"Singular Sensations" + Taking Gag Cartoons Seriously

Here’s a brief teaser (in case I space for another year posting more about it like a formal review) about a book that gave me such an academic oasis that I can’t rave enough about it. "Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States" (review here and here) by Michelle Ann Abate was just published last year by Rutgers University Press. The only mild criticism, on account of a personal bias, is the omission of Kliban’s work, who’s seminal contribution to the genre of single-panel gag cartoons, especially of his unique style in both rendering and type of humor that predated – and opened the door for – Larson’s “Far Side” (another featured artist in this book). But that is balanced by the surprising perspective brought to bear on deconstructing Bill Keane’s “Family Circus” in an new appreciation of one of more benign features ever created, that has largely escaped critical attention.

While perhaps a wee bit wordy, as the target demographic is definitely not the average aficionado of cartoons, the book consolidates many resources and succinctly sums up similar arguments that it took me fifty pages to make for my own MFA thesis on this very topic. And as both a college professor and a professional practitioner for almost forty years, this is a magnificent treatise  Along with this summer’s workshop with Hilary Price, that’s now twice in one year that I’ve heard and read about the cognitive perception of the elements – pictures and words/image and text (though not always verbal) – can and does create a sequential processing through the deliberate compositional arrangement of said components. Rebutting the overshadowing influence of Scott McCloud’s restrictive definitions (of which another genre, that of comics poetry, stands in contrast to) and acknowledging that yes, not only do comics count as a legitimate artform, single-panel gag panels can and do count as comics as well.
Also apologies for the brutal picture of committing the cardinal sin of dog-earing (and underlining + highlighting + notes-in-margins): I can faintly hear the snorts of disapproval from the ghost of my reference librarian mother over such heretical damage.