Singular Sensations
260 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
11 color and 44 B-W images
Paperback
Release Date:13 Sep 2024
ISBN:9781978840683
Hardcover
Release Date:13 Sep 2024
ISBN:9781978840690
Singular Sensations
A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States
Rutgers University Press
What do The Family Circus, Ziggy, and The Far Side have in common? They are all single-panel comics, a seemingly simple form that cartoonists have used in vastly different ways.
Singular Sensations is the first book-length critical study to examine this important but long neglected mode of cartoon art. Michelle Ann Abate provides an overview of how the American single-panel comic evolved, starting with Thomas Nast’s political cartoons and R.F. Outcault’s ground-breaking Yellow Kid series in the nineteenth century. In subsequent chapters, she explores everything from wry New Yorker cartoons to zany twenty-first-century comics like Bizarro. Offering an important corrective to the canonical definition of comics as “sequential art,” Abate reveals the complexity, artistry, and influence of the single panel art form.
Engaging with a wide range of historical time periods, socio-political subjects, and aesthetic styles, Singular Sensations demonstrates how comics as we know and love them would not be the same without single-panel titles. Abate’s book brings the single-panel comic out of the margins and into the foreground.
Singular Sensations is the first book-length critical study to examine this important but long neglected mode of cartoon art. Michelle Ann Abate provides an overview of how the American single-panel comic evolved, starting with Thomas Nast’s political cartoons and R.F. Outcault’s ground-breaking Yellow Kid series in the nineteenth century. In subsequent chapters, she explores everything from wry New Yorker cartoons to zany twenty-first-century comics like Bizarro. Offering an important corrective to the canonical definition of comics as “sequential art,” Abate reveals the complexity, artistry, and influence of the single panel art form.
Engaging with a wide range of historical time periods, socio-political subjects, and aesthetic styles, Singular Sensations demonstrates how comics as we know and love them would not be the same without single-panel titles. Abate’s book brings the single-panel comic out of the margins and into the foreground.
MICHELLE ANN ABATE is Professor of Literature for Children and Young Adults at the Ohio State University in Columbus. She is the author of seven previous books of literary criticism, including Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts and the Lambda Literary Award nominee Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History.
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction. All By Myself: Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre
Chapter 1. “Those Damned Pictures”: Thomas Nast and the Rise of the Single-Panel Comic as Political Cartoon
Chapter 2. Freeze Frame: R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid and the Tableau Vivant
Chapter 3. “The New Yorker’s Most Influential Cartoonist”: Peter Arno and the Extraordinary Ordinary of Everyday Life
Chapter 4. Not Jokester, but Prankster: Little Lulu’s Silent Social Commentary
Chapter 5. Civil / Rights: Jackie Ormes’s Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger, Black Girlhood, and the Black Bourgeoisie
Chapter 6. Outside the Circle of Influence: The Family Circus, Diegetic Space, and Comics Narratology
Chapter 7. Ziggy Was Here: Tom Wilson’s Newspaper Series, World War II, and the Role of Graffiti in Comics
Chapter 8. “His People are Grotesque”: The Far Side and the Aesthetics of Ugliness
Epilogue. Reimagine, Recombine, Recreate: Dan Piraro’s Bizarro, Mashups, and the Comics of Remix Culture
Works Cited
List of Figures
Introduction. All By Myself: Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre
Chapter 1. “Those Damned Pictures”: Thomas Nast and the Rise of the Single-Panel Comic as Political Cartoon
Chapter 2. Freeze Frame: R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid and the Tableau Vivant
Chapter 3. “The New Yorker’s Most Influential Cartoonist”: Peter Arno and the Extraordinary Ordinary of Everyday Life
Chapter 4. Not Jokester, but Prankster: Little Lulu’s Silent Social Commentary
Chapter 5. Civil / Rights: Jackie Ormes’s Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger, Black Girlhood, and the Black Bourgeoisie
Chapter 6. Outside the Circle of Influence: The Family Circus, Diegetic Space, and Comics Narratology
Chapter 7. Ziggy Was Here: Tom Wilson’s Newspaper Series, World War II, and the Role of Graffiti in Comics
Chapter 8. “His People are Grotesque”: The Far Side and the Aesthetics of Ugliness
Epilogue. Reimagine, Recombine, Recreate: Dan Piraro’s Bizarro, Mashups, and the Comics of Remix Culture
Works Cited
