Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services

Rutgers University Press

Visit our Partner Page See all our books
book: Singular Sensations
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Singular Sensations

A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2024

About this book

Shortlisted for the 2024 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Book

What do The Family Circus, Ziggy, and The Far Side have in common? They are all single-panel comics, a seemingly simple form that cartoonists have used in vastly different ways. 
 
Singular Sensations is the first book-length critical study to examine this important but long-neglected mode of cartoon art. Michelle Ann Abate provides an overview of how the American single-panel comic evolved, starting with Thomas Nast’s political cartoons and R.F. Outcault’s groundbreaking Yellow Kid series in the nineteenth century. In subsequent chapters, she explores everything from wry New Yorker cartoons to zany twenty-first-century comics like Bizarro. Offering an important corrective to the canonical definition of comics as “sequential art,” Abate reveals the complexity, artistry, and influence of the single-panel art form. 
 
Engaging with a wide range of historical time periods, sociopolitical subjects, and aesthetic styles, Singular Sensations demonstrates how comics as we know and love them would not be the same without single-panel titles. Abate’s book brings the single-panel comic out of the margins and into the foreground.  

Author / Editor information

MICHELLE ANN ABATE is professor of literature for children and young adults at the Ohio State University in Columbus. She is the author of seven previous books of literary criticism, including Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts and the Lambda Literary Award nominee Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. 
 

Reviews

“With her trademark pitch-perfect precision and profound purview, Abate rips the curtains back to show the magic behind single-panel comic storytelling. With breathtaking historical scope and dazzling analyses of exemplars, Abate gifts us with generative concepts and vital tools that crack wide open understanding of how story works in one gestaltic gulp. Singular Sensations is the paradigm shift in Comics Studies we’ve long awaited!”— Frederick Luis Aldama, author of the Eisner–award winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
    Download PDF
  • Publicly Available

    Contents

    v
    Download PDF
  • Publicly Available

    Preface and Acknowledgments

    vii
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Introduction: All by Myself: Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre

    1
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    1 “Those Damned Pictures”: Thomas Nast and the Rise of the Single-Panel Comic as a Political Cartoon

    22
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    2 Freeze Frame: R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid and the Tableau Vivant

    45
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    3 “The New Yorker’s Most Influential Cartoonist”: Peter Arno and the Extraordinary Ordinary of Everyday Life

    68
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    4 Not Jokester, but Prankster: Little Lulu’s Silent Social Commentary

    85
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    5 Civil/Rights: Jackie Ormes’s Patty-Jo ’n’ Ginger, Black Girlhood, and the Black Bourgeoisie

    106
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    6 Outside the Circle of Influence: The Family Circus, Diegetic Space, and Comics Narratology

    137
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    7 Ziggy Was Here: Tom Wilson’s Newspaper Series, World War II, and the Role of Graffiti in Comics

    155
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    8 “His People Are Grotesque”: The Far Side and the Aesthetics of Ugliness

    173
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Epilogue: Reimagine, Recombine, Recreate: Dan Piraro’s Bizarro, Mash-Ups, and the Comics of Remix Culture

    195
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Notes

    215
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Works Cited

    221
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Index

    233
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    About the Author

    243
    Download PDF

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
September 5, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781978840713
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978840713
eBook ISBN: 9781978840713
Keywords for this book
The Far Side; Ziggy; The Family Circus; comics; comic studies; pop culture; popular culture; United state; media; single-panel comic; political cartoons; social commentary
Audience(s) for this book
For a non-specialist adult audience
Downloaded on 13.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.36019/9781978840713/html
Scroll to top button