Graphic Novels and Comics

For the first time several prominent comic strip historians from different countries collaborated on a publication about the comic strip in the 19th century. Most of the specialists give an overview of the comic strip production in their country and present some of the finest cartoonists of that era. There are also two more detailed discussions which offer new insights into two major cartoonists. The editors, Pascal Lefevre and Charles Dierick of the Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Art discuss the controversy over the definition of the comic strip and explain how the comic strip developed in the 19th century as a mass entertainment. There is also a timeline which gives an overview of the most important facts and names from 1800 till 1914.

This volume showcases some of the best research published in the Studies in Comics journal. Comics have always embraced a diversity of formats, existing in complex relationships with other media, and been dynamic in their response to new technologies and means of distribution. This collection explores interactions between comics and other media and technologies, employing a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives. By focusing on key critical concepts within multimodality (transmediality, adaptation, intertextuality) and addressing multiple platforms and media (digital, analog, music, prose, linguistics, graphics), this collection expands and develops existing comics theory and addresses multiple other media and disciplines.

This anthology hosts a collection of essays examining the role of comics as portals for historical and academic content, while keeping the approach on an international market versus the American one. Few resources currently exist showing the cross-disciplinary aspects of comics. Some of the chapters examine the use of Wonder Woman during World War II, the development and culture of French comics, and theories of Locke and Hobbs in regards to the state of nature and the bonds of community. More so, the continual use of comics for the retelling of classic tales and current events demonstrates that the genre has long passed the phase of for children’s eyes only.

Just as often as superheroes journey into the afterlife, they also return from it. Their surprising immortality has created its own set of storytelling rules and expectations; it also has come to influence their secular readership in new interreligious investigations of narrative character and personal selfhood. Unlocking a new and overdue model for reading comic books, this unique volume explores religious interpretations of popular comic book superheroes such as the Green Lantern and theHulk. A. David Lewis argues that the superhero subgenre offers a hermeneutic for those interested in integrating mutiplicity into religious practices and considerations of the afterlife.

In Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: Studies in Genre, James J. Donahue aims to interrogate and unravel the disparities of representation in the fields of comics studies and comics publishing. Donahue documents and analyzes the works of several Indigenous artists, including Theo Tso, Todd Houseman, and Arigon Starr. Through topically arranged chapters, the author explores a wide array of content produced by Indigenous creators, from superhero and science fiction comics to graphic novels and experimental narratives. While noting the importance of examining how Indigenous works are analyzed, Donahue emphasizes that the creation of artistic and critical spaces for Indigenous comics and graphic novels should be an essential concern for the comics studies field.

Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings offers an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to analyzing Latinx studies and comics studies. The book draws together groundbreaking critical essays, practical pedagogical reflections, and original and republished short comics. The works in this collection discuss the construction of national identity and memory, undocumented narratives, Indigenous and Afro-Latinx experiences, multiracial and multilingual identities, transnational and diasporic connections, natural disasters and unnatural colonial violence, feminist and queer interventions, Latinx futurities, and more. Together, the critical and creative works in this collection begin to map out the emerging and evolving field of Latinx comics studies and to envision what might be possible in and through Latinx comics.

Comics, manga, bandes dessinées, fumetti, tebeo, historietas… no matter the name, they have been a powerful medium across four continents for decades. This is the history of comics around the world from the late 1960s to the dawn of the 21st century.

Attempts to define what comics are and explain how they work have not always been successful because they are premised upon the idea that comic strips, comic books and graphic novels are inherently and almost exclusively visual. This book challenges that premise, and asserts that comics is not just a visual medium. The book outlines the multisensory aspects of comics: the visual, audible, tactile, olfactory and gustatory elements of the medium. It rejects a synaesthetic approach (by which all the senses are engaged through visual stimuli) and instead argues for a truly multisensory model by which the direct stimulation of the reader’s physical senses can be understood. A wide range of examples demonstrates how multisensory communication systems work in both commercial and more experimental contexts.

Lost Literacies is the first full-length study of US comic strips from the period prior to the rise of Sunday newspaper comics. Where current histories assume that nineteenth-century US comics consisted solely of single-panel political cartoons or simple "proto-comics," Lost Literacies introduces readers to an ambitious group of artists and editors who were intent on experimenting with the storytelling possibilities of the sequential strip, resulting in playful comics whose existence upends prevailing narratives about the evolution of comic strips.

Comic strips and comic books were among the most popular and influential forms of mass media in 20thcentury America. This fascinating book focuses on fifteen pioneering cartoonists--ranging from Winsor McCay to Chris Ware--who brought this genre to the highest level of artistic expression and who had the greatest impact on the development of the form.Organized chronologically, Masters of American Comics explores the rise of newspaper comic strips and comic books and considers their artistic development throughout the century. Presenting a wide selection of original drawings as well as progressive proofs, vintage printed Sunday pages, and comic books themselves, the authors also look at how the art of comics was transformed by artistic innovation as well as by changes in popular taste, economics, and printing conventions.

These essays from various critical disciplines examine how comic books and graphic narratives move between various media, while merging youth and adult cultures and popular and high art. The articles feature international perspectives on comics and graphic novels published in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Portugal, Germany, Turkey, India, and Japan.

This book explores the connections between comics and Gothic from four different angles: historical, formal, cultural and textual. It identifies structures, styles and themes drawn from literary gothic traditions and discusses their presence in British and American comics today.

Animation has been part of television since the start of the medium but it has rarely received unbiased recognition from media scholars. More often, it has been ridiculed for supposedly poor technical quality, accused of trafficking in violence aimed at children, and neglected for indulging in vulgar behavior. These accusations are often made categorically, out of prejudice or ignorance, with little attempt to understand the importance of each program on its own terms. This book takes a serious look at the whole genre of television animation, from the early themes and practices through the evolution of the art to the present day.

For decades, scholars have been making the connection between the design of the superhero story and the mythology of the ancient folktale. Moving beyond simple comparisons and common explanations, this volume details how the workings of the superhero comics industry and the conventions of the medium have developed a culture like that of traditional epic storytelling.

Superhero phenomena exploded into 20th- and 21st-century popular culture by way of the visual medium of comic books. In an increasingly secular (yet spiritual) culture that has largely renounced "the gods" (and even religion), what does the return of the superhero through our own pop cultural mythologies say to us--or even about us? This collection of essays from leading and up-and-coming scholars in the fields of comparative mythology and depth psychology considers the return of the superhero as representative of our own unique emergent modern mythology: a wildly diverse pantheon that reflects back to us our most far-reaching hopes and (im)possible (super)human desires.

Covering materials ranging from Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and inscribed objects to contemporary comics, The Visible Text rewrites the history of textual media and technologies. Arguing that media are not defined by technologies alone, but by a combination of technologies and the ideas that people hold about those technologies, Bredehoft identifies four distinct periods or domains in the history of English literature that correspond to four ways in which media ideologies interacted with the two basic defining technologies of manuscripts and printed books.

Beginning with the parallel development of narrative comics at the turn of the 20th century, comics have long been a form that invites—indeed requires—readers to help shape the stories being told. Today, with the rise of interactive media, the creative techniques and the reading practices comics have been experimenting with for a century are now in universal demand. Recounting the history of comics from the nineteenth-century rise of sequential comics to the newspaper strip, through comic books and underground comix, to the graphic novel and webcomics, Gardner shows why they offer the best models for rethinking storytelling in the twenty-first century.

No Straight Lines showcases major names such as Alison Bechdel (whose book Fun Home was named Time Magazine’s 2006 Book of the Year), Howard Cruse (whose groundbreaking Stuck Rubber Baby is now back in print), and Ralf Koenig (one of Europe’s most popular cartoonists), as well as high-profile, cross-over creators who have dabbled in LGBT cartooning, like legendary NYC artist David Wojnarowicz and media darling and advice columnist Dan Savage. No Straight Lines also spotlights many talented creators who never made it out of the queer comics ghetto, but produced amazing work that deserves wider attention.

Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle is the first comprehensive look at comic books by and about race and ethnicity. The thirteen essays tease out for the general reader the nuances of how such multicultural comics skillfully combine visual and verbal elements to tell richly compelling stories that gravitate around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality within and outside the U.S. comic book industry.

Comic books have increasingly become a vehicle for serious social commentary and, specifically, for innovative religious thought. Practitioners of both traditional religions and new religious movements have begun to employ comics as a missionary tool, while humanists and religious progressives use comics' unique fusion of text and image to criticize traditional theologies and to offer alternatives. Addressing the increasing fervor with which the public has come to view comics as an art form and Americans' fraught but passionate relationship with religion, Graven Images explores with real insight the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels.

How do comics produce such a striking range of vibrant stories, representations, and expressions of the sensibilities of their creators? Henry John Pratt's The Philosophy of Comics provides a ground-breaking, illustrated introduction to the study of comics and graphic novels, advancing the field of comics studies by attending to some of its most notable problems. Pratt examines the history of comics, the contrast between comics and cartoons, the tenuous place of comics in the art world, and what it is to be a comic in the first place. With illustrations by Kurt F. Shaffert, The Philosophy of Comics ultimately tries to explain the true underlying value of comics as an art form.

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 result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generativeforce that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.                 

In 1954, the culture, distribution, and content of comics forever changed. Long a mainstay of America's reading diet, comic books began to fall under the scrutiny of parent groups, church leaders, and politicians. The bright colors and cheaply printed pulp pages of comic books that had once provided an escape were suddenly presumed to house something lascivious, insidious, and morally corrosive. While anxieties about representations of violence in comics have largely fallen to the wayside since the moral panic of the 1950s, thematic and symbolic visual depictions of violence remain central to the comics form. BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence examines violence in every iteration--physical violence enacted between people and their environments, formal and structural violence embedded in the comics language itself, representations of historical violence, and ways of reading and seeing violence.

In comic books, superhero stories often depict working-class characters who struggle to make ends meet, lead fulfilling lives, and remain faithful to themselves and their own personal code of ethics. Working-Class Comic Book Heroes: Class Conflict and Populist Politics in Comics examines working-class superheroes and other protagonists who populate heroic narratives in serialized comic books. Essayists analyze and deconstruct these figures, viewing their roles as fictional stand-ins for real-world blue-collar characters. Informed by new working-class studies, the book also discusses how often working-class writers and artists created these characters. Notably Jack Kirby, a working-class Jewish artist, created several of the most recognizable working-class superheroes, including Captain America and the Thing.