Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Comics & Graphic Novels

When Art Spiegelman's Maus-a two-part graphic novel about the Holocaust-won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, comics scholarship grew increasingly popular and notable. The rise of -serious- comics has generated growing levels of interest as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals continue to explore the history, aesthetics, and semiotics of the comics medium.

Yet those who write about the comics often assume analysis of the medium didn't begin until the cultural studies movement was underway. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium brings together nearly two...

Too often remembered solely as the psychiatrist and cultural critic whose testimony in Senate subcommittees sparked the creation of the Comics Code, Fredric Wertham was a far more complex man. Author Bart Beaty traces the evolution of Wertham's attitudes toward popular culture and reassesses his place in the debate about pop culture's effects on youth and society.

When The Seduction of the Innocent was published in 1954, Wertham (1895-1981) became instantly known as an authority on child psychology. Although he had published several books before Seduction, its sharp...

Sixty years before the comics entered the American newspaper press, Rodolphe Topffer of Geneva (1799-1846), schoolmaster, university professor, polemical journalist, art critic, landscape draftsman, and writer of fiction, travel tales, and social criticism, invented a new art form: the comic strip, or -picture story, - that is now the graphic novel. At first he resisted publishing what he called his -little follies.- When he did, they became instantly popular, plagiarized, and imitated throughout Europe and the United States.

Topffer developed a graphic style suited to his poor eyesight:...

Sixty years before the comics entered the American newspaper press, Rodolphe Topffer of Geneva (1799-1846), schoolmaster, university professor, polemical journalist, art critic, landscape draftsman, and writer of fiction, travel tales, and social criticism, invented a new art form: the comic strip, or -picture story, - that is now the graphic novel. At first he resisted publishing what he called his -little follies.- When he did, they became instantly popular, plagiarized, and imitated throughout Europe and the United States.

Topffer developed a graphic style suited to his poor...

George Benjamin Luks (1867-1933) is renowned for the oil paintings, watercolors, and pastel drawings he created as an acclaimed member of the artists' collective known as the Ashcan School. His professional development came, however, from his apprenticeship as a newspaper and magazine artist. Luks spent his early career drawing cartoons, spot illustrations, political caricatures, and comic strips for the New York World and other papers. These early portraits and stories of street urchins, peddlers, shopkeepers, and other ordinary New Yorkers would all be revisited in his later...

It was none other than Langston Hughes who called Oliver Wendell Harrington America's greatest black cartoonist.

Yet largely because he chose to live as an expatriate far from the American mainstream, he has been almost entirely overlooked by contemporary historians and scholars of African American culture.

Born in 1912 and a graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, he was a prolific contributor of humorous and editorial cartoons to the black press in the 1930s and 1940s, but he achieved fame for his creation of a cartoon panel called Dark Laughter, a satire of Harlem society...

The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars about the comics of Chicago-based cartoonist Chris Ware (b. 1967). Both inside and outside academic circles, Ware's work is rapidly being distinguished as essential to the developing canon of the graphic novel. Winner of the 2001 Guardian First Book Prize for the genre-defining Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware has received numerous accolades from both the literary and comics establishment. This collection addresses the range of...

Female action heroes, like other fictional characters, not only reveal a lot about society, but greatly influence individuals in society. It is no surprise that the gradual development and increase in the number of female action heroes coincides with societal changes and social movements, such as feminism. Nor is it a surprise that characteristics of female action heroes echo the progressive toughening of women and young girls in the media.

"Female Action Heroes: A Guide to Women in Comics, Video Games, Film, and Television" brings to the forefront the historical representation of women...

Manga is the backbone of Japanese popular culture, influencing everything from television, movies, and video games to novels, art, and theater. Shojo manga (girls' comics) has been seminal to the genre as a whole and especially formative for Japanese girls' culture throughout the postwar era. In Straight from the Heart, Jennifer Prough examines the shojo manga industry as a site of cultural storytelling, illuminating the ways that issues of mass media, gender, production, and consumption are involved in the process of creating shojo manga.

With their glittery pastel covers and focus...

Jack Kirby (1917-1994) is one of the most influential and popular artists in comics history. With Stan Lee, he created the Fantastic Four and defined the drawing and narrative style of Marvel Comics from the 1960s to the present day. Kirby is credited with creating or cocreating a number of Marvel's mainstay properties, among them the X-Men, the Hulk, Thor, and the Silver Surfer. His earlier work with Joe Simon led to the creation of Captain America, the popular kid gang and romance comic genres, and one of the most successful comics studios of the 1940s and 1950s. Kirby's distinctive...

The advent of the Atomic Age challenged purveyors of popular culture to explain to the general public the complex scientific and social issues of atomic power. "Atomic Comics" examines how comic books, comic strips, and other cartoon media represented the Atomic Age from the early 1920s to the present. Through the exploits of superhero figures such as Atomic Man and Spiderman, as well as an array of nuclear adversaries and atomic-themed adventures, the public acquired a new scientific vocabulary and discovered the major controversies surrounding nuclear science. Ferenc Morton Szasz s...

Best known for her long-running comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, illustrated fiction (Cruddy, The Good Times Are Killing Me), and graphic novels (One Hundred Demons ), the art of Lynda Barry (b. 1956) has branched out to incorporate plays, paintings, radio commentary, and lectures. With a combination of simple, raw drawings and mature, eloquent text, Barry's oeuvre blurs the boundaries between fiction and memoir, comics and literary fiction, and fantasy and reality. Her recent volumes What It Is (2008) and Picture This (2010) fuse autobiography,...

This essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative - realized in various different formats, including comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels - as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture. The contributions assembled in this volume 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...

George Benjamin Luks (1867-1933) is renowned for the oil paintings, watercolors, and pastel drawings he created as an acclaimed member of the artists' collective known as the Ashcan School. His professional development came, however, from his apprenticeship as a newspaper and magazine artist. Luks spent his early career drawing cartoons, spot illustrations, political caricatures, and comic strips for the New York World and other papers. These early portraits and stories of street urchins, peddlers, shopkeepers, and other ordinary New Yorkers would all be revisited in his later...