Nonfiction Books on Comics-- Any Bestsellers?

GOTHOS

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Has anyone ever noticed a book about comics, or related topics like superheroes, making it to any bestseller list, if only briefly?


I suspect they never go beyond niche status.
 

nighttimer

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Well, comics are a niche market, but even if they aren't best sellers, they can be great reads.

Sean Howe's 2012, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story got great reviews and after I read it I felt guilty for putting so much money in Stan Lee's pockets and I can't recall the last time a book provoked that emotion.
 

Max Vaehling

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Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics made quite a splash and also achieved quite some academic respect.

Oh, and Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, of course. Although it seems more and more debatable how much that actually was non-fiction...
 
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Richard White

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There have been a few scholarly works on comics - "From Argh to Zapp" by Harvey Kurtzman is in my collection. However most of what I've found have been either more encyclopedic works ("Superhero Comics of the Golden Age" is one of my go-to books for research), or biographies of writers and artists.

Understanding Comics was a great work. Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art is a fantastic book on "how to" do comics.
 

edutton

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Grant Morrison's Supergods charted for a little while, IIRC. Penguin/RandomHouse touts it as a "NATIONAL BESTSELLER", anyway.