Humanities in the Village: Before Comic Books with Jean Lee Cole

Description

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.

Jean Lee Cole, a professor of English at Loyola University Maryland, will give a talk titled "Before Comic Books: The Early Newspaper Comic Strip and American Culture" discussing 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.

Jean Lee Cole is the author of How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 and lead editor of Parole Femine: Words and Lives of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore.