Arguing Comics

When Art Spiegelman's Maus—a two-part graphic novel about the Holocaust—won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, comics scholarship grew increasingly popular and notable. The rise of “serious” comics has generated growing levels of interest as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals continue to explore the history, aesthetics, and semiotics of the comics medium. Yet those who write about the comics often assume analysis of the medium didn't begin until the cultural studies movement was underway. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium brings together nearly two dozen essays by major writers and intellectuals who analyzed, embraced, and even attacked comic strips and comic books in the period between the turn of the century and the 1960s. From e. e. cummings, who championed George Herriman's Krazy Kat, to Irving Howe, who fretted about Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie, this volume shows that comics have provided a key battleground in the culture wars for over a century. With substantive essays by Umberto Eco, Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, Gilbert Seldes, Dorothy Parker, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, and others, this anthology shows how all of these writers took up comics-related topics as a point of entry into wider debates over modern art, cultural standards, daily life, and mass communication. Arguing Comics shows how prominent writers from the Jazz Age and the Depression era to the heyday of the New York Intellectuals in the 1950s thought about comics and, by extension, popular culture as a whole.

Providing an overview of the dynamic field of comics and graphic novels for students and researchers, this Essential Guide contextualises the major research trends, debates and ideas that have emerged in Comics Studies over the past decades. Interdisciplinary and international in its scope, the critical approaches on offer spread across a wide range of strands, from the formal and the ideological to the historical, literary and cultural. Its concise chapters provide accessible introductions to comics methodologies, comics histories and cultures across the world, high-profile creators and titles, insights from audience and fan studies, and important themes and genres, such as autobiography and superheroes. It also surveys the alternative and small press alongside general reference works and textbooks on comics. Each chapter is complemented by list of key reference works.

A survey of the best scholars writing on the form, craft, history, and significance of the comics

A complete guide to the history, form and contexts of the genre, Superhero Comics helps readers explore the most successful and familiar of comic book genres. In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book reveals: ·The history of superhero comics-from mythic influences to 21st century evolutions ·Cultural contexts-from the formative politics of colonialism, eugenics, KKK vigilantism, and WWII fascism to the Cold War's transformative threat of mutually assured destruction to the on-going revolutions in African American and sexual representation ·Key texts-from the earliest pre-Comics-Code Superman and Batman to the latest post-Code Ms. Marvel and Black Panther ·Approaches to visual analysis-from layout norms to narrative structure to styles of abstraction

Contributions by David M. Ball, Ian Gordon, Andrew Loman, Andrea A. Lunsford, James Lyons, Ana Merino, Graham J. Murphy, Chris Murray, Adam Rosenblatt, Julia Round, Joe Sutliff Sanders, Stephen Weiner, and Paul Williams Starting in the mid-1980s, a talented set of comics artists changed the American comic book industry forever by introducing adult sensibilities and aesthetic considerations into popular genres such as superhero comics and the newspaper strip. Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1987) revolutionized the former genre in particular. During this same period, underground and alternative genres began to garner critical acclaim and media attention beyond comics-specific outlets, as best represented by Art Spiegelman's Maus. Publishers began to collect, bind, and market comics as “graphic novels,” and these appeared in mainstream bookstores and in magazine reviews. The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts brings together new scholarship surveying the production, distribution, and reception of American comics from this pivotal decade to the present. The collection specifically explores the figure of the comics creator—either as writer, as artist, or as writer and artist—in contemporary US comics, using creators as focal points to evaluate changes to the industry, its aesthetics, and its critical reception. The book also includes essays on landmark creators such as Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, as well as insightful interviews with Jeff Smith (Bone), Jim Woodring (Frank) and Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics). As comics have reached new audiences, through different material and electronic forms, the public's broad perception of what comics are has changed. The Rise of the American Comics Artist surveys the ways in which the figure of the creator has been at the heart of these evolutions.

The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking 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."

How do comics produce such a striking range of vibrant stories, representations, and expressions of the sensibilities of their creators? Henry John Pratt's The Philosophy of Comics provides a ground-breaking, illustrated introduction to the study of comics and graphic novels, advancing the field of comics studies by attending to some of its most notable problems. Pratt examines the history of comics, the contrast between comics and cartoons, the tenuous place of comics in the art world, and what it is to be a comic in the first place. Comics work through extensive modes of representation and expression, including through film, non-graphic literature, and theatre. Pratt examines questions such as, why and how are so many films based on comics? Can there be a perfect adaptation from one to the other? Are some comics better than others? Why is reading comics not regarded in the same light as reading literary books? Pratt urges us to look closely at the most significant problems and puzzles that comics provoke, having to do with the very nature of comics, what composes them, how comics are related to other art forms, how they function to manage space and time in storytelling, and why they've been neglected in academic circles despite being a culturally significant art form for decades. With illustrations by Kurt F. Shaffert, The Philosophy of Comics ultimately tries to explain the true underlying value of comics as an art form.

This book explores the connections between comics and Gothic from four different angles: historical, formal, cultural and textual. It identifies structures, styles and themes drawn from literary gothic traditions and discusses their presence in British and American comics today, with particular attention to the DC Vertigo imprint. Part One offers an historical approach to British and American comics and Gothic, summarizing the development of both their creative content and critical models, and discussing censorship, allusion and self-awareness. Part Two brings together some of the gothic narrative strategies of comics and reinterprets critical approaches to the comics medium, arguing for an holistic model based around the symbols of the crypt, the spectre and the archive. Part Three then combines cultural and textual analysis, discussing the communities that have built up around comics and gothic artifacts and concluding with case studies of two of the most famous gothic archetypes in comics: the vampire and the zombie.