Comics and Graphic Novels: Comics History

A global survey and analysis of women cartoonists.

Quattro's impeccably researched book details stories of Black artists who drew--mostly covertly behind the scenes--superhero, horror, and romance comics in the early years of the industry. Using primary source material from World War II-era Black newspapers and magazines, this book profiles pioneers like E.C. Stoner, a descendant of one of George Washington's slaves, who became a renowned fine artist of the Harlem Renaissance and the first Black artist to draw comic books. Perhaps more fascinating is Owen Middleton who was sentenced to life in Sing Sing. Middleton's imprisonment became a cause célèbre championed by Will Durant, which led to Middleton's release and subsequent comics career. Then there is Matt Baker, the most revered of the Black artists, who drew the first Black comic book hero, Vooda! The book is illustrated with rare examples of each artist's work, including full stories from mainstream comic books from rare titles like All-Negro Comics and Negro Heroes, plus unpublished artist's photos

Robbins has spent the last thirty years recording the accomplishments of a century of women cartoonists, and Pretty in Ink is her revised, updated and rewritten history of women cartoonists. Although the comics profession was dominated by men, there were far more women working in the profession throughout the 20th century than other histories indicate, and they have flourished in the 21st. Robbins not only documents the increasing relevance of women throughout the 20th century, with mainstream creators such as Ramona Fradon and Dale Messick and alternative cartoonists such as Lynda Barry, Carol Tyler, and Phoebe Gloeckner, but the latest generation of women cartoonists--Megan Kelso, Cathy Malkasian, Linda Medley, and Lilli Carré, among many others.

Haidu's well researched and reported account of the men and women who created the comic book, and the conservative, book burning, backlash of the 1950s that nearly destroyed it. This long-forgotten skirmish in the culture wars so seriously handicapped American comics that, half a century later the medium is only now recovering.

Readers have long cherished the work of comic masters such as Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer and Art Spiegelman, all of whom happen to be Jewish. Few, however, are probably aware that the Jewish role in creating the American comic art form is no less significant than the Jewish influence on Hollywood filmmaking. Filled with the most stunning examples of this vital artistic tradition, Jews and American Comics tells us how the people of the book' became the people of the comic book.'

Syndicated cartoonist and illustrator Tim Jackson offers an unprecedented and well researched look at the rich yet largely untold story of African American cartoon artists. The volume covers the mid-1880s, the early years of the self-proclaimed black press, to 1968, when African American cartoon artists were accepted in the so-called mainstream. Also provides a historical record of the men and women who created seventy-plus comic strips, many editorial cartoons, and illustrations for articles and places them in full historical context. Offers an invaluable perspective on American history of the black community during pivotal moments, including the Great Migration, race riots, the Great Depression, and both World Wars.

Between the 1940s and 1980s, Chicago's Black press-from was home to some of the best cartoonists in America. Kept out of the pages of white-owned newspapers, Black cartoonists found space to address the joys, the horrors, and the everyday realities of Black life in America. From Jay Jackson's anti-racist time travel adventure serial Bungleton Green, to Morrie Turner's radical mixed-race strip Dinky Fellas, to the Afrofuturist comics of Yaounde Olu and Turtel Onli, to National Book Award-winning novelist Charles Johnson's blistering and deeply funny gag cartoons, this is work that has for far too long been excluded and overlooked. Also featuring the work of Tom Floyd, Seitu Hayden, Jackie Ormes, and Grass Green. Published in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, on the occasion of Chicago Comics- 1960s to Now,June 19-October 3, 2021. Curated by Dan Nadel.

Solid, well-researched social history of the comic book in North America.

An eclectic anthology of artists whose work--created between 1900 and 1969 who were overshadowed by more successful contemporaries. These pioneers are given the showcase they deserve, reprinting--in most cases for the first time since their initial publication--complete comic books and strips by such visionaries as Raymond Ewer, Howard Nostrand, Ogden Whitney, and Dick Briefer. These under-recognized artists often deviated from the thematic and graphic conventions of the comics medium--and influenced Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and others.

Comics scholar, Gerard Jones brilliantly tells the surprising story of the birth of the superhero and the comic book industry. Drawing on exhaustive research, including interviews with friends and relatives of the comics creators, Jones reveals how the immigrant experience and the collision of Yiddish and American culture-forged in the crucible of two world wars-shaped the vision of the make-believe hero. He chronicles how the comics sparked a frightened counterattack that nearly destroyed the industry in the 1950's and how later they surged back at an underground level, to inspire a new generation to transmute those long-ago fantasies into art, literature, blockbuster movies and graphic novels.

Comics scholar Arlen Schumer highlights the careers of eight seminal Silver Age (circa 1956-1970) artists who drew definitive versions of the industry's most iconic characters while creating the tropes for the look of mainstream comic book art itself.

The Belgian comic book scholar and writer Thierry Smolderen remapped the established history of comics with this influential study. Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted ""sequential art"" definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions that inform that definition. His goal is to understand the processes that led to the twentieth-century comic strip, the highly recognizable species of picture stories that he sees crystallizing around 1900 in the United States. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Töpffer, Gustave Doré, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images--satirical images in particular--were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. In tracing this evolution, Smolderen distinguishes himself from other comics historians by following a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state.

Sixty years before the comics entered the American newspaper press, Rodolphe Topffer of Geneva (1799-1846), schoolmaster, university professor, polemical journalist, art critic, landscape draftsman, and writer of fiction, travel tales, and social criticism, invented a new art form: the comic strip, or "picture story," that is now the graphic novel.

Brian Walker's two comprehensive guides to American comics, The Comics Before 1945 and The Comics Since 1945, are combined here in one omnibus edition. Organized by decade, with biographical profiles of artists and analysis of the different comics genres.

Taking up the role of laughter in society, the book examines an era in which the US population was becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. Comic artists and writers, hoping to create works that would appeal to a diverse audience, had to formulate a method for making the "other half" laugh. In magazine fiction, vaudeville, and the comic strip, the oppressive conditions of the poor and the marginalized were portrayed unflinchingly, yet with a distinctly comic sensibility that grew out of caricature and ethnic humor. Author Jean Lee Cole analyzes Progressive Era popular culture, providing a critical angle to approach visual and literary humor about ethnicity--how avenues of comedy serve as expressions of solidarity, commiseration, and empowerment. Cole's argument centers on the comic sensibility, which she defines as a performative act that fosters feelings of solidarity and community among the marginalized. Cole stresses the connections between the worlds of art, journalism, and literature and the people who produced them--including George Herriman, R. F. Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Luks, and William Glackens--and traces the form's emergence in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal-American and how it influenced popular fiction, illustration, and art.

The story of screwball comics, with new research and rare art from some of the most hilarious cartoonists of all time. Before "screwball" became a movie genre, it was a staple of other forms of American culture, including newspaper comic strips. Emerging from the pressures of a rapidly accelerating technological and information-drenched society, screwball comics offered a healthy dose of laughter and perspective. The disruptive, manic, and surreal verbal-visual comedy of these "funnies" fostered an absurdist sensibility embraced by The Marx Brothers (who took their names from a popular comic strip), W. C. Fields, Tex Avery, Spike Jones, Ernie Kovacs, and Mad magazine. Comics scholar Paul C. Tumey traces the development of screwball as a genre in magazine cartoons and newspaper comics, presenting the lives and work of around two dozen cartoonists, with an art-stuffed chapter on each.

Forty-three years on this is still one of the most comprehensive collections of full-color American newspaper daily comics. The book contains full narrative arcs for all the strips and is fairly large, about 10" x 18, but newspapers were much larger than that a century past. Please note: Some of this work contains sexist, racist, and bigoted images and narratives endemic to the times in which they were created.

The only complete collection of Feininger's early comics work. Known worldwide for his accomplishments as a painter, Feininger began his career as a cartoonist, producing--all too briefly--two beautifully ambitious comic strips for the "Chicago Sunday Tribune" in 1906: "The Kin-Der-Kids" and "Wee Willie Winkie's World," both of which remain high points in the history of strip cartooning. "The Kin-Der-Kids" is a rollicking comic opera of the ludicrous exploits of a group of young adventurers as they set off around the world in their bathtub with the oppressive Auntie Jim-Jam in hot pursuit. "Wee Willie Winkie's World" is a Little Nemo-esque visual tour-de-force of a little boy's charming fantasy world. Long considered an equal of Winsor McCay and George Herriman, Feininger's place in strip history is cemented with this beautiful, full-color, oversized collection, edited and featuring an introduction by historian Bill Blackbeard.

A long-overdue tribute to legendary African American sportswriter and boxing cartoonist Ted Carroll. Ted Carroll was one of the greatest American artists and sportswriters of the twentieth century, most notably as a boxing cartoonist and journalist. As a Black man working in an era when boxing was one of the few outlets where Black athletes could achieve wealth, success, and recognition, Carroll's commentary on the sport provides a profound perspective on race and the history of boxing. In A Boxing Legacy: The Life and Works of Writer and Cartoonist Ted Carroll, Ian Phimister and David Patrick celebrate Carroll's extraordinary achievements as a sports cartoonist, illustrator, painter, and writer. Beginning with an introduction to Carroll's life and times, Phimister and Patrick then dive into Carroll's work, reproducing 44 of his best articles contributed to The Ring magazine--the bible of boxing. Arranged thematically, each section of articles includes an overview discussing the selections and providing valuable historical context. Included in the collection is the significant series "The American Black Man in Boxing," which explores race, sport, and society. Ted Carroll's insightful articles illuminate the place of boxing in twentieth-century sport and society with incredible skill and care. The first extended account of Ted Carroll's life and works, and profusely illustrated with his brilliant drawings, A Boxing Legacy finally provides the deserved recognition to a remarkable artist and author who has been overlooked for far too long.