Spotlights Image Comics and its 5th anniversary celebration. State of the Comics Industry Report analyzes 1996. Check out the publishers directory, a history of comics, and writings from popular CBG columnists.

This reference features more than 5,000 new issues and more than 50,000 new facts about comic books published in North America in the last 70 vears.

Indispensable for dealers and serious collectors, this complete comics price guide offers thousands of listings. Organized by category, the listings include issue numbers, artist names, titles, dates, and original and current prices. The book also contains 600 black-and-white photos of rare comics and flaps that put a comics grading guide right at one's fingertips.

This final work in John Lent's series of bibliographies on comic art gathers together an astounding array of citations on American comic books and comic strips. Included in this volume are citations regarding anthologies and reprints; criticism and reviews; exhibitions, festivals, and awards; scholarship and theory; and the business, artistic, cultural, legal, technical, and technological aspects of American comics. Author John Lent has used all manner of methods to gather the citations, searching library and online databases, contacting scholars and other professionals, attending conferences and festivals, and scanning hundreds of periodicals. He has gone to great length to categorize the citations in an easy-to-use, scholarly fashion, and in the process, has helped to establish the field of comic art as an important part of social science and humanities research. The ten volumes in this series, covering all regions of the world, constitute the largest printed bibliography of comic art in the world, and serve as the beacon guiding the burgeoning fields of animation, comics, and cartooning. They are the definitive works on comic art research, and are exhaustive in their inclusiveness, covering all types of publications (academic, trade, popular, fan, etc.) from all over the world. Also included in these books are citations to systematically-researched academic exercises, as well as more ephemeral sources such as fanzines, press articles, and fugitive materials (conference papers, unpublished documents, etc.), attesting to Lent's belief that all pieces of information are vital in a new field of study such as comic art.

"Superman's role in romanticizing commercialism; sexual violence in Japanese manga comics; Wonder Woman as Americanized immigrant; reader's reactions to the gay superhero Northstar; Dilbert as a workplace revolutionary; the Punisher's invasion of Vietnam--these are a few of the issues that Comics & Ideology addresses. Focusing on the intersection of social power and comic art, essays in this book explore how images and narratives in comic books and comic strips may portray social groups and social issues. As a scholarly examination of a form known as 'the funnies' or 'funny books, ' this book argues that the themes and characterizations in comic art are often quite serious. Essays take diverse theoretical perspectives such as cultural studies, political economy, feminist criticism, queer studies, and mythic analysis, all focusing on the relationship of comics to issues of social division."--Publisher description.