[150 years ago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debuted the first comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So in honor of that anniversary, this week I’ve blogged about that strip and four other examples of how the medium has evolved, leading up to this special weekend post highlighting other ComicsStudiers!]
A handful of the many awesome folks we should all be reading to learn more about ComicsStudying.
I have to start by sharing a vital resource that also features a wealth of citations of fellow ComicsStudiers: this excellent Review Roulette newsletter from Vaughn Joy, where she shared an early publication of hers that both models and teaches analyzing comics and engages and cites a ton of great scholars as well. Make sure to read the whole thing and my work here will be done!
One of the most important individual scholars of all things comics is Ian Gordon, as illustrated by his book Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 (1998), edited collections like Comics and Ideology (2001), and much more.
Ian also edited a collection on Charles Schultz, and for a recent public scholarly publication focused on all things Peanuts, check out Blake Scott Ball’s Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts (2021).
One of the best current ComicsStudiers is my friend Matthew Teutsch, as illustrated by this recent post of his on using comics in the Comp/Rhet classroom.
Much comics studying has focused on male cartoonists, so for an important corrective to that trend check out Trina Robbins’s book A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993).
Similarly, I love the revisionist use of comics and graphic images in Walter Greason & Tim Fielder’s The Graphic History of Hip Hop (2024).
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the single most famous work of comics studying, Scott McCloud’s graphic book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993).
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Comics scholars or strips you’d highlight?
PPS. I also have to highlight here the responses to Tuesday’s post that the great historian J.L. Bell shared on Bluesky, in response to this post in particular.
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