Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915 Revised Edition

A revised and expanded edition of the Eisner-nominated book on the earliest American comics, with over 200 classic strips, by over 75 cartoonists: the "Founders of the Funnies."

Publisher Marketing: An essential primer on the Big Bang of comic strips that occurred at the turn of the last century.-- "The New York Times" Review Quotes : Peter Maresca's outsized and outlandish anthology shows just how sensational this newspaper art form was in its early years.-- "The New York Review of Books" Review Quotes : A mind-blowing portable museum retrospective of the raw, tangled ferocity and frustration that went into the making of America.--Chris Ware Review Quotes : Full of surprises...curiously refreshing.--Steven Heller "The Atlantic" Review Quotes : A collection that represents the birth of the medium itself, and Maresca's approach is stunning and simple...--Chip Kidd "The Wall Street Journal" Review Quotes : Succeeds far beyond any expectations-- "The Comics Journal" Review Quotes : This one's a must-have...a wide and wild assortment of early twentieth-century comic art with spectacularly imaginative and innovative layouts.-- "Print Magazine" Review Quotes : "Never thought anything like this could exist outside my dream life."--Art Spiegelman Review Quotes : Society is Nix is more than the best view of the early Sunday supplements that we have. It is also a fine illustrated history of the first 15 years of the medium.-- "Panels & Prose" Review Quotes : All of the strips are in color, with most of them full-page Sunday comics, compiled with painstakingly exacting reproduction that ensures the most robust presentation of this century-old material. The book also includes a slew of scholarly essays providing illuminating background information about the genesis of the art form, offering a valuable education for comic strip fans. ...the revised and expanded second edition is an absolutely essential deep dive into the fascinating origins of American comic strips.-- "Cinema Sentries" Review Quotes : Society is Nix offers a well-chosen selection of those early strips, in full color, alongside a handful of well-written--but not stodgy--essays and treatises by a number of respected comics historians.-- "Forces of Geek" Review Quotes : You might have heard of prominent strips like The Yellow Kid or Little Nemo , but Society is Nix highlights brilliant, idiosyncratic work from scores of lesser-known artists. The impression you get from reading the book is that there was a riot of creativity happening in newspapers from coast to coast, much of which was only seen by a small local audience.-- "Pop Culture Precursors" Publisher Marketing : "Mit Dose Kids, SOCIETY IS NIX!" So said The Inspector about the Katzenjammer Kids. But he could have been speaking of all comic strips in their formative years in the early 1900s. From the very first color Sunday supplement, comics were a driving force in newspaper sales, offering a wild parody of the world and the culture found in the surrounding pages. Society didn't stand a chance!

Format: Hardcover | Pages: 168 | Publication Date: 2025-07-15