Hellboy’s World:
Comics and Monsters on the Margins

Scott Bukatman
University of California Press
280 pages
ISBN 978-0-5202-8804-1 (Paperback)
~$ 24,95
April 2016

Publisher’s page
Hellboy, Mike Mignola’s famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboy’s World shows how our engagement with Hellboy’s world is a highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality. Scott Bukatman’s dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened “adventure of reading” in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader’s imagination to inhabit. Drawing upon other media—including children’s books, sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and illuminated manuscripts—Bukatman reveals the mechanics of creating a world on the page. He also demonstrates the pleasurable and multiple complexities of the reader’s experience, invoking the riotous colors of comics that elude rationality and control and delving into shared fictional universes and occult detection, the horror genre and the evocation of the sublime, and the place of abstraction in Mignola’s art. Monsters populate the world of Hellboy comics, but Bukatman argues that comics are themselves little monsters, unruly sites of sensory and cognitive pleasures that exist, happily, on the margins. The book is not only a treat for Hellboy fans, but it will entice anyone interested in the medium of comics and the art of reading.

Canadian Graphic:
Picturing Life Narratives:

Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley (eds.)
WLU Press
320 pages
ISBN 978-1-77112-179-8 (Paperback)
~$ 29,99
May 2016

Publisher’s page
Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives presents critical essays on contemporary Canadian e role of graphic life narratives in reimagining the national past, including Indigenous–settler relations, both world wars, and Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.

Pioniere des Comic:
Eine andere Avantgarde

Alexander Braun, Max Hollein, and David Currier (eds.)
Hatje Cantz Verlag
256 pages
ISBN 978-3-7757-4110-1
~€ 35,00
June 2016

Publisher’s page
Comics entstanden um 1897 in Form von farbigen Sonntagsbeilagen in den großen amerikanischen Tageszeitungen. Sie erreichten als erstes bebildertes Massenmedium zig Millionen Leser pro Tag und setzten sich sofort an die Spitze der Unterhaltungsindustrie. Lange wurde übersehen, wie innovativ und experimentell die frühen Comic-Pioniere waren und dass sich ihre Arbeiten häufig auf Augenhöhe mit der künstlerischen Avantgarde der Zeit befanden. Winsor McCay nahm ab 1905 den Surrealismus vorweg, so wie George Herriman in Krazy Kat ab 1913 Aspekte des Absurden Theaters etablierte. Cliff Sterretts Szenarien der späten 1920er-Jahre erinnern an expressionistische Stummfilme, während Frank O. King mit Gasoline Alley das Erzählen in Echtzeit probierte. Lyonel Feininger nicht zu vergessen, der 1906/07 mit zwei Comicserien seinen Weg zur künstlerischen Unabhängigkeit beschritt.

Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism

Paul Young
Rutgers University Press
256 pages
ISBN 978-0-8135-6381-7 (Paperback)
~$ 27,95
June 2016

Publisher’s page
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, writer-artist Frank Miller turned Daredevil from a tepid-selling comic into an industry-wide success story, doubling its sales within three years. Lawyer by day and costumed vigilante by night, the character of Daredevil was the perfect vehicle for the explorations of heroic ideals and violence that would come to define Miller’s work. Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism is both a rigorous study of Miller’s artistic influences and innovations and a reflection on how his visionary work on Daredevil impacted generations of comics publishers, creators, and fans. Paul Young explores the accomplishments of Miller the writer, who fused hardboiled crime stories with superhero comics, while reimagining Kingpin (a classic Spider-Man nemesis), recuperating the half-baked villain Bullseye, and inventing a completely new kind of Daredevil villain in Elektra. Yet, he also offers a vivid appreciation of the indelible panels drawn by Miller the artist, taking a fresh look at his distinctive page layouts and lines.

Good Grief! Children and Comics: A Collection of Companion Essays

Michelle Ann Abate and Joe Sutliff Sanders (eds.)
The Ohio State University Libraries
141 pages
DOI: 10.18061/1811/77539
Free Access
June 2016

Publisher’s page
With original essays examining everything from Little Nemo to Calvin and Hobbes, from Batman to the Lumberjanes, from Bone to Maus, this collection of companion essays is your online introduction to the larger questions and contexts of the groundbreaking new exhibit at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (part of the Ohio State University Libraries).

Manga Vision:
Cultural and Communicative Perspectives

Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou and Cathy Sell (eds.), art by Queenie Chan
Monash University Publishing
302 pages
ISBN 978-1-925377-06-4 (Paperback)
~$ 49,95
June 2016

Publisher’s page
Manga Vision examines cultural and communicative aspects of Japanese comics, drawing together scholars from Japan, Australia and Europe working in areas as diverse as cultural studies, linguistics, education, music, art, anthropology, and translation, to explore the influence of manga in Japan and worldwide via translation, OEL manga and fan engagement. The volume includes a mix of theoretical, methodological, empirical and professional practice-based chapters, examining manga from both academic and artistic perspectives. Manga Vision also provides the reader with a multimedia experience, featuring original artwork by Australian manga artist Queenie Chan, cosplay photographs, and an online supplement offering musical compositions inspired by manga, and downloadable manga-related teaching resources.