Tag Archives: Monitor

Monitor 74: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2023 10 29, 00:01

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.

Disability and the Superhero: Essays on Ableism and Representation in Comic Media

Amber E. George (ed.)
Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag
June 2023
Publisher’s website

“This is a collection of essays that analyze the presence of ableism in superhero narratives from television shows, films, and comics. Contributors use critical disability studies, media studies, cultural studies, and other interdisciplinary fields to unveil the misinformation, stigma, and exclusion caused by ableist representations of disability or disability-related experiences. Ableism is unmasked in media franchises such as DC Comics, Marvel, Sesame Street, and more.
These essays go beyond what is currently available in critical disability superhero studies, and explore both the well-known and lesser-known characters including Iron Man, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Thor, Nick Fury, Jessica Jones, War Machine, Wonder Woman, Dr. Poison, the Joker, Bucky Barnes, Punisher, Rocket and Groot, Luke Cage, Captain America, and Sesame Street’s Super Grover. They also offer insightful intersectional analyses of entire series, films, and shows such as Arrowverse and The Ables.”

The Early Reception of Manga in the West

Bildnarrative, Vol. 13

Martin de la Iglesia
Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag
March 2023
Publisher’s website

“Nowadays, manga are ubiquitous not only in their home country Japan but also in the Western world. In some Western countries, they have even surpassed American and European comics in popularity. When did this manga boom start? Many people would think of the late 1990s, when dubbed anime adaptations of manga such as Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon ran on television.
This book, however, explores an earlier wave of manga around the year 1990. It examines what the first translated editions of Kazuo Koike and Gōseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub and Shōtarō Ishinomori’s Japan Inc. looked like, and how readers in the United States and in Germany reacted towards these manga.
Their impact was still rather limited, but then, this first manga wave culminated in 1988/1991 when Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga masterpiece, Akira, was published in English and German, among other languages. Its reception in the West is analysed in great depth in this book, including chapters on the perception of Akira as cyberpunk and its anime adaptation.
Akira opened the floodgates, and in its wake, many more manga titles found their way to American and European readers, including even lengthy but otherwise mediocre series such as Kazuo Koike and Ryōichi Ikegami’s Crying Freeman, the last of the four manga examined in this book. Although manga sales would later soar to greater heights in the 2000s with One Piece, Naruto and others, the first manga wave of ca. 1987–1995 deserves to be remembered for having paved the way.”

Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel

Benoît Crucifix
Cambridge UP
July 2023
Publisher’s website

“Following Art Spiegelman’s declaration that ‘the future of comics is in the past,’ this book considers comics memory in the contemporary North American graphic novel. Cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Seth, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and others have not only produced some of the most important graphic novels, they have also turned to the history of comics as a common visual heritage to pass on to new readers. This book is a full-length study of contemporary cartoonists when they are at work as historians: it offers a detailed description of how they draw from the archives of comics history, examining the different gestures of collecting, curating, reprinting, forging, swiping, and undrawing that give shape to their engagement with the past. In recognizing these different acts of transmission, this book argues for a material and vernacular history of how comics are remembered, shared, and recirculated over time.”

The Rise of the Graphic Novel: Computational Criticism and the Evolution of Literary Value

Cambridge Studies in Graphic Narratives

Alexander Dunst
Cambridge UP
July 2023
Publisher’s website

“Bringing digital humanities methods to the study of comics, this monograph traces the emergence of the graphic novel at the intersection of popular and literary culture. Based on a representative corpus of over 250 graphic novels from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, it shows how the genre has built on the visual style of comics while adopting selected features of the contemporary novel. This argument positions the graphic novel as a crucial case study for our understanding of twenty-first-century culture. More than simply a niche format, graphic novels demonstrate how contemporary literature reworks elements of genre narrative, reconfiguring rather than abolishing distinctions between high and low. The book also puts forward a new historical periodization for the graphic novel, centered on integration into the literary marketplace and leading to an explosive growth in page length and a diversification of aesthetic styles.”

The Cambridge Companion to Comics

Cambridge Companions to Literature

Maaheen Ahmed (ed.)
Cambridge UP
August 2023
Publisher’s website

“The Cambridge Companion to Comics presents comics as a multifaceted prism, generating productive and insightful dialogues with the most salient issues concerning the humanities at large. This volume provides readers with the histories and theories necessary for studying comics. It consists of three sections: Forms maps the most significant comics forms, including material formats and techniques. Readings brings together a selection of tools to equip readers with a critical understanding of comics. Uses examines the roles accorded to comics in museums, galleries, and education. Chapters explore comics through several key aspects, including drawing, serialities, adaptation, transmedia storytelling, issues of stereotyping and representation, and the lives of comics in institutional and social settings. This volume emphasizes the relationship between comics and other media and modes of expression. It offers close readings of vital works, covering more than a century of comics production and extending across visual, literary and cultural disciplines.”

Monitor 72: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2023 07 13, 13:00

Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives: A Critical Guide

Matt Reingold
Bloomsbury Academic
December 2022
Publisher’s website

“The most up-to-date critical guide mapping the history, impact, key critical issues, and seminal texts of the genre, Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives interrogates what makes a work a “Jewish graphic narrative”, and explores the form’s diverse facets to orient readers to the richness and complexity of Jewish graphic storytelling.
Accessible but comprehensive and in an easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as:

The history of the genre in the US and Israel – and its relationship to superheroes, Underground Comix, and Jewish literature
Social and cultural discussions surrounding the legitimization of graphic representation as sites of trauma, understandings of gender, mixed-media in Jewish graphic novels, and the study of these works in the classroom
Critical explorations of graphic narratives about the Holocaust, Israel, the diasporic experience, Judaism, and autobiography and memoir
The works of Will Eisner, Ilana Zeffren, James Sturm, Joann Sfar, JT Waldman, Michel Kichka, Sarah Glidden, Rutu Modan, and Art Spiegelman and such narratives as X Men, Anne Frank’s Diary, and Maus

Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels includes an appendix of relevant works sorted by genre, a glossary of crucial critical terms, and close readings of key texts to help students and readers develop their understanding of the genre and pursue independent study.”

Perfect Copies: Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic

Shiamin Kwa
Rutger’s University Press
January 2023
Publisher’s website

“Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of “reproduction” in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers.”

Asian Political Cartoons

John A. Lent
Rutger’s University Press
January 2023
Publisher’s website

“In Asian Political Cartoons, scholar John A. Lent explores the history and contemporary status of political cartooning in Asia, including East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, North and South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), and South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka).
Incorporating hundreds of interviews, as well as textual analysis of cartoons; observation of workplaces, companies, and cartoonists at work; and historical research, Lent offers not only the first such survey in English, but the most complete and detailed in any language. Richly illustrated, this volume brings much-needed attention to the political cartoons of a region that has accelerated faster and more expansively economically, culturally, and in other ways than perhaps any other part of the world.
Emphasizing the “freedom to cartoon,” the author examines political cartoons that attempt to expose, bring attention to, blame or condemn, satirically mock, and caricaturize problems and their perpetrators. Lent presents readers a pioneering survey of such political cartooning in twenty-two countries and territories, studying aspects of professionalism, cartoonists’ work environments, philosophies and influences, the state of newspaper and magazine industries, the state’s roles in political cartooning, modern technology, and other issues facing political cartoonists.
Asian Political Cartoons encompasses topics such as political and social satire in Asia during ancient times, humor/cartoon magazines established by Western colonists, and propaganda cartoons employed in independence campaigns. The volume also explores stumbling blocks contemporary cartoonists must hurdle, including new or beefed-up restrictions and regulations, a dwindling number of publishing venues, protected vested interests of conglomerate-owned media, and political correctness gone awry. In these pages, cartoonists recount intriguing ways they cope with restrictions—through layered hidden messages, by using other platforms, and finding unique means to use cartooning to make a living.”

Beowulf in Comic Books and Graphic Novels

Richard Scott Nokes
McFarland
February 2023
Publisher’s website

“The legendary story of Beowulf comes to us in only one medieval manuscript with no illustrations. Modern comic book and graphic novel artists have created visual interpretations of Beowulf for decades, both illustrating and altering the classic story to pull out new themes.
This book examines the growing canon of Beowulf comic books and graphic novels since the 1940s, and shows the remarkable emergence of new traditions—from re-envisioning the medieval look, to creating new plotlines, and even to transforming his identity. While placing Beowulf in a fantastical medieval setting, a techno-dystopia of the future, or modern-day America, artists have appropriated the tale to comment on social issues such as war, environmental issues, masculinity, and consumerism. Whether Beowulf is fighting new monsters or allying with popular comic book superheroes, these artists are creating a new canon of illustration that redefines Beowulf’s place in our culture.”

Journal Monitor 16: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2023 06 15, 00:01

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 16.1

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Tilmann Altenberg: “Don Quixote Unbound: Intertextuality, Interpictoriality, and Transculturality in Flix’s German Graphic Novel Adaptation (2012)”
Jörn Ahrens: “The Graphical Epistemology of Comics via Jeff Lemire’s Gideon Falls”
Alicia Lambert: “(Mis)Leading the Reader: Decolonising Adventure Comics in Baruti and Cassiau-Haurie’s Le Singe jaune”
Ylva Lindberg: “The Agency of the Periphery: Changes in Local Comics through Flows of Francophone Bandes dessinées to Sweden, 1950–2020”

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 14.1 & 2

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Wajeehah Aayeshah: “Hockey sticks, purple smoke bombs, and empathy: female character representation in Pakistani comics”
Parnika Agarwal: “Calvin and Hobbes: satirising work, leisure, imagination and agency within the context of the pervasive forces of capitalism”
Jackson Ayres: ‘“A very, very bad mood”: the turn to horror in Alan Moore’s late comics’
Jerzy Szyłak, Sebastian Jakub Konefał: “The influence of local and national press on the comic publishing industry in the Polish People’s Republic between 1956 and 1989”
Prateek: “Emergency’s children: satire in the hindi comics of Hawaldar Bahadur”
Michael Cop, David Large: “‘Words, Words, Words’: Making Comics and Sense of the Three Texts of Hamlet”
Hanae Kim: “‘I read webtoon every day!’: young adult k-pop fans’ language learning and literacies with korean webcomics”

Jonathan M. Bullinger: “Marvel tells / sells its own history: figureheads, promotion, curation, and application, 1982-1987”
Janina Wildfeuer, Ielka van der Sluis, Gisela Redeker, Nina van der Velden: “No laughing matter!? Analyzing the Page Layout of Instruction Comics”
Robert Aman: “Semi-naked revolutionary: native Americans, colourblind anti-racism and the Pillaging of Latin America in Tumac”
Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Arya Suresh: “Critique of DSM, medicalisation and graphic medicine”
Thomas Hamlyn-Harris: “Double take: ephemera and viewpoint construction in graphic memoir”
Sohini Bera, Rajni Singh: “Graphic narratives as history: the emergency period (1975– 1977) in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm”
Shriya Raina: “Corpse geographies in Munnu: a boy from Kashmir: sites of resistance and post-mortem agency”

Studies in Comics 13.1-2

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Denis Dépinoy: “‘Tu te trompes, Fantasio’: Yves Chaland’s decoding and recoding of Spirou”
Shromona Das: “The perfect victim: Reading trauma and victimhood in rape narratives in Indian comics”
Nora Hickey, Amaris Feland Ketcham: “Troubling the sequential image: The poetry comics of Bianca Stone”
Benjamin Fraser: “The shape of European jazz: On mute, mutable and pedagogical musical representations”
Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Giuseppe Samo: “The purple thread: The reception of Prince as a fictional character in graphic narratives”
Greice Schneider, João Senna Teixeira: “Cuteness and everyday humour in Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet”
Damon Herd: “Introduction: Uncomics”

Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 6.3

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Rachel Miller, Daniel Worden: “Understanding Comics at 30: An Introduction”Hillary Chute: “’Weirder than That’: Understanding Comics at Thirty”
Kate Polak: “Three Ideas”Moritz Fink: “’Cool’ Media Studies: McCloud, McLuhan, and the Popification of the Humanities”
Marco d’Alessandro: “Unaframed: A Short Visual Essay”
Charles Hatfield: “The Empowered and Disempowered Reader: Understanding Comics against Itself”
Caitlin Cass: “Alchemy and Control”
Paul Fisher Davies: “What We Do in the Gutters: Or, If Not Transitions, What?”
Ken Parille: “Image over Text: ‘Visual Emphasis’ and Understanding Comics”
Shreya Sangai, Beena Anirjitha Urumy: “Lines from the Margins: Gond Artists Engage with McCloud”
Misha Grifka Wander: “Someone Else’s Icon: Complicating Comics and Identification”
Antonija Cavcic: “Contemplating Covid through Understanding Comics: Conveying Meaning with Panel Transitions in Covid-themed Comics”
Chris Malone: “Reader Participation in Comics (Through Walking my Dog)”
Harriet Hustis: “Understanding McCloud: (En)Countering Closure in the Context of Trauma”
Jason DeHart: “Form and Counter-Narratives: Using Understanding Comics with Pre-Service Teachers”

ImageText 13.3

online, open access
Website

Brian Olszewski: “The Joke Work of Batman: The Killing Joke”
Christopher Younie: “Journey to the West goes Queer”
Jake Zawlacki: “Searching for Legitimacy: Spawn, McFarlane, and the Homage Cover”

Monitor 71: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2023 04 27, 12:01

The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions

Alison Halsall, Jonathan Warren (Eds.)
University Press of Mississippi
October 2022
publisher’s website

“The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader explores the exemplary trove of LGBTQ+ comics that coalesced in the underground and alternative comix scenes of the mid-1960s and in the decades after. Through insightful essays and interviews with leading comics figures, volume contributors illuminate the critical opportunities, current interactions, and future directions of these comics.
This heavily illustrated volume engages with the work of preeminent artists across the globe, such as Howard Cruse, Edie Fake, Justin Hall, Jennifer Camper, and Alison Bechdel, whose iconic artwork is reproduced within the volume. Further, it addresses and questions the possibilities of LGBTQ+ comics from various scholarly positions and multiple geographical vantages, covering a range of queer lived experience. Along the way, certain LGBTQ+ touchstones emerge organically and inevitably—pride, coming out, chosen families, sexual health, gender, risk, and liberation.
Featuring comics figures across the gamut of the industry, from renowned scholars to emerging creators and webcomics artists, the reader explores a range of approaches to LGBTQ+ comics—queer history, gender and sexuality theory, memory studies, graphic medicine, genre studies, biography, and more—and speaks to the diversity of publishing forms and media that shape queer comics and their reading communities.
Chapters trace the connections of LGBTQ+ comics from the panel, strip, comic book, graphic novel, anthology, and graphic memoir to their queer readership, the LGBTQ+ history they make visible, the often still quite fragile LGBTQ+ distribution networks, the coded queer intelligence they deploy, and the community-sustaining energy and optimism they conjure. Above all, The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader highlights the efficacy of LGBTQ+ comics as a kind of common ground for creators and readers.”

Manga: A Critical Guide

Bloomsbury Comics Studies

Shige Suzuki, Ronald Stewart
Bloomsbury
October 2022
publisher’s website

“A wide-ranging introductory guide for readers making their first steps into the world of manga, this book helps readers explore the full range of Japanese comic styles, forms and traditions from its earliest texts to the internationally popular comics of the 21st century.
In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers:

The history of Japanese comics, from influences in early visual culture to the global ‘Manga Boom’ of the 1990s to the present
Case studies of texts reflecting the range of themes, genres, forms and creators, including Osamu Tezuka, Machiko Hasegawa and Katsuhiro Otomo
Key themes and contexts – from gender and sexuality, to history and censorship
Critical approaches to manga, including definitions, biography and reception and global publishing contexts

The book includes a bibliography of essential critical writing on manga, discussion questions for classroom use and a glossary of key critical terms.”

Comics and Archeology

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Zena Kamash, Katy Soar, Leen Van Broeck (Eds.)
Palgrave
October 2022
publisher’s website

“This book adds to the scant academic literature investigating how comics transmit knowledge of the past and how this refraction of the past shapes our understanding of society and politics in sometimes damaging ways. The volume comes at these questions from a specifically archaeological perspective, foregrounding the representation and narrative use of material cultures. It fulfils its objectives through three reception studies in the first part of the volume and three chapters by comic creators in the second part. All six chapters aim to grapple with a set of central questions about the power inherent in drawn images of various kinds.”

Precarious Youth in Contemporary Graphic Narratives: Young Lives in Crisis

Routledge Advances in Comics Studies

María Porras Sánchez, Gerardo Vilches (Eds.)
Routledge
September 2022
publisher’s website

“This volume explores comics as examples of moral outrage in the face of a reality in which precariousness has become an inherent part of young lives. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters devote attention to the expression and representation of precarious subjectivities, as well as to the economic and professional precarity that characterizes comics creation and production.
An international team of authors, young and senior systematically examines the representation of precarious youth in graphic fiction and autobiographic comics, superheroes and precarity, market issues and spaces of activism and vulnerability. With this structure, the book offers a global perspective and comprehensive coverage of different aspects of a complex and multifaceted field of knowledge, with a special attention to minorities and liminal subjects. The comics analyzed function as examples of “ethical solicitation” that bear witness of the precarious existence younger generations endure, while at the same time creating images that voice their outrage and might move readers to act.
This timely and truly interdisciplinary volume will appeal to comics scholars and researchers in the areas of media and cultural studies, modern languages, education, art and design, communication studies, sociology, medical humanities and more.”

Art History for Comics: Past, Present and Potential Futures

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Ian Horton , Maggie Gray
Palgrave
September 2022
publisher’s website

“This book looks at comics through the lens of Art History, examining the past influence of art-historical methodologies on comics scholarship to scope how they can be applied to Comics Studies in the present and future. It unearths how early comics scholars deployed art-historical approaches, including stylistic analysis, iconography, Cultural History and the social history of art, and proposes how such methodologies, updated in light of disciplinary developments within Art History, could be usefully adopted in the study of comics today. Through a series of indicative case studies of British and American comics like Eagle, The Mighty Thor, 2000AD, Escape and Heartbreak Hotel, it argues that art-historical methods better address overlooked aspects of visual and material form. Bringing Art History back into the interdisciplinary nexus of comics scholarship raises some fundamental questions about the categories, frameworks and values underlying contemporary Comics Studies.”

Reframing the Perpetrator in Contemporary Comics: On the Importance of the Strange

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Dragoș Manea
Palgrave
August 2022
publisher’s website

“This book foregrounds the figure of the perpetrator in a selection of British, American, and Canadian comics and explores questions related to remembrance, justice, and historical debt. Its primary focus is on works that deliberately estrange the figure of the perpetrator—through fantasy, absurdism, formal ambiguity, or provocative rewriting—and thus allow readers to engage anew with the history of genocide, mass murder, and sexual violence. This book is particularly interested in the ethical space such an engagement calls into being: in its ability to allow us to ponder the privilege many of us now enjoy, the gross historical injustices that have secured it, and the debt we owe to people long dead.”

Journal Monitor 15: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2022 12 15, 00:01

European Comic Art 15.2

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- “Introduction:Counter-Narratives, Retellings and Redrawings”
- Monalesia Earle, Joe Sutliff Sanders: “Misdirection, Displacement and the Nisse in Hilda and the Black Hound“
- Cara Takakjian: “An Amalgam of Voices: A Prismatic Approach to Memory and History in Gipi’s Graphic Novels”
- Benjamin Fraser: “The Poetry of Snails: The Shown, the Intervened and the Signified in Duelo de caracoles (2010) by Sonia Pulido and Pere Joan”
- Robert Aman: “Ridiculous Empire: Satire and European Colonialism in the Comics of Olivier Schrauwen”
- Armelle Blin-Rolland: “Towards an Ecographics: Ecological Storylines in Bande Dessinée”

Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 6.2

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Alexandra Chiasson: “Zooming in on Ben Passmore”
Sylvain Lesage, Margaret C. Flinn: “Barbarella: Sexual Revolution or Editorial Revolution?”
John A. Walsh: “‘It Was as Much Ours …’: Reader Contributions to Teen Humor Fashion Comics”
Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda: “From the Field: Why Is Manga So Interesting?”
Ritesh Babu: “Civilized Monsters: These Savage Shores and the Colonialist Cage”

Journal of Perpetrator Research 4.2

Special Issue: “Perpetrators in Comics”

online, open access
Website

Laurike in ‘t Veld: “Familial Complicity in Peter Pontiac’s Kraut, Nora Krug’s Belonging, and Serena Katt’s Sunday’s Child”
Tatiana Konrad: “The Legacy of American Slavery: Contesting Blackness and Re-envisioning Nationhood in Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation“
Olga Michael: “Looking at the Perpetrator in Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland“
Johannes Schmid: “Cultural Genocide in Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land“
Mihaela Precup, Dragoș Manea: “The Perpetrator as Punch-line: Hipster Hitler and the Ambiguity of Controversial Humor”
Laurike in ‘t Veld, Christine Gundermann, Kees Ribbens, Ewa Stańczyk: Roundtable on “World War II and Holocaust Comics, Perpetrators, and Education”

Imago: Zeitschrift für Kunstpädagogik 14

Special Issue: “Grafisches Erzählen”

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Alexander Schneider/Carolin Führer: “Grafisches Erzählen”
Dietrich Grünewald: “Von der Kunst des Comics zur Kunst im Comic”
Stefanie Granzow: “Über, mit und durch Comics reden: Bild und Narration intersubjektiv aushandeln”
Bastian Haase: “Vom Panel zur Seitenarchitektur:Die Sonntagsseite als didaktisch-methodischer Impulsgeber”
Anne Krichel: “‘Und wir staunten und wir lachten, wie wir rückwärts Zeit verbrachten’:Retrogrades Erzählen im Comic Rückwärtsland“
Nadia Bader: “Charakterdesign in Comics zwischen Einfachheit und Differenziertheit”
Jeanette Hoffmann, Caroline R. Wittig: “Zur Zeit- und Raumrezeption in szenischen Lesungen zu grafischen Geschichten”

Sane: Sequential Art Narrative in Education 2.7

online, open access
Website

David Lucas Jr: “The Textual Gutter: How Gene Luen Yang Redefines the Gutter in Boxers & Saints to Tell a Transnational Tale”
Maribeth Nottingham, Barbara J. McClanahan, Howard Atkinson: “Evaluating a Suite of Strategies for Reading Graphic Novels: A Confirmatory Case Study”
James O. Barbre III, Justin Carroll, Joshua Tolbert: “Comic Literature and Graphic Novel Uses in History, Literature, Math, and Science”

Monitor 70: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2022 10 03, 00:01

Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry

Jane Tolmie (ed.)

University Press of Mississippi
July 2022
Publisher’s website

“Lynda Barry (b. 1956) is best known for her distinctive style and unique voice, first popularized in her underground weekly comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Since then, she has published prolifically, including numerous comics, illustrated novels, and nonfiction books exploring the creative process. Barry’s work is genre- and form-bending, often using collage to create what she calls “word with drawing” vignettes. Her art, imaginative and self-reflective, allows her to discuss gender, race, relationships, memory, and her personal, everyday lived experience. It is through this experience that Barry examines the creative process and offers to readers ways to record and examine their own lives.
The essays in Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry, edited by Jane Tolmie, study the pedagogy of Barry’s work and its application academically and practically. Examining Barry’s career and work from the point of view of research-creation, Contagious Imagination applies Barry’s unique mixture of teaching, art, learning, and creativity to the very form of the volume, exploring Barry’s imaginative praxis and offering readers their own.
With a foreword by Frederick Luis Aldama and an afterword by Glenn Willmott, this volume explores the impact of Barry’s work in and out of the classroom. Divided into four sections—Teaching and Learning, which focuses on critical pedagogy; Comics and Autobiography, which targets various practices of rememorying; Cruddy, a self-explanatory category that offers two extraordinary critical interventions into Barry criticism around a challenging text; and Research-Creation, which offers two creative, synthetic artistic pieces that embody and enact Barry’s own mixed academic and creative investments—this book offers numerous inroads into Barry’s idiosyncratic imagination and what it can teach us about ourselves.”

Superheld*innen: Gottheiten der Gegenwart?

Nicolaus Wilder

Kiel University Press
August 2022
Publisher’s website

“Superheld*innen fristen trotz ihrer fast 100 Jahre währenden medialen Präsenz ein Nischendasein im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs. Auch wenn dieses aufzubrechen scheint, ist die Perspektive nach wie vor von einer massenkulturkritischen Haltung dominiert, deren Blick notwendigerweise verschlossen bleibt für das Hoffnungsvolle, Orientierende und Bedeutungsvolle ihrer Narrative. Diese überwiegend im Fandiskurs artikulierte Gegenseite erweist sich jedoch als bestens anschlussfähig an eine pädagogische Betrachtungsweise, die durch das Buch eröffnet wird.”

Vertigo Comics: British Creators, US Editors, and the Making of a Transformational Imprint

Isabelle Licari-Guillaume

Routledge
August 2022
Publisher’s website

“This book explores the so-called “British Invasion” of DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint, which played an important role in redefining the mainstream comics industry in the US during the early 1990s.
Focusing on British creators within Vertigo, this study traces the evolution of the line from its creation in 1993 to its demise in 2019. Through an approach grounded in cultural history, the book disentangles the imprint’s complex roots, showing how editors channelled the potential of its British writers at a time of deep-seated economic and cultural change within the comics industry, and promoted a sense of cohesion across titles that defied categories. The author also delves into lesser-known aspects of the Invasion, exploring less-canonical periods and creators that are often eclipsed by Vertigo’s early star writers.
An innovative contribution on a key element of comic book history, this volume will appeal both to researchers of Vertigo scholarship and to fans of the imprint. It will also be an essential read for those interested in transatlantic collaborations and exchanges in the entertainment industry, processes of cultural legitimation and cultural hierarchies, and to anyone working on the representation of national and social identities.”

Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books: Red Ink in the Gutter

John Darowski, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (eds.)

Routledge
August 2022
Publisher’s website

“This volume explores how horror comic books have negotiated with the social and cultural anxieties framing a specific era and geographical space.
Paying attention to academic gaps in comics’ scholarship, these chapters engage with the study of comics from varying interdisciplinary perspectives, such as Marxism; posthumanism; and theories of adaptation, sociology, existentialism, and psychology. Without neglecting the classical era, the book presents case studies ranging from the mainstream comics to the independents, simultaneously offering new critical insights on zones of vacancy within the study of horror comic books while examining a global selection of horror comics from countries such as India (City of Sorrows), France (Zombillénium), Spain (Creepy), Italy (Dylan Dog), and Japan (Tanabe Gou’s Manga Adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft), as well as the United States.
One of the first books centered exclusively on close readings of an under-studied field, this collection will have an appeal to scholars and students of horror comics studies, visual rhetoric, philosophy, sociology, media studies, pop culture, and film studies. It will also appeal to anyone interested in comic books in general and to those interested in investigating intricacies of the horror genre.”

Seeing Comics through Art History: Alternative Approaches to the Form

Maggie Gray, Ian Horton (eds.)

Palgrave
June 2022
Publisher’s website

“This book explores what the methodologies of Art History might offer Comics Studies, in terms of addressing overlooked aspects of aesthetics, form, materiality, perception and visual style. As well as considering what Art History proposes of comic scholarship, including the questioning of some of its deep-rooted categories and procedures, it also appraises what comics and Comics Studies afford and ask of Art History. This book draws together the work of international scholars applying art-historical methodologies to the study of a range of comic strips, books, cartoons, graphic novels and manga, who, as well as being researchers, are also educators, artists, designers, curators, producers, librarians, editors, and writers, with some undertaking practice-based research. Many are trained art historians, but others come from, have migrated into, or straddle other disciplines, such as Comparative Literature, American Literature, Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, and a range of subjects within Art & Design practice.”

The DC Comics Universe: Critical Essays

Douglas Brode (ed.)

McFarland
August 2022
Publisher’s website

“As properties of DC comics continue to sprout over the years, narratives that were once kept sacrosanct now spill over into one another, synergizing into one bona fide creative Universe. Intended for both professional pop culture researchers and general interest readers, this collection of essays covers DC Universe multimedia, including graphic novels, video games, movies and TV shows. Each essay is written by a recognized pop culture expert offering a distinct perspective on a wide variety of topics. Even though many of the entries address important social themes like gender and racism, the book is not limited to these topics. Also included are more lighthearted essays for full verisimilitude, including analyses of long forgotten or seemingly marginal aspects of the DC Extended Universe, as well as in-depth and original interpretations of the most beloved characters and their relationships to one another. Highly accessible and approachable, this work provides previously unavailable in-roads that create a richer comprehension of the ever-expanding DC Universe.”

Journal Monitor 14: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2022 07 21, 00:01

ImageTexT 13.1 & 13.2

online, open access
Website

13.2

Michelle Ann Abate: The Yellow Kid and The Yellow Peril – R. F. Outcault’s Comics Series, Asian Caricature, and Chinese Exclusion
Matthew Holder: Vigilantism and Violent Forms in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns
Chester Scoville: Place, Knowledge, and Bodies in This One Summer

13.1

Benjamin Fraser: “A Sort of Enchanted Place” – Town and Country Mysticism and the Architectural Façade in Seth’s Clyde Fans
Kristy Beers Fägersten, Anna Nordenstam, Margareta Wallin Wictorin: Satirizing the nuclear family in the comic art of Liv Strömquist
Alexandra Lampp Berglund : Deconstructing Diana – An Examination of Disability and Gender in Wonder Woman
José Alaniz – For Angela Likina (1982-2016): ‘We Are Here’: Queer Comics in Russia
Bonnie Cross: Restless Figures – Animated Horror Stories as Hypertext

European Comic Art 15.1

online via subscription
Website

Mike Classon Frangos, Anna Nordenstam: Feminist Comics in the Nordic Region — Queer, Humour and the Body
Leena Romu: Smashing the Ideals of Docile Femininity – Humoristic Strategies of Feminist Resistance in Finnish Women’s Comics Magazines of the 1990s and 2000s
Anna Vuorinne, Ralf Kauranen: Visions of Queer Places – Migration and Utopia in Finnish Queer Comics
Maria Margareta Österholm: The Pain and the Creeping Feeling – Skewed Girlhood in Two Graphic Novels by Åsa Grennvall
Nina Ernst: Bodily Experience and Visual Metaphor in Two Swedish Trans Graphic Narratives
Charlotte Johanne Fabricius: Processual Aesthetics and Feminist Trouble – The Comics of Rikke Villadsen
Adriana Margareta Dancus: Childbirth during the COVID-19 Pandemic – An Analysis of Fødselen [The birth] by Norwegian Cartoonist, Blogger, and Nurse Hanne Monge Sigbjørnsen

IJOCA: International Journal of Comic Art 23.1

print via subscription
Website

John A. Lent, Xu Ying: In Support of Their Fathers’ and Mother’s Legacies – 13 Offspring of China’s Prominent Cartoonists Explain
William Hamilton: Coping with Conflict: Boxing Heroes and German Comics in the Aftermath of the First World War
Michele Ann Abate: “Any Children?” – “The Family Circus” and the Problems of Parenthood
José Alaniz: “Fragging” The Afghan War – Red Blood
Artur Skweres: “All You Need Is Kill, Not Love – Considering the Romantic Relationship in the Manga and Film Adaptations of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s Novel
Mike Rhode: Jason Little Discusses The Vagina, His NSFW Webcomic
Aaron Humphrey, Simon Walsh: The Border Separating Us – Autobiographical Comics of an Australian World War I Internment Camp
Toby Juliff: Tintin and the Jews (of Contemporary Literature)
Shivani Sharma: Within and Between the Visual Metaphoricity of Comics – A Semiotic Approach to the Mahābhārata in Amar Chitra Katha
Jeff S. Wilson: Dramatizing Ontology in 18 Days: Grant Morrison’s Mahābhārata and the Battle to Save Eternity
Ignacio Fernández Sarasola: The Role of Fox Feature Syndicate in the Implementation of the Comics Code Authority
Kirsten Møllegaard: Remembrances of Things Past – Childhood in Graphic Memoirs
Kinko Ito: The Social Functions and Impacts of Popular Manga in Contemporary Japan – A Case of GOLDEN KAMUY
Chadwick L. Roberts, Anita K. McDaniel: Slaying the Monster – Heroic Lesbian Narratives in World’s Finest
Angelo Letizia: Poems, Comics and the Spaces Between: An Examination of the Interplay between Poem and Pag
Noran Amin: The Oriental Superheroes: Political Questions in G. Willow Wilson’s Cairo: A Graphic Novel and Ms. Marvel
Alisia Grace Chase: The Maternal-Feminine and Matrixial Borderspace in Megan Kelso’s “Watergate Sue”
Felipe Rodolfo Hendriksen: Morpheus Aeternorum – Dreams, Androgyny, and Their Characteristics in Sandman (Preludes & Nocturnes) by Neil Gaiman

Studies in Comics 12.1

online via subscription
Website

Ivan Pintor Iranzo, Eva Van de Wiele: Out of family, into history – A comparative study of the superchild in Corriere dei Piccoli, TBO and The Adventures of Tintin
Michel De Dobbeleer: Can stereotypical housewives in Flemish family comics divorce? The cases of Jommeke and De Kiekeboes
Danielle Sutton: The problem with empathy – Justification and appeasement in Hey, Kiddo and Real Friends
Lan Dong: Drawing childhood in conflict: Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir

Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 6.1

online via subscription
Website

Brannon Costello: Strange Daddy – Uprooting the Environmentalist Family Romance in Nancy A. Collins’ Swamp Thing
Amy Mazowita: Privileged Witnessing and the Graphic Self in Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less
Ashley Ecklund: Maus II‘s Emphatic Smoke – The Trace as Graphic Affect

Journal Monitor 13: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2022 06 16, 00:01

European Comic Art 14.2

online, subscription
Website

Fransiska Louwagie, Simon Lambert: “Introduction: Tradition and Innovation in Franco-Belgian Bande dessinée”
Annick Pellegrin: “Anchoring Retro Spirou et Fantasio and Spin-off Albums”
Cristina Álvares: “Spirou’s Origin Myth and Family Romances: The Domestication of Adventure in the New Adventure Comic”
Nicolas Martinez: “Reframing the Western Genre in Bande dessinée, from Hollywood to Ledger Art: An Intermedial Perspective”
Ilan Manouach: “Outlining Conceptual Practices in Comics”

Inks 5.3

online, subscription
Website

Jackson Ayres: “Writing for the Trade or Writing for a Trade?”
Lan Dong: “Drawing Histories, Documenting Experiences: Clément Baloup’s Vietnamese Memories”
Vincent Haddad: “Detroit vs. Everybody (Including Superheroes): Representing Race through Setting in DC Comics”
Susan Vanderborg: “’I Tell You I Know Nothing’: Redefining Accessibility in Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s The Torture Report”
Dale Jacobs: “The 1976 Project: On Comics and Grief, or How Our Lives Intersect with What We Study”

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 11

online, open access
Website

Anna Marta Marini: “Discursive (Re)Contruction of Mexican American Identity in J. Gonzo’s La Mano del Destino”
Johanna Commins: “Composing the Handmaid: From Graphic Novel to Protest Icon”
Mike Classon Frangos: “Swedish Norm-Critical Comics and the Comics Pedagogy of Lynda Barry”
Chris Reyns-Chikuma: “Beyond the Two Solitudes: Differences in Fluidity in Franco-Canadian BD and Anglo-Canadian Comics Through the Influence of Manga”
Alessandro Scanu: “How to Tell a Story without Words: Time and Focalization in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006)”
Niels Høegh Madsen, Mathias Stengaard, Maria Jose Schmidt-Kessen: “The Visualized Employment Contract. An Exploratory Study on Contract Visualization in Danish Employment Contracts”

Journal of Comics & Culture 6

online, subscription
Website

Joshua A. Kopin: “’A Big Hit Wit’ Each Oter’: Techniques of Belonging and Identification on Hogan’s Alley”
Mark R. Martell: “From Invisible to Invincible: Asian American Superheroes in Comics”
Isabelle Martin: “’The Weight of Their Past’: Reconstructing Memory and History Through Photographs in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do”
Ioana Atanassova: “Superman: The Kryptonian-American Immigrant”
Matt Reingold: “International Migrations in Asaf Hanuka’s Ha Yehuda Ha Aravi”
Erika Chung: “Somewhere in Between: Asian Diaspora, Superhero Comics and Identity”

Sane: Sequential Art Narrative in Education 2.6

online, open access
Website

Oliver McGarr, Guillermina Gavaldon, Francisco Manuel Sáez de Adana Herrero: “Using comics as a tool to facilitate critical reflective practice in professional education”
Angelo Letizia: “Empirical Drawings: Utilizing Comic Essays in the Social Studies Classroom to Teach Citizenship”

IJOCA: International Journal of Comic Art 22.2

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José Alaniz: “Survilo and Historical Trauma in Contemporary Russian Comics”
Marty Branagan: “Tintin: From Violent Communist-Hating Conservative to Radical Peacenik, Part 2”
Annabelle Cone: “The Fez, The Harem Pants, and the Embroidered Tie: Fashion and the Politics of Orientalism in Three Francophone Graphic Novels”
John A. Lent, Geisa Fernandes: “Far Out of the Box: The Comics of Chile’s Marcela Trujillo (Maliki)”
Natsume Fusanosuke: “The Characteristics of Japanese Manga”
Stephen Connor: “Ordinary Enemies: Robert Kanigher, Garth Ennis, and the Myth of the Unblemished Wehrmacht”
Pritesh Chakraborty: “Re-invention of Indian Myths in the Superhero Comic Books of Nagraj”
Christine Atchison: “Watchmen: An Exploration of Transcendence in Comics”
Francisco Saez de Adana, Michel Matly: “The 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and American Comics”
John A. Lent: “Trying Times Require Re-inventiveness: Ways of Coping of Taiwan’s Ling Qun”
Brian Cremins: “’Reoccurring Dreams’: Music and the Elegiac Voice in John Porcellino’s Perfect Example”
Alisia Grace Chase: “The Maternal-Feminine and Matrixial Borderspace in Megan Kelso’s Watergate Sue”
Kosei Ono: “How Sugiura’s Ninja-Boy Comics Developed after the Asia-Pacific War”
Aaron Humphrey: “The Pedagogy and Potential of Educational Comics”
Jeffrey O. Segrave: “To Play or Not to Play? That Is the Question: Perspectives on Organized Youth Sports in Comic Strips”
Peter Cullen Bryan: “An Expert on Arrow: Critical Fan Activism and Gail Simone’s Twitter”
Andrew Edward: “Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane? It’s Jack the Ripper!”
Safa Al-shammary: “Habibi Worth a Thousand Words, and a Few Words Worth a Thousand Tales”
Kyle Eveleth: “Print Is Dead; Long Live Print!: Are Digital Comics Killing the Print Comics Industry?”
Angelo J. Letizia: “Comics as a Window into Disposability: Some Thoughts”
Mrinal Chatterjee: “Cartoons in the Time of Corona in India”

Monitor 68: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2022 01 24, 00:01

Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History

Eike Exner

Rutgers University Press
270 pages
November 2021
Publisher’s website

“Japanese comics, commonly known as manga, are a global sensation. Critics, scholars, and everyday readers have often viewed this artform through an Orientalist framework, treating manga as the exotic antithesis to American and European comics. In reality, the history of manga is deeply intertwined with Japan’s avid importation of Western technology and popular culture in the early twentieth century.
Comics and the Origins of Manga reveals how popular U.S. comics characters like Jiggs and Maggie, the Katzenjammer Kids, Felix the Cat, and Popeye achieved immense fame in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Modern comics had earlier developed in the United States in response to new technologies like motion pictures and sound recording, which revolutionized visual storytelling by prompting the invention of devices like speed lines and speech balloons. As audiovisual entertainment like movies and record players spread through Japan, comics followed suit. Their immediate popularity quickly encouraged Japanese editors and cartoonists to enthusiastically embrace the foreign medium and make it their own, paving the way for manga as we know it today.
By challenging the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from centuries of prior Japanese art and explaining why manga and other comics around the world share the same origin story, Comics and the Origins of Manga offers a new understanding of this increasingly influential artform.”

Key Terms in Comics Studies

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Erin La Cour, Simon Grennan, Rik Spanjers (eds.)

Palgrave
390 pages
January 2022
Publisher’s website

“Key Terms in Comics Studies is a glossary of over 300 terms and critical concepts currently used in the Anglophone academic study of comics, including those from other languages that are currently adopted and used in English.
Written by nearly 100 international and contemporary experts from the field, the entries are succinctly defined, exemplified, and referenced. The entries are 250 words or fewer, placed in alphabetical order, and explicitly cross-referenced to others in the book.
Key Terms in Comics Studies is an invaluable tool for both students and established researchers alike.”

Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes

Jeffrey A. Brown

Rutgers University Press
244 pages
November 2021
Publisher’s website

“Impossibly muscular men and voluptuous women parade around in revealing, skintight outfits, and their romantic and sexual entanglements are a key part of the ongoing drama. Such is the state of superhero comics and movies, a genre that has become one of our leading mythologies, conveying influential messages about gender, sexuality, and relationships.
Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence.
With examples spanning from the Golden Ages of DC and Marvel comics up to recent works like the TV series The Boys, this study provides a comprehensive look at how superhero media shapes our perceptions of love, sex, and gender.”

Superheroes and Excess: A Philosophical Adventure

Routledge Advances in Comics Studies

Jamie Brassett, Richard Reynolds (eds.)

Routledge
304 pages
November 2021
Publisher’s website

“Finding the superhero genre in need of further investigation from philosophical standpoints that value excess as a creative drive, rather than denigrate it as a problem to be resolved, this book opens up discussions that highlight different approaches to ‘the creative excess of being’ as expressed through the genre.
While superheroes are an everyday, culturally dominant phenomena, philosophical methods and investigations have a reputation for lofty superiority. Across 13 chapters, this book facilitates a collision between the superhero genre and the discipline of philosophy, resulting in a voyage of exploration where each illuminates the other. The contributions in this book range from new voices to recognized scholars, offering superhero studies a set of critical interventions that are unusual, conceptually diverse, theoretically grounded and varied in practice. These chapters consider ‘excessive’ traits of superheroes against schools of thought that have attempted to conceptualize and understand excess by analysing texts and figures across a variety of mediums, such as The Fantastic Four, Captain America, The Vision, Logan, Black Panther and Super Hero Girls.
With its unique approach to the superhero genre, this book will be an invaluable read for students and scholars working on comic studies, transmedia studies, cultural studies, popular culture and superhero studies.”

Monitor 67: New Publications on Comic Books

Posted on 2021 11 22, 00:01

Robin and the Making of American Adolescence

Lauren R. O’Connor

Rutgers University Press
222 pages
August 2021
publisher’s website

“Holy adolescence, Batman! Robin and the Making of American Adolescence offers the first character history and analysis of the most famous superhero sidekick, Robin. Debuting just a few months after Batman himself, Robin has been an integral part of the Dark Knight’s history—and debuting just a few months prior to the word “teenager” first appearing in print, Robin has from the outset both reflected and reinforced particular images of American adolescence. Closely reading several characters who have “played” Robin over the past eighty years, Robin and the Making of American Adolescence reveals the Boy (and sometimes Girl!) Wonder as a complex figure through whom mainstream culture has addressed anxieties about adolescents in relation to sexuality, gender, and race. This book partners up comics studies and adolescent studies as a new Dynamic Duo, following Robin as he swings alongside the ever-changing American teenager and finally shining the Bat-signal on the latter half of ‘Batman and—.'”

Judge, Jury and Executioner: Essays on The Punisher in Print and on Screen

Alicia M. Goodman, Matthew J McEniry, Ryan Cassidy, Robert G. Weiner (eds.)

McFarland
193 pages
August 2021
publisher’s website

“Since the Punisher’s first appearance in the pages of Spider-Man #129, the character has become one of the most popular and controversial figures in Marvel’s vast universe. The Punisher represents one of the most recognizable types of anti-heroes. His iconic skull insignia stands for a unique type of justice: protecting the innocent while violently eliminating everyone he sees as a villain. This collection examines the Punisher from philosophical perspectives about morality and justice. Essays critique the character through the lenses of gender and feminism; consider the Punisher’s veteran status in relation the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars; and examine how politics and gun violence connect the Punisher’s world with the real world. Many iterations of the Punisher are examined within, including the Netflix release of Marvel’s The Punisher, comics series such as Punisher: MAX, Marvel Knights, and Cosmic Ghost Rider, and several fan fiction stories.”

The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats

Michael Connerty

Palgrave Macmillan
283 pages
August 2021
publisher’s website

“This monograph seeks to recover and assess the critically neglected comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for various British publications, including Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder, and Puck, between 1893 and 1917. It situates the work in relation to late-Victorian and Edwardian media, entertainment and popular culture, as well as to the evolution of the British comic during this crucial period in its development. Yeats’ recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics that Alfred Harmsworth and others published in London from 1890 onwards. The repositioning of Yeats in the context of the comics, and the acknowledgement of the very substantial corpus of graphic humour that he produced, has profound implications for our understanding of his artistic career and of his significant contribution to UK comics history. This book, which also contains many examples of the work, should therefore be of value to those interested in Comics Studies, Irish Studies, and Art History.”

The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics

Benjamin Woo, Jeremy Stoll (eds.)

University Press of Mississippi
286 pages
July 2021
publisher’s website

“The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics is the first collection to explicitly examine the production, circulation, and reception of comics from a social-scientific point of view. Designed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue about theory and methods in comics studies, this volume draws on approaches from fields as diverse as sociology, political science, history, folklore, communication studies, and business, among others, to study the social life of comics and graphic novels.
Taking the concept of a “comics world”—that is, the collection of people, roles, and institutions that “produce” comics as they are—as its organizing principle, the book asks readers to attend to the contexts that shape how comics move through societies and cultures. Each chapter explores a specific comics world or particular site where comics meet one of their publics, such as artists and creators; adaptors; critics and journalists; convention-goers; scanners; fans; and comics scholars themselves. Through their research, contributors demonstrate some of the ways that people participate in comics worlds and how the relationships created in these spaces can provide different perspectives on comics and comics studies.
Moving beyond the page, The Comics World explores the complexity of the lived reality of the comics world: how comics and graphic novels matter to different people at different times, within a social space shared with others.”