Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strips  By Alex Berringer  The Ohio State University Press, 2024 Paper, $36.95 Genre: Nonfiction Reviewed by Bill Plott When The Birmingham News announced its impending abandonment of print editions, two concerns expressed most by readers were the loss of obituaries and the loss of comic strips. Fortunately, there are internet presences such as GoComics.com and ComicsKingdom.com that provide fans with unlimited access to the latter at reasonable costs. That scenario hints at the importance of comic strips in American culture for more than a century. There are few people without some presence of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts in their lives. Generations have shared the daily lives of Blondie, Beetle Bailey, and The Phantom, whose weekly strips sometimes engaged readers with anticipation much like reality television.  Lost Literacies  traces the roots of sequential art, i.e., comic strips, back much further than the early 20th century work of such artists as Richard Outcault, George Herriman, and Rudolph Dirks in the colorful Sunday newspaper comics sections. A University of Montevallo English professor, Beringer says [...]