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The Comics of Alison Bechdel is the first full-length volume dedicated to the comics art of Alison Bechdel, beginning with her early work on the long-running serial comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and including original scholarship on her acclaimed memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. The volume is organized into three sections. The first looks at Bechdel’s place in lesbian comics and considers her work in the context of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. The second looks at kinship, affect, and trauma in Bechdel’s work, with a focus on interiority and the artist’s experiments with comics form. The third looks at place, space, and community, considering the significance of rural queer life, topography and mapping, and forms of LGBTQ community. Archival research and theories of the archive provide new insight into Bechdel’s art, including the composition of Fun Home and the development of the lesser-known Servants to the Cause, which appeared in The Advocate in the late 1980s. An introductory essay orients readers to Bechdel’s career—her childhood in Beech Creek, her involvement in LGBTQ activism and lesbian comix, her move inward towards life writing, and the mainstream cultural recognition prompted by the adaptation of Fun Home into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical—as well as to current trends in Bechdel scholarship.

In the popular press of the early twentieth century, immigrant masses and the tenement districts were frequently portrayed as occasions for laughter rather than as objects of pity or problems to be solved. This distinctly comic sensibility, most visible in the form of the comic strip, merged the grotesque with the urbane and the whimsical with the cynical, representing the world of what Jacob Riis called the “Other Half” with a jaundiced, yet sympathetic, eye. Various forms of the comic sensibility emerged from a competitive, collaborative environment fostered at newspapers and magazines published by figures including William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and S. S. McClure. Characterized by a breezy, irreverent style and packaged in eye-catching typography, vibrant color, and dynamic page design, the comic sensibility combined the performative aspects of vaudeville and the variety of stage, the verbal improvisations of dialect fiction, and a multivalent approach to caricature that originated in nineteenth-century comic weeklies, such as Puck and Judge. Though it was firmly rooted in ethnic humor, the comic sensibility did not simply denigrate or dehumanize ethnic and racial minorities. Stereotype and caricature was used not just to make fun of the Other Half, but also to engage in pointed sociopolitical critique. Sometimes grotesque, sometimes shocking, at other times sweetly humorous or gently mocking, the comic sensibility ultimately enabled group identification and attracted a huge working-class audience.

This book is a scholarly examination of the comic book character of the new Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, from multiple disciplinary approaches, including religious studies, gender studies, cultural studies, communication, and pedagogy. The essays cover topics from fashion, immigration history, technoculture, and fandom and are intended for a broad range of general and academic readers, from comics fans to comics scholars. The book’s four main sections—“Precursors,” “Nation and Religion, Identity and Community,” “Pedagogy and Resistance,” and “Fangirls, Fanboys, and the Culture of Fandom”—apply specific theoretical and cultural frameworks to their examination of the character. The book closes with a one-page comic by comics scholar and artist Jose Alaniz, as well as an exclusive interview with author G. Willow Wilson by gender studies scholar Shabana Mir. The editors’ wide-ranging expertise, from comics and religious studies to literature, gender, and popular culture, inform and shape this volume suitable for both undergraduate and graduate classrooms, as well as the general reader.

It’s been argued that every good superhero needs an equally compelling supervillain. The Supervillain Reader sheds light on why “it’s all about the villain.” The editors have assembled a collection of both reprinted and original essays that tries to answer the question, Why are we so fascinated with the villain in our storytelling? The obsession with the villain is not some 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 tapestry of thought regarding villains in all their manifestations, including film, literature, television, games, and, of course, comics and sequential art. While The Supervillain Readerfocuses on the latter, it goes beyond comic studies to show how the concept of the supervillain is part our larger historical and popular consciousness. The principal goal of this reader is to collect in a single volume articles that show how the villain is a complex part of any narrative regardless of original text. The villain must be compelling, stimulating, and pro-active, whereas the superhero (or protagonist) is most often re-active. Our reader brings into clear focus the unique aspects of villainy and shows why the villain is so compelling, while also providing a theoretical foundation for villainy in numerous media. The editors have carefully curated this collection, and we hope it will be of interest to professors teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, the students they teach, and serious observers of popular culture across professions.

This collection sets out the stakes, definitions, and exemplars of contemporary comics pedagogy. From K-12 contexts to higher ed instruction to ongoing communities of scholars working outside of the academy, comics pedagogy is at the heart of the work of today’s “aca-fans.” Building off of the interdisciplinary interests and approaches to teaching comics and teaching with comics, this volume brings together diverse voices to share key theories and scholarship on comics pedagogy. By bringing together scholars, creators, and educators across various fields and in K-12 as well as university settings, this volume significantly expands scholarship on comics pedagogy.