BOOK REVIEWS
Comics Through Time: A History o f Icons, Idols , and Ideas .
By M. Keith Booker, Editor. Greenwood, 2013.
Comics Through Time is a four volume work that seeks to provide comprehensive
insight into many of the important moments, movements, people, and stories in comic book
history. The four volumes are arranged chronologically, covering the beginnings of comic
books as a medium in the 1800s up through the present day. A casual reader plunging through
every volume would no doubt be taken aback by the breadth of the materials and events being
catalogued.
Arranged alphabetically, each volume of Comics Through Time functions as part
glossary and part encyclopedia, all while telling the story of that particular period in comics
history. While Volume 1 emphasizes newspaper comic strips and The Golden Age creation of
the superhero archetype, Volume 2 highlights the impact of and response to the censoring
body Comics Code Authority. These foci lend a narrative tone to an otherwise scholarly
venture, allowing information to be interpreted via an ever-growing understanding of the
public’s relationship with comic books as both a commercial endeavor and an artistic medium.
There are some limits to the scope of texts being discussed. As we are told in the
preface to each volume by editor M. Keith Booker, “the principal focus is on American comics.”
American and British comics are the focus of every volume, with minimal deference paid to
non-Anglophone comics, and then only those with large Anglophone followings or which have
impacted Anglophone comics in some way. Given that the longest volume reaches almost two
thousand pages, it is understandably necessary (though regrettable) that such principles of
exclusion had to be enforced.
Comics Through Time also provides essays on a number of genres and themes, often
over the course of multiple volumes. For example, while Volume 1 (1800-1960) does not offer
an essay on “Gay and Lesbian Themes,” every other volume does. In this way, a
comprehensive and evolving story of many movements and ideas is told. Each of these
essays, be they on genres such as horror or crime, trends such as adaptations from other
115