Comics are obsessed with origin stories, and this book gives us some doozys: the graphic novel, manga, Osamu Tezuka’s career, the direct market and comics piracy. If those topics sound hard to weave together into a coherent story, they’re surprisingly not. The result is an entertaining, informative but speedy journey through history, from the 18th century to the present day, all in 40 pages. In terms of scope and analysis, this is the most ambitious issue to date of Comic Book Comics, Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s visual history of comics. Whereas some of the previous issues were more rooted in the big personalities (Jack Kirby, Bill Gaines, Simon & Schuster) or a focused issue (copyright and royalties, the Comics Code) but this is about nothing less than the Future of the Comic-Book Industry. The CBC issues each more or less stand on their own, so if you had to start with one, I’d start here. But having recently marathoned through the previous five, I’d say that, once collected, this’ll be one of the great educational primers of comics history, something you can use to launch yourself into David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague, Dan Raviv’s Comics Wars: Marvel’s Battle for Survival or, my personal favourite, John Bell’s Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic-Book Universe. (Shameless Canada plug!) As a tightly edited essay, this issue’s great, but it wouldn’t be nearly as effective without Ryan Dunlavey’s cartooning and running visual gags to back it up. The visuals are an essential thread for following the argument, and illustrates (ha!) that this is a book where comics creators are trying to understand their industry on its own terms.