This edited collection extends two fertile areas of scholarship: comic studies and the study of the American South. Through comic periodicals, graphic novels, newspaper strips and online comics, Comics and the U.S. South examines the construction of the region's cultural identity in relation to race, ethnicity, sexuality, class and gender. Costello and Whitted's book shares the revisionist tendencies of contemporary southern studies and rejects the aura of exceptionalism that sometimes surrounds the South. Rather than seeing the American South as a discrete, marginal region – the nation's Other – Comics and the U.S. South stresses how the South has been central to the USA's sense of itself, and how southern identities have presented themselves and been understood as national American identities. This collection accepts that the cultural construction of the South is not an exclusively southern undertaking: “in recent years critics have turned greater attention to texts that are about the South rather than focussing on texts written by authors who can provide their southern bona fides” (ix).

Comics and the U.S. South is a good, readable addition to existing scholarship, and one easily imagines its chapters becoming touchstones for future research. Comics and the U.S. South covers a range of southern identities while recognizing their distinctiveness; in other words, while backwoods and bayou environments are discussed next to each other, their specificity and local histories are acknowledged and detailed. The editors provide two of the most interesting chapters, which combine close reading with historical and theoretical contexts to shed new light on stories featuring well-known comic characters. Whitted's chapter brings together the horror genre and the memory of slavery, with close analysis of the comics Saga of the Swamp Thing and Bayou, and Costello writes on the “Captain America No More” (1987–89) storyline in which the original Captain America, Steve Rogers, is “replaced by a well-intentioned but reactionary and violent southerner” (63). Gary Richards's chapter, “Everybody's Graphic Protest Novel: Stuck Rubber Baby and the Anxieties of Racial Difference,” is well judged in its analysis of Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), a classic coming-of-age graphic novel about gay identity and the civil rights movement. Richards appreciates the political necessity behind the graphic novel's representational strategies, but he is critical when those strategies are limited in their depiction of black Americans. Unsurprisingly, the chapter by M. Thomas Inge, “Li'l Abner, Snuffy, and Friends: The Appalachian South in the American Comic Strip,” is particularly fascinating and evidentially rich; Inge is the best-known contributor to Comics and the U.S. South and he has already published research on southern studies and comic studies.

It is surprising that this collection does not put greater emphasis on reading comics and culture through a transnational framework. Like many academic fields in the twenty-first century, southern studies has imbibed the trend of studying cultural texts, practices and social structures in and across the borders of nation and continent; this includes thinking about the American South in relation to the Caribbean basin and the global South. As remarked above, this collection confidently challenges the exceptionalism of the US South within the United States, but it does not go far in analysing how southern culture is produced through a dialogic process, created from inside and outside the nation simultaneously (the exception to this is Alison Mandaville's chapter on Randall Kenan's 1989 novel A Visitation of Spirits, which does think about the South and the culture of globalization). Many of the representations of the South under discussion are produced by British creators: Saga of the Swamp Thing, written by Alan Moore; Incognegro, drawn by Warren Pleece; and Preacher, written by Garth Ennis with art by Steve Dillon. While the geographical positions of these creators are not ignored – Nicolas Labarre comments that Ennis and Dillon are “outsiders” (263), for instance – it would have been timely to explore the implications of their location in more detail.

More important are the geographical limitations of the comics theory used in the collection. The writers in Comics and the U.S. South regularly reach for the same sources to explain the formal mechanics of comics: the American comic creators Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, and especially McCloud's book-length sequential art essay Understanding Comics (1993). Where is Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics? Groensteen's book, published by the University Press of Mississippi in an English translation in 2007, is of paramount importance to contemporary comic scholarship. The System of Comics has challenged anglophone scholars to take their understanding of comic form to higher levels of intellectual rigour, but it gets a single mention here, in Costello and Whitted's introduction. Eisner and McCloud have had a deep influence on comic studies, and both have produced lively and informative texts (I teach the theories of them both on undergraduate modules). But with the recent translation of seminal European comic theory into English, Comics and the U.S. South's repeated references to Eisner and McCloud (and McCloud's theoretical sparring partner, comic historian R. C. Harvey) seem old-fashioned and uncritical.

There are a few untidy moments that have slipped through the proofreading net, and William Savage's work should be included in the works cited for Costello's chapter. In Mandaville's chapter the title of Kenan's 2007 book of essays The Fire This Time becomes The Fire Next Time on pages 286–88.

In conclusion, while these are important points that should be borne in mind when reading Comics and the U.S. South, I recommend it to scholars in comic studies and southern studies. Costello and Whitted have produced a coherent collection and readers will find it an interesting and enjoyable volume of research.