Scholars increasingly accept that comics are important sources for understanding popular culture and social values in the societies that have produced them. However, the first generations of historians to seriously study comic books largely focused on issues and approaches that derived from our own discipline. More recently, new tools of visual rhetorical analysis and ways of viewing the past through comics have been pioneered by a generation of scholars looking at issues of race, gender, and class. This panel will present novel approaches to historical research in which researchers read comics by engaging theories of representation, media discourse, platform analysis, and gender studies as well as proposing new ways of thinking of using comic formats to think about and represent the past.