The Photo Journal Guide To Comic Books

"21,000 color illustrations. $20,000,000.00 of collectible comic books. Complete cataloging system for comic books, 1935-1965. Relative value index for 50,000 comic books. Scarcity index; relative rarity of collector's comics, many illustrations in this book are of the only copy left in existence."--Dust jacket.

22,000 vivid color photographs of 20 million dollars worth of rare comic books; 1933-1965. Spend 1 minute looking at each illustration, 8 hours per day, Monday-Friday, it will take 9 weeks to view the entire two volumes. Comic books in the 1940's & 1950's dominated the American scene until television took over in the 1960's. Most comics were thrown away & forgotten. Truely a lost & underappreciated artform - until now! Superman, Batman, Captain America are blazing paths across the silver screen to remind us of the Golden Past. THE PHOTO-JOURNAL GUIDE is the most comprehensive reference book ever published. In addition to 22,000 photographs there are 40,000 comics listed by catalog number, value, scarcity, issue dates & contributing artists. There are comprehensive indexes by title, artists & character appearances. Also there are informative chapters on Social & Historical Impact, Restoration, Preservation & Storage, Collecting, Value, & Grading. $1,000,000 retail sets of THE PHOTO-JOURNAL GUIDE sold during the first 4 months of availability - without wholesalers! William Harroff, Book Collector: "It is truly one of the most beautiful books I possess in a sizable collection. Librarians & collectors who miss this reference work will be kicking themselves for years."

What the first Photo-Journal volumes did for the classic comics of the Golden and Silver Ages, these beautiful hardcovers do for Marvel Comics, reproducing over 7,700 covers from the dawn of the Marvel Age to 1986! Here are the classic runs of fan-favorite and forgotten titles - reproducing each cover in full-color, photographed from the best possible copies of each issue available. Volume 3 features an introduction by Stan "The Man" Lee, as well as runs of such Silver to Modern Age Marvel comics as The Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers, Captain America, Doctor Strange, The Incredible Hulk, and many, many more - all presented in a colorful, informative format; the perfect reference guide for any comic collector or historian! Volume 4 picks up where Volume 3 left off, and features runs of such Silver to Modern Age Marvel comics as Ka-Zar, Marvel Team-Up, Power Man, Tales to Astonish, Two-Gun Kid, Uncanny X-Men, and many, many more all presented in a colorful, informative format; the perfect reference guide for any comic collector or historian!

Originally published in France and long sought in English translation, Jean-Paul Gabilliet's Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books documents the rise and development of the American comic book industry from the 1930s to the present. The book intertwines aesthetic issues and critical biographies with the concerns of production, distribution, and audience reception, making it one of the few interdisciplinary studies of the art form. A thorough introduction by translators and comics scholars Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen brings the book up to date with explorations of the latest innovations, particularly the graphic novel. The book is organized into three sections: a concise history of the evolution of the comic book form in America; an overview of the distribution and consumption of American comic books, detailing specific controversies such as the creation of the Comics Code in the mid-1950s; and the problematic legitimization of the form that has occurred recently within the academy and in popular discourse. Viewing comic books from a variety of theoretical lenses, Gabilliet shows how seemingly disparate issues—creation, production, and reception—are in fact connected in ways that are not necessarily true of other art forms. Analyzing examples from a variety of genres, this book provides a thorough landmark overview of American comic books that sheds new light on this versatile art form.

New Directions in Print Culture Studies features new methods and approaches to cultural and literary history that draw on periodicals, print culture, and material culture, thus revising and rewriting what we think we know about the aesthetic, cultural, and social history of transnational America. The unifying questions posed and answered in this book are methodological: How can we make material, archival objects meaningful? How can we engage and contest dominant conceptions of aesthetic, historical, and literary periods? How can we present archival material in ways that make it accessible to other scholars and students? What theoretical commitments does a focus on material objects entail? New Directions in Print Culture Studies brings together leading scholars to address the methodological, historical, and theoretical commitments that emerge from studying how periodicals, books, images, and ideas circulated from the 19th century to the present. Reaching beyond national boundaries, the essays in this book focus on the different materials and archives we can use to rewrite literary history in ways that highlight not a canon of “major” literary works, but instead the networks, dialogues, and tensions that define print cultures in various moments and movements.

The advent of the Atomic Age challenged purveyors of popular culture to explain to the general public the complex scientific and social issues of atomic power. Atomic Comics examines how comic books, comic strips, and other cartoon media represented the Atomic Age from the early 1920s to the present. Through the exploits of superhero figures such as Atomic Man and Spiderman, as well as an array of nuclear adversaries and atomic-themed adventures, the public acquired a new scientific vocabulary and discovered the major controversies surrounding nuclear science. Ferenc Morton Szasz’s thoughtful analysis of the themes, content, and imagery of scores of comics that appeared largely in the United States and Japan offers a fascinating perspective on the way popular culture shaped American comprehension of the fissioned atom for more than three generations.