Comics & Graphic Novels

A rock‐solid collection of thinking about what defines the medium and what it’s capable of, and a fine foundation for building a new critical and theoretical language to explore comics’ corridors. This book is a wonderful reader, and a superb set of argument‐starters and positions that reveal intent and rigorous thinking about my medium.

An analytic history of the diverse contributions of Black artists to the medium of comics. Covering comic books, superhero comics, graphic novels and cartoon strips from the early 20th century to the present, the book explores the ways in which Black comic artists have grappled with such themes as the Black experience, gender identity, politics and social media.

Surveys the current state of comics scholarship, interrogating its dominant schools, questioning their mutual estrangement, and challenging their propensity to champion the comics they study. Singer advocates for greater disciplinary diversity and methodological rigor in comics studies, making the case for a field that can embrace more critical and oppositional perspectives.

Drawing on computer and cognitive science, psychology and art history, linguistics and literary studies, each chapter presents innovative methods and establishes the practical and theoretical motivations for the quantitative study of comics, manga, and graphic novels. Individual chapters focus on corpus studies, the potential of crowdsourcing for comics research, annotation and narrative analysis, cognitive processing and reception studies.

Offers students a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing key theories and critical methods for analyzing comics. Contributors introduce a wide range of critical perspectives on comics, including disability studies, parasocial relationships, scientific humanities, queer theory, linguistics, critical geography, philosophical aesthetics, historiography, and much more.
Each chapter explains and then demonstrates a critical method or approach, which students can then apply to interrogate and critique the meanings and forms of comic books, graphic novels, and other sequential art.

Thirteen essays tease out 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. Each essay shows how multicultural comic books work in and of themselves and how they are interconnected with a worldwide tradition of comic-book storytelling. Includes a "one-stop shop" for multicultural comic book resources, such as archives, websites, and scholarly books.

Explores various ways of reading, interpreting and using digital comics. Contributors discuss comics made specifically for web consumption, and digital reproductions of print-comics. Essays cover perspectives on reading, criticism and analysis of specific titles, the global reach of digital comics, and how they can be used in educational settings.

Chronicles comics culture, explaining underground comics (also known as "comix") and graphic novels, analyzing their evolution, and offering fascinating portraits of the creative men and women behind them. Chute reveals why these works are an extraordinarily powerful form of expression that stimulates us intellectually and emotionally. Focusing on ten major themes--disaster, superheroes, sex, the suburbs, cities, punk, illness and disability, girls, war, and queerness--Chute explains how comics gets its messages across more effectively than any other form.

Explores how superhero comics, with their creative fusions of fantasy and realism, provide a flexible visual form for engaging issues of disability and intersectional identity (race, class, gender, sexuality) as well as for imagining and valuing different physical and cognitive ways of being in the world.