Volume I covers major works from North America and Europe, beginning with the first underground comix from the 1950s and continuing through to modern sequential artists. The collection contextualizes these original works with 25,000 pages of interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines, including The Comics Journal.
Volume II expands on Volume I by providing an additional 100,000 pages of important, rare, and hard-to-find works, scholarly writings, and more. Volume II adds extensive coverage of the pre-Comics Code era horror, crime, romance, and war comics that fueled the backlash leading to one of the largest censorship campaigns in US history. It also contains tens of thousands of pages of non-mainstream, post-code comics and secondary materials from around the world, including the US, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, England, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Korea, Japan, and more.