The Comic Book Guide to the U.S.A.

For generations, creators of comic books and graphic novels have been telling their stories. They have thrilled readers with the adventures of costumed heroes, monsters and mutants, private eyes, and public menaces. But storytelling is only part of what those creators have been up to.

Intentionally or not, consciously or not, they have also been presenting us with visions of our country. The cities — the regions — where we live.

Writers and artists from the Golden Age to today have created a brilliantly colorful, provocative, and vast body of commentary and social criticism. Some of it is incidental; some of it is accidental. Nevertheless, this commentary reimagines the cities where we live, the old hometowns we are nostalgic about, and the places we wouldn’t mind seeing savaged by a strike force of Satanist cyborg lizard women from Asteroid X.

But all this visionary work has been sitting around, uncollated. Uncurated. Fans of pop culture, comics, history, literature, film, art, architecture, travel, and sociology don’t even know what they are missing!

The Comic Book Guide to the United States of America steps in to take the first fun and comprehensive look at how our country has been portrayed in comics and graphic novels. It includes examples from the debut of the medium right through to the present.

The Comic Book Guide to the United States of America takes us on a terrifically fun and surprisingly insightful trip through this archival record of how our society and our cities have evolved. It helps elucidate how, through comics, we Americans have both perceived and tried to represent ourselves.