The comic strip may not have originated in the US, but in the 20th Century it quickly became an uniquely American art form. This modest blog will track my personal 50 year passion for these panels and prose and how they accompanied Americans through the rapid-fire changes of the last century.
Your guide and author is Steve Smith. I was raised on Peanuts, Steve Canyon, Mary Worth, Beetle Bailey, B.C. and Family Circle. I don’t recall the exact order, but in the early 1970s I devoured Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes as well as The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy and an oversized reprint of “Buck Rogers.” I was hooked on classic comics.
Thus began a lifelong passion for pop culture history. I finished my doctorate in American Civilization at Brown in 1990, taught media criticism at University of Virginia (1988-95) and then left academia to become a media critic of the emerging Internet. This blog will try to combine all of those passions.
I welcome your feedback, suggestions or just to share your own passion for comic strips past at popeyesmith [at] comcast [dot] net.
Panels & Prose 
Dear Mr. Popeye,
I recently discovered your blog with your review of Trina Robbins newest book. I thought it would interest you that the American Weekly collection I had photographed was Bill Blackbeard’s own San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. I lived in SF at the time and Bill let me remove and photograph all the Edmund Dulac covers from 1924-1951. After his passing I learned that his entire collection was donated to the Billy Ireland CAM in Ohio. I am trying to contact them now to find out if further research into the American Weekly’s is still possible. I find their website obtuse, but computer research is not my forte. My eBook is listed on all the usual sites, but the larger JPG version is for sale on Etsy. If you are interested, please contact me for a free review copy.
Sincerely,
Albert S.