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Hybrid lecture series “Learning about the Shoah through Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling”

Termin:
2024 10 08 18-20 Uhr - 2025 01 28

In the winter semester starting next week, Daniel Stein is organizing a lecture series in Siegen together with Jens Aspelmeier and Jana Mikota on the topic of “Learning about the Shoah through Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling – Transnational Remembrance in Graphic Literature”. It will focus on comics and graphic literature, but also on children’s books. Other ComFor members such as Ole Frahm and Ralf Palandt will also be giving talks. All sessions take place on Tuesdays from 6-8 pm. If you are interested in attending individual sessions or the entire lecture series digitally, you are highly welcome to do so by registering through e-mail at mikota (ät) germanistik.uni-siegen.de.

To the lecture series page

“Comics | Histories” published in open access as the first volume of the new series

Comics | HistoriesComics | Histories: Texts, Methods, Resources

Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Felix Giesa, Christina Meyer (eds.)
Rombach
September 2024
259 pages
eBook ISBN 978-3-98858-056-6 (Open Access)
Print ISBN 978-3-98858-055-9

The first volume of Rombach’s new comic studies research series “Comics | Histories” has just been published under the same cover title, edited by Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Felix Giesa, and Christina Meyer. The publication with a total of 10 articles in the sections “Re-Reading Punch Magazine”, “(Re-)Productions”, “War [in] Comics”, and “Periodization, Canonization, Digitization” can now be ordered free of charge as an open access download.

Blurbs:

“This edited study is the first book in a new series of publications which aims to revise the wide spectrum of what are now regarded as comics (including caricatures, cartoons, graphic novels, etc.), broadening the view of Comics Studies, not only retrospectively but also prospectively at a time when modern media identities are dissolving. While there are already significant numbers of publications that foreground representations of history in comics, our edited study (and the new series) seeks to highlight contributions to history by comics in particular. In addition to that, the book (and the series) aims to address comics from a transnational, yet culturally situated, perspective, without privileging national histories of the medium in the narrower sense, i.e., as confined to the North American, Franco-Belgian or Japanese publication markets. The contributions to this first book in the series not only address questions relating to practices of canonisation, periodisation and digitisation, but also provide historical perspectives on a variety of humorous magazines and newspapers and deal with issues relating to adapting and revising comics in different parts of the world and in different cultures. The contributors to this book include a number of international scholars working in different areas and disciplines, such as literary and cultural studies, me-dia studies, history, children’s and youth literature research, computational studies and digital humani-ties. The book is divided into four parts, entitled ‘Re-Reading Punch Magazines’, ‘(Re-)Productions’, ‘War [in] Comics’ and ‘Periodization, Canonization, Digitization’ respectively. The editors of the book hope that the collection of (ongoing) research projects will spark readers’ curiosity and ignite their ambition to ex-plore comics|histories in multifarious ways. The newly launched series is looking for future projects that will also focus on the historiography of Comics Studies, in other words, inter- and transdisciplinary research on comics as objects of analysis in themselves. Multidisciplinary assessments of the field and its practices in terms of research and publishing and author- and editorship promise new insights into processes of knowledge formation, as well as the power relations involved.”

Publisher’s page

Collection “Comics & Intersektionalität” published as vol. 3 of Comicstudien (De Gruyter)

Comics und IntersektionalitätComics & Intersektionalität

Anna Beckmann, Kalina Kupczyńska, Marie Schröer, and Véronique Sina (eds.)
De Gruyter
September 2024
337 pages
eBook ISBN 9783110799385
gebunden ISBN 9783110799293

Volume 3 of De Gruyter’s new Comic Studies series has just been published under the title “Comics & Intersectionality” [Comics & Intersectionality], fortunately also directly as open access. The editors are Anna Beckmann, Kalina Kupczyńska, Marie Schröer, and Véronique Sina. The contributors include also many other ComFor members such as Daniel Stein, Sylvia Kesper-Biermann, Ole Frahm, Marina Rauchenbacher, Katharina Serles, Dorothee Marx, Annemarie Klimke, and Katharina Hülsmann.

Blurbs:
“This volume expands on existing approaches in German-language comics studies by taking a deliberate intersectional perspective. The thematic core of the volume is a scholarly, interdisciplinary exploration of various forms of multidimensional discrimination and exclusion in the comic medium..”

Publisher’s page

19th ComFor-annual conference 2024: „Graphic Medicine“ in Groningen

Termin:
2024 10 23 14:30 Uhr - 2024 10 25

From October 23-25, 2024, the 19th annual conference of the Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) will take place at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The event is organized by Janina Wildfeuer and Barbara Postema. Keynote speakers are Elisabeth El Refaie (Cardiff University), Irmela Krüger-Fürhoff (Freie Universität Berlin) and Erin La Cour (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

“Initiated in 2007, the area of study called ‘Graphic Medicine’ has developed into an impressive field of research that is today broadly understood as “the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare” (Czerwiec et al. 2015). As a discipline, it understands itself as an ‘emerging area of interdisciplinary academic study’ including both theoretical and methodological developments from several disciplines connected to comics studies as well as practical insights and applications from medical practitioners in the healthcare context.

 The conference would like to bring these theoretical and methodological developments as well as practical insights and applications together and offer a fruitful place for discussion and critical evaluation of the discipline and its most recent developments and insights. We aim at opening the conference again for an international context with topics such as: Graphic Medicine for Scholarship, Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narrative; Graphic Pathography; Iconography of Illness; practical applications of Graphic Medicine.

Weiterlesen: Tagungsprogramm

Journal Monitor 18: New Publications on Comic Books

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.


Comicalités:
Dessins d’enfance dans la bande dessinée

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

  • Benoît Crucifix et Maaheen Ahmed: “Logiques d’interaction entre le dessin d’enfant et la bande dessinée”
  • Dragana Radanović, Roel Vande Winkel, Nancy Vansieleghem: “You Draw Like a Child! Interrogating Aetonormative Tendencies in Imitations of Children’s Drawings in Graphic Narratives”
  • Carol Tilley: “The Open Road for Boys Cartooning Contests: A Prosopography”
  • Aleksandar Zograf: “Dečije Novine. From School Magazine to Major Comics Publisher”
  • Breixo Harguindey: “Les premiers psychopédagogues et la bande dessinée. L’expérience de Hanns Guck-in-Die-Luft aux États-Unis et en Allemagne”
  • Véronique Blanchard et Mathias Gardet: “« Dessinez votre vie en 6-8 cases ». La bande dessinée expertisée par la justice des enfants (1945-1960)”
  • Xavier Girard: “Norbert Moutier, Collection Aventures. L’enfance et la sérialité à l’œuvre”
  • Johanna Schipper: “Venir aux mondes : mes premières héroïnes de bande dessinée”
  • Maël Rannou: “Bande-dessiner avant de savoir lire, une exploration d’archives personnelles”

 

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics  15.4

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

  • Dimitris Asimakoulas: “Your translated memory or mine? Re-membering graphic novels in performed audio descriptions for The Cartoon Museum, London”
  • Fadhlan Muchlas Abrori, Theodosia Prodromou, Mara Alagic, Reka Livits, Houssam Kasti, Zsolt Lavicza, Branko Anđić: “Integrating mathematics and science to explain socioscientific issues in educational comics for elementary school students”
  • Eleftheria Karagianni: “On the distinction between creative and non-creative labour and on making comics in Guy Delisle’s graphic memoirs. From “travelogues” to “laborlogs”
  • Melissa Eriko Poulsen: “Life is a long exorcism: horror as mixed race resistance in Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda’s Monstress
  • Patrycja Pichnicka-Trivedi: “Imagining Eastern Europe – representations of Eastern Europe in 21st century French Vampire bandes dessinées”
  • Zohreh Baghban, Susan Poursanati: “Respect the power of the beast: an ecocritical analysis into interspecies relationships in Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City
  • Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Maureen Burdock: “Politics of extractivism, grassroot justice and crude
  • Fátima Susana Mota Roboredo Amante: “In her hands: navigating [sexual] identity and gender roles in a Portuguese graphic novel for young adults by Joana Estrela”

 

European Comic Art 17.1

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

  • Per Esben Svelstad: “The Graphic Novel as Mediation of the Anthropocene: Allegory, Ignorability, and Pedagogy in Javi Rey’s Adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People
  • Robert Rozema: “Not With but Instead: A New Framework for Teaching Graphic Adaptations in Secondary Contexts”
  • Callum D. Smith: “Low Art, ‘Skits’, and ‘Pot-boilers’?: Re-examining the Political Caricatures of Thomas Rowlandson, 1780–1827”
  • Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle and translated by Ann Miller: “The Posed and the Transposed: Wilhelm Schulz’s Guardian Angel

 

ImageTexT 15.1

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

  • Weihsin Gui: “Covidity and Comics: Graphic Medicine from Singapore”
  • Amy Matthewson: “George Du Maurier’s Visual Degeneration: Chinamaniacs and China in the British Imagination”
  • Sohini Naiya, Smriti Singh: “Deciphering the Forest: A Journey from an Intellectual Concern to a Lived Experience”
  • Jenny Robb: “Preserving the Legacy of Black Press Cartoonists”

 

Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 8.1

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

  • Marcos Gonsalez: “In Defense of the Effete Superhero: Theorizing the First Queer Latinx Superhero, Extraño/Gregorio de la Vega”
  • Jake Zawlacki: “Unintended Consequences: Spawn as “Superman Black””
  • Derek Lee: “Is Psylocke Asian? The Racial Fantasy and Ambiguity of an Uncanny Oriental”
  • Chris Gavaler: “Formal Metacomics: Practice as Theory”

 

Comics and Culture 8

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

  • Mel Gibson: “Of Saints and Scientists: Biographies of famous women in the periodical Girl
  • Barbara Friedlander: “The Accidental Profession”
  • Lily Gould: “The Perfect Pastiche: Lily Renée and Fiction House’s Comic Book Women, 1942-1948”
  • Ioana Atanassova: “Women in Manga: Artists, Portrayal, Themes, Style, and Cultural Heritage”
  • Tiffany Babb: “Media as Memoir in Kate Beaton’s Ducks

 

Sane  2.8

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

  • Matt Reingold: “Illustrating Thoughts & Feelings: Student-Produced Political Cartoons About Israel”
  • Genç Osman İlhan, Maide Şin: “Reflections of “Use of Comics in Social Studies Education” Course: The Opinion and Experiences of Teachers”
  • Stewart Brower, Toni Hoberecht, Zane Ratcliffe, Bethie Seay: “Developing and Sustaining a Graphic Scholarship Collection for Academic Libraries”
  • Andrea Tosti: “From Panels to Shelves: The Evolving Intersection of Comics And Italian Libraries. History, Issues, Perspectives”

 

Studies in Comics  14.1

Cover des Journalsonline, subscription
Website

  • Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Lorenzo Di Paola, Nicoletta Mandolini: “Comics Strike Back! Digital Forms, Digital Practices, Digital Audiences”
  • Lorenzo Di Paola, Mario Tirino: “A cyberpunk symphony of dystopian nightmares: Towards an archaeology of early digital comics”
  • Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Lorenzo Di Paola: “Remediation processes and reading protocols: A genealogy of digital comics”
  • Lukas R. A. Wilde: “Webcomics as mediation”
  • Margarita Molina Fernández: “Understanding digital comics for creation: From conception to reception”
  • Daniel Merlin Goodbrey: “From digital display to printed page: An exploration of the use of digital comic adaptations and hybridizations in print comic formats”
  • Marco d’Alessandro: “Continuity: Inside the frame and behind the screen”
  • Lisa Maya Quaianni Manuzzato: “Promoting comics in digital landscapes: Comics artists as content creators”
  • Gaëlle Kovaliv: “Internet, the Paradise Lost of comics? Observations on the constraints behind publishing webcomics, based on interviews with francophone authors”
  • Nicolle Lamerichs, Vanessa Ossa : “Fandom, algorithm, prompting: Reconsidering webcomics”

 

Images du travail, travail des images:
Bandes dessinées et romans graphiques au travail

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

    • Jean-Paul Géhin, Françoise F. Laot, Pierre Nocérino: “De l’œuf et de la poule : le travail mis au jour par le récit dessiné… et inversement ”
    • Sylvain Aquatias et Alain François: “Les débuts professionnels des auteurs et des autrices de bande dessinée”
    • Maëlys Tirehote-Corbin et Léandre Ackermann: “Une lecture critique de l’histoire de la bande dessinée entre invisibilisation et exclusion : le cas des autrices en France”
    • Marc Loriol: “La bande dessinée comme moyen de saisir le geste ouvrier à l’usine”
    • Nicolas Verschueren: “Les « petits dessins » de Persepolis : images du travail dans la fabrique de l’animation”
    • Isabelle Rivoal, Marc Armspach: “L’atelier de Marko. Énergie, intention, ambiance et technique(s) : un dessinateur de bande dessinée à l’œuvre”
    • Claire Marc, Verena Richardier: “Mettre en dessins le travail scientifique”

 

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship  14

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

  • Diego Labra: “Caught Between Manga and the Graphic Novel: Two Cartoonists’ Trajectories in Contemporary Argentinian “National Comics””
  • Jordi Giner-Monfort: “The Bureau of Applied Social Research and Comics Studies in the 1940s”
  • Nicolas Verstappen: “U Ba Kyi’s Neo-Traditionalist Comics Style: At The Crossroads of Myanmar’s Buddhism, Arts and Colonial History”
  • Zuzana Fonioková: “Identity Construction in Graphic Life Narratives by Aline Kominsky Crumb and Katie Green”

“Innovative Methods on Multimodal Comics Research” published in Journal of Semiotics

Zeitschrift für Semiotik, September 2024, Band 45, Heft 1-2/2023Zeitschrift für Semiotik/Journal of Semiotics
September 2024, vol. 45, no. 1-2/2023, 209 pages.
EUR 65,00
ISBN 978-3-95809-680-6

ComFor-members Stephan Packard and Janina Wildfeuer have just published an English special issue on “Innovative Methods in Multimodal Comics Research” in Journal of Semiotics. Online access is planned for Summer 2025.

Summary:

“This special issue on innovative methods in multimodal comics research brings together linguistic as well as inter- and transdisciplinary contributions engaging with the semiotic and multimodal wealth of comics, graphic novels, and other forms of visual narratives. The contributions connect to recent research with new challenges and solutions and engage in dialogue across various approaches to the multimodality of comics. In our introduction to the issue, we want to address this ‘multimodality of comics’ further and give some explanatory notes on our understanding of this concept and the development of the field of research connected to it.”

Articles:

Janina Wildfeuer and Stephan Packard: “Innovative Methods in Multimodal Comics Research: Introduction”

John A. Bateman: “Multimodal Semiotics for the Analysis of Comics and Graphic Novels”

Lauren Edlin and Joshua Reiss: “Measuring Inter-Subjective Agreement on Units and Attributions in Comics with Annotation Experiments”

Miloš Tasic: “Visualising an Oral Epic: Lobacev’s Comic Book Tsar Dušan’s Wedding”

Lukas R.A. Wilde: “Unreliable Iconicity, or: Accounting for the Cartoonish Pictures of Comics in Multimodal Reasoning”

Stephan Packard: “Multimodal Cohesion in Panel Graphs: A Pragmaticist Approach to the Gap Between Comics Grammar and Aesthetics”

Publisher’s page

 

Monitor 77: New Publications on Comic Books

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.


Bild zeigt das Buchcover.Drawing (in) the Feminine: Bande Dessinée and Women

Studies in Comics and Cartoons

Margaret C. Flinn (ed.)
Ohio State University Press
February 2024
Publisher’s website

Drawing (in) the Feminine celebrates and examines the richness of contemporary women’s production in French and Francophone comics art and considers the history of representations made by both dominant and marginalized creators. Bridging historical and contemporary comics output, these essays illuminate the interfaces among genre, gender, and cultural history. Contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, and across a variety of methodologies and disciplinary orientations, challenge prevailing claims about the absence of women creators, characters, and readers in bande dessinée, arguing that women have always been part of its history. While still far from achieving parity with their male counterparts, female creators are occupying an increasingly significant portion of the French-language comics publishing industry, and creators of all genders are putting forth stories that reflect on the diversity and richness of women’s and gender-nonconforming people’s experiences. In the essays collected here, contributors push back against the ways in which the marginalization of women within bande dessinée history has overshadowed their significant contributions, extending avenues for further exploring the true diversity of a flourishing contemporary production.”

 

Bild zeigt das Buchcover.Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: Studies in Genre

James J. Donahue
University Press of Mississippi
March 2024
Publisher’s website

“In recent years, studios like Marvel and DC have seen enormous success transforming comics into major motion pictures. At the same time, bookstores such as Barnes & Noble in the US and Indigo in Canada have made more room for comic books and graphic novels on their shelves. Yet despite the sustained popular appeal and the heightened availability of these media, Indigenous artists continue to find their work given little attention by mainstream publishers, booksellers, production houses, and academics. Nevertheless, Indigenous artists are increasingly turning to graphic narratives, with publishers like Native Realities LLC and Highwater Press carving out ever more space for Indigenous creators.
In Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: Studies in Genre, James J. Donahue aims to interrogate and unravel the disparities of representation in the fields of comics studies and comics publishing. Donahue documents and analyzes the works of several Indigenous artists, including Theo Tso, Todd Houseman, and Arigon Starr. Through topically arranged chapters, the author explores a wide array of content produced by Indigenous creators, from superhero and science fiction comics to graphic novels and experimental narratives. While noting the importance of examining how Indigenous works are analyzed, Donahue emphasizes that the creation of artistic and critical spaces for Indigenous comics and graphic novels should be an essential concern for the comics studies field.”

 

Bild zeigt das Buchcover.Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture

Tom Inge Series on Comics Artists

Jonathan Najarian (ed.)
University Press of Mississippi
January 2024
Publisher’s website

“Since the early 1990s, cartoonist Art Spiegelman has made the case that comics are the natural inheritor of the aesthetic tradition associated with the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. In recent years, scholars have begun to place greater import on the shared historical circumstances of early comics and literary and artistic modernism. Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture is an interdisciplinary consideration of myriad social, cultural, and aesthetic connections.
Filling a gap in current scholarship, an impressively diverse group of scholars approaches the topic from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and methodologies. Drawing on work in literary studies, art history, film studies, philosophy, and material culture studies, contributors attend to the dynamic relationship between avant-garde art, literature, and comics. Essays by both established and emerging voices examine topics as divergent as early twentieth-century film, museum exhibitions, newspaper journalism, magazine illustration, and transnational literary circulation.
In presenting varied critical approaches, this book highlights important interpretive questions for the field. Contributors sometimes arrive at thoughtful consensus and at other times settle on productive disagreements. Ultimately, this collection aims to extend traditional lines of inquiry in both comics studies and modernist studies and to reveal overlaps between ostensibly disparate artistic practices and movements.”

 

Bild zeigt das Buchcover.Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip

Studies in Comics and Cartoons

Alex Beringer
Ohio State University Press
January 2024
Publisher’s website

Lost Literacies is the first full-length study of US comic strips from the period prior to the rise of Sunday newspaper comics. Where current histories assume that nineteenth-century US comics consisted solely of single-panel political cartoons or simple “proto-comics,” Lost Literacies introduces readers to an ambitious group of artists and editors who were intent on experimenting with the storytelling possibilities of the sequential strip, resulting in playful comics whose existence upends prevailing narratives about the evolution of comic strips.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, figures such as artist Frank Bellew and editor T. W. Strong introduced sequential comic strips into humor magazines and precursors to graphic novels known as “graphic albums.” These early works reached audiences in the tens of thousands. Their influences ranged from Walt Whitman’s poetry to Mark Twain’s travel writings to the bawdy stage comedies of the Bowery Theatre. Most importantly, they featured new approaches to graphic storytelling that went far beyond the speech bubbles and panel grids familiar to us today. As readers of Lost Literacies will see, these little-known early US comic strips rival even the most innovative modern comics for their diversity and ambition.”

 

Bild zeigt das Buchcover.BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence

Jim Coby, Joanna Davis-McElligatt (ed.)
University Press of Mississippi
March 2024
Publisher’s website

“In 1954, the culture, distribution, and content of comics forever changed. Long a mainstay of America’s reading diet, comic books began to fall under the scrutiny of parent groups, church leaders, and politicians. The bright colors and cheaply printed pulp pages of comic books that had once provided an escape were suddenly presumed to house something lascivious, insidious, and morally corrosive. While anxieties about representations of violence in comics have largely fallen to the wayside since the moral panic of the 1950s, thematic and symbolic visual depictions of violence remain central to the comics form. BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence examines violence in every iteration—physical violence enacted between people and their environments, formal and structural violence embedded in the comics language itself, representations of historical violence, and ways of reading and seeing violence.
BOOM! SPLAT! is composed of fifteen essays from renowned comics scholars and is organized thematically into four sections, including an examination of histories of violence, forms of violence, modes and systems of violence, and political and social violence. Chapters focus on well-known comics and comics creators, such as Steve Ditko, Hulk, X-Men, and the Marvel universe, to newspaper cartoon strips, postwar graphic novels, revolution, civil rights, trauma, #blacklivesmatter, and more. BOOM! SPLAT! serves as a resource to scholars and comics enthusiasts who wish to contemplate and confront the permutations, forms, structures, and discourses of violence that have always animated cartoons.
Through this interrogation, our understanding of violence moves beyond the immediately physical and interpersonal into modes of ephemeral, psychological, and ideological violence. Contributors fill critical gaps by offering sustained explorations of the function of manifold violences in the comics language—those seen, felt, and imagined. The essays in this collection are critically necessary for understanding the current and historical role that violence has played in comics and will help recognize how cartooning imbricates, resists, and expands our thinking about and experiences of violence.”

 

Bild zeigt das Buchcover.Captain America and the American Journey, 1940-2022

Richard A. Hall
McFarland
February 2024
Publisher’s website

“Captain America made his debut in 1940, just two years behind the first comic book superheroes and five years before the United States’ emergence as the world’s primary superpower at the end of World War II. His journey has been intertwined with America’s progress throughout the decades. Known as the “Sentinel of Liberty,” he has frequently provided socio-political commentary on current events as well as inspiration and warnings concerning the future.
This work explores the interconnected histories of the United States and Captain America, decade-by-decade, from the character’s origins to Chris Evans’ portrayal of him in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It examines how Captain America’s story provides a guide through America’s tenure as a global superpower, holds a mirror up to American society, and acts as a constant reminder of what America can and should be.”

 

Bild zeigt das Buchcover.Superheroes Beyond

Cormac McGarry, Liam Burke, Ian Gordon, Angela Ndalianis (eds.)
University Press of Mississippi
March 2024
Publisher’s website

“In recent years, superheroes on the page and screen have garnered increasing research and wider interest. Nonetheless, many works fall back on familiar examples before arriving at predictable conclusions. Superheroes Beyond moves superhero research beyond expected models. In this innovative collection, contributors unmask international crimefighters, track superheroes outside of the comic book page, and explore heroes whose secret identities are not cisgender men. Superheroes Beyond responds to the growing interest in understanding the unique appeal of superheroes by reveling in the diversity of this heroic type.
Superheroes Beyond explores the complexity and cultural reach of the superhero in three sections. The first, “Beyond Men of Steel,” examines how the archetype has moved beyond simply recapitulating the “man of steel” figure to include broader representations of race, gender, sexuality, and ableness. The second section, “Beyond Comic Books,” discusses how the superhero has become a transmedia phenomenon, moving from comic books to toys to cinema screens and beyond. The final section, “Beyond the United States,” highlights the vibrant but often overlooked history of global superhero figures. Together, the essays in this collection form important starting points for taking stock of the superhero’s far-reaching appeal, contributing the critical conversations required to bring scholarship into the present moment and beyond.”

 

Bild zeigt das Buchcover.Christianity and Comics: Stories We Tell about Heaven and Hell

Blair Davis
Rutgers University Press
March 2024
Publisher’s website

“The Bible has inspired Western art and literature for centuries, so it is no surprise that Christian iconography, characters, and stories have also appeared in many comic books. Yet the sheer stylistic range of these comics is stunning. They include books from Christian publishers, as well as underground comix with religious themes and a vast array of DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse titles, from Hellboy to Preacher.
Christianity and Comics presents an 80-year history of the various ways that the comics industry has drawn from biblical source material. It explores how some publishers specifically targeted Christian audiences with titles like Catholic Comics, books featuring heroic versions of Oral Roberts and Billy Graham, and special religious-themed editions of Archie. But it also considers how popular mainstream comics like Daredevil, The SandmanGhost Rider, and Batman are infused with Christian themes and imagery.
Comics scholar Blair Davis pays special attention to how the medium’s unique use of panels, word balloons, captions, and serialized storytelling have provided vehicles for telling familiar biblical tales in new ways. Spanning the Golden Age of comics to the present day, this book charts how comics have both reflected and influenced Americans’ changing attitudes towards religion.”

Published: “Die Medien des Comics” by Sebastian Bartosch

As volume 2 in De Gruyter’s series „Comicstudien/Comic Studies“, Sebastian Bartosch’s dissertation about the media of comics has been published recently. Congratulations from our side!

Die Medien des ComicsDie Medien des Comics: Vom Zeitungsstrip bis zum digitalen Comic

Sebastian Bartosch
De Gruyter
April 1, 2024
436 pages
eBook ISBN 9783111317540
gebunden ISBN 9783111317373

Blurbs:
“Was macht den Comic als Medium aus? Wer oder was macht ihn zu einem Medium?
Für die Erforschung von Comics gibt es bislang keinen allgemein verbindlichen Medienbegriff: Zu divers scheinen sie, wenn sie aus Texten und Bildern arrangiert, in Zeitungen gedruckt, als Hefte gesammelt, als graphic novels besprochen oder auf Smartphones gelesen werden.
Die Medien des Comics entwickelt ein Medialitätsmodell, mit dem sich der medialen Bestimmung von Comics gerade in ihrer Veränderbarkeit nachgehen lässt. Medialität wird dazu als ein Verbindungsprinzip verstanden, nach dem die Einrichtung eines bestimmbaren Mediums Comic aus Materialien, Zeichen und Institutionen stetig neu vollzogen wird. Analysen zeigen auf, wie heterogene Akteure diese modernen Medienbestimmungen verändern – und wie dabei Kontroversen hinsichtlich der Mediengeschichte, Nostalgie, Selbstreflexivität und Materialität von Comics aufkommen. Dabei führen die Fallbeispiele von der Vergangenheit der comic strips und comic books zu aktuellen Entwicklungen im Zusammenhang mit Smartphones, Webcomics und Blogs.
Der Band richtet sich an Comicforschende unterschiedlicher Disziplinen sowie an Medienwissenschaftler:innen, die sich mit Transformationsprozessen auseinandersetzen.”

Publisher’s page

Guest Lecture (hybrid) Siegen by José Alaniz: “Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature”

Termin:
2024 06 17 4.15 p.m.

On Monday, June 17 2024, José Alaniz (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) will give a guest lecture at the University of Siegen (English Department), for which attendance via WebEx is possible. If you are interested, please register at stein [ät] anglistik.uni-siegen.de to receive the link.

“Comics of the Anthropocene:Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature”

How have comics artists depicted the human-caused destruction of the natural world? How do these works resonate with the ethical and environmental issues? How have comics mourned the loss of nature over the last five decades?
José Alaniz’s lecture explores the representation of animals, mass extinctions and climate change in the era popularly known as the Anthropocene in (mostly) US comics, primarily since the first Earth Day in 1970.

Key words: Critical Animal, Studies, Environmental Humanities, Affect Studies, Comics Studies
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein, Svitlana Stupak

Announcement poster
To the event page