Author:Jeremy Dauber

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

ISBN: 9780393635607

Well, I guess it could refer to such things, but in this case what I am specifically suggesting is the ease with which readers will be able to swing from one topic to another, all within the realm of American comics, simply by selecting index entries at will. American Comics, A History has just over 4,200 of them (index entries, that is). Pick one that’s of interest to you, and you may find yourself being led to dozens more that you didn’t even realize existed in the first place. 

As just one random example, I wanted to explore the origin of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. So I went to the index. After learning on page 143 where the name of the strip came from, I was compelled to check out one of the book’s earlier entries on Mr. Schultz and quickly discovered that he and other notable American cartoonists had significant experience in World War II.

Schultz, for one, was at the Dachau concentration camp when Americans liberated it. Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain American, was an infantryman under General George Patton when he had to go to the hospital with lower extremity infections. While there, he was asked to draw clinical watercolors of soldiers’ frostbitten feet to help doctors elsewhere with their own diagnoses since color photographic equipment was in short supply.  

From Pigpen to Patton in 45 seconds. 

With this book, is our ability to fly across the panorama of American comics (faster than a speeding bullet) merely a function of having a jam-packed, 31-page index? No. It’s more than that. It’s also a function of this book being what must be the most comprehensive survey on the topic ever published. 

Dauber, a professor at Columbia University and the author of several books on Jewish literature and humor, has provided an encyclopedic journey through American comic strips and panels, their creators, the various publishers and syndicators, and many of the movies and television shows that followed on their heels.

From Paul Revere’s cartoonish take on the Boston Massacre in 1770, which helped plant more seeds for anti-British sentiment, through the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020, which caused Comic-Con and other similar conventions to be canceled, Dauber uses this 250-year timeline to explore such essential themes and topics as censorship, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, neglected masterpieces, the underground, the superhero movie franchises, and hundreds of others in between.

It’s overwhelming—but in a fun, useful, and exhilarating way. After all, it is clear from the introduction all the way to page 570 that this is anthology easily allows book reviews to guiltlessly use cutesy, clichéd taglines like ‘Everything you always wanted to know about comics but didn’t even realize you could ask!’

Incidentally, that number—570—includes 86 pages of notes alone. It is indeed a thorough and inclusive undertaking which, I suppose, sometimes serves an as invitation to explore and gently criticize what’s not there. 

As I kid, I was a regular reader of the Sunday newspaper, and while I wasn’t a gigantic fan of many of the strips, there were a handful I made sure to visit every single weekend. I couldn’t eat a bagel without them.

Among those favorites were Dondi and The Lockhorns, both of which were award-winning comic strips syndicated in hundreds of newspapers for decades. So I was quite surprised to find neither strip mentioned even once in American Comics, A History. 

Similarly, there are noteworthy comments about some serious publications, like The New Yorker for instance, and the artists who drew for them, and some about Pulitzer Prize-winning satirist Jules Feiffer. But that simply served to make it a tad disappointing for me not to see anything about author and cartoonist James Thurber, a favorite of mine who had been an important part of America’s humor landscape. 

It was also a bit unexpected to read about such comic-based movies as Superman, Spider-Man, and The Avengers, but not Dick Tracy, on which Warren Beatty went to enormous lengths (quite successfully) to embody the true spirit of the original strip, or even Annie, Brenda Starr, and Popeye, all of which, because they were relatively flat, lackluster renderings of popular comic strips, could simply have been loads of fun to discuss. (Another book, perhaps?)  

Do I hold all these criticisms against the project? No way. It is impossible for these absences, and a few others, to render inconsequential any of the fascinating topics in the book, such as the way Congress got involved in examining comic strips for their potential to exacerbate juvenile delinquency, or the debate as to whether or not Superman is Jewish. (He comes from the house of El, which is a Hebrew word for God, his parents sent him off in an ark of sorts, and  he felt the need to disguise his persona to better blend in.)

And there are dozens of other absorbing areas of focus that the author enthusiastically explores. 

Indeed, simply introducing or reintroducing readers to almost countless comic strips makes it well worth the price of admission. Just be prepared to use the copious index to skip around at will. Readers may wish to do that, for the prose in American Comics, A History, while professional and readable (Dauber is the real deal when it comes to research and writing), nonetheless has somewhat of a grandiloquent, academic, congested feel to it, perhaps merely by virtue of the depth and scope of the research and of the author’s breathless enjoyment in exploring, correlating, and describing it all in one big fell swoop. 

To my way of thinking, however, there was a way to lighten the load, but for reasons of which only the author and publisher are aware, they chose not to go that way. I’m talking here about illustrations.

This remarkable assessment examines thousands of comic strips, yet contains not a single image of a strip, a book, a movie still, or even one character. Boy, did I miss that—just like I miss Dondi and The Lockhorns. 

I also miss Li’l Folks, by the way, which is what Charles Schultz named his comic strip before his syndication company decided to change it to Peanuts. Schultz hated that name. Thanks to American Comics, A History, I’m a little wiser for knowing that—if also a little sadder for not seeing any pictures of those adorable li’l folks anywhere in the book.