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Robin and the Making of American Adolescence

Lauren R. O’Connor

Rutgers University Press
222 Seiten
August 2021
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„Holy adolescence, Batman! Robin and the Making of American Adolescence offers the first character history and analysis of the most famous superhero sidekick, Robin. Debuting just a few months after Batman himself, Robin has been an integral part of the Dark Knight’s history—and debuting just a few months prior to the word “teenager” first appearing in print, Robin has from the outset both reflected and reinforced particular images of American adolescence. Closely reading several characters who have “played” Robin over the past eighty years, Robin and the Making of American Adolescence reveals the Boy (and sometimes Girl!) Wonder as a complex figure through whom mainstream culture has addressed anxieties about adolescents in relation to sexuality, gender, and race. This book partners up comics studies and adolescent studies as a new Dynamic Duo, following Robin as he swings alongside the ever-changing American teenager and finally shining the Bat-signal on the latter half of ‚Batman and—.'“

Judge, Jury and Executioner: Essays on The Punisher in Print and on Screen

Alicia M. Goodman, Matthew J McEniry, Ryan Cassidy, Robert G. Weiner (Hgs.)

McFarland
193 Seiten
August 2021
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„Since the Punisher’s first appearance in the pages of Spider-Man #129, the character has become one of the most popular and controversial figures in Marvel’s vast universe. The Punisher represents one of the most recognizable types of anti-heroes. His iconic skull insignia stands for a unique type of justice: protecting the innocent while violently eliminating everyone he sees as a villain. This collection examines the Punisher from philosophical perspectives about morality and justice. Essays critique the character through the lenses of gender and feminism; consider the Punisher’s veteran status in relation the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars; and examine how politics and gun violence connect the Punisher’s world with the real world. Many iterations of the Punisher are examined within, including the Netflix release of Marvel’s The Punisher, comics series such as Punisher: MAX, Marvel Knights, and Cosmic Ghost Rider, and several fan fiction stories.“

The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats

Michael Connerty

Palgrave Macmillan
283 Seiten
August 2021
Verlagsseite

„This monograph seeks to recover and assess the critically neglected comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for various British publications, including Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder, and Puck, between 1893 and 1917. It situates the work in relation to late-Victorian and Edwardian media, entertainment and popular culture, as well as to the evolution of the British comic during this crucial period in its development. Yeats’ recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics that Alfred Harmsworth and others published in London from 1890 onwards. The repositioning of Yeats in the context of the comics, and the acknowledgement of the very substantial corpus of graphic humour that he produced, has profound implications for our understanding of his artistic career and of his significant contribution to UK comics history. This book, which also contains many examples of the work, should therefore be of value to those interested in Comics Studies, Irish Studies, and Art History.“

The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics

Benjamin Woo, Jeremy Stoll (Hgs.)

University Press of Mississippi
286 Seiten
Juli 2021
Verlagsseite

„The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics is the first collection to explicitly examine the production, circulation, and reception of comics from a social-scientific point of view. Designed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue about theory and methods in comics studies, this volume draws on approaches from fields as diverse as sociology, political science, history, folklore, communication studies, and business, among others, to study the social life of comics and graphic novels.
Taking the concept of a “comics world”—that is, the collection of people, roles, and institutions that “produce” comics as they are—as its organizing principle, the book asks readers to attend to the contexts that shape how comics move through societies and cultures. Each chapter explores a specific comics world or particular site where comics meet one of their publics, such as artists and creators; adaptors; critics and journalists; convention-goers; scanners; fans; and comics scholars themselves. Through their research, contributors demonstrate some of the ways that people participate in comics worlds and how the relationships created in these spaces can provide different perspectives on comics and comics studies.
Moving beyond the page, The Comics World explores the complexity of the lived reality of the comics world: how comics and graphic novels matter to different people at different times, within a social space shared with others.“

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.
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Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 5.1 & 2

online im Abonnement
Website

5.2

• Michelle Ann Abate: “’Sometimes My Hand Shakes So Much I Have to Hold My Wrist to Draw’: Charles M. Schulz and Disability”
• Yosa Vidal: “The Aesthetic and Political Economy of Betrayal in Oesterheld’s Two Versions of The Eternaut I”
• Justin Wigard: “’The Fearless Spaceman Spiff, Interplanetary Explorer Extraordinaire’: Parodic Imagination and the Pulp Aesthetic in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes”
• Rik Spanjers, Aimée de Jongh, Kees Ribbens: “’I Am Always Amazed About What I Find Out When I Get on the Ground’: Joe Sacco On, Before, and After the Page”

5.1

• Benjamin Bigelow, Rüdiger Singer: “Introduction: Migration in Twenty-First-Century Documentary Comics”
• Benjamin Bigelow: “Presenting Absence: Migration and Dislocation in Lene Ask’s Dear Rikard (2014)”
• Ning Ma: “Beyond Race: The Monkey King and Creative Polyculturalism in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”
• Elizabeth „Biz“ Nijdam: “Tying Up Loose Ends: The Fabric of Panel Borders in Kate Evans‘ Threads”
• Agnès Schaffauser: “The Wretched of the Sea: Clandestine Immigration and Graphic Artistry in Bessora and Barroux’s Alpha: Abidjan to Gare du Nord”

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 

online im Abonnement
Website

• Emily A. Geest, Ashley R. Knoch, Andrine A. Shufran: „Villainous snakes and heroic butterflies, the moral alignment of animal-themed characters in American superhero comic books“
• N. Yadav: „Whose line is it anyway: graphic anthology drawing the line as a counter to mainstream rape reportage in India“
• Jeffrey A. Brown: „‘I’m too old for this #$&%.’ Old Wolverine and masculinity“
• Anna-Sophie Jürgens, David Tscharke, Jochen Brocks: „From Caligari to Joker: the clown prince of crime’s psychopathic science“
• Philip Smith: „Representations of Israel, literal and allegorical, in X-Men comics“
• Steven W. Holloway, Justina Kaiser, Brian Flota:Re-imagining (black) comic book cataloguing: increasing accessibility through metadata at one university library“
• James Hodapp: „Fashioning Africanfuturism: African comics, Afrofuturism, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Shuri„
• Luis J. Tosina Fernández: „Visual representation of proverbs in comic books and their translation: Asterix as a paradigmatic case“
• Fatemeh Badi-Ozaman, Masoud Sharififar, Mina Zandrahimi: „Analysing the Persian translation of sound effects in comic books by Celotti’s strategies“
• Wajeehah Aayeshah: „Hockey sticks, purple smoke bombs, and empathy: female character representation in Pakistani comics“
• Kalervo A. Sinervo, Ariela Freedman: „Feeling your pain: empathy in comics“
• Raees Calafato, Freda Gudim: „Comics as a multimodal resource and students’ willingness to communicate in Russian“
• Sohini Bera, Rajni Singh: „Appeal for embracing posthumanist perspectives in Orijit Sen’s The River of Stories„
• Harriet Earle: „Traumatic absurdity, palimpsest, and play: A Slaughterhouse-Five case study“
• Natalia Banasik-Jemielniak: „‚Unicorn humour isn’t very subtle.‘ Graphic novels and comics as a potential didactic tool for teaching irony to children: the example of Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and her unicorn„
• Betül Gaye Dinç, Ilgım Veryeri Alaca: „Göbeklitepe and Ecological Thinking: Human/Nature Entanglement in Firat Yasa’s Graphic Novel Tepe (The Hill)“
• Manatchai Amponpeerapan, Jaray Singhakowinta: „Confrontations and exchanges of virtue ethics: a study of dialectical friendship between superman and batman in comic books“
• Sandra Rousseau“ „Of shapes and sounds : identity and Algerian memory in Nawel Louerrad’s graphic novels“
• Bruce Mutard, Stuart Medley, Helen Kara: „Scholarship in action“
• Kyra Kietrys: „Antonio Altarriba’s El ala rota: remembering a woman hidden in ‘the back room of history’“
• Nicholas Werse: „Framing Religious Violence: Exploring the Paths to Faith and Apostasy in Punk Rock Jesus„
• Partha Bhattacharjee, Priyanka Tripathi, Bidisha Pal: „‘The problem of gender violence in India… was not a legal problem, but a cultural problem’: a conversation with comics creator Ram Devineni“

Studies in Comics 11.2

print im Abonnement
Website

• Xosé Pereira Boán:
  ”Forging intragenerational and common memories: Revisiting Paracuellos’s graphic violence in times of confinement”
• Benoît Crucifix: “Jojo, Jimmy and Marie Chairne: What scribbled comics can (not) tell us”
• Keiko Miyajima: “Queering the palate: The erotics and politics of food in Japanese gourmet manga”
• Monica Chiu: “Graphic panelling and the promotion of transnational affiliations in Thien Pham’s Sumo”
• Daniel Pinti: “Panelling without walls: Narrating the border in Barrier”
• Orion Ussner Kidder: “Fire in the jungle: Genocide and colonization in Russell and Pugh’s The Flintstones”
• Amrita Singh: “Photographic silence: Remediating the graphic to visualize migrant experience in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival”
• Christopher A. Crawford, Igor Juricevic: “Understanding pictorial metaphor in comic book covers: A test of the contextual and structural frameworks”
• Chester N. Scoville: “‘She’s practically normal!’: Disability, gender and image in Doom Patrol”
• Dragoş Manea, Mihaela Precup: “‘Who were you crying for?’: Empathy, fantasy and the framing of the perpetrator in Nina Bunjevac’s Bezimena”
• Paul A. Aleixo, Daniel Matkin, Laura Kilby: “What do teachers think about the educational role of comic books?: A qualitative analysis”

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.
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Die Shoah im Comic seit 2000: Erinnern zeichnen

Thomas Merten

De Gruyter
357 Seiten
Mai 2021
Verlagsseite

„Wie erinnern künftige Generationen an die Shoah, wenn die letzten Zeitzeugen gestorben sind? Die Comics der vergangenen Jahre geben Hinweise darauf: Während die Kinder noch versuchen, Anschluss an die nicht mehr selbst erlebte, aber gleichwohl als einschneidend erfahrene Vergangenheit ihrer Eltern herzustellen – und sich davon zu emanzipieren –, beschäftigt sich die Enkelgeneration primär mit der Tatsache, dass sie die Shoah hauptsächlich medial oder aus zweiter Hand erzählt bekommt.
Um die Geschehnisse besser zu verstehen, versuchen die jüngeren Autorinnen und Autoren, das Bezeugen der historischen Ereignisse selbst nachzuempfinden oder versetzen die Handlung gleich gänzlich ins Jetzt – wo die Shoah vor allem als Spuren und Spätfolgen zu ihnen vordringt. So holen sie Vergangenes eindringlich in die Gegenwart und üben ihrerseits Kritik an Darstellungen, die eher Distanz als Nähe zur Shoah erzeugen. In neueren Comics wollen sie nicht mehr nur von einer vermeintlich fernen Vergangenheit erzählen, sondern deren Auswirkungen und Parallelen in der eigenen Lebenswelt verstehen. So besteht die Chance, die Shoah auch anderen zu vermitteln, die keinen persönlichen Bezug zur Geschichte mehr haben können – und damit dem Vergessen etwas entgegenzusetzen.
Diese Arbeit ordnet die Comics in die gegenwärtige Entwicklung ein, liefert eine kurze Geschichte des Sujets „Shoah-Comic“ und entwickelt dazu eine Theorie des erinnernden Comics. Zusätzlich werden Werke von Autorinnen und Autoren der Kinder- und Enkelgeneration untersucht und miteinander verglichen, darunter Comics von Michel Kichka, Bernice Eisenstein, Rutu Modan, Barbara Yelin und Reinhard Kleist.
Eine Spurensuche danach, wie die Nachkommen in Sprechblasen und Panels ihre Rolle im Gefüge der Zeit finden und mit eigenem Wissen, eigenen Deutungen und eigenen Fragen anreichern.“

Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics: The Dream of Three Lifetimes

Peter Cullen Bryan

Palgrave Macmillan
222 Seiten
Mai 2021
Verlagsseite

„This book examines the scope and nature of Donald Duck and his family’s popularity in Germany, in contrast to the diminished role they play in America. This is achieved through examination of the respective fan communities, business practices, and universality of the characters. This work locates and understands the aspects of translation and adaptation that inform the spread of culture that have as yet been underexplored in the context of comic books. It represents a large-scale attempt to incorporate adaptation and translation studies into comics studies, through a lens of fan studies (used to examine both the American and German fan communities, as well as the work of Don Rosa). This work builds on the efforts of other scholars, including Janet Wasko and Illaria Meloni, while expanding the historical understanding of what might be the world’s best-selling comics.“

Politics in the Gutters: American Politicians and Elections in Comic Book Media

Christina M. Knopf

University Press of Mississippi
306 Seiten
Juli 2021
Verlagsseite

„From the moment Captain America punched Hitler in the jaw, comic books have always been political, and whether it is Marvel’s chairman Ike Perlmutter making a campaign contribution to Donald Trump in 2016 or Marvel’s character Howard the Duck running for president during America’s bicentennial in 1976, the politics of comics have overlapped with the politics of campaigns and governance. Pop culture opens avenues for people to declare their participation in a collective project and helps them to shape their understandings of civic responsibility, leadership, communal history, and present concerns.
Politics in the Gutters: American Politicians and Elections in Comic Book Media opens with an examination of campaign comic books used by the likes of Herbert Hoover and Harry S. Truman, follows the rise of political counterculture comix of the 1960s, and continues on to the graphic novel version of the 9/11 Report and the cottage industry of Sarah Palin comics. It ends with a consideration of comparisons to Donald Trump as a supervillain and a look at comics connections to the pandemic and protests that marked the 2020 election year.
More than just escapist entertainment, comics offer a popular yet complicated vision of the American political tableau. Politics in the Gutters considers the political myths, moments, and mimeses, in comic books—from nonfiction to science fiction, superhero to supernatural, serious to satirical, golden age to present day—to consider how they represent, re-present, underpin, and/or undermine ideas and ideals about American electoral politics.“

Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870

David Kunzle

University Press of Mississippi
472 Seiten
Juli 2021
Verlagsseite

„Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847–1870 enters deep into an era of comic history that has been entirely neglected. This buried cache of mid-Victorian graphic humor is marvelously rich in pictorial narratives of all kinds. Author David Kunzle calls this period a “rebirth” because of the preceding long hiatus in use of the new genre, since the Great Age of Caricature (c. 1780–c. 1820) when the comic strip was practiced as a sideline. Suddenly in 1847, a new, post-Töpffer comic strip sparks to life in Britain, mostly in periodicals, and especially in Punch, where all the best artists of the period participated, if only sporadically: Richard Doyle, John Tenniel, John Leech, Charles Keene, and George Du Maurier. Until now, this aspect of the extensive oeuvre of the well-known masters of the new journal cartoon in Punch has been almost completely ignored. Exceptionally, George Cruikshank revived just once in The Bottle, independently, the whole serious, contrasting Hogarthian picture story.
Numerous comic strips and picture stories appeared in periodicals other than Punch by artists who were likewise largely ignored. Like the Punch luminaries, they adopt in semirealistic style sociopolitical subject matter easily accessible to their (lower-)middle-class readership. The topics covered in and out of Punch by these strips and graphic novels range from French enemies King Louis-Philippe and Emperor Napoleon III to farcical treatment of major historical events: the Bayeux tapestry (1848), the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Artists explore a great variety of social types, occupations, and situations such as the emigrant, the tourist, fox hunting and Indian big game hunting, dueling, the forlorn lover, the student, the artist, the toothache, the burglar, the paramilitary volunteer, Darwinian animal metamorphoses, and even nightmares. In Rebirth of the English Comic Strip, Kunzle analyzes these much-neglected works down to the precocious modernist and absurdist scribbles of Marie Duval, Europe’s first female professional cartoonist.“

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.
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Mixed-Race Superheroes

Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins, Eric L. Berlatsky (Hg.)

Rutgers University Press
288 Seiten
April 2021
Verlagsseite

„American culture has long represented mixed-race identity in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, it has been associated with weakness, abnormality, impurity, transgression, shame, and various pathologies; however, it can also connote genetic superiority, exceptional beauty, and special potentiality. This ambivalence has found its way into superhero media, which runs the gamut from Ant-Man and the Wasp’s tragic mulatta villain Ghost to the cinematic depiction of Aquaman as a heroic ‚half-breed.‘
The essays in this collection contend with the multitude of ways that racial mixedness has been presented in superhero comics, films, television, and literature. They explore how superhero media positions mixed-race characters within a genre that has historically privileged racial purity and propagated images of white supremacy. The book considers such iconic heroes as Superman, Spider-Man, and The Hulk, alongside such lesser-studied characters as Valkyrie, Dr. Fate, and Steven Universe. Examining both literal and symbolic representations of racial mixing, this study interrogates how we might challenge and rewrite stereotypical narratives about mixed-race identity, both in superhero media and beyond.“

Alan Moore: A Critical Guide

Jackson Ayres

Bloomsbury
256 Seiten
April 2021
Verlagsseite

„A complete guide to the comics work of the writer Alan Moore, this book helps readers explore one of the genre’s most important, compelling and subversive writers. In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers: Moore’s comics career – from his early work in 2000AD to his breakthrough graphic novels and his later battles with the industry; Moore’s major works – including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Saga of the Swamp Thing and Promethea; key themes and contexts – from Moore’s subversion of the superhero genre and metafictional techniques to his creative collaborations and battles with the industry for creator control; and critical approaches to Moore’s work. The book includes a bibliography of critical work on Moore and discussion questions for classroom use.“

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero

Roy Schwartz

McFarland
374 Seiten
Mai 2021
Verlagsseite

„Superman is the original superhero, an American icon, and arguably the most famous character in the world—and he’s Jewish! Introduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and Joe Shuster, an immigrant. They based their hero’s origin story on Moses, his strength on Samson, his mission on the golem, and his nebbish secret identity on themselves. They made him a refugee fleeing catastrophe on the eve of World War II and sent him to tear Nazi tanks apart nearly two years before the US joined the war. In the following decades, Superman’s mostly Jewish writers, artists, and editors continued to borrow Jewish motifs for their stories, basing Krypton’s past on Genesis and Exodus, its society on Jewish culture, the trial of Lex Luthor on Adolf Eichmann’s, and a future holiday celebrating Superman on Passover. A fascinating journey through comic book lore, American history, and Jewish tradition, this book examines the entirety of Superman’s career from 1938 to date, and is sure to give readers a newfound appreciation for the Mensch of Steel!“

The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum

Daniel Worden (Hg.)

University Press of Mississippi
318 Seiten
Mai 2021
Verlagsseite

„From his work on underground comix like Zap and Weirdo, to his cultural prominence, R. Crumb is one of the most renowned comics artists in the medium’s history. His work, beginning in the 1960s, ranges provocatively and controversially over major moments, tensions, and ideas in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the counterculture and the emergence of the modern environmentalist movement, to racial politics and sexual liberation.
While Crumb’s early work refined the parodic, over-the-top, and sexually explicit styles we associate with underground comix, he also pioneered the comics memoir, through his own autobiographical and confessional comics, as well as in his collaborations. More recently, Crumb has turned to long-form, book-length works, such as his acclaimed Book of Genesis and Kafka. Over the long arc of his career, Crumb has shaped the conventions of underground and alternative comics, autobiographical comics, and the “graphic novel. ” And, through his involvement in music, animation, and documentary film projects, Crumb is a widely recognized persona, an artist who has defined the vocation of the cartoonist in a widely influential way.
The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum is a groundbreaking collection on the work of a pioneer of underground comix and a fixture of comics culture. Ranging from art history and literary studies, to environmental studies and religious history, the essays included in this volume cast Crumb’s work as formally sophisticated and complex in its representations of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and history, while also charting Crumb’s role in underground comix and the ways in which his work has circulated in the art museum.“