A Columbia University professor of Jewish literature and American Studies offers a sweeping story of cartoons, comic strips, graphic novels and their hold on the American imagination.
[Dauber] demonstrates in American Comics: A History an assured command of comics’ variety as well as the vast literature they’ve inspired. (There are nearly 90 pages of notes.) 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 ... In contrast to the work-for-hire conditions at big outfits, many underground artists retained copyright, engaged in profit-sharing and pioneered direct distribution. Some of these innovations would be emulated later by the corporations, supporting Mr. Dauber’s provocative contention that the underground’s creative business practices were 'arguably . . . even more revolutionary than the underground’s content.' The final chapters of American Comics, surveying recent decades, lack some of the cohesion of its early sections.
Jeremy Dauber’s American Comics: A History is an entertaining, big, and (sometimes too) comprehensive survey of the comics industry, from its inception in early twentieth-century newspapers to the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe megamovie crossover empire ... For all its strengths, American Comics: A History often feels more like advocacy for the medium than an analysis of it. Many pages are filled with quick synopses and appraisals of notable comics that came along over the last hundred years, along with reflections on how the once-family-owned companies that invented comics were eventually subsumed by megagiants. At times, reading Dauber’s warm, appreciative comments...feels like strolling through Roger Angell’s essays on baseball, where every game in the sun is entangled with the memory of every other game ever played in a sort of eternal blissful childhood of sunny bleachers and savory, dripping hotdogs.
No detail escapes Dauber ... There isn’t a subject that is off-limits to this richly creative format ... The one fault to this encompassing study is that it doesn’t have a single picture (probably due to licensing complications). That’s unfortunate in a book that describes so well the power of imagery to convey meaning. Readers will be forced to track down the cited works, but they won’t be disappointed once they do ... A master storyteller, Dauber shows us just how much there is to appreciate in this uniquely American history.
