Panels and Prose began in September 2019 with a modest post about R.F. Outcault’s mentor in urban urchin cartooning, Michael Angelo Woolf. After a series of shorter posts and book reviews, I started writing in earnest the following March a series of deeper long and short essays (that now number over 150) on the comic strip and American culture. This seems a good moment to reassess what this site is about, where it came from and where headed. I have recast the site’s “About” page to include more about my own journey through comics history and especially the six books that lit my fire as a young teen.

But after 150+ posts, many of which seem like random dives into a wide range of decades and topics, what sort of order can I bring to this project? Several visitors of late have mentioned that they appreciate my critical and historical approach to this medium, but it is hard to navigate this growing pile of prose. My first task is to create a chronological reorganization of these posts in a dedicated section of the site. For a while now, I have been conceiving of PanelsandProse.com as a rough draft for a book-length cultural history of the American comic strip. I don’t know if a monograph “final draft” of this work is the best format in this day and age. Perhaps I should just let it expand organically and randomly, as I scan the Panels & Prose library shelves and poke in and out.

But I do want to reassemble the past few years of drafts into a more linear format and see what persistent themes or organizing narrative suggest themselves. Meanwhile, I hope such an historical reorg better surfaces from these years of material the items most relevant to different visitors. Not being a WordPress pro, the simple plan is to create a Table of Contents page that links to the major essays under some historical rubric. And I welcome any alternative suggestions.

As well, I would like to replace the current Bibliography section with an old fashioned Blogroll. My original intention of establishing both for myself and others a comprehensive guide to secondary popular and scholarly works on the comic strip languished quickly. I think of greater value would be links to digital repositories of comic strips. I hear many fans ask on forums where to find some of these strips to browse without investing in the pricey reprints. And, again, please make suggestions for sites I must include. I am not convinced I have discovered all or even most of them.

And, again, if you want to dive into the six books that inspired me, just follow the link.