Ian Gordon is Associate Professor of American history at the Department of History, National University of Singapore

National University of Singapore

The National University of Singapore is Singapore's oldest university. It is the largest university in the country in terms of student enrollment and curriculum offered....

, Singapore

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

. He writes on comic strips and comic books and film and television.

Biography

Ian Gordon earned his PhD in History at the University of Rochester

University of Rochester

The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...

. He is perhaps best known for his book Comic Strips and Consumer Culture. In addition to his book he has published two co-edited books Comics & Ideology and Film and Comic Books and numerous articles. He writes a blog History Futures on an occasional basis.

Comic Strips and Consumer Culture

Gordon uses comic strips to make an argument about American culture. He says that comic strips were one of the first forms of truly national culture, by which he means people all over the country read them on the same day, and so had shared experiences, and that this happened on a wide spread basis as early as 1908. He also ties comic strips to transformations in advertising styles, and not just the comic strip advertising style of the 1930s but the generalized use of more images in advertising as the twentieth century progressed. The book even has a chapter on the beginnings of comic books which is a useful short overview and has good information on the early Superman. On April 11, 2011 he created an online version of the book.

The Journal of American History said: "Gordon has done historians a service by recognizing the importance of popular visual sources as important clues to understanding American culture. And the book is not only informative but fun to read."

American Journalism said: "a must read for any scholar interested in the question of popular culture."

Partial bibliography

Books

• Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998). Paperback edition 2002.
• Comics and Ideology. co-edited. (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).
• Film and Comic Books. co-edited. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007)