10 Books on Comics Studies and Publishing

Are you looking to get an edge on publishing your comic or working in comics publishing? The following is a robust list of books on publishing and comics. These books explore everything about the industry, traditional book publishing, sequential storytelling, its effects on culture, and more. These are books I’ve read through the years and would suggest visiting if you’re interested in learning more about comics and cartoon studies.

1. Comic Books Incorporated by Shawna Kidman

Comic Books Incorporated tells the story of the US comic book business, reframing the history of the medium through an industrial and transmedial lens. Comic books wielded their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business for half a century before moving to the center of mainstream film and television production. Amazon

2. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John Thompson

Offering an in-depth analysis of how the digital revolution is changing the game today, Merchants of Culture is the one book that anyone with a stake in the industry needs to read. For nearly five centuries, the world of book publishing remained largely static. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the industry faces a combination of economic pressures and technological change that is forcing publishers to alter their practices and think hard about the future of the book. Amazon

3. Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge. Amazon

4. How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies by Katherine Kelp-Stebbins

In How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a “universal” language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of reading for difference. Kelp-Stebbins’s anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist analytical framework engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation in a diverse world. Amazon

5. Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre by Daniel Stein

Authorizing Superhero Comics examines the comic book superhero as a lasting phenomenon of US popular serial storytelling. Moving beyond linear- or creator-centered models of genre development, Daniel Stein identifies authorization conflicts that have driven the genre’s evolution from the late 1930s to the present. Amazon

6. Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips by Susan Kirtley

Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. Amazon

7. Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability by Eszter Szép

Eszter Szép’s Comics and the Body is the first book to examine the roles of the body in both drawing and reading comics within a single framework. With an explicit emphasis on the ethical dimensions of bodily vulnerability, Szép takes her place at the forefront of scholars examining comics as embodied experiences, pushing this line of inquiry into bold new territory. Amazon

8. Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future by Aaron Kashtan

Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future, Aaron Kashtan argues that paying attention to comics helps us understand the future of the book. Debates over the future of the book tend to focus on text-based literature, particularly fiction. Amazon

9. Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics by Kate Polak

Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics explores an often-overlooked genre of graphic narratives: those that fictionalize historical realities. While autographics, particularly those that place the memoirist in the context of larger cultural conversations, have been the objects of sustained study, fictional graphic narratives that — as Linda Hutcheon has put it — both “enshrine and question” history is also an important area of study. Amazon

10. Drawing the Line: Comics Studies and INKS, 1994–1997 by Lucy Shelton Caswell and Jared Gardner

Drawing the Line: Comics Studies and INKS, 1994–1997 collects some of the most important essays from INKS: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies, the first peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted exclusively to comics studies. Included in the volume are essays by pioneering comics scholars on newspaper comic strips, Japanese manga, Chinese lianhuanhua, comic books, graphic novels, and editorial cartoons, alongside writings and artwork by celebrated cartoonists such as Will Eisner, Oliver Harrington, Charles Schulz, and Frank Stack. Amazon

About the writer, Britta Buescher
Britta is a creative director, showrunner, and illustrator. Co-conspirators with creatives who involve themselves mainly (but not limited to) in the music and comic book industry. Previously with Dark Horse Comics, Lion Forge, FUNimation, and Nickelodeon. Superpowers include being a leading voice for women illustrators, designers, and animators.

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