
Singular Sensations
A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States
- 254 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Shortlisted for the 2024 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Book
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 groundbreaking 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, sociopolitical 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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction: All by Myself: Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre
- 1 âThose Damned Picturesâ: Thomas Nast and the Rise of the Single-Panel Comic as a Political Cartoon
- 2 Freeze Frame: R. F. Outcaultâs The Yellow Kid and the Tableau Vivant
- 3 âThe New Yorkerâs Most Influential Cartoonistâ: Peter Arno and the Extraordinary Ordinary of Everyday Life
- 4 Not Jokester, but Prankster: Little Luluâs Silent Social Commentary
- 5 Civil/Rights: Jackie Ormesâs Patty-Jo ânâ Ginger, Black Girlhood, and the Black Bourgeoisie
- 6 Outside the Circle of Influence: The Family Circus, Diegetic Space, and Comics Narratology
- 7 Ziggy Was Here: Tom Wilsonâs Newspaper Series, World War II, and the Role of Graffiti in Comics
- 8 âHis People Are Grotesqueâ: The Far Side and the Aesthetics of Ugliness
- Epilogue: Reimagine, Recombine, Recreate: Dan Piraroâs Bizarro, Mash-Ups, and the Comics of Remix Culture
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- About the Author