"No one, before now, has written a history of the comic strip as a technological artifact—not, at least, in such depth, and on such a sound foundation of research." — Michael Chabon, author,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & ClayNominated for the 2026 Eisner Awards for Best Comics-Related BookIf you love comics, you'll love this visual history of comic strips featuring all of the methods, techniques, and wizardry that made the funny pages such an important staple of American life. Featuring interviews with dozens of the century's most famous cartoonists and hundreds of rare archival images.
How Comics Are Made covers the entire history of newspaper comics from a unique angle—how they were made and printed. This book combines years of research and dozens of interviews with cartoonists, historians, and production people to tell the story of how a comic starts with an artist's hand and makes it way through transformations into print and onto a digital screen.
You'll see reproductions of art and artifacts that have never appeared in print anywhere, and some historic comics will appear for the first time ever in any medium in this book. And you'll find out about metal etching, Dragon's Blood (a real thing), flong (also a real thing), and the massively, almost impossibly complicated path that original artwork took to get onto newsprint in the days of metal relief printing.
The book is divided by time and transitions, from the start of consistently appearing daily and weekly comics in newspapers:
- The Early Days: From the Yellow Kid in the 1890s to the 1910s
- Syndication in Metal: When it became affordable to make hundreds or thousands of copies of daily strips to send around the country (or world), from the 1910s to the 1970s
- Flatland: Newspapers' switch from relief to flat printing and the shift to purely photographic transformations from the 1950s to the 1980s
- Pixel Perfect: The transition from photographic to digital, from scanning to digital creation, from the 1970s to 2000s, and through the present day
- Webcomics and Beyond: Look, ma, no ink! Digital comics read online and sometimes put on press to make books
- Each section features interviews with artists, reproductions of original cartoon art, artifacts of printing and coloring, and how cartoons appeared in print—or on screen.
Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian and a long-time technology journalist. A regular contributor over decades to publications that include the Economist, the New York Times, Wired, and Fast Company, Fleishman spent a large part of his career reporting on what was just over the horizon, like ubiquitous access to wireless data and the rise of tiny satellites. He has appeared on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Marketplace, and the BBC's Last Word. The editor and project manager of the three-volume Shift Happens history of keyboards, Fleishman splits his time now between intensive studies in material printing history from the 18th to 21st centuries, working with self-published authors to edit and produce their books, and writing hands-on advice for technology users. A two-time Jeopardy! champion, he lives in Seattle.
