Inventing Comics recovers and translates two of Rudolphe Töpffer's nineteenth-century essays on the rhetorical invention of comics, an amateur aesthetic practice of the popular image. Growing out of contemporary philosophical thought, these essays reflect an early iteration of post-critical thought in the cultural and institutional shift from literacy to electracy.

In his role as a professor of rhetoric and belle-lettres at the Academy of Geneva, Töpffer not only wrote popular fiction (graphic novels, novels, plays), but also a host of scholarly works addressing the relationship between aesthetics and poetics. Sergio C. Figueiredo is an Assistant Professor of Media and Rhetoric in the Department of English at Kennesaw State University. He received his PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University, and his MA in English from Marshall University. His research focuses on the intersections of rhetorical theory, media studies, and electracy. His work has appeared in ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Journal of Visual Literacy, and In Media Res: A Media Commons Project.