LibGuides: Comics & Graphic Novels: Scholarly Research & Journal Articles

Databases

Historical & Primary Sources on Comics

Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels Series
1950 - present. Unlimited users.
Includes both Volumes 1 and 2.

Part 1 covers major works from North America and Europe, beginning with the first underground comix from the 1950s and continuing through to modern sequential artists. It incorporates 75,000 pages of material from artists such as Basil Wolverton and Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Harvey Pekar, Spain Rodriguez, and Vaughn Bode, and modern masters including Peter Bagge, Kim Deitch, Dave Sim, Dan Clowes, and Los Bros. Hernandez. The collection contextualizes these original works with 25,000 pages of interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines, including The Comics Journal.

Part 2 expands on Volume I by offering an additional 100,000 pages of important, rare, and hard-to-find works, scholarly writings, and more. It adds extensive coverage of the pre-Comics Code era horror, crime, romance, and war comics that fueled the backlash leading to one of the largest censorship campaigns in US history. It also contains tens of thousands of pages of non-mainstream, post-code comics and secondary materials from around the world.

Visual Art & Illustration

Art and Architecture Source
1929 - present (full text varies by title). Unlimited users.
The collection includes over 600 full-text journals, 200 full-text books, and a collection of over 63,000 images. Provides the most up-to-date coverage of fine and decorative arts, commercial art, architecture, archaeology, design, and museum studies. An ideal tool for art historians, artists, designers, students, and general researchers.
ARTstor
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Comprised of over 2.5 million digital images of visual material encompassing artistic and historical traditions across many time periods and cultures. Focuses on, but is not limited to, the arts. Includes architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture. Designed to be used by researchers in fields that do not traditionally use images as well as by art historians.
In order to take advantage of all the features of the site, you must register or log in with the service. The registration and login links are visible once you enter the database.
DAAI: Design and Applied Arts Index
1973 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. All areas of design and craft are covered, including industrial design, vehicle design, architecture, interior design, environmental design, computer aided design, furniture design, ceramics, glass, jewellery, metalsmithing, silversmithing, goldsmithing, fashion design, textile design, embroidery, graphic design, typography, multimedia design, illustration, book design, photography, advertising, marketing, retail design, packaging, exhibition design, theatre design, design and craft history, design and craft theory, ergonomics, design for disability, design for the elderly, design and craft education and design management.
International Bibliography of Art (IBA)
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Indexes scholarly literature on Western art and is the successor to the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA). The database includes records created by the Getty Research Institute in 2008-09, with new records created by ProQuest using the same thesaurus and authority files.
The database will grow by 18,000 records per year, ensuring unbroken coverage of journals that were indexed in BHA and IBA prior to 2010. The initial data set created by the Getty Research Institute in 2008-2009 covers scholarship up to 2009, including retrospective records for material published in previous years, and in some cases the new ProQuest indexing will also cover retrospective years in order to fill gaps in coverage.
Publications covered include at least 500 core journals, with an emphasis on specialist and rare titles that are not covered by other indexes, plus detailed coverage of monographs, essay collections, conference proceedings and exhibition catalogues.

Literature, Film & Media

JSTOR
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
MLA International Bibliography
1926 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated ten times per year. Indexes critical materials on literature, criticism, drama, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Provides access to citations from over 4,400 journals, series, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Produced by the Modern Language Association.
Project MUSE
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Journals: Updated as issues are published. Project MUSE is a leading provider of humanities and social science content for the scholarly community, with complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from leading university presses and scholarly societies.
Books: Selected titles from university presses and scholarly societies. All content from the print edition of the book is included in the digital edition. There are no DRM restrictions.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide

Scholarly Journals

Here is a list of 10 major journals in the field of comics research. These are a good place to start if you don't have any specific articles to search for.

Inks: the Journal of the Comics Studies Society
Features scholarly research on sequential art, graphic narrative, and cartooning. The journal seeks to bring together scholarly essays, archival materials, and insights and discoveries from leading comics professionals.
Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics
A peer reviewed journal covering all aspects of the graphic novel, comic strip and comic book, with emphasis on comics in their cultural, institutional and creative contexts. International scope covering not only English language comics but also worldwide comic culture. The journal reflects interdisciplinary research in comics and aims to establish a dialogue between academics, historians, theoreticians and practitioners of comics.
European Comic Art
The first English-language scholarly publication devoted to the study of European-language graphic novels, comic strips, comic books and caricature.
Broken Pencil
One of the few magazines in the world devoted exclusively to underground culture and the independent arts. Broken Pencil reviews the best zines, books, websites, videos and music from the underground and reprints the best articles from the alternative press.
The Comics Journal
International Journal of Comic Art
International and multidisciplinary in scope, IJOCA aims to publish scholarly and readable research on any aspect of comic art, defined as animation, comic books, newspaper and magazine strips, caricature, gag and political cartoons, humorous art, and humor or cartoon magazines.
Journal of Popular Culture
Continues to break down the barriers between so-called "low" and "high" culture and focuses on filling in the gaps that a neglect of popular culture has left in our understanding of the workings of society.
Mechademia
An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and the Fan Arts. Mechademia’s subject area extends from manga and anime to game design, fashion, graphics, packaging, and toy industries, as well as a broad range of fan practices related to popular culture in Japan. Interested in how the academic and fan communities can provide new possibilities for critical thinking and popular writing.
Signs: Studies in Graphic Narratives
International journal for the history of early comics and sequential art.
Studies in Comics
Aims to describe the nature of comics, to identify the medium as a distinct art form, and to address the medium’s formal properties. The emerging field of comics studies is a model for interdisciplinary research and in this spirit this journal welcomes all approaches. This journal is international in scope and provides an inclusive space in which researchers from all backgrounds can present new thinking on comics to a global audience.

Boolean Operators

As you search the catalog, databases, or online resources, try using Boolean Operators to broaden or limit your search

AND: search for both keywords

Ex. Comic Books AND Fantasy

OR: search for either keyword

Ex. Comic Books OR Comic Strips OR Graphic Novels

NOT: exclude a keyword

Ex. Graphic Novels NOT horror

IMPORTANT! You must use caps when searching in the catalog with these operators!