Ingeniously conceived and executed, Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s The Comic Book History of Comics
(IDW) charts the history of comics utilizing the medium itself. Originally published as a six-issue mini-series as Comic Book Comics, the trade collection depicts the medium’s storytelling evolution, its rocky course as a business, as well as its creative touchstones. Throughout the book, attention is paid to both the creative talents who added to the medium as well as the occasionally more dubious types who bankrolled what was first seen as a “fly-by-night” business. Certain figures, familiar to most longtime comics lovers, regularly appear in the book–Siegel and Shuster, Jack Kurtzberg/Kirby, Will Eisner, and a young hyperactive kid named Stan Lieber (who would later, of course, shorten that name to Lee)–first seen scrambling to make a place for themselves in a profession that was initially considered “a couple of steps below digging ditches.”
Van Lente and Dunlavey follow the art and industry from its earliest Depression Era days as a cheap collection of reprint comic strips through its Golden Age blossoming with the creation of Superman and the development of various post-war comic book genres (romance, crime and, ultimately, horror comics) then into the fifties Silver Age which brought a rekindled interest in superheroes. If there’s any area where the duo fall short in the first half of their volume, it’s in the scant mention given to actual funnybooks: animal comics that brought us the work of Carl Barks and his cohorts as well as the earliest incarnation of Walt Kelly’s classic Pogo–and the teen funnies like Archie–though I suspect for many mainstream fans this isn’t an issue. I do wonder why there’s no mention of Jack Cole’s revolutionary wise-guy superhero Plastic Man, though.
The second half of the volume moves us into the sixties, with both the Marvel Age and the underground comix movement, then into the development of the direct market distribution system and the graphic novel. The growth of European comics and Japanese manga are also given their own chapters, but these prove relatively slight. The focus of Comic Book History remains on the American industry. Fair enough: a Manga History of Manga would provide enough material for its own full volume.
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