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 ground-breaking 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, socio-political 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.
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction. All By Myself: Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre
Chapter 1. “Those Damned Pictures”: Thomas Nast and the Rise of the Single-Panel Comic as Political Cartoon
Chapter 2. Freeze Frame: R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid and the Tableau Vivant
Chapter 3. “The New Yorker’s Most Influential Cartoonist”: Peter Arno and the Extraordinary Ordinary of Everyday Life
Chapter 4. Not Jokester, but Prankster: Little Lulu’s Silent Social Commentary
Chapter 5. Civil / Rights: Jackie Ormes’s Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger, Black Girlhood, and the Black Bourgeoisie
Chapter 6. Outside the Circle of Influence: The Family Circus, Diegetic Space, and Comics Narratology
Chapter 7. Ziggy Was Here: Tom Wilson’s Newspaper Series, World War II, and the Role of Graffiti in Comics
Chapter 8. “His People are Grotesque”: The Far Side and the Aesthetics of Ugliness
Epilogue. Reimagine, Recombine, Recreate: Dan Piraro’s Bizarro, Mashups, and the Comics of Remix Culture
Works Cited
