Latinx Popular Culture and Social Conflict: Comics, Graphic Novels, and Film

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Luis Aldama
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Consumer Market ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Cultural Imaginary

Despite Latinxs being the largest growing demographic in the United States, their experiences and identities continue to be underrepresented and misrepresented in the mainstream pop cultural imaginary. However, for all the negative stereotypes and restrictive ways that the mainstream boxes in Latinxs, Latinx musicians, writers, artists, comic book creators, and performers actively metabolize all cultural phenomena to clear positive spaces of empowerment and to make new perception, thought, and feeling about Latinx identities and experiences. It is important to understand, though, that Latinxs today consume all variety of cultural phenomena. For corporate America, therefore, the Latinx demographic represents a huge buying demographic. Viewed through cynical and skeptical eyes, increased representation of Latinxs in mainstream comic books and film results from this push to capture the Latinx consumer market. Within mainstream comic books and films, Latinx subjects are rarely the protagonists. However, Latinx comic book and film creators are actively creating Latinx protagonists within richly rendered Latinx story worlds. Latinx comic book and film creators work in all the storytelling genres and modes (realism, sci-fi, romance, memoir, biography, among many others) to clear new spaces for the expression of Latinx subjectivities and experiences.

Latinx Pop Cultural Studies Hoy!

2019 ◽  
pp. 381-393
Author(s):  
Frederick Luis Aldama
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Consumer Market ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Cultural Imaginary

Despite Latinxs being the largest growing demographic in the United States, their experiences and identities continue to be underrepresented and misrepresented in the mainstream pop cultural imaginary. However, for all the negative stereotypes and restrictive ways that the mainstream boxes in Latinxs, Latinx musicians, writers, artists, comic book creators, and performers actively metabolize all cultural phenomena to clear positive spaces of empowerment and to make new perception, thought, and feeling about Latinx identities and experiences. In film, one sees Latinx actors in mainstream and Latinx films, playing Latinx-identified characters. It’s important to understand, though, that Latinxs today consume all variety of cultural phenomena. For corporate America, therefore, the Latinx demographic represents a huge buying demographic. Viewed with cynical and skeptical eyes, the increased representation of Latinxs in the entertainment industry is a result of this push to capture the Latinx consumer market. Within this schema, Latinx actors are rarely cast as the protagonists. As such, there is an active metabolizing and critical redeployment of these narratives as well as the fashioning of entirely new cultural phenomena. Latinx filmmakers are working in the realist, motion-photographic mode to push back and clear new spaces for Latinx subjectivities and experiences; they are also innovating in the pop cultural space of music videos. Some Latinx creators use the Internet to convey the richly layered aspects of being Latinx. Meanwhile, relative low production costs in areas such as music and comic books have led to a tremendous outpouring of Latinx pop cultural creation in these areas.

The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
World System ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Visual Narrative ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Book Studies

Comic book studies has developed as a solid academic discipline, becoming an increasingly vibrant and field in the United States and globally. A growing number of dissertations, monographs, and edited books publish every year on the subject, while world comics represent the fastest-growing sector of publishing. The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies examines the history and evolution of the visual narrative genre from a global perspective, bringing together readable, jargon-free essays written by established and emerging scholars from diverse geographic, institutional, gender, and national backgrounds. In particular, the Handbook explores how the term “global comics” has been defined, as well the major movements and trends that drive the field. Each essay will help readers understand comic books as a storytelling form grown within specific communities, and will also show how these forms exist within what can be considered a world system of comics.

Wertham’s Little Goblins

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cremins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Comics Studies ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

After Fawcett’s legal settlement with National in 1953, the original Captain Marvel did not return to comic books until 1973. In the meantime, comic book fans and amateur historians began writing about the character in the 1960s. This chapter traces Captain Marvel’s afterlife in these fanzines, publications that helped to establish the foundation for comics studies in the United States. The chapter also includes an overview of recent developments in the field of memory and nostalgia studies. These recent studies of the history of nostalgia in medicine, psychology, and the arts are essential for an understanding of how childhood memories have shaped comics studies as a discipline.

The Biblical Theme of Covenant and American Popular Culture from Colonial Times to Comic Books

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Terry R. Clark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Christian Nationalism

American civil religion incorporates a nostalgic version of biblical Israel’s covenant with their patron deity, Yahweh, imagining the United States as a new Israel. This new myth reflects early Puritan hope for a new foray into a new wilderness of promise, while also promoting a romantic notion of the providential founding of the United States, national innocence, and national purpose, upholding an ideal of pure democracy and divine favor for establishing it universally. This form of Christian nationalism has a tendency toward a new form of imperialism in the modern era that is heavily supported (at least subconsciously) by a vast array of popular culture products. Yet some pop culture media (including comic books) occasionally call into question the concept of human beings living in a covenant relationship with a divine creator, as well as the validity of America’s status as a divinely chosen and divinely guided nation.

Superhero Genre and Graphic Storytelling in Contemporary Hungarian and Russian Cinema

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-253
Author(s):  
Bence Kránicz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Russian Cinema ◽  
Genre Films

The chapter examines how certain contemporary Eastern European genre films use superhero stories rooted in American comic books, and apply specific techniques and methods of the comic book form. Besides the visual connections between the two media, film and comics, the chapter also addresses intermediality and adaptation through the representation of the superhero, and deals with questions concerning postcolonial and post-socialist interpretations of superhero adaptations outside of the United States. It focusses on the connections and continuity between national mass culture, folklore and contemporary national genre films. The interpretations focus primarily on Shaman Vs. Ikarus (György Pálfi, Hungary, 2002) and Black Lightning (Dmitry Kiselev – Aleksandr Voitinsky, Russia, 2009), but also build on the context of other non-American superhero movies, Russian genre films and Hungarian art films.

scholarly journals Who translates the translation? (Re)traduire les héros marginaux d'Alan Moore

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Alice RAY
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Visual System ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Alan Moore

The retranslation phenomenon is essential to the translation process. It is considered as the logical progression of this process which allows the translated literary work to regenerate in a restless cultural and language space. To a lesser extent, we can observe the same phenomenon in the translation of comics. However, this specific translation requires other competencies and a translating approach somehow different from the ones required to translate fiction literature, especially because of the presence of the visual system of drawings which is strongly bound to its own culture and the endless mutations it goes through. The comic book Watchmen (Les Gardiens, in the first French translation) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is known in the whole world as the comic which had not only remodeled the vision we had of super-heroes, but had also given the comic books another voice. Watchmen was published between 1986 and 1987 in the United States and translated in French from 1987 to 1988. Fifteen years after this first translation by Jean-Patrick Manchette, Panini publishing decided to retranslate this famous comic in 2007. However, if the reviews of the first translation were laudatory, the retranslation did not enjoy a great reception from the readers or from the reviewers. This paper proposes a comparative analysis of both these translations and of their original version as well as an experiment on the readers, comic books readers or not, in order to establish why the first translation was a success and the retranslation a failure. Thus, we could withdraw the elements which allow us to understand the reception of comic translation.

scholarly journals Princess Ru and Papyrus - Stereotypes on ancient Egypt in graphic novels

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 763-792
Author(s):  
Vera Vasiljević
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Book Culture

The decipherment of the hieroglyphic script in 1822 marked a fundamental change in the views on ancient Egypt and due to the scientific research the knowledge on the subject substantially increased ever since. Despite the wide accessibility of the results of Egyptological studies, the image of Egypt in the popular culture often contains older conceptions, and some of them, like the myth of ancient and immense wisdom, are turned into stereotypes used in certain popular media. The paper deals with their presence in graphic novels. The origins of the stereotypes are reviewed and the reasons for their persistence analysed. I argue that the sterotypes on Egypt in graphic novels became early on a codified part of the communication whithin the "comic book culture" (M. Pustz), and therefore indispensable in this medium. As representatives of different genres in the graphic novels, the series on adventures Papyrus by Lucien De Gieter, and the comic books Princess Ru by !or"e Loba#ev and Hatshepsut by Nikola Kokan Mitrović were chosen for the analysis.

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Salvation Army ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sunday Evening

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

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