Coming soon: The Greatest Comic Book of All Time!

Or, at least, a scholarly monograph that happens to be called, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comics. Co-authored with my colleague Bart Beaty (University of Calgary), our book uses an approach inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of cultural production to interrogate processes of canonization and consecration in the comics world. Why are some comics and graphic novels celebrated by critics and scholars while others, perhaps equally good, are quickly forgotten? We try to explain these dynamics in a series of short, provocative essays on cultural value and prestige in the field of comics.

The Greatest Comic Book of All Time will be published by Palgrave Macmillan's Palgrave Pivot imprint as part of a new series on comics and graphic novels. In the meantime, visit our website for the book, http://greatestcomicbook.com, for updates, including a blog where Bart and I will be trying to extend the arguments from the book to additional examples and case studies.