Why Comics? Is a survey of the history of comics for adults with a focus on the last 20 or years. Author Hillary Chute is a professor at Northeastern University and while this is not an academic book, it is a big heavy book at well over 400 pages with a lot of writing. After the introduction, there are chapters on disasters, superheroes, sex, the suburbs, cities, punk, illness & disability, girls, war, queer, and fandom. The book is nicely illustrated in full color. Chute discusses most of the big names in comics today: Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Charles Burns, Harvey Pekar, Jaime Hernandez, Matt Groening, Gary Panter, Allie Brosh, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi, Joe Sacco, and Alison Bechdel. She explains the context of their work and their influence, as well as giving some biographical details. She also includes many other lesser known comic artists and so most readers will probably learn something new from reading the book.

The chapter on illness and disability is most relevant to our purposes here. Chute says that the most important work is Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary from 1972. (The full version is available on archive.org.) She devotes many pages to it, putting it in historical context, tracing its influence, and examining what it is about. She explains how it about obsessive sexuality, fantasy, and distortions of reality. This would be characterized as obsessive compulsive disorder. She moves on to Allie Brosh’s chronicle of her own depression in her Hyperbole and a Half comics. Chute covers the history of the comic and its themes over several pages. One might wish that Chute had been able to cover more comics on these themes, but that would make the book even heavier and difficult to carry around. Once one is aware of the themes pursued in comics, one can also searching for oneself. It won’t take much searching to stumble across Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories About Mental Illness by Darryl Cunningham and Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir by Ellen Forney, for example.

So Why Comics? is an excellent resource for anyone interested in recent graphic art. Recommended.

© 2019 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC.