Comic Books and Comic Strips in the United States

Comics have become icons of U.S. popular culture familiar throughout the world. This huge bibliography, one of four compiled by Lent to cover all parts of the world, cites many publications in various writing styles, formats, time periods, and languages. This volume is introduced by famed cartoonists Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey) and Jerry Robinson (The Joker). The genres of comic art have had a phenomenal growth in recent years; the literature has grown with these developments, making this volume of interest to scholars of popular culture and fans alike.

Featured are sections on resources, including an annotated directory of 128 comic art-related periodicals; comics collecting; portrayals of comics in movies, television, and radio; and relationships of comics with art, education and children, eroticism, ethnicity, humanism, the professions, violence, and war. Other parts deal with historical, business, legal, and technical aspects of comics. Two hundred and ninety-one comics-related personnel are singled out for special consideration, as well as 143 individual comic strip characters and 48 comic book titles under 13 genres. The foreword by Mort Walker deals with comics over the years and the topic of political correctness, and the introduction by Jerry Robinson gives a history of comic art. The indices are conveniently divided by authors, cartoonists, characters and titles, periodicals, and subjects. The other three books in this international series cover animation, caricature, gag, magazine, illustrative, and political cartoons in the United States and Canada; comic art of Europe; and comic art of Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

JOHN A. LENT has studied comics for 30 years as a part of mass communications./e Besides his professorial duties, he is managing editor of WittyWorld International Cartoon Magazine, has authored or edited 46 books and written hundreds of articles. The three other volumes that comprise this four-volume international study of comic art literature (of which this is one) are Animation, Caricature, and Gag and Political Cartoons in the United States and Canada: An International Bibliography (Greenwood, 1994), Comic Books and Comic Strips in the United States: An International Bibliography (Greenwood, 1994), and Comic Art in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America: A Comprehensive, International Bibliography (Greenwood, 1996).