What do you read if you want to read about comics? There is a small library of works available now. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is the most obvous title of course. But, off the top of my head, there’s also Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics if you want words rather than pictures and, from a more international perspective, Paul Gravett’s books on manga and graphic novels.

There are plenty more, too, but it’s not as if this particular library shelf couldn’t do with more.

So welcome then Hillary L Chute’s Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. Okay, we’re a little late to this. It’s been out a while now. But Chute’s book is an interesting and accessible take on comics that concentrates on the underground scene of the 1960s and everything that flowed from that, while not ignoring the superhero thing either.

It is, it should be said straight away, an American book which looks at the medium through an American prism. Not a criticism, but obviously if the book had been written in France or Japan it would be a very different thing.

But setting that aside, Chute’s book does a number of things very well. For a start Chute, a professor of English and art and design at Northeastern University in Boston, looks at the formal properties of comics and what they can do better than any other artform.

Her ability to talk about these things comprehensibly is a big plus. This is not academic writing. “The weirdness of time in comics is part of the medium’s force as a storytelling form,” she writes at one point before going on to praise its “all-at-onceness.”

The other thing that jumps out is the way she organises the book through themes. And so we have chapters organised around sex, disaster, punk, illness and queerness.

Many of thosee chapters use specific creators and their biographies as organising principles. Sometimes you’re not sure it always works. Her chapter The chapter on cities, for example, approaches the subject through the work of Harvey Pekar and Jaime Hernandez. Both are fine creators and the chapter does their work justice but I’m not sure it really allows her to address why comics and cities go so well together, which is often a more formal matter.

That said, the following chapter on punk in comics, as told through the life and work of Matt Groening and Gary Panter is a slam dunk success and one of the best sections in the book, and the chapter Why Queer? concentrating on the work of Alison Bechdel also manages to tie up life and work satisfyingly.

In a sense the question all comic book commentators – or American comic book commentators at least – have to ask themselves is what to do about superheroes. There is a legitimate argument that you can’t ignore them even when you’re looking at alternative comics in the US. Everyone from Art Spiegelman to Chris Ware and Dan Clowes has used superhero tropes, after all, even if for the purpose of attacking the genre.

But it’s surely possible that we have now reached the point where graphic memoirs and graphic novels are so widespread and so ambitious that writers could choose to ignore the superhero genre if it doesn’t fit with the work you are looking at.

But perhaps it’s foolish to ignore the pre-eminent genre in American comics, and to her credit Chute takes it seriously, looking at recent incarnations of Ms Marvel, Hawkeye and the Black Panther and how they engage with current political currents in the culture.

In short, add to that shelf.

Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere, by Hillary L Chute is published by Harper.