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.

Monstrous Women in Comics

Horror and Monstrosity Studies Series

Samantha Langsdale, Elizabeth Rae Coody (Eds.)
University Press of Mississippi
296 pages
April 2020
Publisher’s website

“Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are not.
Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody’s edited volume explores the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. To analyze monstrous women is not only to examine comics, but also to witness how those constructions correspond to women’s real material experiences.
Each section takes a critical look at the cultural context surrounding varied monstrous voices: embodiment, maternity, childhood, power, and performance. Featured are essays on such comics as Faith, Monstress, Bitch Planet, and Batgirl and such characters as Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman.
This volume probes into the patriarchal contexts wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject, such that women frequently become monsters.
Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang.”

Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Dominic Davies, Candida Rifkind (Eds.)
Palgrave
345 pages
May 2020
Publisher’s website

“Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics’ documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts?
The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generative force that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.”

The Graphic Lives of Fathers: Memory, Representation, and Fatherhood in North American Autobiographical Comics

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Mihaela Precup
Palgrave
244 pages
February 2020
Publisher’s website

“This book explores the representation of fatherhood in contemporary North American autobiographical comics that depict paternal conduct from the post-war period up to the present. It offers equal space to autobiographical comics penned by daughters who represent their fathers’ complicated and often disappointing behavior, and to works by male cartoonists who depict and usually celebrate their own experiences as fathers. This book asks questions about how the desire to forgive or be forgiven can compromise the authors’ ethics or dictate style, considers the ownership of life stories whose subjects cannot or do not agree to be represented, and investigates the pervasive and complicated effects of dominant masculinities. By close reading these cartoonists’ complex strategies of (self-)representation, this volume also places photography and archival work alongside the problematic legacy of self-deprecation carried on from underground comics, and shows how the vocabulary of graphic narration can work with other media and at the intersection of various genres and modes to produce a valuable scrutiny of contemporary norms of fatherhood.”

Apocalyptic Ecology in the Graphic Novel: Life and the Environment After Societal Collapse

Clint Jones
McFarland
189 pages
April 2020
Publisher’s website

“As awareness of climate change grows, so do the number of cultural depictions of environmental disaster. Graphic novels have reliably produced dramatizations of such disasters. Many use themes of dystopian hopefulness, or the enjoyment readers experience from seeing society prevail in times of apocalypse.
This book argues that these generally inspirational narratives contribute to a societal apathy for real-life environmental degradation.
By examining the narratives and art of the environmental apocalypse in contemporary graphic novels, the author stands against dystopian hope, arguing that the ways in which we experience depictions of apocalypse shape how we respond to real crises.”

Ms. Marvel’s America: No Normal

Jessica Baldanzi, Hussein Rashid (Eds.)
University Press of Mississippi
280 pages
February 2020
Publisher’s website

“Mainstream superheroes are becoming more and more diverse, with new identities for Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man. Though the Marvel-verse is becoming much more racially, ethnically, and gender diverse, many of these comics remain shy about religion.
The new Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, is a notable exception, not only because she is written and conceived by two women, Sana Amanat and G. Willow Wilson, but also because both of these women bring their own experiences as Muslim Americans to the character.
This distinct collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines including literature, cultural studies, religious studies, pedagogy, and communications to engage with a single character, exploring Khan’s significance for a broad readership. While acknowledged as the first Muslim superhero to headline her own series, her character appears well developed and multifaceted in many other ways. She is the first character to take over an established superhero persona, Ms. Marvel, without a reboot of the series or death of the original character. The teenager is also a second-generation immigrant, born to parents who arrived in New Jersey from Pakistan.
With essays from and about diverse voices on an array of topics from fashion to immigration history to fandom, this volume includes an exclusive interview with Ms. Marvel author and cocreator G. Willow Wilson by gender studies scholar Shabana Mir.
Contributions by José Alaniz, Jessica Baldanzi, Eric Berlatsky, Peter E. Carlson, Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins, Antero Garcia, Aaron Kashtan, Winona Landis, A. David Lewis, Martin Lund, Shabana Mir, Kristin M. Peterson, Nicholaus Pumphrey, Hussein Rashid, and J. Richard Stevens.”

Children’s and Young Adult Comics

Bloomsbury Comics Studies

Gwen Athene Tarbox
Bloomsbury
200 pages
April 2020
Publisher’s website

“A complete critical guide to the history, form and contexts of the genre, Children’s and Young Adult Comics helps readers explore how comics have engaged with one of their most crucial audiences.
In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as

• The history of comics for children and young adults, from early cartoon strips to the rise of comics as mainstream children’s literature
• Cultural contexts – from the Comics Code Authority to graphic novel adaptations of popular children’s texts such as Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
• Key texts – from familiar favourites like Peanuts and Archie Comics to YA graphic novels such as Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and hybrid works including the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series
• Important theoretical and critical approaches to studying children’s and young adult comics

Children’s and Young Adult Comics includes a glossary of crucial critical terms and a lengthy resources section to help students and readers develop their understanding of these genres and pursue independent study.”

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.

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

online (via subscription)
Website

• Benjamin Fraser: Tactile comics, disability studies and the mind’s eye: on “A Boat Tour” (2017) in Venice with Max
• Cara Gormally: The baby-making black hole
• Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad: Child soldiers in transatlantic graphic narratives of war
• Fionnuala Doran: Alone amidst X-men: Rogue, sexuality, and mental illness
• J. Andrew Deman: Busting Loose: Ms. Marvel and post-rape trauma in X-Men comics
• Pfunzo Sidogi: (South) Africa’s online animation revolution: the case of Jonas Lekganyane’s The adventures of Noko Mashaba
• Jillian Fleck: A stranger heritage: Canadian identity in the comics of Michael DeForge
• Vlad Beronja: Twilight zones of history: Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia and the Serbian alternative comics of the 1990s
• Giorgio Busi Rizzi: Immigrant song: nostalgic tensions in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival
• Maria Pagès: The spreading of technical knowledge in post-Civil War Spain: the example of Josep Escobar
• Tomasz Żaglewski: From white eagles to turbopoles. The specifics of superhero narratives in Polish comic books
• Tomasz Żaglewski: The Impossibles revived: Hanna-Barbera’s superhero universe in TV and comics
• Patrick Grant & Elizabeth MacFarlane: Designing a literary workshop for the graphic novel: a critical tradition and a new literary form
• Camilla Baasch Andersen: Musings on the comic book contract project and legal design thinking
• Paul Mountfort: ‘Tintin, gender and desire’
• Keith Friedlander: Beyond alternative: Michael DeForge and the new grotesque
• Delilah Bermudez Brataas: Gods and monsters: authorial creation in Gaiman’s Sandman and McCreery and Del Col’s Kill Shakespeare
• Leonie Brialey: Varieties of sincerity and irony in the work of Michael Leunig and Mary Leunig
• Paul Uhlmann: Lines of doubt, fear and tenderness in the work of José Luis Cuevas and Tommi Parrish

Studies in Comics 10.2

Special Issue: Comics and Nation

online (via subscription)
Website

• Tiffany Neo, Alex Mitchell: Expanding comics theory to account for interactivity: A preliminary
• Debarghya Sanyal: The sound of silence: Blank spaces, fading narratives and fragile frames in comics
• Leslie McMurtry: Dark night of the soul: Applicability of theory in comics and radio through the scripted podcast drama
• John C. Traver: Hero or villain? Moral ambiguity and narrative structure under the Comics Code in 1950s Superman stories
• Benjamin Fraser: On polysemiotic interactions, visual paratexts and image-specific translation in comics: The case of Rodolfo Santullo and Matías Bergara’s Dengue
• Mathieu Donner: Rethinking illness through performance: The gaze and the aesthetics of health in Charles Burns’ Black Hole

European Comic Art 13.1

online (open access)
Website

• Laurence Grove: Twenty Years of IBDS
• Matthew Screech: Gauguin and Van Gogh Meet the Ninth Art: Postmodernism and Myths about Great Artists
• Mike Classon Frangos: Liv Strömquist’s Fruit of Knowledge and the Gender of Comics
• Simone Castaldi: ‘The Inexhaustible Surface of Things’: Stefano Tamburini’s Comic Book Work
• Dani Filc: Tintin and Corto Maltese: The European Adventurer Meets the Colonial Other

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.

UK Feminist Cartoons and Comics: A Critical Survey

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Nicola Streeten
Palgrave
274 pages
January 2020
Publisher’s website

“This book demonstrates that since the 1970s, British feminist cartoons and comics have played an important part in the Women’s Movement in Britain. A key component of this has been humour. This aspect of feminist history in Britain has not previously been documented. The book questions why and how British feminists have used humour in comics form to present serious political messages. It also interrogates what the implications have been for the development of feminist cartoons and for the popularisation of feminism in Britain. The work responds to recent North American feminist comics scholarship that concentrates on North American autobiographical comics of trauma by women. This book highlights the relevance of humour and provides a comparative British perspective.
The time frame is 1970 to 2019, chosen as representative of a significant historical period for the development of feminist cartoon and comics activity and of feminist theory and practice. Research methods include archival data collection, complemented by interviews with selected cartoonists. Visual and textual analysis of specific examples draws on literature from humour theory, comics studies and feminist theory. Examples are also considered as responses to the economic, social and political contexts in which they were produced.”

The Phantom Comics and the New Left: A Socialist Superhero

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Robert Aman
Palgrave
137 pages
February 2020
Publisher’s website

“This book is about the Phantom in Sweden, or, more correctly, about Sweden in the Phantom. Robert Aman uncovers how a peripheral American superhero – created in 1936 by Lee Falk – that has been accused of both racism and sexism has become a national concern in a country that several researchers have labelled the most antiracist and gender equal in the world. When a group of Swedish creators began their official production of licensed scripts based on The Phantomcomic in 1972, the character was redefined through the prism of New Left ideology. The plots of these comics, besides aiming to entertain, also sought to affirm for readers the righteousness and validity of an ideological doctrine that, at the time, was dominant among the Swedish public and influential in the country’s foreign policy. Ultimately, Aman demonstrates how the Swedish Phantom embodies values and a political point of view that reflect how Sweden sees itself and its role in the world.”

With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comics

Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, Peter E. Carlson (eds.)
University Press of Mississippi
270 pages
February 2020
Publisher’s website

“More and more educators are using comics in the classroom. As such, this edited volume sets out the stakes, definitions, and exemplars of recent comics pedagogy, from K-12 contexts to higher education instruction to ongoing communities of scholars working outside of the academy.
Building upon interdisciplinary approaches to teaching comics and teaching with comics, this book brings together diverse voices to share key theories and research on comics pedagogy. By gathering scholars, creators, and educators across various fields and in K-12 as well as university settings, editors Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson significantly expand scholarship.
This valuable resource offers both critical pieces and engaging interviews with key comics professionals who reflect on their own teaching experience and on considerations of the benefits of creating comics in education. Included are interviews with acclaimed comics writers Lynda Barry, Brian Michael Bendis, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and David Walker, as well as essays spanning from studying the use of superhero comics in the classroom to the ways comics can enrich and empower young readers.
The inclusion of creators, scholars, and teachers leads to perspectives that make this volume unlike any other currently available. These voices echo the diverse needs of the many stakeholders invested in using comics in education today.”

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

Jean Lee Cole
University Press of Mississippi
214 pages
February 2020
Publisher’s website

“Taking up the role of laughter in society, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895–1920 examines an era in which the US population was becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. Comic artists and writers, hoping to create works that would appeal to a diverse audience, had to formulate a method for making the “other half” laugh. In magazine fiction, vaudeville, and the comic strip, the oppressive conditions of the poor and the marginalized were portrayed unflinchingly, yet with a distinctly comic sensibility that grew out of caricature and ethnic humor.
Author Jean Lee Cole analyzes Progressive Era popular culture, providing a critical angle to approach visual and literary humor about ethnicity—how avenues of comedy serve as expressions of solidarity, commiseration, and empowerment. Cole’s argument centers on the comic sensibility, which she defines as a performative act that fosters feelings of solidarity and community among the marginalized.
Cole stresses the connections between the worlds of art, journalism, and literature and the people who produced them—including George Herriman, R. F. Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Luks, and William Glackens—and traces the form’s emergence in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal-American and how it influenced popular fiction, illustration, and art. How the Other Half Laughs restores the newspaper comic strip to its rightful place as a transformative element of American culture at the turn into the twentieth century.”

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.

Comics as Communication: A Functional Approach

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Paul Fisher Davies
Palgrave
357 pages
November 2019
Publisher’s website

“This book explores how comics function to make meanings in the manner of a language. It outlines a framework for describing the resources and practices of comics creation and readership, using an approach that is compatible with similar descriptions of linguistic and multimodal communication.
The approach is based largely on the work of Michael Halliday, drawing also on the pragmatics of Paul Grice, the Text World Theory of Paul Werth and Joanna Gavins, and ideas from art theory, psychology and narratology. This brings a broad Hallidayan framework of multimodal analysis to comics scholarship, and plays a part in extending that tradition of multimodal linguistics to graphic narrative.”

The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In

Critical Approaches to Comics Artists Series

Janine Utell (ed.)
University Press of Mississippi
282 pages
January 2020
Publisher’s website

“Alison Bechdel is both a driver and beneficiary of the welcoming of comics into the mainstream. Indeed, the seemingly simple binary of outside/inside seems perpetually troubled throughout the career of this important comics artist, known for Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and Dykes to Watch Out For. This volume extends the body of scholarship on her work from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives.
In a definitive collection of original essays, scholars cover the span of Bechdel’s career, placing her groundbreaking early work within the context of her more well-known recent projects. The contributors provide new insights on major themes in Bechdel’s work, such as gender performativity, masculinity, lesbian politics and representation, trauma, life writing, and queer theory.
Situating Bechdel among other comics artists, this book charts possible influences on her work, probes the experimental traits of her comics in their representations of kinship and trauma, combs archival materials to gain insight into Bechdel’s creative process, and analyzes her work in community building and space making through the comics form.
Ultimately, the volume shows that Bechdel’s work consists of performing a series of selves—serializing the self, as it were—each constructed and refracted across and within her chosen artistic modes and genres.”

The Supervillain Reader *

Robert Moses Peaslee, Robert G. Weiner (eds.)
University Press of Mississippi
432 pages
January 2020
Publisher’s website

“The Supervillain Reader, featuring both reprinted and original essays, reveals why we are so fascinated with the villain. The obsession with the villain is not a new phenomenon, and, in fact, one finds villains who are “super” going as far back as ancient religious and mythological texts. This innovative collection brings together essays, book excerpts, and original content from a wide variety of scholars and writers, weaving a rich tapestry of thought regarding villains in all their manifestations, including film, literature, television, games, and, of course, comics and sequential art. While The Supervillain Reader focuses on the latter, it moves beyond comics to show how the vital concept of the supervillain is part of our larger consciousness.
Editors Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner collect pieces that explore how the villain is a complex part of narratives regardless of the original source. The Joker, Lex Luthor, Harley Quinn, Darth Vader, and Magneto must be compelling, stimulating, and proactive, whereas the superhero (or protagonist) is most often reactive. Indeed, whether in comics, films, novels, religious tomes, or video games, the eternal struggle between villain and hero keeps us coming back to these stories over and over again.”

Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics

New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative

Sean Guynes, Martin Lund (eds.)
Ohio State University Press
274 pages
January 2020
Publisher’s website

“In Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, Sean Guynes and Martin Lund bring together a series of essays that contextualize the histories and stakes of whiteness studies, superhero comics, and superhero studies for academics, fans, and media-makers alike. The volume illustrates how the American comic book superhero is fundamentally a figure of white power and white supremacy and ultimately calls for diversity in superhero comics as well as a democratized media culture.
Contributors not only examine superhero narratives but also delve into the production, distribution, audience, and reception of those narratives, highlighting the imbrication of forces that have helped to create, normalize, question, and sometimes even subvert American beliefs about whiteness and race. Unstable Masks considers the co-constitutive nature of identity, representation, narrative, production and consumption, and historical and cultural contexts in forging the stereotypes that decide who gets to be a superhero and who gets to be American on the four-color pages of comic books.”

Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics

Paul Williams
Rutgers University Press
278 pages
January 2020
Publisher’s website

“The term “graphic novel” was first coined in 1964, but it wouldn’t be broadly used until the 1980s, when graphic novels such as Watchmen and Maus achieved commercial success and critical acclaim. What happened in the intervening years, after the graphic novel was conceptualized yet before it was widely recognized?
Dreaming the Graphic Novel examines how notions of the graphic novel began to coalesce in the 1970s, a time of great change for American comics, with declining sales of mainstream periodicals, the arrival of specialty comics stores, and (at least initially) a thriving underground comix scene. Surveying the eclectic array of long comics narratives that emerged from this fertile period, Paul Williams investigates many texts that have fallen out of graphic novel history. As he demonstrates, the question of what makes a text a ‘graphic novel’ was the subject of fierce debate among fans, creators, and publishers, inspiring arguments about the literariness of comics that are still taking place among scholars today.
Unearthing a treasure trove of fanzines, adverts, and unpublished letters, Dreaming the Graphic Novel gives readers an exciting inside look at a pivotal moment in the art form’s development.”

*The ComFor editorial board regrets the lack of diversity in this publication. We endeavour to cover the entire spectrum of comics studies, report in a neutral way and keep the editorial selection process to a minimum. But we are also aware of the problematic structures that shape our academic research environment and that frequently lead to a lower visibility of female comics scholars as well as those with marginalised identities in general. We know that this imbalance is often not intended by the editors / organisers and we do not want to imply this in any way. But nonetheless, we would like to draw attention to it to raise awareness for this problem.

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.

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

online (via subscription)

Website

• Sylvain Rheault: A surge of Indigenous graphic novels
• Anthony N. Castle: Who took the comi’cuts? Whatever happened to Ginger Meggs?
• Miren Junkal Guevara Llaguno: Chester Brown´s Bible in Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus
• Catherine Appleton: The theory-practice interplay in creating a graphic memoir about the trauma of forced migration
• Christopher S. Markle: The new Australian: an observation of inexperienced and outsider views in Perth comics
• David Lewkowich: Traumatic loss and productive impasse in comics: Visual metaphors of depression and melancholia in Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer
• Shilpa Shirishkumar Tanna, Geetha Bakilapadavu: Revealing Layers: Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers
• Kindall Fredricks: ‘Meeting beneath faraway rivers:’ Examining the impact of graphic medicine through the aids memorial quilt and 7 Miles a Second
• Daniel Marrone: Towards jouissance: Pleasure and frustration in the work of Patrick Kyle
• Neal Curtis: Superheroes and the mythic imagination: Order, agency and politics
• E. Dawson Varughese: ‘Drawing thoughts together’: Indian artists’ reflections on the post-millennial Indian graphic narratives scene

ImageText 11.2 (2019-2020)

online (open access)

Website

• Michelle Ann Abate: The Far Side of Comeeks: Gary Larson, Lynda Barry, and Ugliness
• Irenae A. Aigbedion: Graphic Accounts of Violence: Visualizing Slavery in American Comics
• Willi Barthold: The Swordsman as the Artist: Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Eiichirō Oda’s One Piece and 21st Century Cultural Hybridity
• Chamara Moore: Have We Cleared the Intersection Yet?: Black Women in Comic Film Adaptations
• Matt Reingold: The Heritage Broker and the Cultural Mediator: Navigating the Past and the Present in Liana Finck’s A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York
• Juha Virtanen: ‘What face … will the bogeyman of this dark century wear?’ Politicizing a Contemporary Joker Juha Virtanen

IJOCA: International Journal of ComicArt 21.1 (2019)

print (via subscription)

Website

• Ronald Stewart: Itō Hirobumi’s Nose: Syphilis in Early 20th Century Japanese Cartoons
• Paul M. Malone: “You Are Leaving the French Sector”: Flix’s Spirou in Berlin and the Internationalization of German Comics
• Anton Kannemeyer: As I Please: A Personal Reflection on Censorship
• Annabelle Cone: The “Bobo” (bourgeois-bohème) as Post-Modern Figure? Gentrification and Globalization in Dupuy and Berberian’s Monsieur Jean and Boboland
• Tania Pérez-Cano: Graphic Testimonies of the Balsero Crisis of 1994: Narratives of Cuban Detainees at the Guantánamo Naval Base
• Ana Merino: Comics Reinventing Creativity in the Museum: Some Thoughts about the Show “Viñetas Desbordadas/Overflowing Panels”
• Jon Holt: Ishii Takashi, Beyond 1979: Ero Gekiga Godfather, GARO Inheritor, or Shōjo Manga Artist?
• Daniel F. Yezbick: Of Bears, Birds, and Barks: Animetaphoric Antagonism and Animalscéant Anxieties within Dell Funny Animal Franchise Comics
• John A. Lent: Wang Ning, Beijing Total Vision Culture Spreads Co. Ltd., and the Transnationalization of Chinese Comic Books
• Alvaro Alemán, Eduardo Villacís: Pointed Language: Reading Paola Gaviria’s Virus Tropical (2009) from the Perspective of the Visual Protocols of the Graphic Novel
• Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste: On Butterflies, Viruses, and Visas: Comics and the Perils of Diasporic Imagined Communities
• Anu Sugathan: The City and the Medium of Comics: Depiction of Urban Space in Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor and The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers
• ComFor member Dietrich Grünewald: Crossing Borders: Graphic Novels Quoting Art (transl.: Christina Little)
• Kent Worcester: That Chameleon Quality: An Interview with R. Sikoryak
• Sara Dallavalle: Popular Format and Auteur Format in Italian Comics. The Case of Magnus
• Sam Cannon, Hugo Hinojosa Lobos: Chile’s Military Dictatorship and Comics as Alternative Methods of Memorialization: Critical Approaches from Contemporary Chilean Graphic Novels
• Leila Sadegh Beigi: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Embroideries: A Graphic Novelization of Sexual Revolution across Three Generations of Iranian Women
• Mathieu Li-Goyette: A Sublime in Tension Around Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau and Francis Desharnais’ Les Premiers Aviateurs
• Michelle Ann Abate: “They’re Quite Strange in the Larval Stage”: Children and Childhood in Gary Larson’s “The Far Side”
• Magnus Nilsson: Marxism Across Media: Characterization and Montage in Variety Artwork’s Capital in Manga
• Debarghya Sanyal: The Desi Archie: Selling India’s America to America’s India
• Sina Shamsavari: Gay Male Porno Comics: Genre, Conventions, and Challenges
• Anno Moyoco Yasuko Akiyama: Ambitious Women in Male Manga Magazines: Sakuran and Hataraki-Man
• Aimee Vincent: “Hey Kids, Patriarchy!”: Satire and Audience on the Back Covers of Bitch Planet
• Chad A. Barbour: The Fine Art of Genocide: Underground Comix and U.S. History as Horror Story
• John Darowski: Superman’s Remediation of Mid-20th Century American Identity
• Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste: A Matter of Affect: Illustrated Responses to the Immigration Debacle
• Bi Keguan: Random Notes of the Editorial Office of China’s Manhua Magazine (ed.: Bi Weimin, transl..: Xu Ying)
• Chu Der-Chung (Zola Zu) with John A. Lent: The Chus: A Family Teeming with Cartoonists (transl. Xu Ying)
• Alvaro Alemán, Eduardo Villacís: Faith in Comics: Ex-voto Religious Offerings and Comic Art
• Barbara Zocal Da Silva: Translated Hispano-American Comics in Brazil
• Conversation with Jan Ziolkowski and Ariana Chaivaranon: An Afternoon with R. O. Blechman
• John Gardner: Kennedy Conspiracy Comics: ¡en Español!
• Michela Canepari:The Myth of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to Gris Grimly: Some Intersemiotic and Ideological Issues

Section: The Best We Could Do: A Mini-Symposium

• Isabelle Martin: The Role of Water in the Construction of Refugee Subjectivity in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do
• Debarghya Sanyal: A Burden of Tales: Memories, Trauma, and Narratorial Legacies in The Best We Could Do and Munnu
• Francesca Lyn: The Fragmentary Body: Traumatic Configurations in Autobiographical Comics by Women of Color
• A. David Lewis: A Graphic Medicine Prescription

Section: Pioneers in Comics Scholarship

• Kosei Ono: My Life with American Comics: How It Started
• Shefali Elizabeth Mathew: Nature of Reality in the Graphic: “Calvin and Hobbes”

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 Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture, and Politics *

Liam Burke, Ian Gordon and Angela Ndalianis (eds.)
Rutgers University Press
336 pages
December 2019
Publisher’s website

“‘As a man, I’m flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol… as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting’. In the 2005 reboot of the Batman film franchise, Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne articulates how the figure of the superhero can serve as a transcendent icon.
It is hard to imagine a time when superheroes have been more pervasive in our culture. Today, superheroes are intellectual property jealously guarded by media conglomerates, icons co-opted by grassroots groups as a four-color rebuttal to social inequities, masks people wear to more confidently walk convention floors and city streets, and bulletproof banners that embody regional and national identities. From activism to cosplay, this collection unmasks the symbolic function of superheroes.
Bringing together superhero scholars from a range of disciplines, alongside key industry figures such as Harley Quinn co-creator Paul Dini, The Superhero Symbol provides fresh perspectives on how characters like Captain America, Iron Man, and Wonder Woman have engaged with media, culture, and politics, to become the “everlasting” symbols to which a young Bruce Wayne once aspired.”

Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics

Maaheen Ahmed
University Press of Mississippi
264 pages
November 2019
Publisher’s website

“Monsters seem inevitably linked to humans and not always as mere opposites. Maaheen Ahmed examines good monsters in comics to show how Romantic themes from the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries persist in today’s popular culture. Comics monsters, questioning the distinction between human and monster, self and other, are valuable conduits of Romantic inclinations.
Engaging with Romanticism and the many monsters created by Romantic writers and artists such as Mary Shelley, Victor Hugo, and Goya, Ahmed maps the heritage, functions, and effects of monsters in contemporary comics and graphic novels. She highlights the persistence of recurrent Romantic features through monstrous protagonists in English- and French-language comics and draws out their implications. Aspects covered include the dark Romantic predilection for ruins and the sordid, the solitary protagonist and his quest, nostalgia, the prominence of the spectacle as well as excessive emotions, and above all, the monster’s ambiguity and rebelliousness.
Ahmed highlights each Romantic theme through close readings of well-known but often overlooked comics, including Enki Bilal’s Monstre tetralogy, Jim O’Barr’s The Crow, and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, as well as the iconic comics series Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. In blurring the otherness of the monster, these protagonists retain the exaggeration and uncontrollability of all monsters while incorporating Romantic characteristics.”

Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory

Victoria Aarons
Rutgers University Press
254 pages
November 2019
Publisher’s website

“In Holocaust Graphic Narratives, Victoria Aarons demonstrates the range and fluidity of this richly figured genre. Employing memory as her controlling trope, Aarons analyzes the work of the graphic novelists and illustrators, making clear how they extend the traumatic narrative of the Holocaust into the present and, in doing so, give voice to survival in the wake of unrecoverable loss. In recreating moments of traumatic rupture, dislocation, and disequilibrium, these graphic narratives contribute to the evolving field of Holocaust representation and establish a new canon of visual memory. The intergenerational dialogue established by Aarons’ reading of these narratives speaks to the on-going obligation to bear witness to the Holocaust. Examined together, these intergenerational works bridge the erosions created by time and distance. As a genre of witnessing, these graphic stories, in retracing the traumatic tracks of memory, inscribe the weight of history on generations that follow.”

Welcome to Arkham Asylum: Essays on Psychiatry and the Gotham City Institution *

Sharon Packer and Daniel R. Fredrick (eds.)
McFarland
311 pages
October 2019
Publisher’s website

“Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane is a staple of the Batman universe, evolving into a franchise comprised of comic books, graphic novels, video games, films, television series and more. The Arkham franchise, supposedly light-weight entertainment, has tackled weighty issues in contemporary psychiatry. Its plotlines reference clinical and ethical controversies that perplex even the most up-to-date professionals. The 25 essays in this collection explore the significance of Arkham’s sinister psychiatrists, murderous mental patients, and unethical geneticists. It invites debates about the criminalization of the mentally ill, mental patients who move from defunct state hospitals into expanding prisons, madness versus badness, sociopathy versus psychosis, the “insanity defense” and more. Invoking literary figures from Lovecraft to Poe to Caligari, the 25 essays in this collection are a broad-ranging and thorough assessment of the franchise and its relationship to contemporary psychiatry.”

*The ComFor editorial board regrets the lack of diversity in this publication. We endeavour to cover the entire spectrum of comics studies, report in a neutral way and keep the editorial selection process to a minimum. But we are also aware of the problematic structures that shape our academic research environment and that frequently lead to a lower visibility of female comics scholars as well as those with marginalised identities in general. We know that this imbalance is often not intended by the editors / organisers and we do not want to imply this in any way. But nonetheless, we would like to draw attention to it to raise awareness for this problem.