Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Comics & Graphic Novels

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...

What do Superman, Prince Valiant, Cerebus the Aardvark, and Spawn have in common? Their creators Joe Shuster, Harold Foster, Dave Sim, and Todd McFarlane are Canadians. And while many of the cutting-edge talents of contemporary comix and graphic novels are also from Canada artists such as Chester Brown, Seth, Dave Cooper, and Julie Doucet far too few Canadians realize their country had a remarkable involvement with the "funnies" long before.

Invaders from the North profiles past and present comic geniuses, sheds light on unjustly neglected chapters in Canada s pop history,...

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oeuvre and includes (unlike previous French and German editions) all of his eight full-length stories, plus previously unpublished fragments of stories started and abandoned and manuscript segments omitted in the printed versions.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...

When the graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale won a Special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its vivid depiction of the Holocaust and its effects, critics and mainstream audiences recognized that a comic book was capable of exploring complex aesthetic, moral, and cultural themes. Maus's creator Art Spiegelman (b. 1948) became the most famous alternative cartoonist in America.

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...

What Cold War-era superheroes reveal about American society and foreign policy
Physicist Bruce Banner, caught in the nuclear explosion of his experimental gamma bomb, is transformed into the rampaging green monster, the Hulk. High school student Peter Parker, bitten by an irradiated spider, gains its powers and becomes Spiderman. Reed Richards and his friends are caught in a belt of cosmic radiation while orbiting the Earth in a spacecraft and are transformed into the Fantastic Four. While Stan Lee suggests he clung to the hackneyed idea of radioactivity in creating...

The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told -- until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu's remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created--in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish...