Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States

The Far Side. Ziggy. The Family Circus. Many of the most popular, influential, and acclaimed comics series in the United States have used the single-panel form. Singular Sensations is the first full-length critical study to examine this important, but long neglected, mode of cartoon art. From political cartoons in the Gilded Age and gag panels in the Depression era to the character-based work of the postwar period and digital comics in the twenty-first century, Michelle Ann Abate engages with a wide array of historical time periods, socio-political subject matter, and aesthetic styles. During this process, Singular Sensations demonstrates that single-panel comics have played an important role in the origins, history, and evolution of cartoon art in the United States. In many respects, comics as we know them--and especially as we love them--would not be the same without the single-panel form. Accordingly, Singular Sensations moves this mode of cartoon art out of the margins and into foreground.

MICHELLE ANN ABATE is a professor of literature for children and young adults at The Ohio State University, Columbus. She is the author of seven previous books of literary criticism, including Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts (2023). Dr. Abate’s first book, Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History (2008), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.