Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Comics & Graphic Novels

The themes of war and time are intertwined in unique ways in Japanese culture, freighted as that nation is with the multiple legacies of World War II: the country's militarization, its victories and defeats, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the uneasy pacifism imposed by the victors. Delving into topics ranging from the production of wartime propaganda to the multimedia adaptations of romance narrative, contributors to the fourth volume in the Mechademia series address the political, cultural, and technological continuum between war and the everyday time of orderly social productivity...

Focusing on the art and literary form of manga, this volume examines the intercultural exchanges that have shaped manga during the twentieth century and how manga s culturalization is related to its globalization. Through contributions from leading scholars in the fields of comics and Japanese culture, it describes "manga culture" in two ways: as a fundamentally hybrid culture comprised of both subcultures and transcultures, and as an aesthetic culture which has eluded modernist notions of art, originality, and authorship. The latter is demonstrated in a special focus on the best-selling...

Daniel Clowes (b. 1961) emerged from the -alternative comics- boom of the 1980s as one of the most significant cartoonists and most distinctive voices in the development of the graphic novel. His serialized Eightball comics, collected in such books as David Boring, Ice Haven, and Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, helped to set the standards of sophistication and complexity for the medium. The screenplay for Ghost World, which Clowes co-adapted (with Terry Zwigoff) from his graphic novel of the same name, was nominated for an Academy Award.

Since...

In France, Belgium, and other Francophone countries, comic strips---called bande dessinee or -BD- in French---have long been considered a major art form capable of addressing a host of contemporary issues. Among French-speaking intelligentsia, graphic narratives were deemed worthy of canonization and critical study decades before the academy and the press in the United States embraced comics.

The place that BD holds today, however, belies the contentious political route the art form has traveled. In Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic, author Joel E. Vessels examines...

The Jewish Graphic Novel is a lively, interdisciplinary collection of essays that addresses critically acclaimed works in this subgenre of Jewish literary and artistic culture. Featuring insightful discussions of...

Over the last several decades, comic book superheroes have multiplied and, in the process, become more complicated. In this cutting edge anthology an international roster of contributors offer original research and writing on the contemporary comic book superhero, with occasional journeys into the film and television variation. As superheroes and their stories have grown with the audiences that consume them, their formulas, conventions, and narrative worlds have altered to follow suit, injecting new, unpredictable and more challenging characterizations that engage ravenous readers who...

Exploring an overlooked era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s shines a new light on what was a dark decade, but an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults.

Blurring the lines between high art and popular consumption, artists of the Italian comics scene went beyond passively documenting history and began actively shaping it through the creation of fictional worlds where history, cultural data, and pop-realism...

***NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER***
Visually and emotionally rich, "MetaMaus" is as groundbreaking as the masterpiece whose creation it reveals.
In the pages of "MetaMaus," Art Spiegelman re-enters the Pulitzer prize winning "Maus," the modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since it was first published twenty-five years ago.
He probes the questions that "Maus" most often evokes Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics? and gives us a new and essential work about the creative process.
"MetaMaus" includes a bonus DVD-R that...

One of the most distinctive voices in mainstream comics since the 1970s, Howard Chaykin (b. 1950) has earned a reputation as a visionary formal innovator and a compelling storyteller whose comics offer both pulp-adventure thrills and thoughtful engagement with real-world politics and culture. His body of work is defined by the belief that comics can be a vehicle for sophisticated adult entertainment and for narratives that utilize the medium's unique properties to explore serious themes with intelligence and wit.

Beginning with early interviews in fanzines and concluding with a new...