Great Old Books About Comic Books and Comic Strips

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Sometimes reading about comic books and comic strips is just as much fun as reading comic books and comic strips themselves.  Whether it’s about the progression of the storytelling, or the disputes between Stan Lee and the artists that he worked with, or the lawsuits involving Superman and other costumed heroes like Captain Marvel, or Dr. Wertham and the Comics Code Authority controversy, or even just appreciating the evolution of artistic styles over the generations, there’s a lot of interesting stuff about the history of comic books and comic strips.

Yeah, you can find videos about these topics online, but watching or listening to videos about comic books and comic strips (or even books in general) is kind of lame when you have books that can do the job more effectively. Books and comics should be read about, preferably with an actual book. I’m old fashioned, I guess. I like pages, especially pages with words and/or pictures on them, and the best books with words and pictures on them are books about comic books and comic and comic strips. 

The good news about the following books is that they’re relatively easy to find online now, and they don’t cost very much, not even by my cheapskate standards. The best books about comic books and comic strips have the right combination of both exposition and comic art. If there’s no exposition, then there’s no context or connection between the variety of creators that should be discussed in any given book. Too much exposition, the you’re defeating the purpose of a book about comic books and/or comic strips. I think all the books below have the right combination.

The Great Comic Book Heroes with  forward and exposition written by Jules Feiffer

I have nostalgic feelings for this book.  Back in the 1970s, my family would drive 400 miles once a year to see my aunt, uncle, and cousins, and this book was always on the living room table.  While the adults talked and talked, I would read and reread the numerous superhero origin stories from the 1940s in this book while ignoring the 50 pages of exposition at the beginning (and the conversations around me). Now that I have my own copy, I enjoy the exposition and ignore the chicken scratch drawings that passed for comic book art in the 1940s.

Don’t get me wrong; I get a kick out of seeing those chicken scratch illustrations.  But I also understand why they were considered to be crap, especially by some of the artists who drew them.

A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics

My older brother gave this to me when I was in high school, and I would have kept it even if it hadn’t been a gift.  I would have liked more of a variety of comic book samples, but the Smithsonian chose to highlight a few and then really highlight them.  To the Smithsonian’s credit, they /it chose good examples of each comic.  For example, Plastic Man by Jack Cole in the late 1940s was one of the grooviest superheroes ever. But it has to be by Jack Cole. To me, no other artist gets Plastic Man quite right.

Not only does this book have a couple Pogo episodes by Walt Kelly that don’t give me the usual Pogo headache, it also has a fantastic Uncle Scrooge episode drawn by the legendary Carl Barks. Without this book, I might not have become aware of a lot of the funny animal genre that was huge before Marvel Comics revived superheroes in the 1960s, but I’m pretty much a fan of something from every genre and/or era I just haven’t gotten to each one yet. I have to pace myself.

I even like the Pogo comics.  Pogo usually gives me a headache but not these. It was almost a miracle. Thank you, Smithsonian!

As I mentioned earlier, if you look online, you can probably buy any of these books for around $20, even when you include shipping. Part of me is saddened that stuff like this is so undervalued right now, but the other part of me is glad because I can still afford to buy stuff like this without having to deal with the overly aggressive book flippers out there.

Comix: A History of Comics in America

A History of Comic Books in America doesn’t have much exposition (great selling point for me when I was a kid), and the double spread for each page is awesome!  Plus, the selections are great, maybe the best I’ve seen in books about comic books.  Jack Kirby on Fantastic Four!  Steve Ditko drawing Dr. Strange!  Jack Cole drawing Plastic Man!  Plus, there’s a  bunch of cool E.C. stuff that books like this sometimes shy away from. 

As crazy as some of the Jack Kirby Fantastic Four or Steve Ditko Dr. Strange stories were (above picture), some of the E.C. stuff from the 1950s was (picture below) even crazier, and I didn’t even know about it until reading this book and others like it. I liked knowing about E.C. comics, but it was also frustrating because they were almost impossible for me to find/buy in the 1970s. Aaarrgh! I might have been better off not knowing about them for a while.  

However, if not for this book (and others), I might have limited myself exclusively to Marvel Comics and the superhero genre, but after reading these comic book history books and seeing all of the other great stuff out there (most of which I just can’t get to in one blog post), I branched out into other areas when I could. If you like comics nowadays, you’ll never run out of great reading material.

The Comics: The Complete Collection

The Comics: The Complete Collection is huge, hardcover, and heavy, and this one is solely about comic strips.  It’s not the kind of book you should read while lying on your back and holding it over your face.  I should know.  I tried, holding it precariously over my face, and accidentally dropped it.  Now I talk funny, but I’ll get over it.  I have a blog.

The Comics: The Complete Collection is more about showing the comic strips than informing with exposition, but there’s still just enough biographical stuff for readers to get background info about creators they might be unfamiliar with. It’s pages and pages of comic strips from each decade of the 20th century, and there’s a bunch of comic strips and creators that I had never heard of before. If you find this book, just make sure that you have a comfortable place to either sit with it on your lap or a table you can place it on.

Backstage at the Strips by Mort Walker

This large trade paperback might not count as a pure comic strip book, but I’m going to include it anyway. Yes, it’s written and put together by a comic strip creator, Mort Walker, and it focuses primarily on that one comic strip cartoonist, Mort Walker, but Backstage at the Strips still does a enough discussion about the history of comic strips and their influence on culture for me to justify this book being on my list. Plus, it’s my list. If you don’t like my list, then make your own list.

Comic strips don’t seem to be as big of a thing as they used to be, but I understand why. Since newspapers don’t have the circulation and influence they had in the past, it makes sense that the comics in the funnies sections would also lose their audiences. Even so, whenever I put a book of old comic strips in front of some students (I chose kids who would treat the books respectfully), a lot of them still gladly read the comic strip books… and liked them, even though they had no context beforehand of who the characters were. I saw that a lot as a teacher. Of course, I didn’t show my students these particular books. I wasn’t THAT dedicated.

Here are a couple honorable mention books about comic books and comic strips.

Jack Kirby & Stan Lee: Stuf’ Said by I’m not sure.

I’ve already written a blog post about this book, so you can read about it here. It’s one of my favorite books of all time (I explain why in the blog post), but it primarily focuses on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby from Marvel Comics, so it really belongs in a different category. Still, it’s about comic books, so I will at least mention it here.

Excelsior: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee by Stan Lee and some other guy

I’ve also written about this trade as well (and you can read about it here). This is a great book for fans of Stan Lee, but it might piss you off if you have strong anti-Marvel feelings for how Marvel artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were screwed over by Marvel (and maybe even by Stan Lee) in the 1960s and 1970s. This is definitely a pro-Stan Lee book, which is what I’d expect from a book written by Stan Lee.

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But enough about me! What do you think? What other great books have I missed? What is your favorite era for either comic books or comic strips? Which of these books deserves its own blog post? What other types of media are fun to read about? Prove that you can read exposition between pictures by leaving a comment below!

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For more about comic books and comic strips, see The Comic Book/Comic Strip Home Page!

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This isn’t a novel about comic books, but it has a lot of comic book references (not enough, however, to annoy people who don’t read comic books).

It’s the oldest story in the world, 1990s style!

Man meets woman; man falls in “luuuvvv” with woman; man gets blindsided by reality!

The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy is now available on Amazon !