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Monitor: New Publications on Comic Books

Comics and Power

Comics and Power
Representing and Questioning Culture, Subjects and Communities

Rikke Platz Cortsen, Erin La Cour and Anne Magnussen (eds.)
Cambridge Scholars Publising
355 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4438-7086-3
~£ 52.99
February 2015
Publisher’s page
Many introductions to comics scholarship books begin with an anecdote recounting the author’s childhood experiences reading comics, thereby testifying to the power of comics to engage and impact youth, but comics and power are intertwined in a numbers of ways that go beyond concern for children’s reading habits. Comics and Power presents very different methods of studying the complex and diverse relationship between comics and power. Divided into three sections, its 14 chapters discuss how comics interact with, reproduce, and/or challenge existing power structures – from the comics medium and its institutions to discourses about art, subjectivity, identity, and communities. The contributors and their work, as such, represent a new generation of comics research that combines the study of comics as a unique art form with a focus on the ways in which comics – like any other medium – participate in shaping the societies of which they are part.

Comics and the World Wars

Comics and the World Wars
A Cultural Record

Jane L. Chapman et al. (eds.)
Palgrave MacMillan
240 pages
ISBN 978-1-1372-7371-0
~£ 60,00
July 2015
Publisher’s page
Comics and the World Wars argues for the use of comics as a primary source by offering a highly original argument that such examples produced during the World Wars act as a cultural record. Recuperating currently unknown or neglected strips, this work demonstrates how these can be used for the study of both world wars. Representing the fruits of over five years team research, this book reveals how sequential illustrated narratives used humour as a coping mechanism and a way to criticise authority, promoted certain forms of behaviour and discouraged others, represented a deliberately inclusive educational strategy for reading wartime content, and became a barometer for contemporary popular thinking.

Continue Reading: Four more publications

Monitor: New Publications on Comic Books

Global Manga

Global Manga
‘Japanese’ Comics without Japan?

Casey Brienza (ed.)
Ashgate
224 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4724-3543-9
~£ 54.00
July 2015
Publisher’s page
Outside Japan, the term ‘manga’ usually refers to comics originally published in Japan. Yet nowadays many publications labelled ‘manga’ are not translations of Japanese works but rather have been wholly conceived and created elsewhere. These comics, although often derided and dismissed as ‘fake manga’, represent an important but understudied global cultural phenomenon which, controversially, may even point to a future of ‘Japanese’ comics without Japan.
This book takes seriously the political economy and cultural production of this so-called ‘global manga’ produced throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia and explores the conditions under which it arises and flourishes; what counts as ‘manga’ and who gets to decide; the implications of global manga for contemporary economies of cultural and creative labour; the ways in which it is shaped by or mixes with local cultural forms and contexts; and, ultimately, what it means for manga to be ‘authentically’ Japanese in the first place.

Praxis Deutsch: Graphic Novels

Praxis Deutsch 252: Graphic Novels

Dieter Wrobel (ed.)
Friedrich Verlag
65 pages
ISSN 0341-5279
~€ 16.90
July 2015
Publisher’s page
Die Graphic Novel ist eine ganz besondere Literaturform, denn sie überschreitet die Möglichkeiten anderer Bild-Text-Verbünde wie z. B. Bilderbücher oder Comics. Sie erschafft etwas Neues, indem sie Bilder mit den Möglichkeiten eines Romans verbindet und damit an erzählerischer Komplexität gewinnt. Auch deshalb sind Graphic Novels bei verschiedensten Lesern so beliebt. Nicht nur spannende Geschichten werden erzählt, sondern auch schwierige gesellschaftliche, politische oder soziale Themen können anschaulich dargestellt werden. Daraus ergeben sich für den Literaturunterricht interessante Perspektiven und Ansatzpunkte. Denn die Hybridtexte ermöglichen das Lernen an und über Literatur und Medien in allen Altersgruppen.

Weiterlesen: vier weitere Neuerscheinungen

PROGRAM: 10th COMFOR-Annual Conference in Frankfurt/M.

ComFor-Jahrestagung 2015_klein

1. Frankfurt Symposium on Comics Studies:
“History in Comics – History of Comics”

Directly to the registration

As the title indicates, the contributions and discussions of the conference will focus on comics and graphic literature with a double perspective: One field of interest will consist of the historical topics and subjects, ranging from antiquity to contemporary history, that are depicted in works of sequential art from all over the world and attract the attention of a broad readership. Contributing considerably to an international archive of cultural memory, comics play an important role in academic research as both historical source material and as depictions and interpretations of historical events. This provides a fertile ground for interdisciplinary research that combines approaches from academic disciplines such as literature, art, media, and cultural studies and history in particular.
Another field of interest – closely linked to and in correspondence with the aspects mentioned above – consists of the historicisation of the phenomenon ‘comic’, its contemporary varieties and its readership(s) as well as the analysis of its international developments. Focusing on history and the historical in picture stories, it is adequate and relevant to ask about the lines of tradition of the medium and their preconditions: not least since the debates on new (or seemingly new) trends such as manga and graphic novel, seriality, media culture, the relation of comics and picture books, comics in traditional and modern media, etc. raise questions on the nature of graphic literature.

Continue reading: Program and registration

Masterclass with Lev Manovich

Termin:
2015 09 23 10:00-17:00

Hybride Narrativität_Förderer

MASTERCLASS ON CULTURAL ANALYTICS WITH LEV MANOVICH

Date: 23 September 2015, 10am-5pm, University of Potsdam
To sign up for the workshop, please contact Jochen Laubrock at: laubrock@uni-potsdam.de. Participation is free but will be limited to 20 seats, so please register early.

Lev Manovich is Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and founder and director of the Software Studies Initiative. In 2014 he was included in The Verge’s list of the 50 “most interesting people building the future”. He is well known for the automated exploration, analysis, and visualization of big image data, as exemplified in the “One million manga pages” or “Selfiecity” projects. Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury, 2013), Black Box – White Cube (Merve, 2005), Soft Cinema (MIT Press, 2005), The Language of the New Media (MIT Press, 2001), Metamediji (Belgrade, 2001), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993) as well as over 120 articles which have been published in 30 countries and reprinted over 450 times. He is also one of the editors of the Software Studies book series (MIT Press) and Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Science (Springer).

Organizers’ Page

Short interview with Bart Beaty on “What Were Comics?”

whatwerecomicsDuring the last weeks, the research group “Hybrid Narrativity” of the universities of Potsdam and Paderborn received a lot of attention, not least because of their successful funding through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project is sometimes compared to a somewhat similiar Canadian approach, “What Were Comics?”: a relatively new project by Bart Beaty, Benjamin Woo and Nick Sousanis, supported by the University of Calgary and Carleton University.
“This project will develop a random sample set of comic books representing two per cent of all publications produced in the United States each year from 1933 to 2014. Comics will be indexed for a variety of formal elements (story length; page layout; panel composition; volume of text in captions, word balloons, and sound effects; scene transitions; etc.), producing a systematic survey of comic books’ material and symbolic characteristics over time” (cf. project description).
Since not all too many people in Germany are aware of What Were Comics? yet, the ComFor editorial board had a short interview with Bart Beaty, explaining a little bit of the backgrounds:

Read on: Bart Beaty-short interview