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Monitor 76: 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.


The illustration shows the book cover.Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis

Alison Halsall
The Ohio State University Press
September 2023
Publisher’s website

In Growing Up Graphic, Alison Halsall considers graphic texts for young readers to interrogate how they help children develop new ideas about social justice and become potential agents of change. With a focus on comics that depict difficult experiences affecting young people, Halsall explores the complexities of queer graphic memoirs, narratives of belonging, depictions of illness and disability, and explorations of Indigenous experiences. She discusses, among others, Child Soldier by Jessica Dee Humphreys and Michel Chikwanine, War Brothers by Sharon E. McKay, Baddawi by Leila Abdelrazaq, Matt Huynh’s interactive adaptation of Nam Le’s The Boat, and David Alexander Robertson’s 7 Generations. These examples contest images of childhood victimization, passivity, and helplessness, instead presenting young people as social actors who attempt to make sense of the challenges that affect them. In considering comics for children and about children, Growing Up Graphic centers a previously underexplored vein of graphic narratives and argues that these texts offer important insights into the interests and capabilities of children as readers.

 

The illustration shows the book cover.Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics

Routledge Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Comics

Charlotte J. Fabricius
Routledge
October 2023
Publisher’s website

Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics investigates girl superheroes published by DC and Marvel Comics in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, asking who the new-and-improved super-girls are and what potentials they hold for imagining girls as agents of change, in the genre as well as its socio-cultural context.
As super-girls have grown increasingly numerous and diverse since the turn of the millennium, they provide an opportunity for reconsidering representations of gender and power in the superhero genre. This book offers the term agentic embodiment as an analytical tool for critiquing the body politics of superhero comics, particularly concerning youth, femininity, whiteness, and violence. Grounded in comics studies and informed by feminist cultural studies, the book contributes a critical and hopeful perspective on the diversification of a genre often written off as irredeemably conservative and patriarchal.

 

The illustration shows the book cover.Ben Katchor

Benjamin Fraser
University Press of Mississippi
October 2023
Publisher’s website

The recipient of a 2000 MacArthur fellowship, Ben Katchor (b. 1951) is a beloved comics artist with a career spanning four decades. Published in indie weeklies across the United States, his comics are known for evoking the sensorium of the modern metropolis. As part of the Biographix series edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Ben Katchor offers scholars and fans a thorough overview of the artist’s career from 1988 to 2020.

 

The illustration shows the book cover.The Political Imagination in Spanish Graphic Narrative

Routledge Advances in Comics Studies

Xavier Dapena, Joanne Britland (eds.)
Routledge
November 2023
Publisher’s website

In a spirit of community and collective action, this volume offers insights into the complexity of the political imagination and its cultural scope within Spanish graphic narrative through the lens of global political and social movements.
Developed during the critical years of the COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdown, the volume and its chapters reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the comic. They employ a cultural studies approach with different theoretical frameworks ranging from debates within comics studies, film and media theory, postcolonialism, feminism, economics, multimodality, aging, aesthetics, memory studies, food studies, and sound studies, among others.

 

The illustration shows the book cover.Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined

Kees de Groot (ed.)
Bloomsbury
November 2023
Publisher’s website

This open access book offers an overview of the relations between comics and religion from the perspective of cultural sociology. How do comics function in religions and how does religion appear in comics? And how do graphic narratives inform us about contemporary society and the changing role of religion?
Contributing scholars use international examples to explore the diversity of religions, spirituality, and dispersed notions of the sacred, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Indian, and Japanese religions. In addition, the rituals, ethics, and worldviews that surface in the comics milieu are discussed.

 

The illustration shows the book cover.The Patterns of Comics: Visual Languages of Comics from Asia, Europe, and North America

Neil Cohn
Bloomsbury
December 2023
Publisher’s website

Comics are a global phenomenon, and yet it’s easy to distinguish the visual styles of comics from Asia, Europe, or the United States. But, do the structures of these visual narratives differ in more subtle ways? Might these comics actually be drawn in different visual languages that vary in their structures across cultures? To address these questions, The Patterns of Comics seeks evidence through a sustained analysis of an annotated corpus of over 36,000 panels from more than 350 comics from Asia, Europe, and the United States. This data-driven approach reveals the cross-cultural variation in symbology, layout, and storytelling between various visual languages, and shows how comics have changed across 80 years.

Journal Monitor 17: 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.


European Comic Art  16.2

Cover des Journalsonline, subscription
Website

  • Domingo Sánchez-Mesa, Jan Baetens: “Intermediality and Comics”
  • David Miranda-Barreiro: “Intermediality and Transmedial Thanatography in Jacobo Fernández Serrano’s Lois Pereiro: Breve encontro”
  • Daniela Kuschel: “‘Between Stage and Page’: La vida es sueño as Comic Book”
  • Nicoletta Mandolini, Giorgio Busi Rizzi: “Brazilian Trans Artivism, Comics and Communities, between Digital and Print: The Cases of Pequenas felicidades trans and Transistorizada

 

ImageText  14

Cover des Journalsonline, open access
Website

Issue 1:

  • Alexander Slotkin, Laura Gonzales: “Technical Storytelling: Comics and Community”
  • Mónica González Ybarra, Idalia Nuñez: “Zines from the Borderlands: Chicanx/Latinx Pre-service Teacher Multimodal Critical Reflections”
  • Emma Kostopolus: “Skillshare and Guerrilla TechComm: Zines in the Technical Writing Classroom”
  • Kristin C. Bennett: “Bam! Pow! Zap! Battling Systemic Ableism in Technical and Professional Medical Communications through the Application of Graphic Medicine Grounded in Disability Justice”

Issue 2:

  • Seamus O’Malley: “Superpowerlessness: Hellblazer and Thatcher”
  • Nao Tomabechi: “The Silk Road to Better Representation: Marvel’s Silk and the Progress of Asian American Female Representation”
  • Yi Wang: “’Memories Are Powerful Things’: Exploring Post-Incarceration Trauma Through Young Adult Comics”

 

 

Gothic Studies 25.3

Cover des JournalsSonderausgabe: Gothic and Comics

online, open access
Website

  • Julia Round, Susanne Schwertfeger: “Introduction: Gothic and Comics”
  • Stuart Lindsay: “The Transgressive Bodies of Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens Line”
  • Mary Beth Tegan, Matthew Costello: “A Woman is Being Side-Kicked: Gothic Superheroes and the Suppression of Female Autonomy Amid Feminism’s Second Wave”
  • Matthew J. A. Green: “‘Keep it Gothic, Man’: Gothic and Graphic Medicine in Ian Williams’s The Bad Doctor
  • Tosha R. Taylor: “Gothic Doubling and Fractured Identity in Shōjo Manga: Yuki Kaori’s Angel Sanctuary
  • Catherine Spooner: “My Friend the Devil: Gothic Comics, the Whimsical Macabre and Rewriting William Blake in Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s Satania

 

Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 7

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Issue 1:

  • Michelle Ann Abate: “Thinking Outside of the Box: Theorizing the Frameless Panel”
  • Jacob Murel: “An Exploration in the Digital Analysis of Comics Images”
  • Philip Smith: “Sandro Botticelli’s Visual Language in Illustrations of The Divine Comedy
  • Jenny Robb: “Preserving the Legacy of Black Press Cartoonists”

Issue 2:

  • Manuela Di Franco: “From Funnies to Adventures: Translation, Censorship, and Adaptation of American Comics in Fascist Italy”
  • Michael Kobre: “Disallowed Truths: Race, Shadow Books, and Captain America”
  • Elizabeth Woock: “The Graphic “I” in Research Comics”
  • Elizabeth Woock: “Visualizing the Author”
  • Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda: “A Wide Range of Possible Expression from Tezuka’s Manga to Gekiga, from Azuma Hideo to Doraemon”

Issue 3:

  • Edmilson F. Miranda Jr., David Callahan: “(In)visible Interstices: Double-Consciousness and the Gutter in Brazilian Jefferson Costa’s Rosebush, Medal, Plantation and Other Stories
  • John Petrus: “Monstrous Beauty: The Alternative Aesthetic of Difference in Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
  • Lara Saguisag: “Labor in the Margins: Filipino Comics Workers in the US Comic Book Industry”

 

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 14

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Website

Issue 5:

  • Abhilasha Gusain, Smita Jha: “A Visual Dialogue: Practising Hospitality through the reading of Graphic Narratives”
  • Enrique Del Rey Cabero: “Portrait of the comics artist as a failure. Conflicted authorship, metacomic and exercises in style in Kiko da Silva’s El infierno del dibujante
  • Tyler Welsh: “Lost in adaptation: (violent) frames in The Killing Joke
  • Arya Suresh, Sathyaraj Venkatesan: “‘Fog of Medication’: psychiatric drugs, neurochemical selves, and graphic medicine”
  • Ritam Sarkar, Somdatta Bhattacharya: “Urban comics and social justice: restructuring neoliberal spaces of Delhi in Sarnath Banerjee’s all quiet in Vikaspuri
  • Kazumi Nagaike: “Queer seduction in Japanese essay manga: an analysis of manga physicality and gay, lesbian and Fujoshi eroticism”
  • Anna Nordenstam, Margareta Wallin Wictorin: “Climate Activism – Contemporary Swedish Feminist Comics”

Issue 6:

  • Vikram Nijhawan: “’The lunatic, the lover, and the poet’: ambiguous three-way authorship in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman #19, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
  • Aishwarya Katyal, Neha Jain: “Behold the Virago: Iconography of goddess Kali and body politics in Someday by Samidha Gunjal”
  • Rafael Alarcón Medina: “Sensational comics: erotic comics, women, and popular subjectivity in neoliberal Mexico”
  • Pritesh Chakraborty: “Youth in peril: representation of vulnerability of young people in doga comic books”
  • Danielle Terceiro: “Three graphic memoirs and the ‘family mind’ in action”
  • Robert Aman: “Spirou in the Congo: colonial racism and civilising mission in journal de Spirou 1938-1960”
  • Abinsha Joseph, Smita Jha: “Lands that make us: decoding maps, landscapes, and identities in Aaniya Asrani’s Portraits of Exile
  • Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Arya Suresh: “Geography of madness: communitarian psychiatry and spatial logic in The Third Population
  • Katarzyna Machała: “Reading To Kill a Mockingbird two generations later: the graphic novel”

New Publication: „Figuren begegnen in Filmen und Comics“ (Encountering Characters in Films and Comics)

Figuren begenen in Filmen und ComicsComFor member Björn Hochschild’s dissertation, titled Figuren begegnen in Filmen und Comics (Encountering Characters in Films and Comics), has just been published as the 12th volume of the Cinepoetics series by De Gruyter. His book discusses existing neophenomenological film theory and presents a phenomenology of comics. Based on an interdisciplinary exchange of these theories, it develops a phenomenological method of character analysis. It demonstrates this in encounters with characters in films and comics by Chris Ware, Riad Sattouf, and Marc Forster.

The book is available in print and as open access (https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111198019).

471 pages
eBook
ISBN: 9783111198019
Hardcover
ISBN: 9783111086958

Blurbs:
“How do we encounter characters in films and comics? While audiences might relate to characters intuitively, film and comics scholars cannot analyze them in the same intuitive way. Theories and analytical methods influenced by narratology and cognitive theory often conceptualize characters as finished subjects presented in a medial disguise. This study argues instead that film-watching and comic-reading are dynamic situations permeated by subjectivity. Conceptualized as film- or comic-behavior, these subjectivized dynamics form the basis for the emergence of characters for viewers and readers. The study develops a phenomenological theory and method that allows us to analyze encounters with characters through descriptions of film- and comic-behaviors. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception, it discusses current phenomenological positions in film studies and articulates an extensive phenomenological framework for comic research. The works of Chris Ware, Riad Sattouf, and Marc Forster, which it discusses, are not only the subject of analytical case studies but also an integral part of this study’s theoretical framework.”

Publisher’s Page

New Publication on Anke Feuchtenberger

The volume Die Königin Vontjanze: Kleiner Atlas zum Werk von Anke Feuchtenberger, edited by Ole Frahm and Andreas Stuhlmann and supported by ComFor, has just been published by Textem Verlag.

Die Königin Vontjanze: Kleiner Atlas zum Werk von Anke Feuchtenberger292 pages
23,00 Euro
Languages: German, Englisch
Design: Jan Schaab
16,5 x 23,5 cm
ISBN: 978-3-86485-303-6
Hamburg 2023
Publisher’s page

„Stets dem Experiment verpflichtet, immer mit einer klaren politischen, feministischen Haltung sind Anke Feuchtenbergers Zeichnungen prägend für mehrere Generationen von Comicautor*innen. Dieser Band ist eine Verbeugung vor ihrem Werk: Neben Comics umfasst es Zeichnung, Illustrationen, Bühnenbilder, Animationen, Plakate und vieles anderes mehr. In ihrer Lehre an der Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg hat sie in fünfundzwanzig Jahren maßgeblich das mitgestaltet, was heute im deutschen Sprachraum als Graphic Novel bekannt ist. Dieses Buch versammelt 40 Beiträge: Texte und Bilder ehemaliger Studierender, Kolleg*innen, Geisteswissenschaftler*innen und Fans. Ergänzt um ein ausführliches Gespräch mit und zahllose Bildbeispiele von Anke Feuchtenberger.”

New publication: “Superevil: Villains in Silver Age Superhero Comics”

The dissertation of ComFor-member Anke Marie Bock was recently published with Logos Verlag Berlin, sure to be relevant for future research:

Superevil. Villains in Silver Age Superhero ComicsSuperevil: Villains in Silver Age Superhero Comics

Anke Marie Bock
Logos Verlag Berlin
September 2023
ISBN 978-3-8325-5693-8
Publisher’s page

Superevil: Villains in Silver Age Superhero Comics sheds light on the often-disregarded supervillains in the American superhero comic of the 1960s. From Loki to Killmonger – they all possess famous cinematic counterparts, yet it is their comic origin that this study examines. Not only did The Silver Age produce countless superheroes and supervillains who have conquered the screens in the last two decades, but it also created complex villains. Silver Age supervillains were, as the analyses in Superevil show, the main and only means to include political and societal criticism in a cultural product, which suffered from censorship and belittlement. Instead of focusing on the superheroes once more, Anke Marie Bock pioneers in putting the supervillain as such in the center of the attention. In addition to addressing the tendency to neglect villains in superhero-comic studies, revealing many important functions the supervillains fulfill, among them criticizing Cold War politics, racism, gender roles and the often unquestioned binary of good and evil on the examples of i.a. The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and Black Panther comics.