Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Comics & Graphic Novels

Sfar So Far is the first monograph in any language devoted to the graphic novels of Joann Sfar, an artist whose abundant and innovative work has profoundly marked the contemporary French comics scene. This book examines how, over the past two decades, Sfar has constructed an idiosyncratic universe with its own thematic and stylistic recurrences: a playful drafting style, contrasting with the thoughtful introduction of historical, theological, and philosophical matters; a sophisticated use of literary, filmic, musical, and pictorial references; an exploration of his own Jewish...

This collection examines new comic-book cultures, graphic writing, and bande dessinee texts as they relate to postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone settings. The individual chapters are framed within a larger enquiry that considers definitive aspects of the postcolonial condition in twenty-first-century (con)texts.

The authors demonstrate that the fields of comic-book production and circulation in various regional histories introduce new postcolonial vocabularies, reconstitute conventional "image-functions" in established social texts and political...

The Comics of Joe Sacco addresses the range of his award-winning work, from his early comics stories as well as his groundbreaking journalism Palestine (1993) and Safe Area to Gorazde (2000), to Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and his most recent book The Great War (2013), a graphic history of World War I.

First in the new series, Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, this edited volume explores Sacco's comics journalism, and features established and emerging scholars from comics studies, cultural studies, geography, literary studies, political science, and...

This book is the follow-up to Thierry Groensteen's groundbreaking The System of Comics, in which the leading French-language comics theorist set out to investigate how the medium functions, introducing the principle of iconic solidarity, and showing the systems that underlie the articulation between panels at three levels: page layout, linear sequence, and nonsequential links woven through the comic book as a whole. He now develops that analysis further, using examples from a very wide range of comics, including the work of American artists such as Chris Ware and Robert Crumb. He...

It has become an axiom in comic studies that -comics is a language, not a genre.- But what exactly does that mean, and how is discourse on the form both aided and hindered by thinking of it in linguistic terms? In Comics and Language, Hannah Miodrag challenges many of the key assumptions about the -grammar- and formal characteristics of comics, and offers a more nuanced, theoretical framework that she argues will better serve the field by offering a consistent means for communicating critical theory in the scholarship. Through engaging close readings and an accessible use of theory,...

Autobiography has seen enormous expansions and challenges over the past decades. One of these expansions has been in comics, and it is an expansion that pushes back against any postmodern notion of the death of the author/subject, while also demanding new approaches from critics.

Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art is a collection of essays about autobiography, semiautobiography, fictionalized autobiography, memory, and self-narration in sequential art, or comics. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds including English, American studies,...

-There is no better, smarter examination of the relationship between comics and film.-

--Mark Waid, Eisner Award-winning writer of Kingdom Come and Daredevil

In the summer of 2000 X-Men surpassed all box office expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed into Hollywood's leading genre. From superheroes to Spartan warriors, The Comic Book Film Adaptation offers the first dedicated study to examine how comic books moved from the fringes of popular...

For fans of Peter Bagge (b. 1957) and his bracing satirical writing and drawing, this collection offers a perfect means to track how he describes his career choices, work habits, preoccupations, and comedic sensibility since the 1980s. Featuring a new interview and much previously unavailable material, this book delivers insightful, occasionally gossipy, sometimes funny, and often tart conversations. His career has intersected with the modern history of comics, from underground comix and indie comics to comics journalism and graphic nonfiction.

Bagge's detailed, garrulous, and often...

Among the masters of the nineteenth-century comic strip, Gustave Dore has been much neglected. For his illustrations to literary classics, he earned an unsurpassed reputation and corresponding scholarly attention. Dore himself repudiated his early work, and similarly critics and biographers have given short shrift to his beginnings as a caricaturist. These caricatures are herein rescued entirely for the first time in English by the renowned comics scholar David Kunzle.

Dore's caricature is known to a few specialists, but virtually no one has pointed out that his mastery of the comic...

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today.

Batman's foe has cropped up in thousands of comics, numerous animated series, and three major blockbuster feature films since 1966. Actually, the Joker debuted in DC comics...

A noted comics artist himself, Santiago Garcia follows the history of the graphic novel from early nineteenth-century European sequential art, through the development of newspaper strips in the United States, to the development of the twentieth-century comic book and its subsequent crisis. He considers the aesthetic and entrepreneurial innovations that established the conditions for the rise of the graphic novel all over the world.

Garcia not only treats the formal components of the art, but also examines the cultural position of comics in various formats as a popular medium. Typically...

This essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture. Its contributions test the applicability of narratological concepts to graphic narrative, examine aspects of graphic narrative beyond the 'single work', consider the development of particular narrative strategies within individual genres, and trace the forms and functions of graphic narrative across cultures. Analyzing a wide range of texts, genres, and narrative strategies from both theoretical and historical...