"American Comics: A History" by Jeremy Dauber

Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber serves up a treatise on the great American comic that takes you through over 150 years of history. He goes all the way back to Thomas Nast, who fashioned images of Uncle Sam and Santa we still abide by, and runs through the comics of the 21st century.There’s Superman, of course, and all the super folks that followed along with the moral panic of the Eisenhower era that changed comics as we knew them, underground comix that brought more changes and then there are the developments that followed in the latter years of the 20th century (such as the graphic novel).While recognizing that the erosion of the American newspaper has cost us editorial cartoons and comic strips, including favorites that ran for 60 years or longer, Dauber remains optimistic about the medium in general. You get the back story along with the cover story from a researcher who’s unapologetic about his love for the medium. “Some of my earliest reading memories are of lying on the floor, sprawled out with the Sunday comics pages,” related Dauber, who said his next book will focus on horror.