An anthology charting the long-standing cultural debate that comic books sparked With substantive essays by Umberto Eco, Marshall McLuhan, Dorothy Parker, e.e. cummings, C.L.R. James, and others When Art Spiegelman's Maus - a graphic novel on the Holocaust - won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the ongoing debate about comics and the rise of the 'serious' comic was cranked up a gear. There has been an assumption that analysis of the comic book medium didn't begin until the cultural studies movement was underway. Arguing Comics shows this to be inaccurate by bringing together two dozen essays by major writers and intellectuals who analysed, embraced, even attacked comic strips and comic books in the period between the turn of the century and the 1960s.