REVIEWS: American Comics: A History

I’ve always enjoyed reading history books and scholarly work about comics—American Comics: A History by Jeremy Dauber, is the latest such entry. Though I’m pretty familiar with the history of American comics, this book offers an ambitious and very readable narrative overview of comics from its beginnings to the present day. I particularly found fascinating the quantitative information that showed that, up until the 1950s or so, adults and women still made up a significant portion of comics readers, contrary to the belief that comics have always been a “children’s” medium. 

Towards the end of the book, however, the book loses some of its narrative steam when it turns into a laundry list of comics and trends, as comics become more fragmented and diverse with the explosion of new outlets and platforms that encompass alternative comics, manga, graphic novels, and the YA and book market. With the current era of comics still evolving, no doubt it was a challenge coming up with a compelling way to cover the recent expanding comics scene in a way that made thematic and narrative sense—something for future scholars to tackle. (The book nevertheless piqued my interest in some comics I wasn’t aware of previously.) Nevertheless, the book provides a great overview of the history and breadth of comics in the U.S.