On Comics and Grief covers the year after the author's mother passed away, during which he experienced profound loss and grief while working on a project predicated on Jacobs's reading of every commercially produced comic book published in the US in 1976. The book is organized in 12 chapters prefaced by an introduction. Each chapter represents a month when Jacobs reads and analyzes two titles for his study, synthesizing personal experience with the traditionally non-personalized project of scholarship. Jacobs's approach reveals deep and sometimes startling connections between coming to grips with emotional experiences and practicing literary criticism. The comics selected for each month often represent extremes of comics content and thus readership. April's selections, for example, are issues of Daredevil and Little Dot . The juxtaposition of seemingly different comics suggests critical tensions that complement Jacobs's personal account. The author enhances and complicates this effect by interrupting his narrative with quotes from writers who work in different authorial contexts, from comic studies to commercial advertisements.

Impressive in scope and moving in affect, Jacobs's On Comics and Grief is a unique and significant contribution to several scholarly disciplines as well as to non-fiction writing. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.