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Asian Comics is the first book that covers the comics (comic books and magazines, humor/cartoon magazines, newspaper strips, graphic novels, and gag panels) of the continent − 16 countries in all. Broken into parts on East, Southeast, and South Asia, the book carefully surveys the history and contemporary status of comics, both from artistic and industrial perspectives and including main stream and alternative forms and points out trends, issues, and problems cartoonists face. Decades-long (more than 30 years) research was carried out through interviews with more than 400 comics-related individuals during about 60 trips to Asia for that purpose, observation in their studios/offices and homes, participation with cartoonists in many festivals, symposia, workshops, and lectures, and primary scrutiny of archives, government and other data. Interviewees included the fathers and an occasional mother of Asian comic art and the cream of the crop and some young cartoonists. The result is a structured blend of factual data, views of comics people, and fascinating anecdotes about how cartoonists broke in, their working habits and styles, and their contributions. Also interesting is the first chapter discussing the predecessors of contemporary Asian comic art in the form of paintings, sculptures, scrolls, and puppet drama that displayed caricature, wit and playfulness, satire, and sequential narrative. The book is enhanced by many illustrations and supported by a full bibliography and endnotes.

Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. This book offers an assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this genre. It considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields—including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology—the book shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one’s self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.

This book examines the historical origins and cultural significance of Superman and his fellow American crusaders. It asserts that the superhero seems a direct response to modernity, often fighting the interrelated processes of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and capitalism that transformed the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. Reeling from the destabilizing forces, Americans turned to heroic fiction as a means of explaining national and personal identities to themselves and to the world. In so doing, they created characters and stories that sometimes affirmed, but other times subverted conventional notions of race, class, gender, and nationalism. The cultural conversation articulated through the nation's early heroic fiction eventually led to a new heroic type—the brightly clad, super-powered, pro-social action heroes that first appeared in American comic books starting in the late 1930s. Although indelibly shaped by the Great Depression and World War II sensibilities of the second-generation immigrants most responsible for their creation, comic book superheroes remain a mainstay of American popular culture. Tracing superhero fiction all the way back to the nineteenth century, the book firmly bases analysis of dime novels, pulp fiction, and comics in historical, biographical, and reader response sources. It explores the roles played by creators, producers, and consumers in crafting superhero fiction, ultimately concluding that these narratives are essential for understanding vital trajectories in American culture.

Boys Love (or simply BL) has emerged as a mainstream genre in manga, anime, and games for girls and young women. This genre was first developed in Japan in the early 1970s by a group of female artists. By the late 1970s, many amateur women fans were getting involved and creating and self-publishing homoerotic parodies of established male manga characters and popular media figures. The popularity of these encouraged a surge in the number of commercial titles. Today, a wide range of products, produced both by professionals and amateurs, is rapidly gaining a global audience. This book provides an overview of the BL phenomenon in Japan, its history and various subgenres and introduces translations of some key Japanese scholarship not otherwise available. The book looks at a range of literary, artistic, and other cultural products that celebrate the beauty of adolescent boys and young men. In Japan, depiction of the “beautiful boy” has long been a romantic and sexualized trope for both sexes and commands a high degree of cultural visibility today across a range of genres from pop music to animation. Drawing from diverse disciplinary homes, the chapters unite in their attention to historical context, analytical precision, and close readings of diverse boys love texts.

This book reveals the largely unknown and rather surprising history of the British superhero. It is often thought that Britain did not have its own superheroes, yet this book demonstrates that there were a great many in Britain and that they were often used as a way to comment on the relationship between Britain and America. Sometimes they emulated the style of American comics, but they also frequently became sites of resistance to perceived American political and cultural hegemony, drawing upon satire and parody as a means of critique. The book illustrates that the superhero genre is a blend of several influences, and that in British comics these influences were quite different from those in America, resulting in some contrasting approaches to the figure of the superhero. It identifies the origins of the superhero and supervillain in nineteenth-century popular culture such as the penny dreadfuls and boys' weeklies and in science fiction writing of the 1920s and 1930s. The book traces the emergence of British superheroes in the 1940s, the advent of “fake” American comics, and the reformatting of reprinted material. It then chronicles the British Invasion of the 1980s and the pivotal roles in American superhero comics and film production held by British artists today. This book will challenge views about British superheroes and the comics creators who fashioned them.

This overview of the history of Canadian comics explores not only the few Canadian cartoonists who have received study, but many who have not. Contributors look at the myriad ways that English-language, Francophone, indigenous, and queer Canadian comics and cartoonists pose alternatives to American comics, to dominant perceptions, even to gender and racial categories. Specific works covered range from the earliest Canadian comic books to the work of contemporary creators. In contrast to the United States’ melting pot, Canada has been understood to comprise a social, cultural, and ethnic mosaic, with distinct cultural variation as part of its identity. This volume reveals differences that often reflect in highly regional and localized comics such as Paul MacKinnon’s Cape Breton-specific Old Trout Funnies, Michel Rabagliati’s Montreal-based Paul comics, and Kurt Martell and Christopher Merkley’s Thunder Bay-specific zombie apocalypse. The collection also considers some of the conventionally “alternative” cartoonists, such as Seth, Dave Sim, and Chester Brown. It offers alternate views of the diverse and engaging work of two very different Canadian cartoonists who bring their own alternatives into play: Jeff Lemire in his bridging of Canadian/US and mainstream / alternative sensibilities and Nina Bunjevac in her own blending of realism and fantasy as well as of insider / outsider status. Despite an upsurge in research on Canadian comics, there is still remarkably little written about most major and all minor Canadian cartoonists.This volume provides insight into some of the lesser-known Canadian alternatives still awaiting full exploration.

Why was Captain Marvel—a little boy named Billy Batson whose magic word transforms him into the World’s Mightiest Mortal—one of the most popular comic book characters in the United States in the 1940s? To answer this question, this book takes the reader on a journey through the lives of the writers, artists, and readers who devoted themselves to this hero and his adventures. It’s the story of artist C. C. Beck and writer Otto Binder, one of the most innovative and prolific creative teams of the Golden Age of comics in the U. S.; of the comic book fanzines of the 1960s, which celebrated Billy and the rest of the Marvel Family; and of an art form steeped in nostalgia, a term with a long, complex, and often misunderstood history. Taking its cue from C. C. Beck’s theories of comic art, this book is a study of why we read comics, and, more significantly, how we remember these heroes and the America that dreamed them in the first place.

In the summer of 2000 X-Men surpassed all box office expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed into Hollywood's leading genre. From superheroes to Spartan warriors, The Comic Book Film Adaptation offers the first dedicated study to examine how comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production. Through in-depth analysis, industry interviews, and audience research, this book charts the cause-and-effect of this influential trend. It considers the cultural traumas, business demands, and digital possibilities that Hollywood faced at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The industry managed to meet these challenges by exploiting comics and their existing audiences. However, studios were caught off-guard when these comic book fans, empowered by digital media, began to influence the success of adaptations. Nonetheless, filmmakers soon developed strategies to take advantage of this intense fanbase, while codifying the trend into a more lucrative genre, the comic book movie, which appealed to an even wider audience. Central to this vibrant trend is a comic aesthetic in which filmmakers utilize digital filmmaking technologies to engage with the language and conventions of comics like never before. The Comic Book Film Adaptation explores this unique moment in which cinema is stimulated, challenged, and enriched by the once-dismissed medium of comics.

It has become an axiom in comic studies that “comics is a language, not a genre.” But what exactly does that mean, and how is discourse on the form both aided and hindered by thinking of it in linguistic terms? This book challenges many of the key assumptions about the “grammar” and formal characteristics of comics, and offers a more nuanced, theoretical framework that it argues will better serve the field by offering a consistent means for communicating critical theory in the scholarship. Through engaging close readings and an accessible use of theory, it exposes the problems embedded in the ways critics have used ideas of language, literature, structuralism, and semiotics, and sets out a theoretically sound way of understanding how comics communicate. The book argues against the critical tendency to flatten the distinctions between language and images, and to discuss literature purely in terms of story content. It closely examines the original critical theories that such arguments purport to draw on and shows how they in fact point away from the conclusions they are commonly used to prove. The book improves the use the field makes of existing scholarly disciplines, furthers the ongoing sophistication of the field, provides analyses of a range of different texts, and takes an interdisciplinary approach. It will appeal to the general comics reader and will prove crucial for specialized scholars in the fields of comics, literature, cultural studies, art history, and visual studies.

This book is the follow-up to The System of Comics, in which the author, a French-language comics theorist, set out to investigate how the medium functions, introducing the principle of iconic solidarity, and showing the systems that underlie the articulation between panels at three levels: page layout, linear sequence, and nonsequential links woven through the comic book as a whole. This analysis is now developed further, using examples from a very wide range of comics, including the work of American artists such as Chris Ware and Robert Crumb. The book tests out the theoretical framework by bringing it up against cases that challenge it, such as abstract comics, digital comics, and shōjo manga, and offers insightful reflections on these innovations. In addition, it includes chapters on three new areas. First, the book explores the role of the narrator, both verbal and visual, and the particular issues that arise out of narration in autobiographical comics. Second, it tackles the question of rhythm in comics, and the skill demonstrated by virtuoso artists in intertwining different rhythms over and above the basic beat provided by the discontinuity of the panels. And third, the book resets the relationship of comics to contemporary art, conditioned by cultural history and aesthetic traditions but evolving recently as comics artists move onto avant-garde terrain.

This book offers a wide-ranging assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman’s Metropolis or Chris Ware’s Chicago to the swamps, back roads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, it critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Some chapters seek to discover what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly (Pogo), Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld (A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of the comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, the book contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and southern studies.

In the most comprehensive and authoritative source on this subject, this book covers almost all comics art forms in mainland China, providing the history from the nineteenth century to the present as well as perspectives on both the industry and the art form. This volume encompasses political, social, and gag cartoons, lianhuanhua (picture books), comic books, humorous drawings, cartoon and humor periodicals, and donghua (animation) while exploring topics ranging from the earliest Western-influenced cartoons and the popular, often salacious, 1930s humor magazines to cartoons as wartime propaganda and comics art in the reform. Coupling a comprehensive review of secondary materials (histories, anthologies, biographies, memoirs, and more) in English and Chinese with the artists' actual works, the result spans more than two centuries of Chinese animation. Structured chronologically, the study begins with precursors in early China and proceeds through the Republican, wartime, Communist, and market economy periods. Based primarily on interviews the editors conducted with over one hundred cartoonists, animators, and other comics art figures, Comics Art in China sheds light on tumult and triumphs. Lent and Xu describe the evolution of Chinese comics within a global context, probing the often-tense relationship between expression and government, as well as proving that art can be a powerful force for revolution. Enhanced with over one hundred black-and-white and color illustrations, this book stands out as not only the first such survey in English, but perhaps the most complete one in any language.

This book brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars about the comics of Chicago-based cartoonist Chris Ware (b. 1967). Both inside and outside academic circles, Ware’s work is rapidly being distinguished as essential to the developing canon of the graphic novel. Winner of the 2001 Guardian First Book Prize for the genre-defining Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware has received numerous accolades from both the literary and comics establishment. This collection addresses the range of Ware’s work from his earliest drawings in the 1990s in The ACME Novelty Library and his acclaimed Jimmy Corrigan, to his most recent works-in-progress, “Building Stories” and “Rusty Brown.”

Hergé, the creator of Tintin, is one of the most important and influential figures in the history of comics. His style popularized what has become known as the “clear line” in cartooning, but these thirteen scholars show how his life and art were actually very complicated. The book includes analyses of Hergé’s aesthetic techniques, including studies of his efforts to comprehend and represent absence and the rhythm of mundanity between panels of action. Broad views of his career explain how Hergé navigated changing ideas of air travel, and narrow readings of his life and work during Nazi occupation explain how the changing demands of the occupied press transformed his understanding of what comics could do. Other chapters explore the fraught lines between high and low art. By reading the late masterpieces of the Tintin series, these comics scholars from around the world attempt to answer a question Hergé himself never could: where his own legacy would fall between high art and low art. The book also reexamines Hergé’s place in the history of cartooning, considering how the clear line style has been reinterpreted around the world, from contemporary Francophone writers to a widely praised Chinese-American cartoonist and on to Turkey, where Tintin has been reinvented into something more specifically meaningful to an audience Hergé probably never anticipated. With authors from five continents drawing on a variety of critical methods, the chapters of The Comics of Hergé show how rich comics can become when the lines blur.

The Comics of Joe Sacco addresses the range of his award-winning work, from his early graphic short stories as well as his groundbreaking journalism Palestine (1993) and Safe Area to Goražde (2000), to Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and his most recent book TheGreat War (2013), a graphic history of World War I. First in the new series Critical Approaches to Comics Artists (see page 40 for details), this edited volume explores Sacco’s comics journalism, and features established and emerging scholars from comics studies, cultural studies, geography, literary studies, political science, and communication studies. Sacco’s work has already found a place in some of the foundational scholarship in comics studies, and this book solidifies his role as one of the most important comics artists today. Sections focus on how Sacco’s comics journalism critiques and employs the “standard of objectivity” in mainstream reporting, what aesthetic principles and approaches to lived experience can be found in his comics, how Sacco employs the space of the comics page to map history and war, and the ways that his comics function in the classroom and as human rights activism. The Comics of Joe Sacco offers definitive, exciting approaches to some of the most important—and necessary—comics today, by one of the most acclaimed journalist-artists of our time.

Conflict is one of the most prevalent themes in comics, film and literature; we have been writing stories of war and violence since time immemorial. Comics is no stranger to such narratives and is writing them in ways that are different from (and complementary to) literature and film. This book brings together two distinct areas of research–trauma studies and comics–to provide a new interpretation of this long-standing central theme. Focusing on representations of conflict and war in post-Vietnam American comics, it claims that the comics form is able to mimic traumatic experience in order to represent the events as accurately and viscerally as possible. The textual focus spans the whole form, placing mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics. The specific comics fit a narrow set of criteria, all being published after 1975 by American creators, discussed in conversation with critical material from a wide range of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Fredric Jameson, as well as contemporary trauma theory and clinical psychology. This book is structured around six key issues in conflict and traumatic representation, with close analyses of the chosen texts to consider the effectiveness of comics, both formally and thematically, in the areas of mourning, dreams, and personal identity. Comics, Trauma and the New Art of War also consider how timescales, temporality, and postmodernism affect, and are affected by, the dual focus of comics and trauma.

This book addresses the conflicted meanings associated with the figure of the action heroine as she has evolved in various media forms since the late 1980s. It discusses this immensely popular character type as an example of, and challenge to, existing theories about gender as a performance identity. Her assumption of heroic masculine traits combined with her sexualized physical depiction demonstrates the ambiguous nature of traditional gender expectations and indicates a growing awareness of more aggressive and violent roles for women. The excessive sexual fetishism of action heroines is a central theme throughout. The topic is analyzed as an insight into the transgressive image of the dominatrix, as a reflection of the shift in popular feminism from second-wave politics to third-wave and post-feminist pleasures, and as a form of patriarchal backlash that facilitates a masculine fantasy of controlling strong female characters. The book interprets the action heroine as a representation of changing gender dynamics that balances the sexual objectification of women with progressive models of female strength. While its primary focus is the action heroine as represented in Hollywood film and television, the book also includes the action heroine’s emergence in contemporary popular literature, comic books, cartoons, and video games.

The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities—disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies—the book seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol. The author traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series—some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar United States as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body's “imperfection” comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series as The Human Fly, Strikeforce: Morituri, and the landmark graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel, all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond.

This book analyzes ways in which popular and visual culture used humor—in a variety of forms—to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001 and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humor and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality. Furthermore, it demonstrates that laughter is simultaneously an avenue through which social issues are deferred or obfuscated, a way in which neoliberal or neoconservative rhetoric is challenged, and a means of forming alternative political ideologies. The book’s chapters cover a broad range of media productions, including news parodies (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, The Onion), TV roundtable shows (Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher), comic strips and cartoons (Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks, Jeff Danzinger’s editorial cartoons), television drama (Rescue Me), animated satire (South Park), graphic novels (Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers), documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11), and other productions. Along with examining the rhetorical methods and aesthetic techniques of these productions, the text places each in specific political and journalistic contexts, showing how corporations, news outlets, and political institutions responded to—and sometimes co-opted—these forms of humor.

In France, Belgium, and other Francophone countries, comic strips—called bande dessinée or “BD” in French—have long been considered a major art form capable of addressing a host of contemporary issues. Among French-speaking intelligentsia, graphic narratives were deemed worthy of canonization and critical study decades before the academy and the press in the United States embraced comics. The place that BD holds today, however, belies the contentious political route the art form has traveled. This book examines the trek of BD from it being considered a fomenter of rebellion, to a medium suitable only for semi-literates, to an impediment to education, and most recently to an art capable of addressing social concerns in mainstream culture. In the mid-1800s, alarmists feared political caricatures might incite the ire of an illiterate working class. To counter this notion, proponents yoked the art to a particular articulation of “Frenchness” based on literacy and reason. With the post-World War II economic upswing, French consumers saw BD as a way to navigate the changes brought by modernization. After bande dessinée came to be understood as a compass for the masses, the government, especially Francois Mitterand’s administration, brought comics increasingly into “official” culture. The author argues that BDs are central to the formation of France’s self-image and a self-awareness of what it means to be French.