Jared Gardner is professor of English at the Ohio State University, where he directs the program in Popular Culture Studies. He is the author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845, Projections: Comics and the History of 21st-century Storytelling; and The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture. He is currently working on a monograph on illness, time, and comics, to be entitled “Patient Time.”