From the Editors' Chair: Periodical Comics

Comics are suddenly everywhere. Every other movie—both blockbuster and independent—seems to be an adaptation of a comic. In 2005, the New York Times began featuring serial comics in its Sunday magazine, inspired by Hearst's "Sunday supplements that newspapers first published more than a century ago."¹ For a newspaper that greeted the new form in 1899 with the declaration that "a picture supplement is not a newspaper," and that studiously resisted its influence for the next hundred years, this decision to publish "funny pages" is surely a milestone.² Bookstores that only a few years earlier laughed openly at inquiries for comics are now devoting huge tracts of real estate to graphic novels and manga (Japanese comics). When Art Spiegelman received the Pulitzer Prize for Maus in 1992, the publishing world roiled at the scandal of a comic being accorded one of its very highest honors. Fifteen years later, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home graces the "Best of 2006" lists for publications from the London Times to Time Magazine (where it won top honors), with scarcely a flutter of anxiety over its comic form. The new century looks in every way poised to witness the mainstream cultural recognition of the unique properties, history, and powers of the comic form.

Recognition and institutionalization within the Academy of course necessarily proceed at a slower pace, but even here we have seen remarkable strides in recent years. From 1994–1997 our guest editor, Lucy Shelton Caswell, edited Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies, the first academic journal devoted entirely to the study of the comic form. It was a journal that was ahead of its time, which in the world of academic publishing sadly meant that it was destined (like so many pioneering periodical projects before it) for an early end. But a decade after it ceased publication, scholars continue to turn to its pages for models of what comic scholarship should and could be. And in the intervening decade, new academic venues have emerged, walking through the doors opened up by Inks. The International Journal of Comic Art started in 1999. The University of Mississippi Press began what has since become the most extensive list in comics studies of any university press, and Yale University Press has published the first academic monograph devoted to a single comics creator, Chris Ware. And in the last couple of years we have seen academic journals that in the past would have never addressed the comics form devote whole issues to its study, including Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, and now American Periodicals.

But as comics autobiographer Harvey Pekar reminds us in his introduction to the Best American Comics: 2006 (another milestone in comics' recent history), even as the graphic novel and book-length manga garner increasing attention and critical and cultural respect, periodical comics are struggling as never before. Comic strips are afforded increasingly compacted space in the daily newspapers, independent comic stores are closing at an alarming rate, and the venues for independent and alternative comics are vanishing.³ It might well be easy to miss the fact that, despite the attention accorded to a small number of comics creators and properties, we are in profound danger of losing the very periodical energies that have nourished the form for more than a century.

In point of fact, the vast majority of "graphic novels" began their life as periodical comics. Spiegelman published his pioneering graphic memoir in various periodical venues, including his legendary RAW magazine. Chris Ware's celebrated Jimmy Corrigan was published serially over the course of several years in Ware's The Acme Novelty Library. All of the superhero characters being adapted for the big screen this summer continue to find serial life in the pages of monthly comic books. The periodical form is vital not only to the history but to the future of comics, and for this reason American Periodicals has chosen this occasion to highlight the long and ongoing periodical life of comics in this special issue.

But just as periodical studies remains vital to comics, comic studies is increasingly relevant to periodical studies as well. As...