Sean Kleefelds Webcomics, an entry in the Bloomsbury Comics Studies series, is essential because it remedies the lack of a high-level account of webcomics. It allows the reader to survey the entire field and to see the common threads that link seemingly disparate genres together ... I hope that other future scholarly works, by Kleefeld or others, will complement Kleefelds perspective by offering more critical and theoretically informed analyses of webcomics. For such works, however, Kleefelds Webcomics represents an essential starting point. * Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society * Ive always been a great fan of Sean Kleefelds writing: its clarity, its circumspection, and the measured quality of his tone. Kleefeld is an ideal writer to chronicle the rise of modern webcomics. He patiently explores not just the nascent realities of an industry in flux but all of the roads not taken, all of the false starts and dead ends, with the perspicacity an unformed future demands. In Kleefelds hands, defining what comics looks like today is less a sorting out process for the ages than a mad crash down a steep hill hoping to scoop up some village's bouncing wheel of cheese set loose on the valley below. By the time youre through, youll know just what set of circumstances won the day, and what set didnt and what might be yet to come. The longer you take to find and read your own copy is the amount of time I get to be smarter than you. * Tom Spurgeon, Publisher and Managing Editor, The Comics Reporter *
