On the Cover: Image from United States of Banana: A Comic Book, Cobolt, 2017

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Joakim Lindengren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Cover Image

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.

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.

Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cremins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Taking ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Comic Art ◽  
The 1960S

Why was Captain Marvel—a little boy named Billy Batson whose magic word transforms him into the World’s Mightiest Mortal—one of the most popular comic book characters in the United States in the 1940s? To answer this question, this book takes the reader on a journey through the lives of the writers, artists, and readers who devoted themselves to this hero and his adventures. It’s the story of artist C. C. Beck and writer Otto Binder, one of the most innovative and prolific creative teams of the Golden Age of comics in the U. S.; of the comic book fanzines of the 1960s, which celebrated Billy and the rest of the Marvel Family; and of an art form steeped in nostalgia, a term with a long, complex, and often misunderstood history. Taking its cue from C. C. Beck’s theories of comic art, this book is a study of why we read comics, and, more significantly, how we remember these heroes and the America that dreamed them in the first place.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-46
Author(s):  
Marc DiPaolo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
Contemporary Context

Examines case studies of fictional heroes as analogues of real-life working-class figures to encourage greater empathy between members of different classes. Doing so will help scholar, undergraduate, and fan readers understand the very contemporary context of America through the lens of fictional characters who are understandably resonant with a broad swath of the public during this politically divided time. The essays in this anthology contemplate the social anxieties that attend class conflict in the United States and Great Britain, and consider how fictional comic book narratives depict these cultural anxieties.

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.

THE THIRTY YEARS’ CRISIS: ANXIETY AND FEAR IN THE MID-CENTURY UNITED STATES

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 287-298
Author(s):  
DANIEL IMMERWAHR
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
New Venture ◽  
Book Publisher ◽  
Sexual Infidelity ◽  
Anxiety And Fear ◽  
Postwar Culture

In 1952, Bill Gaines, the entrepreneurial comic book publisher, embarked on a new venture. He had already made a name for himself by introducing the “horror” comics (Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Terror) that had rapidly acquired an eager readership. Those titles summoned up repressed aspects of postwar culture, reveling in sadism, sexual infidelity, and grisly torture. But the id knows many pathways, and in 1952 Gaines launched a humor magazine called Mad. The title was a celebration of unreason. As its icon, Mad boasted Alfred E. Neuman, a grinning half-wit who lived by the mantra, “What, me worry?”

Introduction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Bosia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fiftieth Anniversary ◽  
Cover Image ◽  
Marriage Equality ◽  
Sexual Diversity ◽  
Gender Minorities ◽  
Lgbt Politics ◽  
Selection Of

This introduction outlines the types of phenomena and forms of analysis covered in the contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics. Pivoting from the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, it addresses current LGBT politics, from the adoption of marriage equality in Taiwan to innovative restrictive laws in Russia, from retrenchment over the rights of gender minorities in the United States to the moves toward decriminalization in Tunisia. The analysis provokes the reader to think of global sexual diversity politics as complex patterns of change without regard to notions of progress or social evolution in positive terms. In discussing the handbook, the introduction explores issues involved in developing a work with real global reach, including issues of equality and inclusion, the challenges of working on these topics, as well as the selection of a cover image. Finally, the introduction outlines the organization of the handbook in analytical terms.

Fire in the jungle: Genocide and colonization in Russell and Pugh’s The Flintstones

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
Orion Ussner Kidder
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
White Settler ◽  
American States

Mark Russell and Steve Pugh’s The Flintstones comic book (2016–17) addresses US colonialism much more directly than most popular media but focalizes its story through a white, settler American. Thus, it represents an unwillingness and/or inability to think outside of that narrow perspective, i.e. while it is anti-colonial, it is not postcolonial. The book was published through a licensing agreement between Hanna-Barbara and DC Comics in which several Hanna-Barbera cartoons were combined with contrasting genres to create grim and/or mature stories. DC’s The Flintstones, in particular, takes on a collection of social issues, including religion as cynical manipulation, military-industrial propaganda, exploitation of foreign/immigrant labour and media depictions of the environmental crisis. However, it consistently undermines its own messages, often through visual jokes that end up confirming the ideas the book satirizes but also through sincere pronouncements that prevent the satirical critique from reaching a concrete conclusion. The overarching narrative of the series is about the lingering trauma of colonization. It equates the colonization of the land presently held by United States with that country’s war in Vietnam. This equation results from depicting the literal colonization of an Indigenous space and land but using imagery that reflects US media depictions of their war in Vietnam: colonialist soldiers in green fatigues use fire (i.e. napalm) to exterminate racist caricatures of Southeast Asian guerrilla fighters in order to clear a forest and expose the literal bedrock from which the Flinstone’s city will be built. Fred Flintstone, who represents a settler American, states quite directly that he ‘participated in a genocide’ as a soldier in that invasion, thus confirming an anti-colonialist critique. However, the book never takes on the perspective of the colonized peoples, who by then have been wiped out, which is why it stops short of a postcolonialist critique.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document