Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945. By Ian Gordon. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. xii, 233 pp. $29.95, isbn 1-56098-856-8.)

Comic art is big business today. In 1996, Sotheby's priced a copy of Action Comics, no. 1, at $125,000. In 1989, the movie Batman was the year's highest-earning box office feature, followed by sequel Batman movies in 1992, 1995, and 1997. Total revenue from Batman licensed products came to $1 billion in three years. Thus, Ian Gordon's Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 is an important book explaining how comic art shaped American society, both as a new form in advertising and as a commodity form itself. 1

Comic art began in American illustrated humor magazines and newspaper comic supplements of the late nineteenth century. Raucous humor and caricature gradually evolved into the recognizable comic strip format with known characters and narrative. By the 1890s, writers combined text, graphics, and humor and introduced stock images, the naughty boy of "Yellow Kid" and "Hogan's Alley," for instance. By 1900, newspaper chains such as William Randolph Hearst's syndicated the newly popular "Katzenjammer Kids" and "Buster Brown" to sell both papers and products. Gordon argues that Buster Brown was the crucial link between comic strips and the development of a visual culture of consumption in America. . . .

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