The Comic Book History of Comics is an award-winning non-fiction graphic novel by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey
The inspiring, infuriating, and utterly insane story of comics, graphic novels, and manga - as a comic book! The Comic Book History of Comics is an irreverent-but-accurate take on the true behind-the-scenes history of the world's favorite art form.
Most texts about the history of comics have a tendency to center around the author's personal favorite sub-category: comic strips, super heros, pulps, undergrounds, European comics, Japanese comics, etc.- while ignoring other, equally significant forms. We attempted to avoid that pitfall by focusing on the breakthrough cultural moments and creative inventions that advanced the comics art form as a whole (rather than just talk about the stuff we liked) using their signature "make as many jokes as possible, as fast as possible" style.
That being said, The Comic Book History of Comics was NEVER intended to be an all-encompassing academic history text - to attempt to do so in the medium of comics itself would be a lifelong endeavor. We loved making this book but we thought 256 pages achieved our goal in making a gateway history of the comics art form, focusing on the benchmark creative breakthroughs of the comics medium itself, and some of the key people behind them.
Since it's 2008 debut as a self-published black and white comic book it has been revised, expanded and re-published a few times. The most recent edition was colored by Adam Guzowski and published as two volume edition in 2017 by IDW. In 2020 we followed up with a companion project, The Comic Book History of Animation. All editions of The Comic Book History of Comics are currently out-of-print but we still have a few remaining copies at the Evil Twin Comics web store (or check used book stores!).
We are using this website to occasionally post excerpts from the book. Subscribe to our mailing list to have new chapters delivered to your email.
Thanks for reading!
-Fred Van Lente & Ryan Dunlavey
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