Comics As Culture

Comics have become important elements in the culture of the 20th century, not only has the genre been recognized as a medium and an art form in its own right; it has also inspired other means of communication from text books to interactive media. In 13 articles, Comics and Culture offers an introduction to the field of comics research written by scholars from Europe and the USA. The articles span a great variety of approaches including general discussions of the aesthetics and definition of comics, comparisons of comics with other media, analyses of specific comics and genres, and discussions of the cultural status of comics in society. One way to characterize this book is to focus on the contributors. Recognized and established research with important publications to their credit form one group: Donald Ault, Thierry Groensteen, M. Thomas Inge, Pascal Lefvre and Roger Sabin. Another group is from the new generation of researches represented by PhD students: Hans-Christian Christiansen

These ten essays by one of America's foremost authorities on popular culture survey the influence of the comic strip and, despite the legions of detractors, show it to be an art form that has enriched and reflected most of American culture.

These ten essays by one of America's foremost authorities on popular culture survey the influence of the comic strip and, despite the legions of detractors, show it to be an art form that has enriched and reflected most of American culture.

Comics and cartoons are ingrained in American life. One critic has called comic books crude, unimaginative, banal, vulgar, ultimately corrupting. They have been regarded with considerable suspicion by parents, educators, psychiatrists, and moral reformers. They have been investigated by governmental committees and subjected to severe censorship. Yet more than 200 million copies are sold annually. Upon even casual examination BLONDIE, ARCHIE, MARY WORTH, THE WIZARD OF ID, and SHOEamong the many comic stripswill be found to support some commonly accepted notion or standard of society. Why do comics both amuse and arouse controversy? Here is an attempt at an answer in a sharp-eyed comic-book lovers probing look at this step-child genre. He finds comics both loved and hated, relished and sneered at. In their relying on dramatic conventions of character, dialogue, scene, gesture, compressed time, and stage devices, he finds the comics close to the drama but probably closer kin to

These essays from various critical disciplines examine how comic books and graphic narratives move between various media, while merging youth and adult cultures and popular and high art. The articles feature international perspectives on comics and graphic novels published in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Portugal, Germany, Turkey, India, and Japan. Topics range from film adaptation, to journalism in comics, to the current manga boom.

Spanish comics have attracted considerable critical attention internationally: dissertations have been written, monographs have been published, and an array of cultural institutions in Spain (the media, publishing houses, bookstores, museums, and archives) have increasingly promoted the pleasures, pertinence, and power of graphic narrative to an ever-expanding readership - all in an area of cultural production that was held, until recently, to be the stuff of child's play, the unenlightened, or the unsophisticated. This volume takes up the charge of examining how contemporary comics in Spain have confronted questions of cultural legitimacy through serious and timely engagement with diverse themes, forms, and approaches - a collective undertaking that, while keenly in step with transnational theoretical trends, foregrounds local, regional, and national dimensions particular to the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Spanish milieu. From memory and history to the economic and the political, and from the body and personal space to mental geography, the essays collected in Consequential Art account for several key ways in which a range of comics practitioners have deployed the image-text connection and alternative methods of seeing to interrogate some of the most significant cultural issues in Spain.

This anthology explores tensions between the individualistic artistic ideals and the collective industrial realities of contemporary cultural production with eighteen all-new chapters presenting pioneering empirical research on the complexities and controversies of comics work. Art Spiegelman. Alan Moore. Osamu Tezuka. Neil Gaiman. Names such as these have become synonymous with the medium of comics. Meanwhile, the large numbers of people without whose collective action no comic book would ever exist in the first place are routinely overlooked. Cultures of Comics Work unveils this hidden, global industrial labor of writers, illustrators, graphic designers, letterers, editors, printers, typesetters, publicists, publishers, distributors, translators, retailers, and countless others both directly and indirectly involved in the creative production of what is commonly thought of as the comic book. Drawing upon diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, an international and interdisciplinary cohort of cutting-edge researchers and practitioners intervenes in debates about cultural work and paves innovative directions for comics scholarship.

Comics and cartoons are ingrained in American life. One critic has called comic books "crude, unimaginative, banal, vulgar, ultimately corrupting." They have been regarded with considerable suspicion by parents, educators, psychiatrists, and moral reformers. They have been investigated by governmental committees and subjected to severe censorship. Yet more than 200 million copies are sold annually. Upon even casual examination BLONDIE, ARCHIE, MARY WORTH, THE WIZARD OF ID, and SHOE--among the many comic strips--will be found to support some commonly accepted notion or standard of society. Why do comics both amuse and arouse controversy? Here is an attempt at an answer in a sharp-eyed comic-book lover's probing look at this step-child genre. He finds comics both loved and hated, relished and sneered at. In their relying on dramatic conventions of character, dialogue, scene, gesture, compressed time, and stage devices, he finds the comics close to the drama but probably closer kin to the movies.