexts. Chief among these are comic books, comic strips, and animations, but also represented are illustrated fiction, children’s picture books, digital-concrete poetic forms and visual rhetoric.
Studies in Comics
Aims to describe the nature of comics, to identify the medium as a distinct art form and to address the medium's formal properties. The emerging field of comics studies is a model for interdisciplinary research and this peer-reviewed journal welcomes all approaches and methodologies. Its specific goal, however, is to expand the relationship between comics and theory and to seek to articulate a 'theory of comics'.
History of Comics
The Comic Book History of Comics
For the first time ever, the inspiring, infuriating, and utterly insane story of comics, graphic novels, and manga is presented in comic book form!
American Comics: A History
The sweeping story of cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels and their century-long hold on the American imagination.
Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art
This book traces the history of the comic from early cartoon-like woodcuts through to the graphic strips of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Organized thematically it explores the various genres of the comic book - including humour, adventure, girls' comics, underground and alternative.
Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book
The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the long nineteenth century. While existing scholarship on Victorian illustrators largely centers on the realist artists of the “Sixties,” this volume examines the entire lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book.
The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay
Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted "sequential art" definition of the comic strip, the author engages with the historical processes that led to the the highly recognizable species of picture stories that emerged around 1900 in the United States.
Comic Art Propaganda: A Graphic History
A visual history of some of the most outrageous, unbelievable and politically charged comics ever published. As one of the most effective and powerful forms of communication, it comes as no surprise that comic art has been misappropriated by governments, self-interest groups, do-gooders, and sinister organizations to spread their message.
The Ten-Cent Plague
Between World War II and the emergence of television, American popular culture as we know it was first created in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress — only to resurface in Mad magazine.
Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code
In tracing the evolution of the controversy and the resulting code, Seal of Approval examines important issues about children, media effects, and censorship. It is the first book-length scholarly study of this period of comic book history.
Dirty Pictures
In the 1950s, comics meant POW! BAM! superheroes, family-friendly gags, and Sunday funnies, but in the 1960s, inspired by these strips and the satire of Mad magazine, a new generation of creators set out to subvert the medium, and with it, American culture.
Dreaming the Graphic Novel
Examines how notions of the graphic novel began to coalesce in the 1970s, a time of great change for American comics, with declining sales of mainstream periodicals, the arrival of specialty comics stores, and (at least initially) a thriving underground comix scene.
Theory and Criticism
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art form.
Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form
In the follow-up to his instant classic Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud takes comics to the next level, charting twelve different revolutions in how comics are created, read, and perceived today, and how they're poised to conquer the new millennium.
More Critical Approaches to Comics
This comprehensive text offers a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing key theories and critical methods for analyzing comics.
Seeing Comics Through Art History: Alternative Approaches to the Form
This book explores what the methodologies of Art History might offer Comics Studies, in terms of addressing overlooked aspects of aesthetics, form, materiality, perception and visual style.
The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and their Publics
The first collection to explicitly examine the production, circulation, and reception of comics from a social-scientific point of view.
Classics and Comics
Explores the engagement of classics with the epitome of modern popular literature, the comic book. Collects sixteen articles that look at how classical content is deployed in comics and reconfigured for a modern audience.
Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know
Presents an accessible, entertaining, and highly illustrated guide to the diversity of contemporary comics in book form.
The Graphic Novel: An Introduction
Explores the graphic novel as a form of visual and literary communication, showing readers how to situate and analyze graphic novels since their rise to prominence half a century ago.
Comics As History, Comics As Literature
A collection of essays examining the role of comics as portals for historical and academic content, as well as the cross-disciplinary aspects of comics.
From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels
This essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture.
Comics and Identity
Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics
Examines comics' potential for representing lives and perspectives that have been socially marginalized or excluded.
Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels
American comics from the start have reflected the white supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness, and both signal and hide its presence.
Monstrous Women in Comics
Explores the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability.
Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle
The thirteen essays in this collection tease out the nuances of how multicultural comics skillfully combine visual and verbal elements to tell richly compelling stories around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality within and outside the U.S. comic book industry.
Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation
Bringing together contributors from a wide-range of critical perspectives, this collection is an analytic history of the diverse contributions of Black artists to the medium of comics.
The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art
The Blacker the Ink is the first book to explore not only the diverse range of black characters in comics, but also the multitude of ways that black artists, writers, and publishers have made a mark on the industry.
