This is both fiscally obvious and intellectually unfortunate, because there are good scholarly reasons for bringing together the work of a range of writers. It can put a multi-faceted focus on large issues in ways not easily open to the monograph. It can also make connections across a wider range of material than an individual researcher can encompass. It is interesting, therefore, to consider what electronic publishing has to offer this sort of scholarly communication. The broad answer is, ‘quite a lot’.

Drawing the Line is a collection unified by a clear question: what are the uses for political cartoons in historical analysis? It is an important question, because writers have often used cartoons to illuminate accounts of cultural and political history, but no solid account of what they are good for as evidence yet exists. People throw them into their texts on the assumption that they reflect something, possibly public opinion, and tend not to question the extent to which they are attempts to intervene in debates, or engagements with particular audiences. So it is pleasing to have a group of historians look at how they work in a range of contexts, several Australian, but also British, American, Iraqi, Yugoslav and Malaysian. The cumulative effect is to demonstrate that attention to cartoons is, indeed, a good way of doing history. In particular, it requires of historians a clear account of context and, especially, power structures as a precondition for unpacking the cartoons. Their witty compactness demands (and usually gets in this collection) cogent exposition that is both precise in the scholarly sense and intelligible to the less-expert reader.

While I suspect that only a limited number of copies will ever be printed and bound (though the production values of my copy are entirely satisfactory), the fact that this exists as a collection in cyberspace has a far greater scholarly impact than if they were distributed across a range of journals. For example, a researcher interested in cartoons of the Australian labour movement will find Nick Dyrenfurth and Marian Quartly’s substantial account on the Internet, part with the $15 charged for that article, and still have access to the abstracts of the other ten chapters, and to the idea that there is a body of knowledge and critique in place. This could be done in special numbers of journals, but it tends not to occur there so comprehensively. A collection like this is a collaborative effort that pools intellectual capital, even if individual readers seldom read more than one of the contributions. More-over, because it is not seeking to draw in ‘the general public’, the collection has all the paraphernalia of footnotes and bibliographies that allow it to serve as a basis for further scholarship. The next step is for scholars to attach their collections of evidence to the essays, so that they can be mined by others driven by different questions.

Whether Monash has the cost structure right or not, the fact that this collection has emerged in Australia and possesses a genuinely international range is impressive. When uttered by publishers, the word ‘international’ seems principally to mean ‘relating to the United States or the more famous moments of British and European culture’. This format, however, permits Australian material to sit beside Iraqi and Yugoslav work as if they are pursuing cognate questions; which they are. As the vast majority of scholarly research is publicly funded to some extent, a case could be made for making such material, properly peer-reviewed and edited, free on the Internet. At present, universities pay academics to do research, give the research to publishers (or even pay them to accept it), then buy it back at increasingly high prices through their libraries. Even if the results were uniformly excellent in the way of knowledge circulation, this would still be an odd state of affairs. As it is, locking knowledge up in expensive books or journal subscriptions is hard to defend as public interest or investment.

The sophistication with which this collection treats cartoons as historical evidence is admirable. Cartoons are used to illuminate Regency masculinity, nineteenth-century US power structures, shifting British attitudes to Kaiser Wilhelm, late-Victorian constructions of Australia as youthful, international influences on the Australian labour movement, the condition of soldiers during the two world wars, British and Japanese propaganda in World War II, Iraq and Malaya, the development of Yugoslav identity under Tito, and the different subcultures of the web-comic. The cartoons are treated throughout as complex cultural artefacts; not necessarily works of high art, but objects rich in meaning. They are plentifully reproduced and seriously discussed, and their provenance is properly traced through notes and bibliographies.

Too often in discussions of cartoons, the level has been set at the sort of glib lightness that the ‘general reader’ is supposed to require. That reader will find parts of this volume heavygoing, but as a contribution to scholarship on that rich and evanescent cultural artefact, the cartoon, Drawing the Line constitutes a great leap forward. I suspect that only an e-press would have touched it, and it seems probable that much more scholarly communication is headed that way.