Do Books on Comics Need Pictures?

When I published my first book last year, it got a lot of reviews. It made the Wall Street Journal’s national print edition. The Financial Times and The New Republic reviewed it. Time magazine did a write up on my findings in the book. The editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Russell Moore, recommended it to his expansive audience of newsletter readers.

I was blown away by the reception.

More than a year after publication, however, the review that still sticks in my mind never ran in a major publication or showed up in the email boxes of tens of thousands of readers. It ran in the reader reviews on Amazon.

“The book was not illustrated by the comic strips. It had too much just writing.”

Aside from the fact that negative reviews are always the hardest to ignore (I could write a whole piece about what I’ve learned about navigating public feedback), there were a couple reasons that this particular review bothered me. For one, it was inelegant, gruff, and grammatically flawed. But even more, it was absolutely false!

When I got invited for a sit down with Oxford University Press editor Susan Ferber at the Southern Historical Association meeting, I was ecstatic. Terrified, granted, but ecstatic. I dressed in my best suit — I had just happened to find it on the rack at my local Target — and arrived early enough to nonchalantly scope out the room (I’m a regular James Bond in my methods, I assure myself). There were people everywhere. Important people. But at least there was a hair of privacy in the fact that being a nobody fresh out of grad school no one was likely to notice me. Anonymity is the modern equivalent of privacy, right?

The meeting was a rush. I tried to take notes and smile and sound like I knew what I was talking about, but mostly I was trying not to hyperventilate thinking that I couldn’t believe a big publisher was even talking to me. There’s one thing, though, that I vividly remember from that meeting. Susan told me that if we were going to get this book deal done, I was going to have to get the rights to reprint the Peanuts comic strips.

No problem at all, I said confidently. Truth was, I had no idea whether I could get the rights or not. I was bluffing. Sure, I had gotten special permission to publish a couple strips in an academic article I had published. But this was the big leagues. What did I know about negotiating licenses?

I’d been warned to expect difficulties when it came to reprint rights. Years before I had presented some very early ideas about Charlie Brown and the rise of the environmentalist movement at the American Society for Environmental History. The format was perfectly suited to my topic: it was a poster exhibit. As I stood at the end of my assigned row hoping that someone — anyone — would notice my work, an older gentleman finally did. Slowly, deliberately, he read his way through my posters. As I tried to inconspicuously glance (“Shaken, not stirred.” Perfect Queen’s English.), I was struck with the sudden sense of recognition. I knew this man from somewhere. A graduate class discussion? A book jacket? The History Channel?

Ah, yes; it was Bill Cronon, none other than a founding father of the environmental history field.

He was polite. He pointed out a pretty big factual error on my presentation. But he was polite. He engaged me in conversation, interested in the possibilities of my research (it was almost entirely possibilities back then). And then he warned me that I better figure out the rights issues real soon. He didn’t want me to get to the end and realize that the costs would be too prohibitive to move forward. He had seen it before with his own graduate students (Disney is serious about protecting that mouse).

So there I sat, back at the Southern Historical Association, face-to-face with a major editor offering me the chance to do a serious book deal. Could I get the rights for the comic strips? Absolutely, I assured her. I had no idea how I was going to do it or how much it might cost. All I knew was that I wanted this book deal. Surely I could figure out the details later.

I got the book deal. And after lots of revisions and brilliant writing advice from Susan, it came time to secure those reprint rights. I’ll be darned (pardon my Charlie Brownism) if Bill Cronon wasn’t right. Those things were expensive. Real expensive. Some were so expensive, in fact, that they just had to be cut.

I scrambled to gather as much money as I could on my own, but I was still coming up well short. My bluff had caught up to me. When I delivered the bad news to Susan, she barely flinched. She’s such a pro. Let me work on this, she replied. In the end, she took the issue all the way to the top. A book about Peanuts had to have the comic strips in it. It just couldn’t work any other way. Management agreed. They wrote a check to cover the remainder of the rights.

I can’t say enough about how awesome Susan Ferber was for believing in my book enough to make a difficult request from her bosses or how fortunate I was that Oxford had our backs. But what I can say with the fiery certainty of near-missed catastrophe is that Amazon reviewer was dead wrong. The “illustrations” are in the book, Charlotte. I know because we had to fight for them. I know because a good chunk of it came out of my pocket. I know because it very nearly derailed the book.

The audacity of the internet sometimes.

Here I get to the point of this whole post (about time!). As I’m working on my next book — a biography of Batman — I’ve been doing a lot of reading in comics history. There is soooooo much wonderful stuff out there right now. But I’m noticing in the popular press books that there are very few — if any — reproductions of comics art, covers, or pages. The thing is, it hasn’t dampened my enjoyment of these books in the slightest! It’s not because I carry some encyclopedic knowledge of comics imagery and iconography in my brain, either.

So it has gotten me to thinking about how exactly I read these books. I have the book in hand, diligently making my way through (I’m a pitifully slow reader. Just ask my wife. She’ll tell you.). But always within reach is my smartphone or tablet. Every time I come across a character or cover or sequence that I’m unfamiliar with, I simply google them. Sometimes — if it’s particularly interesting to me — I’ll even take a reading break to dive down internet rabbit hole for a bit. If anything, it enriches my reading of the book in my hand. I think I might even enjoy it more because I have immediate access to see exactly what the author is referring to in crisp, hi-def color.

It strikes me that even with a sizable budget for images in a printed book, you’re never going to be able to reprint everything you discuss within the pages. You’ll only ever have a subset of highlights and examples. But in the age of iPhones and Google and Comixology and GoComics and everything else, does the book really even need to reprint the images?

I mean, clearly it matters to Charlotte on Amazon.

But for the rest of us, can a book on comics be just as good without any of the comics reprinted inside. The more I read lately, the more I’m thinking that maybe it can.