Comics & Graphic Novels

Covers such topics as: the history and rise of autobiographical comics; cultural contexts; and important theoretical and critical approaches to autobiographical comics. Includes a glossary of crucial critical terms, annotated guides to further reading and online resources and discussion questions to help readers develop their understanding of the genre and pursue independent study.

Explores the representation of fatherhood in contemporary North American autobiographical comics that depict paternal conduct from the post-war period up to the present. This book asks questions about how the desire to forgive or be forgiven can compromise the authors’ ethics or dictate style, considers the ownership of life stories whose subjects cannot or do not agree to be represented, and investigates the pervasive and complicated effects of dominant masculinities.

Focusing on the comics form's ability to produce alternative and challenging autobiographical narratives, thematic chapters investigate the work of artists writing from perspectives of marginality including gender, sexuality, disability, and race, as well as trauma. The book provides detailed formal analysis to show that the highly personal and hand-drawn aesthetics of comics can help artists push against established narrative and visual conventions, and in the process invent new ways of seeing and being seen.

Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generative force that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.

In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, comics have shown a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Hillary Chute explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war.

Mobilizes the concept of kitsch to investigate the tensions around the representation of genocide in international graphic novels that focus on the Holocaust and the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Offers a fresh approach that considers how some of the kitsch strategies employed in these works facilitate an affective interaction with the genocide narrative, while also analyzing where kitsch still produces problems as it critically examines depictions of perpetrators and the visual and verbal representations of sexual violence. Explores how graphic novels employ anti-kitsch strategies to avoid the dangers of excess in dealing with genocide.

With a focus on the roles played by styles and archives this edited volume offers an original intervention, highlighting several novel ways of thinking about comics and memory as comics memory. In considering the many manifestations of memory in comics as well as the functioning and influence of institutions, public and private practices, the book exemplifies new possibilities for understanding the complex entanglements of memory and comics.

Establishes how artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. Follows a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics based on its history.

Investigates comic books and graphic novels, beginning with the early development of these media. The essays place the work in a cultural context, addressing theory and terminology, adaptations of comic books, the superhero genre, and comic books and graphic novels that deal with history and nonfiction.

Presents a detailed history of the superhero and its development across the course of human history. The first complete history of superheroes that thoroughly traces the development of superheroes, from their beginning in 2100 B.C.E. with the Epic of Gilgamesh to their fully entrenched status in modern pop culture and the comic book and graphic novel worlds. Identifies and examines the ways in which superheroes have been present in popular literature since the beginning of human history.

An interdisciplinary, themed anthology that focuses on how comics have played a crucial role in representing, constructing, and reifying the immigrant subject and the immigrant experience in popular global culture of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Contributors examine immigrant experience as they navigate new socio-political milieux in cartoons, comics, and graphic novels across cultures and time periods. They interrogate how immigration is portrayed in comics and how the ‘immigrant’ was an indispensable and vital trope to the development of the comics medium in the twentieth century. At the heart of the book’s interdisciplinary nexus is a critical framework steeped in the ideas of remembrance and commemoration.

Draws together global research to examine how comics can be used for critical inquiry within schools and how they can be used within specific disciplines. As comics are beginning to be recognized more widely as an important resource for teaching, with a huge breadth of topics and styles, this interdisciplinary book unites a variety of research to analyze how learning is 'done' with and through comics.

By placing graphic narratives in the global flow of cultural production and reception, the book investigates controversial representations of transnational politics, examines transnational adaptations of superhero characters, and maps many of the translations and transformations that have come to shape contemporary comics culture on a global scale.

Combining entertainment and education, India's most beloved comic book series, Amar Chitra Katha, or "Immortal Picture Stories," is also an important cultural institution that has helped define what it means to be Hindu and Indian for several generations of readers. In this intriguing study, she explores the making of the comic books and the kinds of editorial and ideological choices that go into their production.

Covers the nations and regions of Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Shows that nearly every country had a golden age of cartooning and has experienced a recent rejuvenation of the art form. Provides illustrations and detailed information on comics’ countries and regions--their histories, key creators, characters, contemporary status, problems, trends, and issues.

Offers a variety of perspectives on women’s manga and the nature, scope, and significance of the relationship between women and comics/manga, both globally as well as locally. With a specific focus on women’s direct roles in manga creation, it illustrates how the globalization of manga has united different cultures and identities, focusing on networks of women creators and readerships. The book details manga’s shift to a global medium, developing, uniting, and involving increasing numbers of participants worldwide

Examines cultural and communicative aspects of Japanese comics, drawing together scholars from Japan, Australia and Europe working in areas as diverse as cultural studies, linguistics, education, music, art, anthropology, and translation, to explore the influence of manga in Japan and worldwide via translation, OEL manga and fan engagement. Includes a mix of theoretical, methodological, empirical and professional practice-based chapters, examining manga from both academic and artistic perspectives.

Illustrating from personal experience the sometimes fraught nature of teaching about 'cool Japan,' they suggest ways in which Japanese Studies as a discipline needs to develop clearer guidelines for teaching and research, especially for new scholars entering the field. Identifies key challenges in using Japanese popular culture materials in their research and teaching. Addresses issues such as the availability of unofficially translated and transmitted Japanese material; the emphasis on adult-themes, violence, sexual scenes and under-age characters; and the high levels of discrepancy in legislation and ratings systems across the world. Considering how these issues affect researchers, teachers and fans in the US, Canada, Australia, China, Japan and elsewhere in Asia, the contributors discuss the different ways in which academic and fan practices are challenged by local regulations.

Provides in-depth insight for over 70 of the most popular manga graphic novels, ranging from metaseries to stand-alone books. This set focuses on translated works that have been particularly influential in the development of the manga tradition.

The contributors’ excavations delve into: comics created by Latinos that push the boundaries of generic conventions; Latino comic book author-artists who complicate issues of race and gender through their careful reconfigurations of the body; comic strips; Latino superheroes in mainstream comics; and the complex ways that Latino superheroes are created and consumed within larger popular cultural trends.

Places particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world.

Starting with the Civil War, Dauber takes readers through comics' progress in the twentieth century and beyond. Shows not only how comics have changed, but how American politics and history have changed them. Describes the origins of beloved comics, champions neglected masterpieces, and argues that we can understand how America sees itself through whose stories comics tell.

Diverting the lens of comics studies to the swamps, back roads, small towns, and cities of the US South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Offers a wide-ranging assessment of how life and culture in the US South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Contributes to and productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies.

Studies comics from the formal dismantling of the French colonial empire in 1962 up to the present. The author analyzes comics representing a gamut of perspectives on immigration and postcolonial ethnic minorities, ranging from staunch defense to violent rejection. French cartoonists of ethnic minority and immigrant heritage are a major focus. Individual chapters are dedicated to specific artists, artistic collectives, comics, or themes, including an anti-racist comic strip serialized in Charlie Hebdo, undocumented migrants in comics, and racism in far-right comics.

Examines the thematic and critical developments in Spanish sequential art, with essays focusing on comics published in Spain since 2007.
Topics of particular interest include: studies about historical and personal memory; representations of gender, race, and identity; and texts dealing with Spanish customs, traditions, and the current political situation in Spain. These overarching topics share many points of contact with one another, and this interrelationship (as well as the many points of divergence) is illustrative of the uniqueness, diversity, and paradoxes of literary and cultural production in modern-day Spain, thus illuminating our understanding of Spanish national consciousness in the present day.

Exploring an era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, Drawn and Dangerous shines a new light on an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults.
Blurring the lines between high art and popular consumption, artists of the Italian comics scene went beyond passively documenting history and began actively shaping it through the creation of fictional worlds where history, cultural data, and pop-realism interacted freely. Featuring brutal Stalinist supermen, gay space travelers, suburban juvenile delinquents, and student activists, these comics ultimately revealed a volatile era more precisely than any mainstream press.

Demonstrates that since the 1970s, British feminist cartoons and comics have played an important part in the Women’s Movement in Britain. Questions why and how British feminists have used humor in comics form to present serious political messages. It interrogates what the implications have been for the development of feminist cartoons and for the popularization of feminism in Britain.

Arab comics are revealing of the changing attitudes towards politics, social relations and even language. During the last ten years, young Arabs have crafted stories explaining issues such as authoritarianism, resistance, war, sex, gender relations and youth culture. Hoigilt guides the reader through the emergence of independent comics, explores their social and political critique, and analyses their visual and verbal rhetoric.