Urban Comics

Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives makes an important and timely contribution both to comics studies and urban studies, offering a decolonisation and reconfiguration of both of these already interdisciplinary fields. With chapter-length discussions of comics from cities such as Cairo, Cape Town, New Orleans, Delhi and Beirut, this book shows how artistic collectives and urban social movements working across the global South are producing some of the most exciting and formally innovative graphic narratives of the contemporary moment. Throughout, the author reads an expansive range of graphic narratives through the vocabulary of urban studies to argue that these formal innovations should be thought of as a kind of infrastructure. This ‘infrastructural form’ allows urban comics to reveal that the built environments of our cities are not static, banal, or depoliticised, but rather highly charged material spaces that allow some forms of social life to exist while also prohibiting others. Built from a formal infrastructure of grids, gutters and panels, and capable of volumetric, multi-scalar perspectives, this book shows how urban comics are able to represent, repair and even rebuild contemporary global cities toward more socially just and sustainable ends. Operating at the intersection of comics studies and urban studies, and offering large global surveys alongside close textual and visual analyses, this book explores and opens up the fascinating relationship between comics and graphic narratives, on the one hand, and cities and urban spaces, on the other.

Red Hood: The epic “Cheer” story line reaches its conclusion, and Red Hood’s alliance with Batman will be forever changed. Will the former Dynamic Duo get the Cheerdrop drug off the streets for good? Or will they forever be at the mercy of the villain who created it? And will Red Hood find a new home for Tyler, the boy he’s sworn to protect? Tim Drake: Tim Drake is in the den of the Chaos Monsters with the other kidnapped teenagers of Gotham City. In order to free himself and the other teens, Tim will have to embrace help from his friend Bernard and hear something about himself he never knew. A brand-new chapter of Tim Drake’s life starts here, and you won’t want to miss it! Black Canary: Oracle locates some Batman weaponry, missing since The Joker War, and calls in her old friend Dinah Lance to help retrieve it! Fists will fly, the Canary will scream, and a stunning new mission begins. The ending will leave readers in shock and awe! Zealot: The HALO Corporation sent their top field agent, code name Zealot, to hunt Maxwell Lord. But the villain has a guardian angel in the form of...Wonder Woman?! A throw down for the ages will ensue!

Includes international essays on possibly the most important aspect of the aesthetics and narratives of comics - urban topography and environment.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 More and more people are noticing links between urban geography and the spaces within the layout of panels on the comics page. Benjamin Fraser explores the representation of the city in a range of comics from across the globe. Comics address the city as an idea, a historical fact, a social construction, a material-built environment, a shared space forged from the collective imagination, or as a social arena navigated according to personal desire. Accordingly, Fraser brings insights from urban theory to bear on specific comics. The works selected comprise a variety of international, alternative, and independent small-press comics artists, from engravings and early comics to single-panel work, graphic novels, manga, and trading cards, by artists such as Will Eisner, Tsutomu Nihei, Hariton Pushwagner, Julie Doucet, Frans Masereel, and Chris Ware. In the first monograph on this subject, Fraser touches on many themes of modern urban life: activism, alienation, consumerism, flânerie, gentrification, the mystery story, science fiction, sexual orientation, and working-class labor. He leads readers to images of such cities as Barcelona, Buenos Aires, London, Lyon, Madrid, Montevideo, Montreal, New York, Oslo, Paris, São Paolo, and Tokyo. Through close readings, each chapter introduces readers to specific comics artists and works and investigates a range of topics related to the medium’s spatial form, stylistic variation, and cultural prominence. Mainly, Fraser mixes interest in urbanism and architecture with the creative strategies that comics artists employ to bring their urban images to life.

Barcelona, City of Comics introduces readers of English to a range of Spanish- and Catalan-language comics published after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. During this time of palpable social change, the Catalonian capital regained its reputation as the hub of comics publishing in Spain. Comics collectives such as El Rrollo and Butifarra, as well as individual artists from Montse Clavé to Mariscal, contributed to a thriving comics subculture that drew from and pushed beyond the countercultural comics tradition in the United States. As the Salón Internacional del Cómic de Barcelona (1981–) drew greater attention to the city, comics magazines teemed with graphic depictions of urban scenes. On the comics page, themes of architecture and city life were employed as social critique, while the city of Barcelona itself increasingly solidified its reputation on the global stage through urban planning. With a foreword by Pere Joan, Barcelona, City of Comics delves into the relationship between comics and urbanism in one of Europe's most notable global cities.

Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field. It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

This book proposes a novel creative research practice in geography based on comics. It presents a transdisciplinary approach that uses a set of qualitative visual methods and extends from within the geohumanities across literary spatial studies, comics, urban studies, mobility studies, and beyond. Written by a geographer-cartoonist, the book focuses on ‘narrative geographies’ and embraces a geocritical and relational approach to examine comic book geographies in pursuit of a growing interest in creative, art-based experimental methods in the geohumanities. It explores comics-based research through interconnections between art and geography and through theoretical and methodological contributions from scholars working in the fields of the social sciences, humanities, literary geographies, mobilities, comics, literary studies, and urban studies, as well as from visual artists, comics authors, and art practitioners. Comics are valuable objects of geographical interest because of their spatial grammar. They are also a language particularly suited to geographical analysis, and the ‘geoGraphic novel’ offers a practice of research that has the power to assemble and disassemble new spatial meanings. The book thus explores how the ‘geoGraphic novel’ as a verbo-visual genre allows the study of geographical issues, composes geocentred stories, engages wider and non-specialist audiences, promotes geo-artistic collaboration, and works as a narrative intervention in urban contexts. Through a practice-based approach and the internal perspective of a geographer-cartoonist, the book provides examples of how geoGraphic fieldwork is conducted and offers analysis of the processes of ideation, composition, and dissemination of geoGraphic narratives.

-Batwoman: FEAR STATE TIE-IN! Someone has hacked into the Oracle Network and has started spreading information around Gotham-Batman is dead, Cassandra Cain Batgirl is a killer, Fear Toxin is in the air. Which is true and which is false? Batwoman will find out with the help of Commissioner Renee Montoya and…Kate’s sister Beth, AKA Red Alice?! -Outsiders: FEAR STATE TIE-IN! Scarecrow has stirred Gotham City into a panic, and it’s awakened one of his first students he experimented on, a man turned into a monster known as THE FEARFUL! The Outsiders will have to reunite with the Signal in order to stop the Fearful and keep the city at peace. But a message from the world of FUTURE STATE reaches the Signal and changes everything. -Azrael: Azrael, the last acolyte of the Order of St. Dumas, has returned to the streets of Gotham City after serving with the Justice League in the stars. He’s convinced he’s strayed too far from his purpose, too far from his teachings, and needs to reassert himself. But he’ll be met with a city that’s changed forever, a city that will shake his faith. -Professor Pyg: Just in time for Halloween, a tale of Super Hero horror from fan-favorite creator Christian Ward, writing and drawing a story of Batman hunting down Professor Pyg in order to find the victim of a kidnapping. Batman will dig back into his memories of youth to track down Pyg and save a child’s life.