Im Monitor werden in unregelmäßigen Abständen aktuelle Publikationen aus den letzten 6 Monaten vorgestellt, die für die Comicforschung relevant sein könnten. Die kurzen Ankündigungstexte dazu stammen von den jeweiligen Verlagsseiten. Haben Sie Anregungen oder Hinweise auf Neuerscheinungen, die übersehen worden sind und hier erwähnt werden sollten? Das Team freut sich über eine Mail an redaktion@comicgesellschaft.de.
→ Zu früheren Monitoren.

The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets

Kevin Haworth
University Press of Mississippi
194 Seiten
März 2019
Verlagsseite

„Best known for her Eisner Award-winning graphic novels, Exit Wounds and The Property, Rutu Modan’s richly colored compositions invite readers into complex Israeli society, opening up a world too often defined only by news headlines. Her strong female protagonists stick out in a comics scene still too dominated by men, as she combines a mystery novelist’s plotting with a memoirist’s insights into psychology and trauma.
The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets conducts a close reading of her work and examines her role in creating a comics arts scene in Israel. Drawing upon archival research, Kevin Haworth traces the history of Israeli comics from its beginning as 1930s cheap children’s stories, through the counterculture movement of the 1970s, to the burst of creativity that began in the 1990s and continues full force today.
Based on new interviews with Modan (b. 1966) and other comics artists, Haworth indicates the key role of Actus Tragicus, the collective that changed Israeli comics forever and launched her career. Haworth shows how Modan’s work grew from experimental mini-comics to critically acclaimed graphic novels, delving into the creative process behind Exit Wounds and The Property. He analyzes how the recurring themes of family secrets and absence weave through her stories, and how she adapts the famous clear line illustration style to her morally complex tales.“

Shōjo Across Media: Exploring „Girl“ Practices in Contemporary Japan

Jaqueline Berndt, Kazumi Nagaike und Fusami Ogi (Hgs.)
East Asian Popular Culture
Springer
397 Seiten
März 2019
Verlagsseite

„Since the 2000s, the Japanese word shōjo has gained global currency, accompanying the transcultural spread of other popular Japanese media such as manga and anime. The term refers to both a character type specifically, as well as commercial genres marketed to female audiences more generally. Through its diverse chapters this edited collection introduces the two main currents of shōjo research: on the one hand, historical investigations of Japan’s modern girl culture and its representations, informed by Japanese-studies and gender-studies concerns; on the other hand, explorations of the transcultural performativity of shōjo as a crafted concept and affect-prone code, shaped by media studies, genre theory, and fan-culture research.
While acknowledging that shōjo has mediated multiple discourses throughout the twentieth century—discourses on Japan and its modernity, consumption and consumerism, non-hegemonic gender, and also technology—this volume shifts the focus to shōjo mediations, stretching from media by and for actual girls, to shōjo as media. As a result, the Japan-derived concept, while still situated, begins to offer possibilities for broader conceptualizations of girlness within the contemporary global digital mediascape.“

Lessons Drawn: Essays on the Pedagogy of Comics and Graphic Novels

David D. Seelow (Hg.)
McFarland
258 Seiten
2019
Verlagsseite

„Imagine a classroom where students put away their smart phones and enthusiastically participate in learning activities that unleash creativity and refine critical thinking. Students today live and learn in a transmedia environment that demands multi-modal writing skills and multiple literacies. This collection brings together 17 new essays on using comics and graphic novels to provide both a learning framework and hands-on strategies that transform students’ learning experiences through literary forms they respond to.“

Politics in Gotham: The Batman Universe and Political Thought

Damien K. Picariello (Hg.)
Palgrave
237 Seiten
März 2019
Verlagsseite

„In Politics in Gotham, scholars from a variety of fields—political science, philosophy, law, and others—provide answers to the question: “What does Batman have to do with politics?” Contributors use the Batman canon, from the comics to the feature films, to explore a broad range of issues in politics and political thought. What can Batman’s role in Gotham City teach us about democracy? How do Batman’s vigilantism and his violence fit within a society committed to the rule of law? What’s the relationship between politics in Gotham and politics in our own communities? From Machiavelli to the fake news phenomenon, this book provides a compelling introduction to the politics behind one of the world’s most enduring pop culture figures.“

Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities

Fusami Ogi, et al. (Hgs.)
Palgrave
366 Seiten
März 2019
Verlagsseite

„Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond offers a variety of perspectives on women’s manga and the nature, scope, and significance of the relationship between women and comics/manga, both globally as well as locally. Based on the activities since 2009 of the Women’s MANGA Research Project in Asia (WMRPA), the edited volume elucidates social and historical aspects of the Asian wave of manga from ever-broader perspectives of transnationalization and glocalization. With a specific focus on women’s direct roles in manga creation, it illustrates how the globalization of manga has united different cultures and identities, focusing on networks of women creators and readerships.
Taking an Asian regional approach combined with investigations of non-Asian cultures which have felt manga’s impact, the book details manga’s shift to a global medium, developing, uniting, and involving increasing numbers of participants worldwide. Unveiling diverse Asian identities and showing ways to unite them, the contributors to this volume recognize the overlaps and unique trends that emerge as a result.“

Der Zeitschriftenmonitor ist eine Unterkategorie des Monitors. Hier werden in unregelmäßigen Abständen kürzlich erschienene Ausgaben und Artikel internationaler Zeitschriften zur Comicforschung sowie Sonderhefte mit einschlägigem Themenschwerpunkt vorgestellt. Die Ankündigungstexte und/oder Inhaltsverzeichnisse stammen von den jeweiligen Websites.
Haben Sie Anregungen oder Hinweise auf Neuerscheinungen, die übersehen worden sind und hier erwähnt werden sollten? Das Team freut sich über eine Mail an redaktion@comicgesellschaft.de.
→ Zu früheren Monitoren

IJOCA (International Journal of Comic Art) 20.2 (2018)

print (im Abonnement)
Website

• John A. Lent: A 20-Year Harvest of Comic Art Scholarship: International Journal of Comic Art 1999-2018
• Rob Rogers: Six in a Row? That Has to Be Some Kind of Record!
• Haydon Manning, Robert Phiddian: The Editorial Cartoon’s Fading Impact – The State of Play in Australia at the Federal Election of 2016 and Beyond
• John A. Lent: The New Wave of Investigative Cartooning in South Korea
• Benjamin Wai-ming Ng: Drawing Chinese Political Cartoons in Japan: Blessing in Disguise or Trade-off?
• Leonard Rifas: The Politics of Underground Comix and the Environmental Crisis
• Richard Scully: Mark Knight vs Serena Williams – Crossing the Line: Offensive and Controversial Cartoons in the 21st Century – „The View from Australia“ – Part Two
• Lim Cheng Tju: Morgan Chua (1949-2018) and Political Cartooning in Singapore
• Sara S. Elmaghraby: Cartooning Poverty: Are Cartoonists Helping Sustainable Development in Egypt?
• Jose Alaniz: „Hippies“ and Pacifism in Igor Kolgarev’s Militariisk Comics
• Milind Ranade: Discovering Tom Browne and His Postcards
• Jeffrey SJ Kirchoff: Beyond the Printed Page: Dementia, Graphic Medicine, and Digital Comics
• Janis Breckenridge, Maia Watkins: Reading Between the Lines: Drawing on the Horrors of Disappearance in „Un asesino anda suelto“
• Mike Rhode: A Chat with Izar Lunacek of Slovenia
• Izar Lunacek: A Brief History of Slovenian Comics
• Melanie Hernandez: Currier & Ives’s Darktown Series: Recovering White Social Capital through Violent Satire
• Tomasz Zaglewski: Superhero Sentimentalism. Analyzing the Social Media Nostalgia for the First Wave of American Comics in Poland
• Jean Braithwaite: Navigating Jimmy Corrigan: Time, Space, and Puzzles, Including Pagination
• Marlene Pohle: A Cartoonist Chronicler of Cartoonists‘ Confabs
• William H. Foster III: March Graphic Novel: „American History Lives Again“
• Steve Danziger: Malice, Metaphysics, and Mengele – Holocaust Motifs and the Renunciation of Evil in EC Horror Comics
• Robyn Johnson: Bishie Man or Woman, It Matters Not: Grotesque Resistance to Heteronormative Love in Yu Wo’s 1/2 Prince
• Citlaly Aguilar Campos: Liminality and Meta-fiction in Comics: The Ayotzinapa Case by Augusto Mora
• Joilo Batista Freitas Cardoso, Caio Mattos Moreira Cardoso: The V Mask in Translation: From Commercial to Subversive Systems
• Ken Junior Lipenga: Intersections of Sex and Violence in Preacher
• Ignacio Fernandez Sarasola: Crime News: Blaming Comic Books for Crimes Committed During the „Golden Age“
• J.T.H. Connor: Behind the Scenes of the „War in Comics“ Exhibit: An Interview with Canada’s Andrew Loman and Irene Velentzas
• Paola Moreno Izaguirre: Art Toy as Anatomical Sketch
• Northrop Davis: Legendary Hollywood Designer Syd Mead’s Important Contributions to Landmark Anime
• Barry Pearl: Charles M. Schulz: Cartoons Without Peanuts

Studies in Comics 9.2 (2018)

online (im Abonnement)
Website

• Joshua Gowdy: Meaning from Movement: Blurring the Temporal Border between Animation and Comics
• Carolina Martins: Unfolding and Crossing the Augmented Space: Metaleptic Tools and Processes within Graphic Narrative Installations
• Tara McInerney: Doujinshi and Comiket: A Day of ‘Hare’
• J. B. O’Ready: Exploring the Borders between American, Muslim, Female and Superhero Identities with Kamala Khan
• Stella Oh: Colonial Hauntings in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons
• Paul Fisher Davies: Goffman’s Frame Analysis, Modality and Comics
• Nancy Pedri: Breaking Out of Panels: Formal Expressions of Subjectivity in Ellen Forney’s Marbles and Una’s Becoming Unbecoming
• Lauranne Poharec: Focalized Split Panels: Bridging the Borders in Comics Form
• Golnar Nabizadeh: An Interview with Shaun Tan

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 9 (2018)

online (im Abonnement)
Website

• Esther De Bruijn, Kelsey Hughes: Millennial Capitalism’s Vampires: The South African Graphic Novel Rebirth
• Tomasz Żaglewski: ‘A Joke less Killing’. Animated Remediation of a Comic Book as an Extra-mediation
• Cord A. Scott: Cold War Politics, Cuba, and Spy vs. Spy
• Dominic Davies: Graphic Katrina: Disaster Capitalism, Tourism Gentrification and the Affect Economy in Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (2009)
• Olivia Albiero: Between Free Movement and Confinement: Overcoming Boundaries in Simon Schwartz’s Drüben! and Colleen Frakes’s Prison Island
• William Schulte, Nathaniel Frederick: Black Panther and Black Agency: Constructing Cultural Nationalism in Comic Books Featuring Black Panther, 1973–1979
• Francesca Battaglia: Gender Boundaries in Saiyūki by Kazuya Minekura: The Queer Family as a Model of Leadership
• Buket Akgün: Mythology Moe-ified: Classical Witches, Warriors, and Monsters in Japanese Manga
• A. J. Paylor: “Hello World!” Gwenpool: Marvel’s Camusian Absurd Hero
• Francesco-Alessio Ursini: ‘Alla Ricerca dei Plumcake Perduti’: Visual Metaphors, Satire, and Intertextuality in Zero Calcare’s fumetti
• Vera J. Camden, Valentino L. Zullo: Wonder Woman and the Public Humanities: A Reflection on the 2016 Wonder Woman Symposium
• Vera J. Camden, Valentino L. Zullo: Truth, Justice, and the Amazonian Way: An Interview with Greg Rucka
• Phil Jimenez: Wonder Woman, Feminist Icon? Queer Icon? No, Love Icon
• Trina Robbins: Babes in Arms
• Melanie Elizabeth Gibson: Rising from the Ashes: Making Spaces for new Children’s Comics Cultures in Britain in the 21st Century
• Genevieve Valentine: Empire of a Wicked Woman: Catwoman, Royalty, and the Making of a Comics Icon
• Vera J. Camden, Valentino L. Zullo: Wonder Woman Symposium Roundtable
• Chris Gavaler, Leigh Ann Beavers: Clarifying Closure

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 10.2 (2018-2019)

online (open access)
Website

• Jon Holt: What You See Is What You Get: Visualizing Hypocrisy in Umezu Kazuo’s Manga Cat-Eyed Boy
• Rui Lopes: “must we all remain helpless?”: Superman vs. the Nuclear Threat in the Late Cold War
• Russell McConnell: Historical Avant-Garde: How Marcia Williams Recreates Shakespeare’s Theater in the Comics Medium
• Kai Mikkonen, Olli Philippe Lautenbacher: Global Attention in Reading Comics: Eye-movement Indications of Interplay between Narrative Content and Layout
• Nicholas Wirtz: Beyond Words: The Visual Demands of Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde
• Asuka Yamazaki: “Only the Winner is Allowed to Live”: The Concept of Cannibalism in Attack on Titan

The Comics Grid 9 (2019)

online (open access)
Website

• Ken Junior Lipenga: The New Normal: Enfreakment in Saga
• Paul Fisher Davies: New Choices of the Comics Creator
• Pat Grant: The Board and the Body: Material Constraints and Style in Graphic Narrative
• Enrique del Rey Cabero: Beyond Linearity: Holistic, Multidirectional, Multilinear and Translinear Reading in Comics
• Melanie McGovern, Martin Paul Eve: Information Labour and Shame in Farmer and Chevli’s Abortion Eve
• Ian Hornsby: …Comic Books, Möbius Strips, Philosophy and…

Im Monitor werden in unregelmäßigen Abständen aktuelle Publikationen aus den letzten 6 Monaten vorgestellt, die für die Comicforschung relevant sein könnten. Die kurzen Ankündigungstexte dazu stammen von den jeweiligen Verlagsseiten. Haben Sie Anregungen oder Hinweise auf Neuerscheinungen, die übersehen worden sind und hier erwähnt werden sollten? Das Team freut sich über eine Mail an redaktion@comicgesellschaft.de. → Zu früheren Monitoren.

Teaching Comics Through Multiple Lenses: Critical Perspectives

Crag Hill (Hg.)
Routledge
186 Seiten
Dezember 2018
Verlagsseite

„Building off the argument that comics succeed as literature—rich, complex narratives filled with compelling characters interrogating the thought-provoking issues of our time—this book argues that comics are an expressive medium whose moves (structural and aesthetic) may be shared by literature, the visual arts, and film, but beyond this are a unique art form possessing qualities these other mediums do not. Drawing from a range of current comics scholarship demonstrating this point, this book explores the unique intelligence/s of comics and how they expand the ways readers engage with the world in ways different than prose, or film, or other visual arts. Written by teachers and scholars of comics for instructors, this book bridges research and pedagogy, providing instructors with models of critical readings around a variety of comics.“

Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts, and Gender in Classic American Comics

Michelle Ann Abate
University Press of Mississippi
286 Seiten
Dezember 2018
Verlagsseite

„For several generations, comics were regarded as a boy’s club — created by, for, and about men and boys. In the twenty-first century, however, comics have seen a rise of female creators, characters, and readers.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the medium was enjoyed equally by both sexes, and girls were the protagonists of some of the earliest, most successful, and most influential comics. In Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts, and Gender in Classic American Comics, Michelle Ann Abate examines the important but long-overlooked cadre of young female protagonists in US comics during the first half of the twentieth century. She treats characters ranging from Little Orphan Annie and Nancy to Little Lulu, Little Audrey of the Harvey Girls, and Li’l Tomboy — a group that collectively forms a tradition of funny girls in American comics.
Abate demonstrates the massive popularity these funny girls enjoyed, revealing their unexplored narrative richness, aesthetic complexity, and critical possibility. Much of the humor in these comics arose from questioning gender roles, challenging social manners, and defying the status quo. Further, they embodied powerful points of collection about both the construction and intersection of race, class, gender, and age, as well as popular perceptions about children, representations of girlhood, and changing attitudes regarding youth. Finally, but just as importantly, these strips shed light on another major phenomenon within comics: branding, licensing, and merchandising. Collectively, these comics did far more than provide amusement — they were serious agents for cultural commentary and sociopolitical change.“

Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies

Marc Singer
World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series
University of Texas Press
312 Seiten
Januar 2019
Verlagsseite

„Comics studies has reached a crossroads. Graphic novels have never received more attention and legitimation from scholars, but new canons and new critical discourses have created tensions within a field built on the populist rhetoric of cultural studies. As a result, comics studies has begun to cleave into distinct camps — based primarily in cultural or literary studies — that attempt to dictate the boundaries of the discipline or else resist disciplinarity itself. The consequence is a growing disconnect in the ways that comics scholars talk to each other — or, more frequently, do not talk to each other or even acknowledge each other’s work.
Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies surveys the current state of comics scholarship, interrogating its dominant schools, questioning their mutual estrangement, and challenging their propensity to champion the comics they study. Marc Singer advocates for greater disciplinary diversity and methodological rigor in comics studies, making the case for a field that can embrace more critical and oppositional perspectives. Working through extended readings of some of the most acclaimed comics creators — including Marjane Satrapi, Alan Moore, Kyle Baker, and Chris Ware — Singer demonstrates how comics studies can break out of the celebratory frameworks and restrictive canons that currently define the field to produce new scholarship that expands our understanding of comics and their critics.“

The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place inside Yourself

Tahneer Oksman und Seamus O’Malley (Hgs.)
Critical Approaches to Comics Artists Series
University Press of Mississippi
240 Seiten
Januar 2019
Verlagsseite

„In a self-reflexive way, Julie Doucet’s and Gabrielle Bell’s comics defy easy categorization. In this volume, editors Tahneer Oksman and Seamus O’Malley regard Doucet’s and Bell’s art as actively feminist, not only because they offer women’s perspectives, but because they do so by provocatively bringing up the complicated, multivalent frameworks of such engagements. While each artist has a unique perspective, style, and worldview, the essays in this book investigate their shared investments in formal innovation and experimentation, and in playing with questions of the autobiographical, the fantastic, and the spaces in between.
Doucet is a Canadian underground cartoonist, known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary. Meanwhile, Bell is a British American cartoonist best known for her intensely introspective semiautobiographical comics and graphic memoirs, such as the Lucky series and Cecil and Jordan in New York. By pairing Doucet alongside Bell, the book recognizes the significance of female networks, and the social and cultural connections, associations, and conditions that shape every work of art. “

The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitsch

Laurike in’t Veld
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
Palgrave Macmillan
240 Seiten
Januar 2019
Verlagsseite

„This book mobilises the concept of kitsch to investigate the tensions around the representation of genocide in international graphic novels that focus on the Holocaust and the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. In response to the predominantly negative readings of kitsch as meaningless or inappropriate, this book offers a fresh approach that considers how some of the kitsch strategies employed in these works facilitate an affective interaction with the genocide narrative. These productive strategies include the use of the visual metaphors of the animal and the doll figure and the explicit and excessive depictions of mass violence. The book also analyses where kitsch still produces problems as it critically examines depictions of perpetrators and the visual and verbal representations of sexual violence. Furthermore, it explores how graphic novels employ anti-kitsch strategies to avoid the dangers of excess in dealing with genocide. The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels will appeal to those working in comics-graphic novel studies, popular culture studies, and Holocaust and genocide studies.“

Mit diesem Post geht auf der ComFor-Website eine neue Rubrik an den Start: der Zeitschriftenmonitor, eine Unterkategorie des Monitors. Hier werden in unregelmäßigen Abständen kürzlich erschienene Ausgaben und Artikel internationaler Zeitschriften zur Comicforschung sowie Sonderhefte mit einschlägigem Themenschwerpunkt vorgestellt. Die Ankündigungstexte und/oder Inhaltsverzeichnisse stammen von den jeweiligen Websites.
Haben Sie Anregungen oder Hinweise auf Neuerscheinungen, die übersehen worden sind und hier erwähnt werden sollten? Das Team freut sich über eine Mail an redaktion@comicgesellschaft.de.
→ Zu früheren Monitoren

European Comic Art 11.2 (Sep. 2018)

Themenschwerpunkt: Spanish Comics, part II
print & online im Abonnement
Website

• Anne Magnussen: Introduction
• Louie Dean Valencia-García: Tintin in the Movida Madrileña: Gender and Sexuality in the Punk Comic Book Zine Scene
• Gerardo Vilches: Satirical Panels against Censorship: A Battle That Raged during the Spanish Transition
• Juan Carlos Pérez García: The Representation of Traumatic Memory in Spanish Comics: Remembering the Civil War and Francoism in Panels
• Sarah D. Harris: They Tried To Bury Us; They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds’: Intergenerational Memory and La casa
• Agatha Mohring: Therapeutic Journeys in Contemporary Spanish Graphic Novels

Comicalités: Études de culture graphique (17.11.2018)

online, open access
Website

• Frédéric Ducarme: Are nekketsu shōnen manga sports manga? The example of Dragon Ball
• Élise Awaïda Carton and Stéphane Carpentier: Monde sportif et univers des super-héros de bandes dessinées: Quelles remises en cause des normes corporelles?
• Sylvain Aquatias: Genre et légitimité dans l’édition de bande dessinée: pt. 1: Le poids de la légitimité, des revues aux collections; pt. 2: Le roman graphique ou la négation du genre

Image [&] Narrative 19.3 (Nov. 2018)

Themenschwerpunkt: Lewis Trondheim
online, open access
Website

• Chris Reyns-Chikuma, David Pinho Barros: Introduction «Lewis Trondheim, un artiste-orchestre dans le monde de la bande dessinée»
• Chantal Cointot: Approximate Author-ity: Self-Crafting “Le Bec” and Other Trondheimian Masks
• Côme Martin: Monumentaux inachèvements : Lapinot et les carottes de Patagonie et Capharnaüm
• Fabrice Leroy: Quand les lapins volent : Onirisme, minimalisme et abstraction dans Lapinot et les carottes de Patagonie de Lewis Trondheim
• Ann Miller: Trondheim, artist of the supermodern city and interstitial travel through the non-lieux
• Jérôme Dutel: D’une mouche « expérimentale » à plusieurs mouches « commerciales »? Passages d’une bande dessinée (1995) à une série d’animation (1999-2001)

allmende: Zeitschrift für Literatur 38.102 (Dez. 2018)

Themenschwerpunkt: Graphic Novel
print
Website

„Was versteht man unter einer Graphic Novel? Und vor allem: Warum erfährt sie in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur solche Aufmerksamkeit? Neben aktuellen Tendenzen innerhalb der Szene, ob autobiografischer, zeitkritischer oder feministischer Natur, wird die Graphic Novel als Literaturgattung ins Auge gefasst. Wer waren die Initiatoren dieses Genres? Welche Impulsgeber gestalten die Szene heute aktiv mit? Wir wollen einen Beitrag leisten zur Vorstellung der »neunten Kunst« und ihren Vertreterinnen und Vertretern.
Mit Beiträgen von Titus Ackermann, Stefanie Diekmann, Tim Dinter, Matthias Gnehm, Nora Krug, Yi Luo, Ulli Lust, Nicolas Mahler, Uli Oesterle, Andreas Platthaus, Thomas Pletzinger, Kati Rickenbach, Jan Soeken, Thomas von Steinaecker, Tina Stolt, Mara Stuhlfauth-Trabert, Florian Trabert.“

Im Monitor werden in unregelmäßigen Abständen aktuelle Publikationen aus den letzten 6 Monaten vorgestellt, die für die Comicforschung relevant sein könnten. Die kurzen Ankündigungstexte dazu stammen von den jeweiligen Verlagsseiten. Haben Sie Anregungen oder Hinweise auf Neuerscheinungen, die übersehen worden sind und hier erwähnt werden sollten? Das Team freut sich über eine Mail an redaktion@comicgesellschaft.de. → Zu früheren Monitoren.

Adventure Comics and Youth Cultures in India

Raminder Kaur und Saif Eqbal
Routledge
226 Seiten
ISBN 978-1138358683 (Paperback)
~£29.99
Oktober 2018
Verlagsseite

„This pioneering book presents a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India with a particular focus on vernacular superheroism. It chronicles popular and youth culture in the subcontinent from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary era dominated by creative audio-video-digital outlets.
The authors highlight early precedents in adventures set by the avuncular detective Chacha Chaudhary with his ‘faster than a computer brain’, the forays of the film veteran Amitabh Bachchan’s superheroic alter ego called Supremo, the Protectors of Earth and Mankind (P.O.E.M.), along with the exploits of key comic book characters, such as Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu, Doga, Shakti and Chandika. The book considers how pulp literature, western comics, television programmes, technological developments and major space ventures sparked a thirst for extraterrestrial action and how these laid the grounds for vernacular ventures in the Indian superhero comics genre. It contains descriptions, textual and contextual analyses, excerpts of interviews with comic book creators, producers, retailers and distributers, together with the views, dreams and fantasies of young readers of adventure comics. These narratives touch upon special powers, super-intelligence, phenomenal technologies, justice, vengeance, geopolitics, romance, sex and the amazing potentials of masked identities enabled by navigation of the internet.“

The Disappearance of Hong Kong in Comics, Advertising and Graphic Design

Wendy Wong
Palgrave
245 Seiten
ISBN 978-3-319-92095-5 (Hardcover)
~$84.99
November 2018
Verlagsseite

„This book examines Hong Kong’s struggle against the disappearance of its unique identity under the historical challenges of colonialism, in addition to the more recent reimposition of Chinese authoritarian government control, as reflected in three under-researched forms of visual media: comics, advertising and graphic design. Each section of the book focuses on one of these three forms, and each chapter focuses on one stage of Hong Kong’s changing cultural identity. The articulative position of this book is on studies of visual cultural history and media communication. Its case studies will broaden readers’ own cultural knowledge for a more international understanding. The Disappearance of Hong Kong in Comics, Advertising and Graphic Design advances the development of its three key subjects in terms of identity, communication and cultural politics, aiming to reach a wide range of multidisciplinary readers.“

Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation

Wendy Haslem, Elizabeth MacFarlane und Sarah Richardson (Hgs.)
Routledge
196 Seiten
ISBN 978-1138389892 (Hardcover)
~£115.99
November 2018
Verlagsseite

„Throughout the history of the genre, the superhero has been characterised primarily by physical transformation and physical difference. Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation explores the transformation of the superhero body across multiple media forms including comics, film, television, literature and the graphic novel. How does the body of the hero offer new ways to imagine identities? 　How does it represent or subvert cultural ideals? How are ideologies of race, gender and disability signified or destabilised in the physicality of the superhero? How are superhero bodies drawn, written and filmed across diverse forms of media and across histories?
This volume collects essays that attend to the physicality of superheroes: the transformative bodies of superheroes, the superhero’s position in urban and natural spaces, the dialectic between the superhero’s physical and metaphysical self, and the superhero body’s relationship with violence. This will be the first collection of scholarly research specifically dedicated to investigating the diversity of superhero bodies, their emergence, their powers, their secrets, their histories and their transformations.“

Comics: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven aus Theorie und Praxis auf ein Stiefkind der Medienpädagogik

Christine Dallmann, Anja Hartung, Alfons Aigner und Kai-Thorsten Buchele (Hgs.)
Kopaed
280 Seiten
ISBN 978-3-86736-495-9 (Paperback)
~€20.00
Dezember 2018
Verlagsseite

„Comics standen lange im Verruf, simpler Unterhaltungsstoff zu sein, der nur mehr von der Lektüre anspruchsvoller, ja bildungswertvoller Literatur abzuhalten suche. Bereits die bewahrpädagogische Debatte im frühen 20. Jahrhundert verurteilte Comics als „Schmutz und Schund“ und damit als schädlich für die moralische und geistige Entwicklung von Kindern und Jugendlichen. Wenngleich bewahrpädagogische Positionen sich gegenwärtig eher gegen andere Medien richten, haben sich viele Vorbehalte gegen Comics bis heute gehalten. Zu Unrecht, meint Ralf Vollbrecht, und dem stimmen die Herausgeberinnen und Herausgeber dieses Bandes zu und unternehmen den Versuch einer medienpädagogisch motivierten Annäherung. Dabei werden Bezüge sowohl zum wissenschaftlichen Werk und Wirken von Ralf Vollbrecht als auch zu seinen Comic-Präferenzen hergestellt. Mit diesem durchaus unkonventionellen Ansatz möge der Band hier und da bereichernde Einblicke gewähren, in seiner bebilderten Form auch unterhalten und möglicherweise sogar eine weitere Beschäftigung mit dem Themenfeld Comics aus medienpädagogischer Perspektive anregen.“

Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity: The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero as Cultural Nexus

Jeffrey A. Brown
Routledge
226 Seiten
ISBN 978-1138302853 (Hardcover)
~£110.00
Dezember 2018
Verlagsseite

„Concentrating primarily on contemporary depictions of Batman in the comic books, this book analyzes why Batman is so immensely popular right now in America and globally, and how the fictional Dark Knight reveals both new cultural concerns and longstanding beliefs about American values. The organizing premise is that while Batman is perceived as a very clearly defined character, he is open to a wide range of interpretations and depictions in the comics (what Henry Jenkins refers to as „multiplicities“), each of which allows access to different cultural issues. The idea of Batman functions as an anchoring point out of which multiple Batmen, or Batman-like characters, can occupy different positions: Grim Batman, Gay Batman, Female Batman, Black Batman, Cute Batman, and so on. Each iteration opens up a discussion of different cultural issues pertinent to modern society, such as sexuality, ethnicity, feminism and familial relationships.“