Our proposed project is the foundational step in a larger program of work that seeks to reorient the study of comics (comic books, comic strips, graphic novels) by introducing data-driven research to the field for the first time. During this phase of the research we have two specific and inter-related goals: first, we will create the most comprehensive online open-access research tool for the study of the American comic book; second, we will draw upon the data produced by this tool to rewrite the history of the American comic book as the development of a set of styles and techniques that existed across the industry as a whole. By exponentially expanding our sample set, we will shift the study of comics away from the broadly humanistic study of exceptional works and towards a more rigorous focus on works that typified cultural production over time. This perspectival shift in method will produce new theories of the comic book as we facilitate a move from asking the theoretically abstract question of "what are comics?" to the empirically-grounded question of "what were comics?".

The rapid development of comics studies as an inter-discipline over the past two decades has taken place overwhelmingly in departments of languages and literature. As with other scholarly sub-fields that emerged within humanistic research traditions, comics studies has consistently struggled with the problem of the typical. Key studies in comic book aesthetics, narratology, history, and culture depend primarily or exclusively on the study of a canon of "exceptional" texts that are regularly enlisted to stand in for comics per se. To take but one obvious example, the Bonner Online-Bibliographie zur Comicforschung lists 243 scholarly contributions about Art Spiegelman's widely celebrated autobiographical comic book Maus, but only two on the more than seventy years of comic books published by Archie Comics, a company that was at one time the top-selling comic book publisher in the United States. While, of course, much can be learned from close readings of the "best" comics, these atypical works provide an unreliable basis for generalizing about the form in any meaningful way.

This project will address this problem by constructing a data set that will highlight the formal development of the American comic book over its eighty-year history. This project will develop a random sample set of comic books representing two per cent of all publications produced in the United States each year from 1933 to 2014. Comics will be indexed for a variety of formal elements (story length; page layout; panel composition; volume of text in captions, word balloons, and sound effects; scene transitions; etc.), producing a systematic survey of comic books' material and symbolic characteristics over time. Inspired by the distant readings of Franco Moretti and the team of researchers at the Stanford Literary Lab by creating an accessible, online database which will be shared among scholars, and by mining that database for insights into the historical evolution of the comic book as a publishing format and communicative medium.

By re-inserting what Margaret Cohen has termed "the great unread" -- those unstudied, forgotten, and forgettable works that make up the vast bulk of cultural output -- into the study of comic books, we will be able to more accurately mark the shifts in genre, composition, and materiality that have characterized this art form over time.