Fred Van Lente, Ryan Dunlavey, and Adam Guzowski’s The Comic Book History of Comics: Birth of a Medium is a treatise on the place of comics as an important part of the fabric of American popular culture. Readers who are familiar with American history and culture may catch that Birth of a Medium is a citation of D. W Griffith’s early American film, Birth of a Nation, but non-American readers (like me!) may not get the reference and may be surprised at the American-centric nature of this text. Though I do think that readers will want to be aware that Birth of a Medium doesn’t offer a comprehensive account of the rise of comics as a medium globally, I count the extreme focus of the text as a positive; Lente and Dunlavey are excellent historians of American comics, and they’ve produced a detailed and relatively balanced text on that topic.