Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher

AMERICAN COMICS

Jeremy Dauber

A History

The sweeping story of cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels and their century-long hold on the world's imagination.
Comics have conquered America. From our multiplexes, where Marvel and DC movies reign supreme, to our television screens, where comics-based shows like The Walking Dead have become among the most popular in cable history, to convention halls, best-seller lists, Pulitzer Prizewinning titles, and MacArthur Fellowship recipients, comics shape American culture, in ways high and low, superficial, and deeply profound. In American Comics, Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes readers through their incredible but little-known history, starting with the Civil War and cartoonist Thomas Nast, creator of the lasting and iconic images of Uncle Sam and Santa Claus; the golden age of newspaper comic strips and the first great superhero boom; the moral panic of the Eisenhower era, the Marvel Comics revolution, and the underground comix movement of the 1960s and '70s; and finally into the twenty-first century, taking in the grim and gritty Dark Knights and Watchmen alongside the brilliant rise of the graphic novel by acclaimed practitioners like Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel. Dauber's story shows not only how comics have changed, but how American politics and history have changed them. Throughout, he describes the origins of beloved comics, champions neglected masterpieces, and argues that we can understand how America sees itself through whose stories comics tell. Striking and revelatory, American Comics is a rich chronicle of the last 150 years of American history through the lens of its comic strips, political cartoons, superheroes, graphic novels, and more. Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Jewish Comedy and The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem, both finalists for the National Jewish Book Award. He lives in New York City.
Available products
Book

Published 2021-11-16 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

NPR/WAMU 1A, interview: We talk with Dauber about the evolving landscape of American comics. Read more...

Dauber joins us to discuss why cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels have captured the American imagination and what they can reveal about the changing politics and culture of the country. Read more...

Until now one could only dream of an engaging, analytic history encompassing the entire medium. That sounds like a job for Superman, but Jeremy Dauber has gotten there first... His perceptive, critical overview is enlivened by a jaunty style that bops from the political cartoons of Thomas Nast in the 1860s to the demise of an equally influential gadfly, Mad magazine, in 2018. Read more...

With encyclopedic knowledge, Jeremy Dauber brilliantly excavates the story of this art form - warts and all - from its origins right up to the twenty-first century, and strikes cartoon gold. For anyone curious about a medium that's influenced and embedded itself in every part of our culture, American Comics is an essential guidebook. If you are already a connoisseur of comics, be prepared to be enlightened anew.

An entertaining and richly detailed new history of comics... a scholarly survey that is both opinionated and frequently funny... .the story Dauber tells is a mighty one... Dauber ably demonstrates that comics, as much as or more than any other art or literature, can handle the most serious of topics, including one of the most serious of all: our ability to laugh at ourselves. Read more...

No detail escapes Dauber... A master storyteller, Dauber shows just how much there is to appreciate in this uniquely American history. Read more...

Dauber covers the entire landscape of American comics in this outstanding...thorough - and thoroughly entertaining - work.

[Dauber] pithily and accurately describes hundreds of individual strips and books, colorfully expanding the limits of conventional definitions. This... chronicle will not soon be matched, let alone surpassed.

Excerpt: Tracing the Internet's Enormous Impact on American Comics Read more...

'This book,' writes Dauber...'tries to cover the whole shebang'.If anything, he understates his intent... [T]here's plenty of delight and revelation for comics fans... Dauber clearly knows and cherishes his subject, and readers who share his passion will find plenty to love.

Sweeping... [C]omprehensive.. Dauber's book sets itself apart, and comics enthusiasts will be enthralled.