Douglas Rednour

Even the villainy of COVID-19 couldn’t dash the hopes of comics and pop culture fans expecting to attend the annual San Diego Comic-Con, canceled this year for the first time since its inception in 1970. Rising to fill the programming void was the virtual convention, Comic-Con@Home, held July 22–26, offering more than 400 hours of online events freely available to the public.

Unshackled from its humble five-cent ­origins, the comic book has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon, inspiring innovative content across multiple media steeped in both decades-old properties and freshly conceived concepts.

Scott Chantler, creator of the Eisner-nominated family memoir Two Generals and the epic frontier adventure Northwest Passage, offers the new biography Bix, about famed Jazz Age icon Bix Beiderbecke.