[Dauber] demonstrates in American Comics: A History an assured command of comics’ variety as well as the vast literature they’ve inspired. (There are nearly 90 pages of notes.) His perceptive, critical overview is enlivened by a jaunty style that bops from the political cartoons of Thomas Nast in the 1860s to the demise of an equally influential gadfly, Mad magazine, in 2018.

Jeremy Dauber’s American Comics: A History is an entertaining, big, and (sometimes too) comprehensive survey of the comics industry, from its inception in early twentieth-century newspapers to the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe megamovie crossover empire.

No detail escapes Dauber.

Dauber has written a scholarly survey that is both opinionated and frequently funny.

... no one has ever tied this history closer to societal events and told it in a more sweeping manner than Dauber...has done in this latest work.

Dauber...pithily and accurately describes hundreds of individual strips and books, colorfully expanding the limits of conventional definitions. This crammed chronicle will not soon be matched, let alone surpassed..

Although the presentation of all this well-researched material leads to some narrative discohesion, there’s plenty of delight and revelation for comics fans.