Novel Perspectives On German Language Comics Studies

Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies: History, Pedagogy, Theory gathers an international team of contributors from two continents whose innovative scholarship demonstrates a regard for comics and graphic novels as works of art in their own right. The contributions serve as models for further research that will continue to define the relationship between comics and other traditional “high art” forms, such as literature and the visual arts. Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies is the first English-language anthology that focuses exclusively on the graphic texts of German-speaking countries. In its breadth, this book functions as an important resource in a limited pool of critical works on German-language comics and graphic novels. The individual chapters differ significantly from one another in methodology, subject matter, and style. Taken together, however, they present a cross-section of comics and graphic novel scholarship being performed in North America and Europe today. Moreover, they help to secure a place for these works in a globalized culture of comics. This volume’s contributors have helped create a new critical language within which this rapidly expanding medium can be read and interpreted.

Bringing together the work of an array of North American and European scholars, this collection highlights a previously unexamined area within global comics studies. It analyses comics from countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain like East Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine, given their shared history of WWII and communism. In addition to situating these graphic narratives in their national and subnational contexts, Comics of the New Europe pays particular attention to transnational connections along the common themes of nostalgia, memoir, and life under communism. The essays offer insights into a new generation of European cartoonists that looks forward, inspired and informed by traditions from Franco-Belgian and American comics, and back, as they use the medium of comics to reexamine and reevaluate not only their national pasts and respective comics traditions but also their own post-1989 identities and experiences.

Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics’ documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts? The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the 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.

This book examines the scope and nature of Donald Duck and his family's popularity in Germany, in contrast to the diminished role they play in America. This is achieved through examination of the respective fan communities, business practices, and universality of the characters. This work locates and understands the aspects of translation and adaptation that inform the spread of culture that have as yet been underexplored in the context of comic books. It represents a large-scale attempt to incorporate adaptation and translation studies into comics studies, through a lens of fan studies (used to examine both the American and German fan communities, as well as the work of Don Rosa). This work builds on the efforts of other scholars, including Janet Wasko and Illaria Meloni, while expanding the historical understanding of what might be the world’s best-selling comics. Peter Cullen Bryan is Lecturer at Pennsylvania State University, USA. His areas of study include American Studies, Intercultural Communications, and 21st Century American culture, emphasizing comic art and fan communities. His research has appeared in the Journal of Fandom Studies, The Journal of American Culture, and Popular Culture Studies Journal. He serves on the boards of the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association, as well as Secretary for the Intercultural Communication section of the International Communication Association.

This volume surveys transnational encounters and entanglements between Germany and East Asia since 1945, a period that has witnessed unprecedented global connections between the two regions. It examines their sociopolitical and cultural connections through a variety of media. Since 1945, cultural flow between Germany and East Asia has increasingly become bidirectional, spurred by East Asian economies’ unprecedented growth. In exploring their dynamic and evolving relations, this volume emphasizes how they have negotiated their differences and have frequently cooperated toward common goals in meeting the challenges of the contemporary world. Given their long-standing historical differences, their post-1945 relations reveal a surprisingly high degree of affinity in many areas. To show how they have deeply shaped each other’s views, this volume presents 12 chapters by scholars from the fields of history, sinology, sociology, literature, music, and film. Topics include cultural topics, such as German and Swiss writers on East Asia (Enzensberg, Muschg, and Kreitz), Japanese writer on Germany (Tezuka and Tawada), German commemorative culture in Korea, Beethoven in China, metal music in Germany and Japan, diary films on Japan (Wenders), as well as sociopolitical topics, such as Sino– East German diplomacy, Germans and Korean democracy, and Japanes and Korean communities in Germany.

As with all other forms of popular culture, comics in East Germany were tightly controlled by the state. Comics were employed as extensions of the regime’s educational system, delivering official ideology so as to develop the “socialist personality” of young people and generate enthusiasm for state socialism. The East German children who avidly read these comics, however, found their own meanings in and projected their own desires upon them. Four-Color Communism gives a lively account of East German comics from both perspectives, showing how the perceived freedoms they embodied created expectations that ultimately limited the regime’s efforts to bring readers into the fold.

This textbook provides the first foundational introduction to the practice of analysing multimodality, covering the full breadth of media and situations in which multimodality needs to be a concern. Readers learn via use cases how to approach any multimodal situation and to derive their own specifically tailored sets of methods for conducting and evaluating analyses. Extensive references and critical discussion of existing approaches from many disciplines and in each of the multimodal domains addressed are provided. The authors adopt a problem-oriented perspective throughout, showing how an appropriate foundation for understanding multimodality as a phenomenon can be used to derive strong methodological guidance for analysis as well as supporting the adoption and combination of appropriate theoretical tools. Theoretical positions found in the literature are consequently always related back to the purposes of analysis rather than being promoted as valuable in their own right. By these means the book establishes the necessary theoretical foundations to engage productively with today’s increasingly complex combinations of multimodal artefacts and performances of all kinds.

Comparative Literature is changing fast with methodologies, topics, and research interests emerging and remerging. The fifth volume of ICLA 2016 proceedings, Dialogues between Media, focuses on the current interest in inter-arts studies, as well as papers on comics studies, further testimony to the fact that comics have truly arrived in mainstream academic discourse. "Adaptation" is a key term for the studies presented in this volume; various articles discuss the adaptation of literary source texts in different target media - cinematic versions, comics adaptations, TV series, theatre, and opera. Essays on the interplay of media beyond adaptation further show many of the strands that are woven into dialogues between media, and thus the expanding range of comparative literature.