Bird in Hand, the Ivy Bookshop, and Johns Hopkins University's Alexander Grass Humanities Institute present the latest installment of Humanities in the Village—this time a discussion of early comics in America with Jean Lee Cole.
In "Before Comic Books: The Early Newspaper Comic Strip and American Culture," Cole will show how the earliest newspaper comic strips were marked by wild creativity, violence, and class commentary almost completely absent from today's "funny pages." Cole argues that they—and the laughter they provoked—also played an important role in the formation of immigrant and working-class community identity.
Cole is the author of How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 and Parole Femine: Words and Lives of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore.
The talk is open to the public. More info and the link to join is on the Ivy Bookshop website.
