About Panels & Prose

The comic strip may not have originated in the US, but in the 20th Century it quickly became an uniquely American art form. This modest blog will track my personal 50 year passion for these panels and prose and how they accompanied Americans through the rapid-fire changes of the last century.

Your guide and author is Steve Smith. I was raised on Peanuts, Steve Canyon, Mary Worth, Beetle Bailey, B.C. and Family Circle. I don’t recall the exact order, but in the early 1970s I devoured Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes as well as The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy and an oversized reprint of “Buck Rogers.” I was hooked on classic comics.

Thus began a lifelong passion for pop culture history. I finished my doctorate in American Civilization at Brown in 1990, taught media criticism at University of Virginia (1988-95) and then left academia to become a media critic of the emerging Internet. This blog will try to combine all of those passions.

I welcome your feedback, suggestions or just to share your own passion for comic strips past at popeyesmith [at] comcast [dot] net.