The latest edition of The Comics Research Bibliography, the project celebrating its 30th anniversary this year is now available.
Edited by Mike Rhode, John A. Lent and Tony R. Rose, the release of Comics Research Bibliography 2025 – available here as an e-edition – commemorates John A. Lent’s 90th birth year, since John started the field with his 10-volume set. Tony Rose has been assisting for the past couple of years, and librarian Elizabeth Walker has just joined the team.
The Comics Research Bibliography is a worldwide bibliography of all types of comic art, including comic books, comic strips, caricature, gag cartoons, animation, editorial cartoons, biography, webcomics, political cartoons, history of cartooning, and comics scholarship.
This new edition of the project has been updated with 3327 new entries, and an addenda of 2000 more pages of unsorted citations is available here. A print edition will be released in the coming month.
“These citations have been formatted but not yet placed into the CRB,” says Mike Rhode, who’s also creator of the ComicsDC blog, Exhibits and Media Reviews editor, and assistant editor, for the International Journal of Comic Art, and co-editor with Bill Watterson of the book, Art of Richard Thompson. “Many of them are from the first online iteration of the CRB, now preserved on the Internet Archive.
“For our 30th Anniversary and in honour of John Lent’s 90th birth year, we are providing these as a resource the first time, since they are searchable by keyword. However, the goal remains to empty this document by placing all the citations into the main bibliography which is online now at Comics Research Bibliography.
A version combining both into an almost 4000-page document will be posted later this week (after I create a new cover for it).”
Lent Comic Art Classification Also Updated
Long before America’s Library of Congress started revamping its cataloguing for comic art, John Lent had devised a system of his own. For his 90th birth year, the Lent Comic Art Classification has been updated and published it online for free with over 900 new terms added.
This classification system is derived from John A. Lent’s 10-volume set of Comic Art Bibliography with additions and emendations by Mike Rhode published versions of the Comics Research Bibliography.
“In 1986, in preparation for a conference presentation in India, I self-published a 156-page international bibliography on comic art, which I also sent to some libraries and researchers,” says John. ” “That led to the compilation of ten volumes of comic art sources, broken down by regions, genres, functions, and other aspects, published by Greenwood Press between 1994 and 2006.
“As I assembled materials for these bibliographies, I developed categories into which to place sources. The classification system presented in this monograph is the result. The classification system portrayed in these pages is meant to bring some order to filing, categorising, and discussing comics and cartoons. Actually, the fullest section, on the United States, can be used with minor modifications to organise comic art studies about any country.”
• Edited by Mike Rhode, John A. Lent and Tony R. Rose, the of Comics Research Bibliography 2025 is available here as an e-edition
• Lent Comic Art Classificiation – 2nd Edition – is available here
• Follow daily progress on the Comics Research Bibliography either on the ComicsDC blog using this link; on or Facebook here
• Consider subscribing to the International Journal of Comic Art at ijoca.net
- About the Author
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Comics, Comics Education News, Comics Studies, Creating Comics, downthetubes Comics News
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