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.

EcoComix: Essays on the Environment in Comics and Graphic Novels

Sidney I. Dobrin (ed.)

McFarland
189 pages
September 2020
Publisher’s website

“Exploring image and imagination in conjunction with natural environments, the animal, and the human, this collection of essays turns the ecocritical and ecocompositional gaze upon comic studies. The comic form has a long tradition of representing environmental rhetoric. Through discussions of comics including A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, We3, Concrete, and Black Orchid, these essays bring the rich work of ecological criticism into dialogue with the multi-faceted landscape of comics, graphic novels, web-comics, cartoons, and animation. The contributors ask not only how nature and environment are portrayed in these texts but also how these textual forms inform how we come to know nature and environment–or what we understand those terms to represent. Interdisciplinary in approach, this collection welcomes diverse approaches that integrate not only ecocriticism and comics studies, but animal studies, posthumanism, ecofeminism, queer ecology, semiotics, visual rhetoric and communication, ecoseeing, image-text studies, space and spatial theories, writing studies, media ecology, ecomedia, and other methodological approaches.”

Wonder Women and Bad Girls: Superheroine and Supervillainess Archetypes in Popular Media

Valerie Estelle Frankel

McFarland
237 pages
October 2020
Publisher’s website

“Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, Shuri, and Black Widow. These four characters portray very different versions of women: the superheroine, the abuse victim, the fourth wave princess, and the spy, respectively. In this in-depth analysis of female characters in superhero media, the author begins by identifying ten eras of superhero media defined by the way they portray women. Following this, the various archetypes of superheroines are classified into four categories: boundary crossers, good girls, outcasts, and those that reclaim power. From Golden Age comics through today’s hottest films, heroines have been surprisingly assertive, diverse, and remarkable in this celebration of all the archetypes.”

Spanish Graphic Narratives: Recent Developments in Sequential Art

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Collin McKinney, David F. Richter (eds.)

Palgrave Macmillan
315 pages
December 2020
Publisher’s website

“Spanish Graphic Narratives examines the most recent thematic and critical developments in Spanish sequential art, with essays focusing on comics published in Spain since 2007. Considering Spain’s rich literary history, contentious Civil War (1936–39), oppressive Francisco Franco regime (1939–75), and progressive contemporary politics, both the recent graphic novel production in Spain and the thematic focal points of the essays here are greatly varied. Topics of particular interest include studies on the subject of historical and personal memory; representations of gender, race, and identity; and texts dealing with Spanish customs, traditions, and the current political situation in Spain. These overarching topics share many points of contact one with another, and this interrelationship (as well as the many points of divergence) is illustrative of the uniqueness, diversity, and paradoxes of literary and cultural production in modern-day Spain, thus illuminating our understanding of Spanish national consciousness in the present day.”

Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts: Marvel, Diversity and the 21st Century Superhero

Jeffrey A. Brown
Rutgers University Press
180 pages
January 2021
Publisher’s website

“Marvel is one of the hottest media companies in the world right now, and its beloved superheroes are all over film, television and comic books. Yet rather than simply cashing in on the popularity of iconic white male characters like Peter Parker, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, Marvel has consciously diversified its lineup of superheroes, courting controversy in the process.
Panthers, Hulks, and Ironhearts offers the first comprehensive study of how Marvel has reimagined what a superhero might look like in the twenty-first century. It examines how they have revitalized older characters like Black Panther and Luke Cage, while creating new ones like Latina superhero Miss America. Furthermore, it considers the mixed fan responses to Marvel’s recasting of certain “legacy heroes,” including a Pakistani-American Ms. Marvel, a Korean-American Hulk, and a whole rainbow of multiverse Spidermen.
If the superhero comic is a quintessentially American creation, then how might the increasing diversification of Marvel’s superhero lineup reveal a fundamental shift in our understanding of American identity? This timely study answers those questions and considers what Marvel’s comics, TV series, and films might teach us about stereotyping, Orientalism, repatriation, whitewashing, and identification.”

Heroes Masked and Mythic: Echoes of Ancient Archetypes in Comic Book Characters

Christopher Wood
McFarland
264 pages
January 2021
Publisher’s website

“Epic battles, hideous monsters and a host of petty gods–the world of Classical mythology continues to fascinate and inspire. Heroes like Herakles, Achilles and Perseus have influenced Western art and literature for centuries, and today are reinvented in the modern superhero. What does Iron Man have to do with the Homeric hero Odysseus? How does the African warrior Memnon compare with Marvel’s Black Panther? Do DC’s Wonder Woman and Xena the Warrior Princess reflect the tradition of Amazon women such as Penthesileia? How does the modern superhero’s journey echo that of the epic warrior? With fresh insight into ancient Greek texts and historical art, this book examines modern superhero archetypes and iconography in comics and film as the crystallization of the hero’s journey in the modern imagination.”

The Journal Monitor is a subcategory of the regular Monitor. It is an irregularly published overview of issues of international journals on comics studies as well as special issues on corresponding topics. The introductory texts and/or tables of contents come from the respective websites.
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.

The Comics Grid 10

online (open access)
Website

• Candida Rifkind: The Elements of a Life: Lauren Redniss’s Graphic Biography of Marie Curie
• Susan Bond: “It’s Showtime, Synergy!”: Musical Sequences in Jem and the Holograms
• Miranda Corcoran: Bleeding Panels, Leaking Forms: Reading the Abject in Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods (2014)
• Mark Anthony Giancaspro: Picture-Perfect or Potentially Perilous? Assessing the Validity of ‘Comic Contracts’
• Aislinn O’Connell: Generic Super Heroes: Can They Exist?
• Christian Mehrstam: Silver Lining: The Emblematic Exemplum of Silver Surfer #40–43 (1990)
• Harriet Earle: The Politics of Lace in Kate Evans’ Threads: From the Refugee Crisis (2017)
• Jamie Michaels: Graphic Backgrounds: Collective Dissociative Trauma in Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds (2007)

European Comic Art 13.2

online (via subscription)
Website

• Laurence Grove, Anne Magnussen, Ann Miller: Introduction: Mise en abyme
• Renaud Chavanne: The Bunker and the Desert: On the Motif of the Cube-panel in Inside Mœbius
• Thierry Groensteen: Five Years of Editing Les Cahiers de la Bande Dessinée
• Francisca Lladó: El Perdón y la furia and José de Ribera’s Journey from Faith to Magic: Historical Fiction by Altarriba and Keko
• Fredrik Strömberg: Schemata in the Graphic Novel Persepolis: Accommodation, Combination, Integration

inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 4.2

online (via subscription)
Website

• Eli Boonin-Vail: “The Body of the Nation”: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther and the Black Literary Tradition
• Madeline B. Gangnes, Kevin Cooley: Drawn to Reconcile: The Queer Reparative Journey of ElfQuest
• Sam Cowling: Rethinking Racial Ontology through McDuffie’s Deathlok
• Frederik Byrn Køhlert: “A Grotesque, Incurable Disease”: Whiteness as Illness in Gabby Schulz’s Sick
• Maaheen Ahmed: From the Archives: The Alain Van Passen Collection: At the Crossroads of Comics Collecting and Critique

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

online (open access)
Website

• Michelle Ann Abate: Ziggy was here: Tom Wilson’s newspaper comic, World War II, and the role of graffiti in sequential art
• Namrata Dey Roy, Mary Helen O’Connor: Rolling Blackouts: voicing the other micro-narratives
• Subir Dey, Prasad Bokil: The narrative functions of sound-symbolic words in comics and graphic novels
• Li-Chi Chen, Eryk Hajndrych: Comicbook characters’ facial features and actions and movements as two sources of humour: the case of Fullmetal Alchemist
• Bancha Rattanamathuwong: Queering the harem: queerness in reverse harem manga and anime
• Purba Chakraborty, Rashmi Gaur: Hermeneutic flashbacks: building the narrative space in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde
• A.J. Paylor: Comics and the Situationist International
• Katharina Wiedlack: Ballerina with PTSD: imagining Russia in contemporary Black Widow comics
• Franco Vitella: Comics, the library has those: how public libraries can use graphic novels to foster reading communities
• Suhaan Kiran Mehta: Colouring superheroes: Hue, saturation, and value in Ms.Marvel: Kamala Khan #1 and DC’s Detective Comics Annual #12 and Batman Annual #28
• Andy Draycott: Iconoclasm, iconophobia, and graphic novel adaptations of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress
• Nicoletta Mandolini: Let’s go graphic. Mapping Italian graphic novels on gender-based violence
• Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Sweetha Saji: Capturing alternate realities: visual metaphors and patient perspectives in graphic narratives on mental illness
• Abhilasha Gusain, Smita Jha: Trauma, Memory, History and its Counter Narration in Thi Bui’s Graphic Memoir The Best We Could Do
• Nicholas Holm: Excalibur, aesthetics and an other Britain: from whimsical tradition to tabloid aesthetic
• Santiago Parga Linares: Proustian curiosity and the archive: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
• Phillip Joy, Stéphanie E. M. Gauvin, Megan Aston, Matthew Numer: Reflections in comics: the views of queer artists in producing body image comics and how their work can improve health
• Ewa Stańczyk: Szaber in post-war Poland: satirising plunder in Polish magazine cartoons (1945-1946)

Comics and Culture 5*

print (via subscription)
Website

• Paul Levitz: French Comics in America
• Jean-Paul Gabilliet: US Comics in France: A Brief Historical Survey
• Paul Gravett: “Yeah, Well, They Love Jerry Lewis, Don’t They?”: The French Connections That Helped Bring BD to the USA
• Sylvain Lesage: Angoulême and the Ninth Art: From Comics Fandom to Cultural Policies
• Pascal Ory: Mickey Go Home! The De-Americanization of Bande Dessinée (1945-1950)
• Nicolas Labarre: “The Illustrated Fantasy Magazine from France.” From Métal Hurlant to Heavy Metal
• Benoît Crucifix, Sylvain Lesage: (À Suivre) Overseas: The Transatlantic Circulation of the French Graphic Novel

*The ComFor editorial board regrets the lack of diversity in this publication. We endeavour to cover the entire spectrum of comics studies, report in a neutral way and keep the editorial selection process to a minimum. But we are also aware of the problematic structures that shape our academic research environment and that frequently lead to a lower visibility of female comics scholars as well as those with marginalised identities in general. We know that this imbalance is often not intended by the editors / organisers and we do not want to imply this in any way. But nonetheless, we would like to draw attention to it to raise awareness for this problem.