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
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.