Comic artists and writers, hoping to create works that would appeal to a diverse audience, had to formulate a method for making the 'other half' laugh. Taking up the role of laughter in society, the book examines an era in which the US population was becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. In tracing this evolution, Smolderen distinguishes himself from other comics historians by following a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Töpffer, Gustave Doré, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images-satirical images in particular-were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. His goal is to understand the processes that led to the twentieth-century comic strip, the highly recognizable species of picture stories that he sees crystallizing around 1900 in the United States.

Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted ''sequential art'' definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions that inform that definition. Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. The Belgian comic book scholar and writer Thierry Smolderen remapped the established history of comics with this influential study. Then there is Matt Baker, the most revered of the Black artists, who drew the first Black comic book hero, Vooda! The book is illustrated with rare examples of each artist's work, including full stories from mainstream comic books from rare titles like All-Negro Comics and Negro Heroes, plus unpublished artist's photos Middleton's imprisonment became a cause célèbre championed by Will Durant, which led to Middleton's release and subsequent comics career. Perhaps more fascinating is Owen Middleton who was sentenced to life in Sing Sing. Stoner, a descendant of one of George Washington's slaves, who became a renowned fine artist of the Harlem Renaissance and the first Black artist to draw comic books.

Using primary source material from World War II-era Black newspapers and magazines, this book profiles pioneers like E.C. Quattro's impeccably researched book details stories of Black artists who drew-mostly covertly behind the scenes-superhero, horror, and romance comics in the early years of the industry.

Pretty In Ink by Trina Robbins