Comic Potential

A play set in the foreseeable future when everything has changed except human nature; a future where TV daytime soaps are performed by android actors emotionally programmed by the control room. One, JC 31333, finds herself humanized as Jacie Triplethree, complete with a sense of humour and Adam, a young scriptwriter, falls for her.

This book is a seminal study that significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa’s under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema, particularly the direct-to-video Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood, the book examines the often-neglected aesthetics of the African comic imagination. In modern African literature, which sometimes creatively traces a path back to African folklore, and in Nollywood — with its aesthetic relationship to Onitsha Market Literature — the pertinent styles range from comic simplicitas to comic magnitude with the facilitation of language, characterization, and plot by a poetics of laughter or lightness as an important aspect of style. The poetics at work is substantially carnivalesque, a comic preference or tendency that is attributable, in different contexts, to a purposeful comic sensibility or an unstructured but ingrained or virtual comic mode. In the best instances of this comic vision, the characteristic laughter or lightness can facilitate a revaluation or reappreciation of the world, either because of the aesthetic structure of signification or the consequent chain of signification. This referentiality or progressive signification is an important aspect of the poetics of laughter as the African comic imagination variously reflects, across genres, both the festival character of comedy and its pedagogical value. This book marks an important contribution to African literature, postcolonial literature, world literature, comic imagination, poetics, critical theory, and African cinema.

Writer and artist Schrag opens her heart and examines it with a magnifying glass to reveal the emotional turbulence, pain, and passion of teenage life. "Potential" reveals Ariel's junior year of high school as well as her artistic maturation. For mature readers.

The free online guide written by KaptainMyke has been released for the first time in print! Learn the hidden underground secrets of cleaning and pressing comic books. This book contains all of the vast information covered online at www.kaptainmyke.com and includes all new, never before seen material. Properly photograph and handle comic books to prevent damage. Obtain the highest grades possible when submitting to grading companies. Learn how to prescreen and inspect comic books with precision. Know the difference between pressable and unpressable defects. Learn about restoration detection and how you can avoid potential risks. Become informed on the dangers of bad pressing and what you can do to prevent damage to comic books. The cleaning and stain removal tips inside will provide extra value to your books. This book is filled with full color pages that include tips and real world examples for your review. Fix your mistakes and prevent future potential mistakes as you practice. Utilize and follow guidance from formula pages based off year and type of paperstock. Inspection forms, a flow chart and pressing matrix diagram are included as brand new content to guide you along every step of the learning process. All pages are color coded and easy to understand for anyone who has never attempted cleaning or pressing comic books. Suppose you could tell if a graded comic book has been cleaned and pressed - without ever having to open it? What if there were grading notes that could immediately give you clues for pressing potential? This book covers all of that and more! Everything included inside this book guarantees a clean blue universal graded label using no restoration techniques or tricks. You are guaranteed to improve the condition and grade of any comic book using the procedures outlined in this guide. If you collect comic books, this book is for you.

Autobiography is one of the most dynamic and quickly-growing genres in contemporary comics and graphic narratives. In Serial Selves, Frederik Byrn Køhlert examines the genre’s potential for representing lives and perspectives that have been socially marginalized or excluded. With a focus 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. Interdisciplinary in scope and attuned to theories and methods from both literary and visual studies, 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. As the first comparative study of how comics artists from a wide range of backgrounds use the form to write and draw themselves into cultural visibility, Serial Selves will be of interest to anyone interested in the current boom in autobiographical comics, as well as issues of representation in comics and visual culture more broadly.

This book builds on cognitive stylistics, humour studies and psychological approaches to literature and film to explore the emotional aspects of humorous narrative comprehension. It investigates how the linguistic features of comic novels and short stories (by, for example, Douglas Adams, Joseph Heller and Nick Hornby) can shape readers' experience of comedy, considering the ways in which moods, characters and the plot is used to trigger blends of positive and negative emotion. The book offers an approach to such features of comedy as dark humour, cringe humour and comic suspense, emphasising the relationship between humorous language and mental states which are typically considered serious. Agnes Marszalek's focus on the non-humorous side of experiencing comedy offers a key contribution to the study of humorous narratives. By investigating humour as part of a narrative world, this book moves towards addressing the complexity of the experience of humour in narrative texts, providing implications not only for the linguistics of humour, but also for those approaches to discourse comprehension which explore the affective side of engaging with texts.

The most comprehensive reference ever compiled about the rich and enduring genre of comic books and graphic novels, from their emergence in the 1930s to their late-century breakout into the mainstream. At a time when graphic novels have expanded beyond their fan cults to become mainstream bestsellers and sources for Hollywood entertainment, Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels serves as an exhaustive exploration of the genre's history, its landmark creators and creations, and its profound influence on American life and culture. Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels focuses on English-language comics—plus a small selection of influential Japanese and European works available in English—with special emphasis on the new graphic novel format that emerged in the 1970s. Entries cover influential comic artists and writers such as Will Eisner, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison, major genres and themes, and specific characters, comic book imprints, and landmark titles, including the pulp noir 100 Bullets, the post-apocalyptic Y: The Last Man, the revisionist superhero drama, Identity Crisis, and more. Key franchises such as Superman and Batman are the center of a constellation of related entries that include graphic novels and other imprints featuring the same characters or material.

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, for several generations of readers, what it means to be Hindu and Indian. Karline McLain worked in the ACK production offices and had many conversations with Anant Pai, founder and publisher, and with artists, writers, and readers about why the comics are so popular and what messages they convey. 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.