The History Cooperative Book Review Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945. By Ian Gordon. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.
Comic art is big business today.
Thus, Ian Gordon's Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 is an important book explaining how comic art shaped American society, both as a new form in advertising and as a commodity form itself. 1 Comic art began in American illustrated humor magazines and newspaper comic supplements of the late nineteenth century. Raucous humor and caricature gradually evolved into the recognizable comic strip format with known characters and narrative. Gordon argues that Buster Brown was the crucial link between comic strips and the development of a visual culture of consumption in America. But this culture also included the extension of commodity status to ideas and symbols.