History and Criticism of Comics: 1970-95
Gifford was regarded by many as the UK's pre-eminent comics historian, particularly of early British comics. The British Library provides catalogues and reference works written by Gifford as assistance to researchers of its British Comics Collection, and indeed most of the reference works on the subject provided by the British Library were written by Gifford.
Comics scholarship, still relatively undeveloped in comparison to other media, was almost non-existent in 1971, when Gifford published his first book on comics history, Discovering Comics. At that time, no comprehensive archive of British comics existed, no fully researched cataloguing had been attempted, the mass pulping of comics in Britain in the 1940s meant that many issues and even titles were lost without effective records, no university courses were dedicated to the study of the medium, and serious research and debate had not taken place into the origin and development of the comic as a form. Gifford was determined that the comic should gain a credibility in mainstream culture and academia which it already possessed in continental Europe, and to a lesser extent the US: "Curiously, only Great Britain, where the comic paper was born, takes its comics for what they superficially seem – ephemera to be discarded as soon as read." Although enthusiastic about comics of every era, Gifford had a particular passion for vintage comics, "earlier in the medium's evolution, when it was a chaos of one-offs, irregular schedules, and a comic historian's nightmare of inept publishers operating from the back rooms of run-down bookshops on a shoe string budget."
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