Fragmented and hybrid in style, On Comics and Grief examines a year in comic book publishing and the author’s grief surrounding his mother’s death. This book connects grief, memory, nostalgia, personal history, theory, and multiple lines of comics studies inquiry in relation to the comic books of 1976.
Structured around a year of comic books with a cover date of 1976, the year the author turned ten, the book is divided into an Introduction plus twelve sections, each a month of the publishing year. Two comic books are highlighted each month and examined through the interwoven lenses of creative nonfiction and comics studies. Through these twenty-four comics, the book addresses the major comic book publishers and virtually all genres of comics published in 1976.
By pushing the ways in which the personal is used in comics studies, combining different modes of writing, and embracing a fragmentary style, the book explores what is possible in academic writing in general and comics studies in particular. On Comics and Grief both acts as a way for the author to process his grief and uses grief as a way to think about the comics themselves through the emotions and personal connections that underlie the work we do as scholars.

Dale Jacobs is professor of English at University of Windsor. He is author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy and editor of The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change. His essays on comics have appeared in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, English Journal, College Composition and Communication, Journal of Comics and Culture, and Studies in Comics.

Dale Jacobs' profile page

When Dale Jacobs looks back on what a single year of comics reading reveals about a lifetime of his mother’s love, the results are as poignant as they are critically provocative. Brilliantly conceived, On Comics and Grief makes space for us, as scholars and enthusiasts, to explore how the aims of our public work are inescapably shaped by our most personal experiences.

Qiana Whitted, University of South Carolina, author of EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest

I’ve always believed that comics have the power to evoke any emotion and any idea, and Dale Jacobs clearly feels the same. This is a wonderful exploration of the emotional power of the medium.

Jeff Lemire, author of Essex County and Sweet Tooth

On Comics and Grief covers the year after the author’s mother passed away, during which he experienced profound loss and grief while working on a project predicated on Jacobs’s reading of every commercially produced comic book published in the US in 1976. The book is organized in 12 chapters prefaced by an introduction. Each chapter represents a month when Jacobs reads and analyzes two titles for his study, synthesizing personal experience with the traditionally non-personalized project of scholarship. Jacobs’s approach reveals deep and sometimes startling connections between coming to grips with emotional experiences and practicing literary criticism. The comics selected for each month often represent extremes of comics content and thus readership. April’s selections, for example, are issues of Daredevil and Little Dot. The juxtaposition of seemingly different comics suggests critical tensions that complement Jacobs’s personal account. The author enhances and complicates this effect by interrupting his narrative with quotes from writers who work in different authorial contexts, from comic studies to commercial advertisements. Impressive in scope and moving in affect, Jacobs’s On Comics and Grief is a unique and significant contribution to several scholarly disciplines as well as to non-fiction writing. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

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