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Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 18901945. By Ian Gordon. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. xii, 233 PP. $29.95, ISBN 1-56098-856-8.)
Comic art is big business today. In 1996, Sotheby's priced a copy of Action Comics, no. 1, at $125,000. In 1989, the movie Batman was the year's highest-earning box office feature, followed by sequel Batman movies in 1992, 1995, and 1997. Total revenue from Batman licensed products came to $1 billion in three years. Thus, Ian Gordon's Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 is an important book explaining how comic art shaped American society, both as a new form in advertising and as a commodity form itself.
Comic art began in American illustrated humor magazines and newspaper comic supplements of the late nineteenth century. Raucous humor and caricature gradually evolved into the recognizable...