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Neil Gaiman (1960-present) currently reigns in the literary world as one of the most critically-decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy-award winning DC/ Vertigo series, The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally-renowned in literary circles for works such as Neverwhere, Coraline, the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, etc. award-winning American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, for children, for the comic reader to the viewer of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media and every language making him a celebrity on a world-wide scale. Despite Gaiman's incredible contributions to multiple national comics traditions (from such works as Miracleman to the aforementioned The Sandman), to the maturation of American comics as a serious storytelling medium, and to changing the rights of creators to retain ownership of their works, his work continues to be underrepresented in sustained fashion in comics studies. As American Gods tops ratings charts for Starz, Anansi Boys can be found in radio play from the BBC, and adaptations of some of his work from Trigger Warning and Fragile Things become standalone comics by renowned artists, it seems timely to bring the bulk of Gaiman's comics into the scholarly discussion. The thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, a formal introduction, forward, and afterword examine the work (specifically-comics, graphic novels, picture books, visual adaptations of prose works, etc.) of Gaiman and a multitude of his collaborative illustrators. The essays radiate from an examination of Gaiman's work surrounding proclamations challenging his readers to "make good art'; what makes Gaiman's work unique and worthy of study lies in his eschewing of typical categorizations and typologies, his constant efforts to make good art-whatever form that art may take-howsoever the genres and audiences may slip into one another. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who always seems fully-assembled virtually from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and his own voice far later in his life.

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.

Over the last twenty years, the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world. This book is an introduction to the history and controversies that have shaped comics exhibitions, who the pioneers were, different ideas about comic art exhibits around the world, how the best practices for displaying comics have developed and why, and how artists and curators have found ways to display comics that break away from the “framed pages on the wall” format. Using long out-of-print reviews and new material from experts such as Art Spiegelman, Denis Kitchen, and Andrei Molotiu, Comic Art in Museums maps out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930’s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these shows. To borrow a phrase from Theirry Groensteen, it’s the story of one way that comics have finally achieved “cultural legitimization.”

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.

Comics and Sacred Texts: Reimagining Religion and Graphic Narratives explores how comics and notions of the sacred interweave to produce new modes of seeing and understanding the sacred. The creative texts explored within this edited volume share an expressive interest in modes of seeing the sacred in graphic structures. We examine the intersections between religion and comics in ways that critically expand our ability to think well about religious landscapes, rhetorical practices, pictorial representation, and the everyday experiences of the uncanny. Sacred Texts and Comics engages the diverse and expansive universe of comic studies and its capacity to reveal new modalities of the sacred. We explore how the sacred erupts in places, and through mediums, that challenge where we should see and encounter divine presence. Comics also reimagine sacred texts, and move readers to see traditional texts anew. But the sacred also has limits and borders, so we look at monsters and wizards in comic books, and how these beings challenge visual assumptions about the normal and the sacred. Finally, we show how comics reveal the everyday sacred: a presence in the mundane, common, and often overlooked features of familiar existence. Collectively, the essays in Sacred Texts and Comics reveal how comics, as a visual medium, moves readers to reimagine the sacred. We claim that seeing the sacred is a learned practice: we must learn where to look for and how to envision the sacred.

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.

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.

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.

Julie Doucet, who started publishing in the late 1980s, is a cartoonist and artist best known for her semi-auto biographical works, as depicted in her Dirty Plotte series as well as My New York Diary. Coming into her own in the late 1990s, when she first started self-publishing her comics, Gabrielle Bell rose to prominence with her 2009 book of short story comics, Cecil and Jordan in New York, as well as her diary comics, which have been recurrently collected in full-length books. While each artist has a unique perspective, style, and world view, the essays in this book investigate these artists' shared investments informal innovation and experimentation and in playing with question soft he auto biographical, the fantastic, and the spaces in between. This volume brings to gether eight original essays, including an extensive introduction, in addition to five republished interviews with the artists. Utilizing a variety of methodologies (archival work, gender theory, genre theory, etc.), the engagements in this book reflect how, despite the importance of finding “a place in side yourself” in order to create, this space is always, for better or worse, also as hared space, culled from, and subject to, surrounding lives, experiences, and subjectivities. Both the world of comics and its critics have been male-dominated for too long. The essays in this volume allow us to think about women’s place in the comics canon, while also appreciating Doucet and Bell as unique artists with powerful personal visions.