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

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 groundbreaking 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, sociopolitical 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.

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.