Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Comics & Graphic Novels

Scholar David A. Berona examines...

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...

Among the many accomplishments in art and literature by Genevan Rodolphe Topffer (1799-1846), his virtual invention of the comic strip, or graphic novel, stands out as the most surprising, curious, and to us, after a century inundated by comic strips, by far the most significant.

This volume is the first English-language version of the Topffer comics oeuvre and includes (unlike previous French and German editions) all of his eight full-length stories, plus previously unpublished fragments of stories started and abandoned and manuscript segments omitted in the printed versions. Comics...

Stan Lee (b. 1922), co-creator of The Amazing Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, and The Uncanny X-Men, is one of the most successful writers and publishers of comics. During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote superhero adventures for Marvel Comics. His storylines imbued the genre with angst and contemporary politics and focused as much on the personal lives of his characters as on heroics. His work, in collaboration with cartoonists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, remains deeply influential. His role as a spokesperson and impresario for Marvel...

Since 1968, Garry Trudeau (b. 1948) has brought his brand of political satire to bear on public figures, movie stars, heads of state, and even on himself. Trudeau has also advocated for artists' rights and challenged industry norms while keeping a decidedly low profile. In Garry Trudeau: -Doonesbury- and the Aesthetics of Satire, Kerry D. Soper traces the contribution of this groundbreaking artist.

Trudeau is arguably the premier American political and social satirist of the last forty years. Amazingly, he achieved this on the comics page, rather than the editorial page. By...

Through the combination of text and images, comic books offer a unique opportunity to explore deep questions about aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology in nontraditional ways. The essays in this collection focus on a wide variety of genres, from mainstream superhero comics, to graphic novels of social realism, to European adventure classics.

Included among the contributions are essays on existentialism in Daniel Clowes's graphic novel Ghost World, ecocriticism in Paul Chadwick's long-running Concrete series, and political philosophies in Herge's perennially popular The...

Harvey Pekar's American Splendor is the longest-running and arguably the most influential autobiographical comic book series produced in America. Since 1976, Pekar (b. 1939) has reported on his life through his comics. Pekar's comic books deal with his life as a Veterans Administration clerk and freelance music critic; his friends and co-workers and their stories; and his home city of Cleveland. Pekar's struggles with physical and mental problems, a low-paying job, Hollywood, marriage, his daughter's adoption, and success are all laid out in his comics. Pekar prides himself on...

A Comics Studies Reader offers the best of the new comics scholarship in nearly thirty essays on a wide variety of such comics forms as gag cartoons, editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books, manga, and graphic novels.

The anthology covers the pioneering work of Rodolphe Topffer, the Disney comics of Carl Barks, and the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, as well as Peanuts, romance comics, and superheroes. It explores the stylistic achievements of manga, the international anti-comics campaign, and power and class in Mexican comic books and English...

Viva la historieta critically examines the participation of Mexican comic books in the continuing debate over the character and consequences of globalization in Mexico. The focus of the book is on graphic narratives produced by and for Mexicans in the period following the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an economic accord that institutionalized the free-market vision of relationships among the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Eight chapters cover a broad range of contemporary Mexican comics, including works of propaganda, romance and...