A survey of the best scholarly writing on the form, craft, history, and significance of the comics

“Jeet Heer is a cultural journalist and academic who divides his time between Toronto and Regina. He has written for many publications including the Globe and Mail, Slate.com, the Boston Globe, the Walrus, the American Prospect, the Comics Journal, the Virginia Quarterly Review and the Guardian of London. He has co-edited eight books and been a contributing editor to another eight volumes. With Kent Worcester, Jeet co-edited A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi), which won the Peter C. Rollins Book Award given annually to the best book in American Studies or Cultural Studies. He's been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. His articles have been anthologized in both The Best American Comics Criticism (Fantagraphics) and The Best Canadian Essays collection for 2012. With Chris Ware, Jeet continues to edit the Walt and Skeezix series from Drawn and Quarterly, which is now entering its sixth volume.

Jeet Heer's profile page

Kent Worcester is professor of political science at Marymount Manhattan College. His books include Peter Kuper: Conversations, Peter Bagge: Conversations, The Superhero Reader (coedited with Charles Hatfield and Jeet Heer), A Comics Studies Reader (coedited with Jeet Heer), and Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (coedited with Jeet Heer), all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Kent Worcester's profile page

The editorial work accomplished by Heer and Worcester is simply impressive. Not only have they managed to gather material that is challenging, well-written, well-thought and that should enable a big leap forward in comics theory and criticism, but the two editors have also succeeded in giving each text the necessary space and context.

Image & Narrative

While such critically acclaimed graphic novels as Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986, 1991), Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan (2000), and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (2006) established the artistic legitimacy of comics, academic comics scholarship has thriven apace. The 28 essays Heer and Worcester collect reflect the various approaches to writing about comics taken by writers in the burgeoning discipline. Those include the historical in pieces on nineteenth-century graphic storyteller Rodolphe Töpffer and other progenitors of the medium; the formal in esoteric pieces on the craft and art of comics, covering such aspects as the "verbal-visual blend" of words and pictures, the ways artists indicate panel sequencing, and sound representation in Japanese manga; and the critical-analytic in considerations of seminal works by Ware, Spiegelman, and others. Most of the essays focus on American comics, but several examine works from Japan, Mexico, and France, where scholars have deemed comics 'the ninth art.' The contributions range in readability from totally accessible to highly rarefied and borderline pedantic. Still, altogether they attest to the artistic importance of a long-neglected medium.

Booklist

Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester have, once again, performed admirably in producing another compendious survey of comics scholarship. Their earlier effort in this vein, Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, scanned the historical landscape for essays about comics written by various literary critics and the like; their current production, A Comics Studies Reader, compiles 28 essays by contemporary scholars and critics. The result is a sort of panorama of current serious thinking about the art of cartooning in all its forms.

Robert C. Harvey

Since academics have helped legitimize comics as an art form to be taken seriously, it only makes sense that an entire book of scholarly essays put illustrated fiction under the microscope. It very well could serve as the required reading for that course I never had the opportunity to ace.

Oklahoma Gazette