Two of my favorite books this year were not about comics specifically but about the larger visual culture in which comics emerged during the first half of the American 20th Century. Christopher Long’s overview of commercial graphic ideas, Modern Americanness: The New Graphic Design in the United States 1890–1940 takes us from the poster art craze of the 1890s to the streamlining motif that flourished in late 1930s graphic storytelling. And Ennis Carter’s Posters for the People: Art of the WPA reproduces nearly 500 of the best posters from the New Deal-funded Federal Art Project of the 1930s. Between the two books we peer into a comics-adjacent history of commercial art and how it was incorporating design ideas that expressed the experience of modernity and absorbed some of the artistic concepts of formal modernist art. Although neither book mentions cartooning per se, their subjects are engaged in the same cultural project as cartoonists – to find visual languages that capture and often assuage the dislocations of modern change.
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Comics at Scale: Checking In With Peter Maresca at Sunday Press Books
In our ongoing series of interviews with publishers who are keeping comics history alive, we go oversized this week. Since it started publishing reprints of classic newspaper comics 20 years ago with Little Nemo, Sunday Press reimagined what a reprint could be. These massively oversized books try to immerse us in the original scale and rich color of the earliest Sunday pages. Sunday Press has applied its format to Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Milt Gross, Gasoline Alley, among others. Peter Maresca is founder of Sunday Press Books. We spent an hour with Peter recently recalling his background in comics and tech, the origins of Sunday Press Books with the Little Nemo project, and his thoughts on keeping comics history relevant for a new generation of readers and creators.
Continue readingGet Me to The Church on Time: Decoding the Postwar Cartoon Marriage Boom
“It is a old comical strip trick – pretendin’ th’ hero gotta git married.” It keeps “stupid readers excited,” Li’l Abner claims in 1952. Days later he unwittingly weds Daisy Mae, ending a nearly 20 year tease. But this time it was no “comical strip” trick. In fact, several perennial bachelors of the comics pages fell in a post-WWII rush to the altar. Along with Abner, Prince Valiant, Buz Sawyer, Dick Tracy and Kerry Drake all enjoyed funny page weddings between 1946 and 1957. Comic strip heroes were just following the lead of the real-world heroes returning from WWII. Desperate to make up for lost time and return to normality, over 16 million Americans got hitched in 1946, the year after war ended in Europe and the Pacific. But each of these strips framed the new normal in American life differently. As the best of popular art often does, Vale, Dick, Abner, Buz, Kerry and their mates offered Americans a range of stories, myths really, about what this new normal meant.
Continue readingThe Year in Pre-Code Comic Book Reprints, 2025
I am an EC chauvinist. I should cop to this before rounding up the notable pre-code comic book reprints from the last year. For decades now I have been devouring the many crime, horror, sci-fi, and romance comics that were part of the glut of adult titles after WWII, in part because they represented the unrealized potential of the comics format in post-war America. This was a real pop culture moment. War veterans ate a steady diet of comic books “over there” and seemed primed to follow the medium into more nuanced and adult storylines in the 40s and 50s. Likewise overseas, Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées were on a similar path towards the popular, if not literary, mainstream. But in the U.S. that evolution was derailed and slammed into reverse by anti-comics crusades and the industry’s own “Comics Code Authority” in 1954. Self-censorship effectively arrested the medium in pre-adolescence, focused the industry on anodyne morality tales and pubescent fantasies of super-human prowess for at least a couple of decades.
Continue reading2025 Comic Reprints: Rediscovering Lost Classics
We have already reviewed some of the major 2025 comic reprint releases from major publishers: the reissue of Sunday Press’s Society is Nix, the anniversary celebrations of Peanuts, Hagar and Beetle Bailey as well as Cathy, and the resurfacing if Rea Irvin’s The Smythes. But this year saw a number of self-publishers bring back everything from Sky Masters of the Space Patrol to Milt Gross. I wanted to devote one round-up that highlights these laudable efforts and the often-obscure treasures they have unearthed.
Continue readingDoes This Zeitgeist Make Me Look Fat?: An Overdue Appreciation of “Cathy”
Across five decades of adulthood, every woman I have ever known was familiar, often intimately, with Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy (1976-2010). Our heroine’s struggles with new and old gender roles, the pressures of fashion and body messaging, diet trends, new tech, workplace culture…and MOM, always MOM, found their way into more diaries, onto more refrigerators and clipped into mother/daughter exchanges than any comic of its day. Tis a pity that so many of us male comics readers passed it over as “not for us” or simply unfunny. Spending a couple of days immersed in the new and most welcome 4-volume Cathy 50th Anniversary Collection ($225, Andrews McMeel) makes clear that Cathy was among the most insightful, witty and intelligent strips we had about the experience of post-counter-culture America. And I could have avoided a lot of stupid missteps with the women in my life if I had paid even glancing attention to Guisewite’s wisdom.
Continue readingShelf Scan: Celebrating Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, Hagar and Donald
Before Thanksgiving and the shopping season overcomes us, let’s make sure we start our annual Panels & Prose quick takes on recent books for comic strip fans. The pile of new releases is high and teetering, so let’s break this down into several posts this week and next. Today, we handle the celebratory and anniversary collections involving Peanuts, Hagar, Beetle Baley. For a hands-on look at these books, look for the video “Quick Flip” at the end.
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Panels & Prose 