In Medievalist Comics and the American Century, Chris Bishop offers a reception history of medievalist American comics, considering them in the broader context of American history and the influence medievalism had on American culture – and that American scholars had on the study, dissemination, and popularization of medieval and medievalist texts. His focus is mainstream periodical comics, with Hal Foster's newspaper strip Prince Valiant (1937–) the one exception. Other characters and series covered are Marvel's Thor, Conan and Red Sonja, and DC's Green Arrow and their Beowulf and Northlanders series. An obvious oversight is the independent title Usaki Yojimbo, by Stan Sakai, set in medieval Japan – especially puzzling in its absence, given Bishop's linking of Northlanders to Japanese film – but independent titles seem not to have fit into Bishop's plan. Each chapter focusses primarily on establishing the historical context out of which each work emerged and in which it continued – Prince Valiant, for instance, out of the popularization of Arthurian materials and how they informed American culture; Green Arrow out of the popularization of Robin Hood that began in the nineteenth century; Thor out of the quest for a Nordic mythology and the influx of Nordic and Germanic immigrants to the United States; and so on. Bishop has a clear thesis and builds his argument consistently, each chapter featuring a conclusion that reiterates what has preceded it and links the current chapter to earlier ones. He brings together a wealth of documentation that clarifies the origins of the works addressed and documents their medievalist elements. Most useful is the information about the historical contexts for such apparently fantasy creations as Conan and Red Sonja – especially interesting is Bishop's case for historical antecedents for female warriors (though whether the architects of the Red Sonja comics could have had knowledge of these antecedents is another question).

Nevertheless, the book overstates its case, asserting in his introduction, “The creators of the comics at which we will be looking believed them to be representations of the Middle Ages, and the intended audiences for these comics believed that too” (13), a claim not borne out and even contradicted in the book, such as when it acknowledges that Hal Foster “never claimed to be presenting accurate representations of a historical subject, indeed, just the opposite” (47). Other figures covered, such as Green Arrow, Conan, and Red Sonja, are clearly not represented in their comics as inhabiting the Middle Ages, however broadly defined, and their creators clearly did not think they were depicting the Middle Ages, historically accurately or otherwise. The reason for such an overstatement is unclear and reflects an overall limitation here: the book needed another round of editing, not only to iron out such problems with the argument but also to correct errors.

Bishop covers a lot of territory, which requires detailed knowledge about many historical periods and many scholarly traditions. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, several basic mistakes of fact crop up throughout the book, from the wildly inaccurate claim on page 15 that, in its early years, Action Comics was selling 100 million copies a month, which is off by a factor of a hundred, through misstatements or errors about character identities (Bishop says that one of Hank Pym's alter egos was Ultron, but Ultron was a robot whose brain patterns copied Pym's; he suggests that V of V for Vendetta lost his transgender status when DC took over the series, but V was never a transsexual in the series – Bishop is conflating V with an earlier, unrealized series – and so on). The importance of such errors or misleading statements – and there are many others, including some surprising grammatical errors (lie/lay confusion, palate/palette confusion, eke/eek etc.) – to the larger argument is perhaps minor, but their occurrence does not inspire confidence. More puzzling is the conclusion, which offers an interesting discussion of the problematic understanding of the words “feudal” and “medieval” which has no clear bearing on the preceding discussion. Why the section is included, and why as a conclusion, is not clear; problems of terminology are not irrelevant to this study, but structurally they would have been better considered in the introduction, and more closely linked to the book's specific focus on medievalist comics.

In short, this book is of value to those interested in reception history, given its extensive information about how medievalism informs mainstream comics, but of less use to comics scholars, as little space is devoted to analysis of the comics themselves (though comics scholars will find useful information about the genesis of the series discussed), and there are no images included – always a limitation in a book on comics, especially for readers unfamiliar with the works being discussed.