Bibliography

An ongoing compendium of secondary sources for comic strip history I have found valuable.

Books, Articles and Web Sites

  1. Ahmed, Maaheen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Comics, Cambridge University Press, 2023
  2. Ahrens, Jorn Ahrens and Arno Meteling, eds. Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, Continuum, 2010 and Arno Meteling, eds. Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, Continuum, 2010
  3. Appel, John, “Abie the Agent, Gimpl the Matchmaker, Berl Schliemazel, et. al,” in Charles Hardy, etc. Ethnic Images in the Comics. Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1986.
  4. Armour, Robert A. “Comic Strips, Theatre, and Early Narrative Films 1895-1904.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 1987, pp. 14–26.
  5. Becker, Stephen. Comic Art in America: A Social History of the Funnies, The Political Cartoons, Magazine Humor, Sportung Cartoons and Animated Cartoons. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959.
  6. Berger, Arthur Asa. The Comic-Stripped American; What Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks, and Charlie Brown Tell Us About Ourselves. New York: Penguin, 1973
  7. Blackbeard, Bill, The Comic Strip Century: Celebrating 100 Years of an American Art Form, Kitchen Sink Press, 1995
  8. Beringer, Alex. Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth Century US Comic Strip. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2024.
  9. Blackbeard, Bill. R.F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics. Northampton, 1993.
  10. Blackbeard, Bill, The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics,Smithsonian, 1977
  11. Blair, Walter and Hamlin Hill. America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
  12. Boime, Albert. “The comic Stripped and Ash Canned: A Review Essay. Art Journal 32, no. 1 (Autumn 1972), pp. 21-25,30. Reprinted in ed. Munson, Kim A. Comic Art in Museums. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. pp. 120-134.
  13. Borus, Daniel H. Twentieth Century Mutliplicity: American Thought and Culture, 1900-1920. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009
  14. Boswell, Peyton Jr. Modern American Painting. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1940
  15. Brennecke, Ernest. “The Real Mission of the Funny Paper.” The Century Magazine Mar. 1924: 665-675
  16. Brown, Joshua. Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
  17. Bukatman, Scott. The Politics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, University of California Press, 2012.
  18. Canemaker, John. Winsor McCay : His Life and Art. Revised, Expanded Edition, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005
  19. Cole, Jean Lee. How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920, University Press of Mississippi, 2020.
  20. Coyle, Heather Campbell/ Jazz Age Illustration. Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum/ Yale University Press, 2024
  21. Crockett Almanacs. The Tall Tales of Davey Crockett: The Second Nashville Series, 1839-1841. Michael A Lofaro, ed. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1987
  22. Exner, Eike. The Creation of the Comic Strip as an Audiovisual Stage in the New York Journal 1896-1900, ImageText Vol. 10, no. 1.
  23. Cullin, Jim. The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996.
  24. Exner, Eike. The Creation of the Comic Strip as an Audiovisual Stage in the New York Journal 1896-1900, ImageText Vol. 10, no. 1.
  25. Fell, John. Film and the Narrative Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
  26. Forbush, William Byron. The Boy Problem. Boston: The Pilgrim Press, Sixth Edition, 1907
  27. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling, Stanford University Press, 2012.
  28. Glenn, Susan A., “‘Give an Imitation of Me: Vaudeville Mimics and the Play of the Self,” American Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1 (March 1998), pp. 47-76.
  29. Gopnik, Adam. “Comics and Catastrophe: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the History of the Cartoon,” The New Republic, June22, 1987. Reprinted in Hilary Chute, ed. Maus Now: Selected Writing. New York: Pantheon Books, 2022. pp.33-45.
  30. Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945, Smithsonian, 1998.
  31. Grady, William. Redrawing the Western: A History of American Comics and the Mythic West. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024.
  32. Gunning, Tom. “The Art of Succession: Reading, Writing and Watching Comics.” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 3 (Spring 2014), pp. 36-51.
  33. Gunning, Tom. “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorial Era.” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (March 22, 2012), 495.
  34. Hall, Hillary. The Newspaper Comic Strip in the Making of American Mass Culture, 1900-1935. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Sheffield, 2019.
  35. Hancock, La Touche. “American Caricature and Comic Art Part I,” The Bookman 16 (Oct. 1902), 120-31.
  36. Harvey, R.C.. The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History
  37. Harvey, Robert C., Children of the Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Comic Strip, University of Washington Press, 1998
  38. Harvey, R.C. Milton Caniff
  39. Harvey, R.C. “Outcault, Goddard, The Comics and The Yellow Kid.” The Comics Journal, June 9, 2016.
  40. Haskell, Barbara. The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900-1950. New York: W.W. Norton/Whitney Museum of American Art, 1999
  41. Hayward, Jennifer. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fiction From Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997.
  42. Heer, Jeet, “Crazy Quilts, Krazy Kat’s and King’s Cartoons: The Birth of Domestic Modernism,” in Peter Maresca, ed. Crazy Quilt: Frank King, Scraps and Panels On the Way to Gasoline Alley (Palo Alto: The Sunday Press, 2017), pp. 6-8
  43. Holtz, Allan, “The Daily Show,” Hogan’s Alley #12 (Vol. 3, no. 4) 2004, pp. 64-80.
  44. Holtz, Allan. American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
  45. Jones, Gavin. Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age. Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press, 1999.
  46. Kahn, Michael Alexander and Richard Samuel West. What Fools These Mortals Be!: The Story of Puck, America’s First and Most Influential Magazine of Color Political Cartoons. San Diego: IDW Publishing, 2014.
  47. Kasen, Jill H. “Whither the Self-Made Man? Comic Culture and the Crisis of Legitimation in the United States.” Social Problems, vol. 28, no. 2, 1980, pp. 131–48. 
  48. Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994
  49. Lears, Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation:The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. New York: Harper, 2009.
  50. Lobel, Michael. John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
  51. Marble, Anne Russell . “The Reign of the Spectacular.” Dial, 35, Nov. 1, 1903, 297-99.
  52. Maresca, Peter, ed. Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915 Revised Edition. Palo Alto: Sunday Press Books/Fantagraphics, 2025.
  53. Marshall, Richard. America’s Great Comic Strip Artists. New York: Abbeville Press, 1989.
  54. McCrory, Amy. “Sports Cartoons in Context: TAD Dorgan and Multi-Genre Cartooning in Early Twentieth-Century Newspapers.” American Periodicals, Vol. 18, no 1 (2008), pp.45-68
  55. Meyer, Christina. Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019
  56. Monod, David. Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020
  57. Mooney, Amy M. “;As Others See Us”: The Chicago Defender Cartoonist Jay Jackson as Cultural Critic. MELUS, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 2014),
  58. Moss, Richard, “Racial Anxiety in the Comics Page: Harry Hershfeld’s ‘Abie the Agent,’ 1914-1940. The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2007. pp. 90-109.
  59. Mullaney, Dean and Bruce Cantwell, King of the Comics: One Hundred Years of King Features Syndicate, IDW, 2015
  60. Perelman, S.J. “How I Learned to Wink and Leer.” NY Times, April 23, 1978, pp363, 379.
  61. Rauser, Amelia. Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008
  62. Roeder, Katherine. Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay, University Press of Mississippi, 2014.
  63. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
  64. Robinson, Jerry, The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, Penguin, 1974
  65. Roob, Alexander. Press Graphics: The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism, 1819-1921. New York: Taschen, 2023.
  66. Saguisag, Laura. Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019.
  67. Schlereth, Thomas J. Victorian America: Transformation in Everyday Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991
  68. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001
  69. Sloane, David E.E. American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
  70. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visdions of Gender in victorian America. New York: Knopf, 1985
  71. Snyder, Robert W. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dean) 2nd edition, 1989 and 2000.
  72. Soper, Kerry, “From Swarthy Ape to Sympathetic Everyman and Subversive Trickster: The Development of Irish Caricature in American Comic Strips between 1890 and 1920.” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 2 (2005), pp. 257-296).
  73. Soper, Kerry. “Performing ‘Jiggs’: Irish Caricature and Comedic Ambivalence toward Assimilation and the American Dream in George McManus’s ‘Bringing up Father.’” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol. 4, no. 2, 2005, pp. 173–213.
  74. Sussman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984
  75. Tisserand, Michael. Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White. (New York: Harper, 2016)
  76. Walker, Brian, The Comics: Since 1945, Abrams, 2002
  77. Walker, Brian, The Comics: Before 1945, Abrams, 2004
  78. Wanzo, Rebecca, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, New York University Press, 2020.
  79. Waugh, Colton. The Comics. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Reprinted Jackson: Univeristy Press of Mississippi, 1991
  80. Westbrook, David. “From Hogan’s Alley to Coconino County: Four Narratives of the Early Comic Strip.” 1999: Web Site
  81. Willmott, Glenn, Entanglements of Style: The Uniqueness of Modernism in Comics, in Najarian, pp. 15-32.
  82. Yaszek, Lisa, “‘Those Damn Pictures’: Americanization and the Comic Strip in the Progressive Era.” Journal of American Studies, 28, no 1 (1994)
  83. Zurier, Rebecca. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

Online Articles

  1. R.C. Harvey. “Outcault, Goddard, The Comics and the Yellow Kid.” The Comics Journal, 2016. Web Site
  2. Heer, Jeet, “The Complex Origins of Little Orphan Annie,” August, 2020, Bunk.
  3. Heer, Jeet, “Pulp Propaganda,” Sept. 30, 2015, The New Republic.