Monitor is an irregularly published overview of publications from the previous six months that may be of relevance to comics studies scholars. The introductory texts are the respective publishers’. Do you have suggestions or information on new releases that have been overlooked and should be introduced on our website? Please let us know via email: redaktion@comicgesellschaft.de.
→ See previous Monitor posts.

Medieval Spaces in Comics: Affect and Ideology

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Elizabeth Allyn Woock
Palgrave Macmillan
November 2024
Publisher’s website

“This book proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing and discussing narrative space in comics. Building on Mieke Bal’s phenomenological approach to cultural analysis (2002), Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1996), and Geraint D’Arcy’s use of the mise en scène to describe space in the comics format (2020), this book layers in a nuanced approach to the depiction of medieval environments through affect theory and poetics to interrogate the staging of ideas which are associated with the medieval period. Considering the action, setting, and story – as well as affect, atmosphere, and mood – medieval space is contextualized as an ethically complex poetic image. This book also explores the communicative possibilities of the comics format, and seeks to show rather than just tell the methodologies of space in comics-based research through illustrating key sections of the text.”

Innovations in Digital Comics: A Popular Revolution

Elements in Publishing and Book Culture

Francesca Benatti
Cambridge University Press
October 2024
Publisher’s website

“Le premier ouvrage scientifique traçant une histoire des créatrices de bandes dessinées pour une (re)valorisation du matrimoine.
Peut-on encore raconter l’histoire de la bande dessinée sans parler des femmes qui y ont contribué ? Pourtant, jusqu’à tout récemment encore, les « Maîtres du neuvième art » étaient des hommes, occultant ainsi l’apport des créatrices.
L’ambition de cet ouvrage est de restituer aux créatrices de BD la place qui leur revient, et de repenser l’histoire du neuvième art en s’attachant à des trajectoires, des sujets et des œuvres silenciés. S’appuyant sur les recherches menées par le groupe de travail « Les Bréchoises » en 2020-2022, le livre offre de multiples ressources permettant de dégager les contours d’un matrimoine de la BD en Europe et dans les Amériques, depuis le XIXe siècle jusqu’à la période contemporaine. Consacré à l’évolution esthétique, discursive, politique et genrée, il met ainsi en lumière le travail des coloristes, dessinatrices, éditrices et scénaristes ayant contribué à ce médium. Leur présence dans le champ professionnel de la BD en France, en Espagne, au Canada, aux États-Unis, en Allemagne, en Argentine, au Mexique, au Brésil et en Belgique constitue un héritage vaste et complexe dont les composantes, contrairement aux idées reçues, se comptent par centaines. Dès lors, l’ouvrage invite à relire l’histoire de cette forme d’expression dans une approche inclusive et transversale qui traverse les siècles et les espaces.”

Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States

Michelle Ann Abate
Rutgers University Press
September 2024
Publisher’s website

“What do The Family Circus, Ziggy, and The Far Side have in common? They are all single-panel comics, a seemingly simple form that cartoonists have used in vastly different ways.
Singular Sensations is the first book-length critical study to examine this important but long-neglected mode of cartoon art. Michelle Ann Abate provides an overview of how the American single-panel comic evolved, starting with Thomas Nast’s political cartoons and R.F. Outcault’s groundbreaking Yellow Kid series in the nineteenth century. In subsequent chapters, she explores everything from wry New Yorker cartoons to zany twenty-first-century comics like Bizarro. Offering an important corrective to the canonical definition of comics as “sequential art,” Abate reveals the complexity, artistry, and influence of the single-panel art form.
Engaging with a wide range of historical time periods, sociopolitical subjects, and aesthetic styles, Singular Sensations demonstrates how comics as we know and love them would not be the same without single-panel titles. Abate’s book brings the single-panel comic out of the margins and into the foreground.”

British Newspaper Strips: A Contextual History

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Adam Twycross
Palgrave Macmillan
August 2024
Publisher’s website

“This book explores the history and development of the British daily newspaper strip. It considers such strips within their political, commercial and societal contexts and fills in a crucial section of publishing history that has been largely overlooked by both comics and newspaper studies to date. Beginning with an examination of the role of the image within British publishing in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the book moves on to explore the arrival and development of the first daily strips. It considers the links that bound these strips to surrounding cultural forms, their relationship to their host newspapers, and their position within the wider structures of the emerging popular press. Subsequent chapters cover a range of topics including the impact of the world wars, the anti-comics campaigns of the 1940s and 50s, and how changes to British publishing and wider society shaped the newspaper strips of the final decades of the twentieth century. Culminating with a discussion of the way in which strips became established within the broadsheet press from the 1960s, the book builds to provide a detailed overview of the twentieth century development of this most neglected cultural form.”

Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books: Red Ink in the Gutter

Routledge Advances in Comics Studies

By John Darowski, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Hgs.)
Routledge
August 2024
Publisher’s website

“This volume explores how horror comic books have negotiated with the social and cultural anxieties framing a specific era and geographical space.
Paying attention to academic gaps in comics’ scholarship, these chapters engage with the study of comics from varying interdisciplinary perspectives, such as Marxism; posthumanism; and theories of adaptation, sociology, existentialism, and psychology. Without neglecting the classical era, the book presents case studies ranging from the mainstream comics to the independents, simultaneously offering new critical insights on zones of vacancy within the study of horror comic books while examining a global selection of horror comics from countries such as India (City of Sorrows), France (Zombillénium), Spain (Creepy), Italy (Dylan Dog), and Japan (Tanabe Gou’s Manga Adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft), as well as the United States.
One of the first books centered exclusively on close readings of an under-studied field, this collection will have an appeal to scholars and students of horror comics studies, visual rhetoric, philosophy, sociology, media studies, pop culture, and film studies. It will also appeal to anyone interested in comic books in general and to those interested in investigating intricacies of the horror genre.”

Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics

Daniel Worden
Ohio State University Press
August 2024
Publisher’s website

“In Petrochemical Fantasies, Daniel Worden reveals the entwined history of comics and fossil fuels in the United States. From the 1840s to the present, comics have depicted the power, pollution, and rapid expansion of energy systems—especially the explosive growth of coal and oil. In the 1930s, some of the first comic books were the gas station giveaways Gulf Funny Weekly and Standard Oil Comics. And in recent years, comics have become one of the major sites for visualizing life after oil, a striking reversal of the medium’s early boosterism.
Surveying the work of acclaimed artists such as Nell Brinkley, George Herriman, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, and R. F. Outcault and recovering little-known works, Worden advances a new history of American comics in the Anthropocene. From late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editorial cartoons and superhero comics that visualize our modern energy culture to contemporary comics grappling with climate crises, Petrochemical Fantasies places comics, environmental humanities, and energy studies in conversation with each other to unearth the crucial but overlooked history of comics’ place in US energy culture.”

Construire un Matrimoine de la BD: Créations, mobilisations et transmissions des femmes dans le neuvième art, en Europe et en Amérique

Marys Renné Hertiman, Camille de Singly (Hgs.)
Les presses du réel
June 2024
Publisher’s website

“Le premier ouvrage scientifique traçant une histoire des créatrices de bandes dessinées pour une (re)valorisation du matrimoine.
Peut-on encore raconter l’histoire de la bande dessinée sans parler des femmes qui y ont contribué ? Pourtant, jusqu’à tout récemment encore, les « Maîtres du neuvième art » étaient des hommes, occultant ainsi l’apport des créatrices.
L’ambition de cet ouvrage est de restituer aux créatrices de BD la place qui leur revient, et de repenser l’histoire du neuvième art en s’attachant à des trajectoires, des sujets et des œuvres silenciés. S’appuyant sur les recherches menées par le groupe de travail « Les Bréchoises » en 2020-2022, le livre offre de multiples ressources permettant de dégager les contours d’un matrimoine de la BD en Europe et dans les Amériques, depuis le XIXe siècle jusqu’à la période contemporaine. Consacré à l’évolution esthétique, discursive, politique et genrée, il met ainsi en lumière le travail des coloristes, dessinatrices, éditrices et scénaristes ayant contribué à ce médium. Leur présence dans le champ professionnel de la BD en France, en Espagne, au Canada, aux États-Unis, en Allemagne, en Argentine, au Mexique, au Brésil et en Belgique constitue un héritage vaste et complexe dont les composantes, contrairement aux idées reçues, se comptent par centaines. Dès lors, l’ouvrage invite à relire l’histoire de cette forme d’expression dans une approche inclusive et transversale qui traverse les siècles et les espaces.”

From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich: The Materiality of Cheap Comics

Neale Barnholden
University Press of Mississippi
June 2024
Publisher’s website

“Between the 1930s and the invention of the internet, American comics reached readers in a few distinct physical forms: the familiar monthly stapled pamphlet, the newspaper comics section, bubblegum wrappers, and bound books. From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich: The Materiality of Cheap Comics places the history of four representative comics—Watchmen, Uncle Scrooge, Richie Rich, and Fleer Funnies—in the larger contexts of book history, children’s culture, and consumerism to understand the roles that comics have played as very specific kinds of books. While comics have received increasing amounts of scholarly attention over the past several decades, their material form is a neglected aspect of how creators, corporations, and readers have constructed meaning inside and around narratives.
Neale Barnholden traces the unusual and surprising histories of comics ranging from the most acclaimed works to literal garbage, analyzing how the physical objects containing comics change the meaning of those comics. For example, Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge comics were gradually salvaged by a fan-driven project, an evolution that is evident when considering their increasingly expensive forms. Similarly, Watchmen has been physically made into the epitome of “prestigious graphic novel” by the DC Comics corporation. On the other hand, Harvey Comics’ Richie Rich is typically misunderstood as a result of its own branding, while Fleer Funnies uses its inextricable association with bubblegum to offer unexpectedly sophisticated meanings. Examining the bibliographical histories of each title, Barnholden demonstrates how the materiality of consumer culture suggests meanings to comics texts beyond the narratives.”

Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland

Ewa Stańczyk
University Press of Mississippi
June 2024
Publisher’s website

“Antisemitic caricatures had existed in Polish society since at least the mid-nineteenth century. But never had the devastating impacts of this imagery been fully realized or so blatantly apparent than on the eve of the Second World War. In Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland, scholar Ewa Stańczyk explores how illustrators conceived of Jewish people in satirical drawing and reflected on the burning political questions of the day. Incorporating hundreds of cartoons, satirical texts, and newspaper articles from the 1930s, Stańczyk investigates how a visual culture that was essentially hostile to Jews penetrated deep and wide into Polish print media. In her sensitive analysis of these sources, the first of this kind in English, the author examines how major satirical magazines intervened in the ongoing events and contributed to the racialized political climate of the time.
Paying close attention to the antisemitic tropes that were both local and global, Stańczyk reflects on the role of pictorial humor in the transmission of visual antisemitism across historical and geographical borders. As she discusses the communities of artists, publishers, and political commentators who made up the visual culture of the day, Stańczyk tells a captivating story of people who served the antisemitic cause, and those who chose to oppose it.”

Écouter la bande dessinée

Benoît Glaude
Les Impressions Nouvelles
May 2024
Publisher’s website

“Lire une bande dessinée c’est tout à la fois la regarder, la manipuler, la sentir… et l’entendre, même dans une soi-disant « lecture silencieuse ».
Mais avez-vous déjà entendu raconter une bande dessinée à voix haute ? Ceux qui lisent parfois des livres à des enfants se douteront qu’il ne s’agit pas d’une expérience hors du commun. À côté de la lecture partagée, on connaît des fictions sonores jouées à plusieurs voix, avec musiques et bruitages, adaptées de bandes dessinées. Du 78 tours à la Lunii, en passant par le livre-disque, un certain nombre d’objets de la culture enfantine rendent ces expériences audio réitérables à volonté.
Aujourd’hui, les séries audio en streaming et les dramatiques radio en podcasts, comme les lectures publiques lors de festivals, performent la bande dessinée pour des publics de tout âge. Tandis que le son cherche sa place dans la bande dessinée numérique, la bande dessinée trouve la sienne dans l’offre florissante des livres et séries audio.
Cet ouvrage propose d’écouter ces mises en voix, en se plongeant dans leur histoire, des années 1930 à nos jours.”

Shaolin Brew: Race, Comics, and the Evolution of the Superhero

Troy D. Smith
University Press of Mississippi
May 2024
Publisher’s website

“Shaolin Brew: Race, Comics, and the Evolution of the Superhero looks at how the comic book industry developed from a white perspective and how minority characters were and are viewed through a stereotypical white gaze. Further, the book explores how voices of color have launched a shift in the industry, taking nonwhite characters who were originally viewed through a white lens and situating them outside the framework of whiteness. The financial success of Blaxploitation and Kung Fu films in the early 1970s led to major comics publishers creating, for the first time, Black and Asian superhero characters who headlined their own comics. The introduction of Black and Asian main characters, who previously only served as guest stars or sidekicks, launched a new kind of engagement between comics companies and minority characters and readers. However, scripted as they were by white writers, these characters were mired in stereotypes.
Author Troy D. Smith focuses on Asian, Black, and Latinx representation in the comic industry and how it has evolved over the years. Smith explores topics that include Orientalism, whitewashing, Black respectability politics, the model minority myth, and political controversies facing fandoms. In particular, Smith examines how fans take the superheroes they grew up with—such as Luke Cage, Black Lightning, and Shang Chi—and turn them into the characters they wished they had as children. Shaolin Brew delves into the efforts of fans of color who urged creators to make these characters more realistic. This refining process increased as more writers and artists of color broke into the industry, bringing their own perspectives to the characters. As many of these characters transitioned from page to screen, a new generation of writers, artists, and readers have cooperated to evolve one-dimensional stereotypes into multifaceted, dynamic heroes.”