Comics Studies

From Savage to Sensational, from lawyer to hulking beast, from advocate to Avenger and from independent woman to hyper-sexualised feminista – She-Hulk provides a case study in what occurs when ‘great power’ meets the ‘great responsibility’ of the legal professional. This article seeks to fill a gap in the fledgling field of Law and Comics via an analysis of She-Hulk, revealing a character defined by binaries, constructed through real world and imagined patriarchal forces, whose superpowers do not make her immune from the struggles faced by the female voice within the legal system. Yet She-Hulk offers a solution to this exclusion – the realm of the abject, the monstrous, splintering the law to protect her client’s interests. She-Hulk reveals that superhero powers are needed to overcome the challenges of feminist lawyering.

Comics are complex documents whose reception engages cognitive processes such as scene perception, language processing, and narrative understanding. Possibly because of their complexity , they have rarely been studied in cognitive science. Modeling the stimulus ideally requires a formal description, which can be provided by feature descriptors from computer vision and computational linguistics. With a focus on document analysis, here we review work on the computational modeling of comics. We argue that the development of modern feature descriptors based on deep learning techniques has made sufficient progress to allow the investigation of complex material such as comics for reception studies, including experimentation and computational modeling of cognitive processes.

Historically, comics have been viewed as a "debased or simplified word-based literacy," explains Dale Jacobs, who considers comics to be complex, multimodal texts. Examining Ted Naifeh's Polly and the Pirates, Jacobs shows how comics can engage students in multiple literacies, furthering meaning-making practices in the classroom and beyond. We are better able to "hear" the narrator's voice because we can see what words are emphasized by the bold lettering, and we associate particular kinds of voices with the narrative voice of a pirate's tale, especially emphasized here by the shape of the text boxes.

Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable developed society. Being the most developed non-western country, Japan offers an instructive window onto concerns about gender worldwide. Although overall gender equality is advancing in Japan, difficulties remain, especially in achieving equality in the workplace. We draw on theories of ontological commitment and the psychology of fiction to critically analyse the role of popular culture — in this case manga — in the reproduction of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace. We present examples of four of the most popular mainstream manga aimed at working men and women in Japan and show how women are depicted. We argue that the hyper-mediated fictional realism of representative tropes generates an ontological commitment to characters and narratives among consumers that reinforces the reproduction of a culturally exceptionalist national political economic space, one of whose essential defining characteristics is a gendered workplace. Our research suggests important implications for researching the relationship between culture, in all its forms, and spatial variation in persistent institutional biases among varieties of capitalism.

Among the growing number of works of graphic fiction, a number of titles dealing directly with the patient experience of illness or caring for others with an illness are to be found. Thanks in part to the Medical Humanities movement, many medical schools now encourage the reading of classic literature to gain insight into the human condition. Until recently, the medium of comics (the term is used in the plural to refer to both the physical objects and the attendant philosophy and practice surrounding them) has received little attention from healthcare scholars, even though some authors argue that graphic fiction is, in fact, a form of literature. This paper suggests that it is time that the medium was examined by healthcare professionals and studies some acclaimed comic works. Drawing on the principles of narrative medicine, this paper will ask whether comics and graphic novels could be used as a resource for health professionals, patients and carers.

Visual narratives, such as comics and animations, are becoming increasingly popular as a tool for science education and communication. Combining the benefits of visualization with powerful metaphors and character-driven narratives, comics have the potential to make scientific subjects more accessible and engaging for a wider audience. While many authors have experimented with this medium, empirical research on the effects of visual narratives in science communication remains scarce. This review summarizes the available evidence across disciplines, highlighting the cognitive mechanisms that may underlie the effects of visual narratives. Abstract Public engagement with science and

This article explores how a minor medium such as comics-specifically, Alberto Breccia's version of Edgar Allan Poe's ''William Wilson''-used its countercensorial potential to activate memory in a context stifled by harsh repression. Through the development of several reading hypotheses, the author demonstrates how Breccia's drawings allow for a decoding that runs counter to the signification imposed by the Argentina junta of 1976-83. By recontextualizing the transfer to comics and by detaching the images from Poe's source text, the analysis diverges from traditional adaptation studies, which privilege words (the ''original'') over images (the adaptation itself ). Instead, the analysis foregrounds the specificity of the Latin American cultural framework as one of camouflage, in which encryption and decoding are central and potentially empowering. This utopian thrust is located in the comic's appeal to memory, which runs directly counter to a censorial logic intent on erasing and forgetting.

In this paper, I investigate the Swedish, non-native use of English swear words in Swedish-language comic strips. I first consider the established relationships between both swearing and humor, and comics and humor. I propose that swear word usage and the comic strip framework contribute to a mutual feedback loop, whereby the comic strip derives its humor from the use of English swear words, while at the same time the comic strip context, by invoking a play frame, primes the swear word usage for humorous interpretation. Modeling Siegel (1995), I then consider how a code-switch to English serves as a framing device or contextualization cue for humor in Swedish-language contexts. The analysis of a selection of Swedish comic strips draws from the Encryption Theory of[ 1 1 _ T D $ D I F F ] Humor (Flamson and Barrett, 2008), and suggests that humor[ 1 2 _ T D $ D I F F ] created via the Swedish practice of swearing in English is a function of shared background knowledge[ 1 3 _ T D $ D I F F ] that capitalizes on the fundamental incongruity of two discourse systems operating under different norms of appropriateness.

Comic books, eagerly consumed by Australian readers and reviled with equal intensity by their detractors, became embroiled in post-war era debates about youth culture, censorship and Australian national identity. Yet there are few references to this remarkable publishing phenomenon in most histories of Australian print media, or in studies of Australian popular culture. This article demonstrates how the history of comic books in Australia has largely been recorded by fans and collectors who have undertaken the process of discovery, documentation and research – a task that, in any other field of print culture inquiry, would have been the preserve of academics. While acknowledging some of the problematic aspects of fan literature, the article argues that future research into the evolution of the comic-book medium within Australia must recognise, and engage with, this largely untapped body of ‘fan scholarship’ if we are to enrich our understanding of this neglected Australian media industry.

Reading Arkham Asylum jurisprudentially, we encounter a story of the meeting of reason and unreason in the context of justice – of conscious law and its unconscious threat. Batman's exploration of the Asylum is symbolic of the legal unconscious, and reflects the processes of repression that can be seen in dominant legal knowledge. A threat to this dominant knowledge can be seen in Two-Face's reliance on his coin to ‘judge’ his victims. Moreover, Arkham Asylum configures the threat of law's unconscious as the lawyer's severed head inside the house of law. Ultimately, Batman's journey through Arkham Asylum reminds law of the aesthetic and irrational contexts that it strives to deny and from which it seeks to defend itself – and that cultural legal studies explores. It recalls the unreason outside law's logic, the chaos outside its order, the madness outside its sanity. The lesson of Batman's encounters in the Asylum is that we should remember the ‘madness’ outside the legal order, and thus recognise that law is always already more than its conscious ‘sanity’ can contain.

This article compares arachnid-based Marvel and DC comics characters. The composition of a comic book character often has interesting ‘real-life’ influences. Given the strong connection between arachnids (especially spiders, scorpions and mites, all belonging to the zoological class Arachnida) and human beings it is not surprising that they have inspired many fictional characters.
We recorded 84 Marvel Comics characters and 40 DC Comics characters, detailed in the dataset that accompanies the article (Da-Silva 2014). Most characters have been created recently, since the 1990s. Marvel has significantly more arachnid characters than DC. As for taxonomic classification, the characters were based mostly on spiders (zoological order Araneae). Of the total characters, the majority are human beings, but an overwhelming number have at least some typical arachnid features. Villains (60.91% of total) are significantly more numerous, considering the sum of the two publishers. Arachnids have bad reputation for being dangerous (Thorp and Woodson 1976; Ruppert and Barnes 1996). Since the public usually considers spiders, scorpions and mites “harmful” in general, we expected a larger contingent of villains. However, there was no statistical difference between the amount of villains and heroes in Marvel characters. It did not happen probably due to the success of one character: the Amazing Spider-Man.

This article argues that comics production in India should be
configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s
segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the
representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces.
Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s
founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti
Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in
cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban
social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the
proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal
Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their
collaborative production processes and socialized consumption
practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements
draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic
Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that
resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric.

In Understanding Comics (1993), Scott McCloud depicts the medium of comics as a ‘vessel’ able to contain all kinds of content. However, this visual metaphor falls short of grasping the complex relations that constitute the mediality of a medium. Drawing on accounts that describe media as ensembles of heterogeneous elements, including aesthetic artefacts as well as the sociocultural practices of production and reception (e.g. Elleström 2010, Jensen 2008, Schmidt 2008), this paper proposes to understand the mediality of comics as an actor-network: Consisting of ‘associations between entities’ that make others act, such a network is largely shaped by transformations or ‘translations’ (Latour 2005). To demonstrate how these translations generate new associations – and, with them, the mediality of contemporary comics – two examples will be employed: In Brian Fies’ "Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?" (2009), elements characteristic for the materiality of US-American comic books of the 1930s to 1970s are transformed into parts of a recent graphic novel. In Dylan Horrocks’ "Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen" (2014), comics as printed objects, their creators, and the different genres and styles of graphic storytelling are depicted as significantly affecting each other. Both Fies and Horrocks have published their work in the printed form as well as online, thus demonstrating how the mediality of comics persists, and changes, by associating with new technologies.

Art Spiegelman is one of the most-discussed creators in Comic Book Studies. His Pulitzer-winning work Maus (1980 and 1991) was, alongside The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987), the catalyst to a sea change in the commercial and critical fortunes of the alternative comic book during the mid-1980s. It has been a landmark text in critical discourses on comics ever since. The purpose of this and its companion paper is to offer a synthesis and reinvestigation of both the existing critical literature on Spiegelman as well as, perhaps most importantly, the lacunae within that literature. The aims of these two papers, then, are twofold: firstly, to establish where we have got to and, secondly, to suggest some directions for the future of Spiegelman scholarship. This, the first of the two papers, will be devoted to the richest vein of Spiegelman scholarship, on Maus. Art Spiegelman is one of the most-discussed creators in Comic Book Studies. The Bonner Online-Bibliographie Zur Comicforschung lists almost 350 articles on Spiegelman which means that, within the field of Comics Studies, in terms of sheer quantity of critical interest, he is exceeded only by Alan Moore. His Pulitzer-winning work Maus (1980 and 1991) features regularly in book clubs, high school literature syllabi, as well as under-and postgraduate courses on both comics and Holocaust literature. This is hardly surprising; Maus was, alongside The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987), the catalyst to a sea change in the commercial and critical fortunes of the alternative comic book during the mid-1980s. It has been a landmark text in critical discourse on comics ever since. The purpose of this and its companion paper is to offer a synthesis and reinvestigation of both the existing critical literature on Spiegelman as well as, perhaps most importantly, the lacunae within that literature. The aims of these two papers, then, are twofold: firstly, to establish where we have got to and, secondly, to suggest some directions for the future of Spiegelman scholarship. This, the first of the two papers, will be devoted to the richest vein of Spiegelman scholarship, on Maus. Maus dramatises a series of interviews which Spiegelman conducted with his father, Vladek Spiegelman, an Auschwitz survivor. Both the interview process and the story which Vladek Spiegelman's in-text incarnation tells are depicted. Famously, Spiegelman chose to use an animal allegory to tell the story, with Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Americans as dogs. Bella Brodzki's essay 'Breakdowns and Breakthroughs: Looking for Art in Young Spiegelman's Graphic Subjects' on the volume Breakdowns effectively sums up much of the criticism on Spiegelman (and, indeed, much of the formative stage of modern comics scholarship) in four words (including one contraction): 'it's all about Maus' (Brodzki 2011, 51). The overwhelming majority of critical work on Spiegelman has centred upon Maus, often to the point where other works have been read as lengthy appendices to his masterpiece. The earliest examples of Spiegelman (and, specifically, Maus) criticism came from scholars working in disparate fields that included oral testimony (such as Joshua Brown's paper Of Mice

Though we are all inevitably familiar with the everyday effects of forgetting, we generally fail to ask about what its internal movements look like, or how we can talk about what they reveal. Despite its necessity as a structuring process of autobiographical inquiry, forgetting’s invisible moves are always obscured by that which remains: the typically unquestioned and seemingly permanent products of remembrance. In this article, I think about how we may conceptualize the status of forgetting in the context of teacher education, and how we may encourage preservice teachers to acknowledge the enigmatic and incomplete status of their autobiographical texts. I begin by looking to theories of autobiography, memory and forgetting (with a particular emphasis on teacher education), and I then look closely at a number of psychoanalytic considerations of the mind and its inner workings, which help to conceptualize forgetting and remembering as in a psychically productive, dialectical relationship. I then turn my attention to 2 multimodal, textual examples, which emphasize the problems of representation in relation to remembering and narrative: a collage from Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, and an autobiographical comic authored by an undergraduate student in teacher education. In the final section of this article, I argue that thinking about forgetting in relation to autobiographical remembrance can lead to an ethical stance of mutual opacity and shared ignorance in teacher education.

The Phantom, an American comic about a superhero of British heritage set in a fictional African country, is held in high esteem elsewhere, regarded as a national institution in Australia, New Zealand and much of Scandinavia. Since the early 1960s, officially licensed scripts have been produced by the Swedish-based scriptwriters of ‘Team Fantomen’ who today remain the major suppliers of adventures to the Phantom comics around the world. This essay suggests that this shift in the scripts’ geographical origin also altered the politics of the comic: in the hands of Team Fantomen, the masked hero is instilled with political doctrines reflected in Swedish foreign policy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This ideological shift means that the masked hero moves away from the role of colonialist fantasy prevalent in the American scripts to become a supporter of decolonisation, social justice and equality. The Phantom becomes an avatar of democratic socialist ideology, the episodes offering a direct commentary on Sweden’s perception of its own role in the world as a leading proponent of international solidarity.

Purpose -Up to now, no extensive work has addressed the capacity and resiliency of pre-school children, nor the importance of extending disaster preparedness education to them. The purpose of this paper is to show that given the right learning tools to engage them, in this case a comic strip designed for this purpose by the first author, pre-school children are able to demonstrate the extent of their learning well. Design/methodology/approach -Comic strips have been used in a number of ways to enhance knowledge and education, including for disaster risk reduction (DRR). Their use as learning stimuli is outlined, showing their historical context as well as their potential for future use. The methodology used included classroom observations, coupled with interviews with some of the class. Findings -The research showed that pre-school children engaged with and responded to the comic strips in a positive manner while the blank comic strips allowed learners to make sense of the topic through the retelling of the story, allowing them to be placed within a schema of understanding deemed essential for deeper level learning. Originality/value -The research is significant because it shows that, even at a young age, complex cognitive process were engaged in order for learners to take their new knowledge, place it within the context of their own experience and re-tell it to others. This pattern of reflection, reasoning and testing is important for triple-loop learning, which may hold the key to truly resilient individuals and communities.

This study focuses on the iconographic channel of the graphic novel as a particular occurrence of silence. In Comics, images provide not only the data required for the development of narration; they also render available the concrete circumstances of the enunciation and often orient the reader towards the identification of language in action, or towards the selection of a particular communicative intention, a process which coincides with Saville-Troike's silences carrying illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect (1985), or with Kurzon's silences – intentional signifiers alternating with an utterable signified. Through the analysis of concrete scenes taken from three graphic novels dealing with sociopolitical contexts of conflict – Satrapi's Persepolis (2000), Folman and Polonsky's Waltz with Bashir (2009) and Sacco's Palestine (2007) – we identify two different sets of arguments: (1) semi-silent arguments resulting from the interplay between verbal and visua...

In 1933, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish teenagers from Ohio, fashioned an ideal personality called Superman and a narrative of his marvelous deeds. Little did they suspect that several years after conceptualizing the figure and their many vain attempts to sell the story to various comic book publishers, their creation would give rise to the iconic genre of comic book superheroes. There is no doubt that the Superman character and the accompanying narrative led to Siegel and Shuster, the writer and artist, respectively, becoming famous. However, was it only the appealing character and compelling narrative that accounted for the story's enormous popularity, which turned its creators into such a celebrated pair, or did the visual design play a major part in that phenomenal success? Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in the comic book medium in several disciplines, including history, philosophy, and literature. However, little has been written about its visual aspect, and comic book art has not yet been accorded much recognition among art historians. Since the integration of storyline and art is what allow the comic book medium to be unique and interesting, I contend that there should be a focus on the art as well as on the narrative of works in comic books. In the present study, I explore the significance of the visual image in the prototype of the Superman figure that Siegel and Schuster sold to DC Comics and its first appearance in the series American Comic Books. I argue that although the popularity of Superman's first appearance was due to the conceptual ideals that the character embodied, the visual design of the ideal man was also an essential factor in its success. Accordingly, through a discussion of the first published Superman storyline, I emphasize the artistic-visual value of the figure of this protagonist in particular and the comic book medium in general.

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter- geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities.

This essay explores the transmission of imagined Indian qualities via the comic book hero. While 1950s comics featured white men playing Indian, this racial performance resonates most richly in depictions of Captain America as Indian. Neil Gaiman’s 1602 (2003-04) and Tony Bedard’s one-shot story, What If? Featuring Captain America (2006) both depict the Marvel hero as playing Indian.

In this paper, I pose the question of how a traumatic past may be represented through a strategy of intergenerational, interpsychic displacement. I present the case of one reader who uses poetry and art to respond to a difficult text: Lynda Barry’s The Freddie Stories. In my examination of this reader’s encounter with difficult knowledge, I turn to Bion’s concept of the caesura as a means of investigating between affect and representation, memory and its screen, self and other, past and present, revelation and concealment.

Equipping future social workers to interrogate social justice, human rights, and cultural issues requires a revision of social work education. Culturally relevant teaching is increasingly important in today’s globalized world. In this article, we explore the role of comics as a form of social work pedagogy to tackle complex social issues. The article argues that comics offer specific benefits to educators seeking to develop critical thinking and self-reflexivity in their students. We present findings from focus group discussions with social work students to examine the relevance of comics in social work education. Ultimately, the use of comics as a teaching tool contributes to the effective preparation of future social workers through the mutual transformation it engenders in students and educators.

This article presents a discussion about some of the main theoretical approaches of the assemblage of panels on the page and the double page, arguing that the correspondences between the images on the page are not fundamentally linear. On the contrary, comics foster readings that can be holistic, multidirectional and multilinear. Moreover, the correspondences between images through the pages of the whole book are also relevant. The book form, often disregarded by the critics, actually plays a very important role in the way comics are read and favour a reading that is translinear. Finally, some works are even breaking with the codex as a format, suggesting new ways of reading and engaging with the comics form. In order to illustrate how all these reading protocols work, this article offers a selection of examples of graphic narratives from different periods, from Winsor McCay to Richard McGuire.

ABSTRACT Although Dominion soldiers’ Great War field publications are relatively well known,
the way troops created cartoon multi-panel formats in some of them has been neglected as a
record of satirical social observation. Visual narrative humour provides a ‘bottom-up’ perspective
for journalistic observations that in many cases capture the spirit of the army in terms of stoicism,
buoyed by a culture of internal complaints. Troop concerns expressed in the early comic
strips of Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and British were similar. They shared a collective
editorial purpose of morale boosting among the ranks through the use of everyday narratives
that elevated the anti-heroism of the citizen soldier, portrayed as a transnational everyman in the
service of empire. The regenerative value of disparagement humour provided a redefinition of
courage as the very act of endurance on the Western Front.

George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat has been discussed in mythic terms for more than half a century. This article argues that much of this ‘mythology’ has not been founded on the material itself, but rather on memories and recollections of readers and critics. Using Walter Benjamin’s notions of cult value and exhibition value, this article investigates the historical circumstances that shaped the most prominent of these recollections to show how writers like Gilbert Seldes and E. E. Cummings shaped the myth of Krazy Kat to create an ‘aura’ of genius around a work that was largely inaccessible to most readers.

Art Spiegelman is one of the most-discussed creators in Comic Book Studies. His Pulitzer-winning work Maus (1980 and 1991) was, alongside The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987), the catalyst to a sea change in the commercial and critical fortunes of the alternative comic book during the mid-1980s. It has been a landmark text in critical discourse on comics ever since. The purpose of this and its companion paper is to offer a synthesis and reinvestigation of both the existing critical literature on Spiegelman as well as, perhaps most importantly, the lacunae within that literature. The aims of these two papers, then, are twofold: firstly, to establish where we have got to and, secondly, to suggest some directions for the future of Spiegelman scholarship. The first paper concerned Maus. This, the second of the two, is devoted to In The Shadow of No Towers (2004), Breakdowns (1977 and 2008), and Spiegelman's other works. Spiegelman's Maus is, inarguably, one of the most important comics in the history of the medium and has accordingly, as we saw in Part 1 of this survey, attracted a great deal of critical attention. His subsequent works In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) and the reissue of his first collection Breakdowns (originally 1977, reissued in 2008) have generated considerable further interest. Breakdowns is Spiegelman's first collection of comics. It was made up of pieces created during the early-and mid-1970s and circulated in various underground comics including Funny Aminals (1972) and Short Order Comix (1973-1974). The first version of Breakdowns was collected in 1977. It was reissued in 2008 with the addition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, an introductory comic almost as long as the rest of the volume and which was, in part, autobiography. The comics of Breakdowns are characteristic of the underground genre of the 1960s and 1970s in that they are highly experimental, darkly humorous, anti-authoritarian, make heavy use of quotation and were circulated in small independent comics magazines. Within Breakdowns, Spiegelman shows a high degree of formal play with the comic book medium in terms of panel transitions, pacing and word-image combinations. In the Shadow of No Towers was written in the aftermath of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks which Spiegelman witnessed at first-hand. They were originally created to be circulated episodically in the press, but in the political climate after the attacks, Spiegelman struggled to find a newspaper willing to carry the series in the United States and turned, instead, to European newspapers. In 2003, the American press began to publish images from the series. A hardback version, containing all 10 plates, an introductory essay and a series of early 20th century comics which Spiegelman selected for their charm and uncannily resonant foreshadowing of the attacks, was published in 2004. In the Shadow of No Towers contains multiple narrative sequences and artistic styles often within the same page. It is a chaotic and challenging reading experience, more similar to the experimental work found in Breakdowns than Maus. It also contains examples of biting political satire in the form of editorial cartoons, and numerous allusions to other comics. Many of those who knew Spiegelman entirely through Maus responded less than

This article explores Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ recycling of film noir images and tropes in The Fade Out, a twelve-issue comic book series that borrows heavily from photographic and cinematic materials (including publicity stills and actors’ head shots) to craft a ‘remediated’ vision of old Hollywood that is simultaneously deceptive and truthful about the harsh realities of working in an industry popularly known as the ‘Dream Factory’. The nightmares that haunt the narrative’s protagonist, Charlie Parish, tied to his military past as well as to his relationship to a dead starlet named Valeria Sommers, are referred to by the narrator as ‘half-remembered images’, a fitting description of the way in which Phillips’ own drawings – his nearly ‘perfect’ reproductions of earlier photos and movie scenes – are actually incomplete without the kind of historical contextualization that this series demands. By juxtaposing panels from the comic book with those original images, the author reveals how, beneath the nostalgic surface of The Fade Out, a deeper message about cultural memory and historical archiving is being articulated. Mixing real-world figures (e.g. screen icons such as Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Clark Gable) and fictional characters who nevertheless call to mind actual people from Hollywood’s past, this comic book series invites us to speculate on the demands of the star system as well as on the possibility that our own fading memory might make such distinctions (e.g. between ‘real’ and ‘fake’) less clear in the years to come.

The X-Men's Rogue's ability to absorb the powers and personality of others through " flesh-to-flesh contact " presents an affective figure for the queer potential of the X-Men's metaphor of mutancy as difference. Close readings of Rogue's first appearance, Avengers Annual #10, and the end of her first major character arc, Uncanny X-Men #185, reveal that this affective figure for queerness is variable and derived from X-Men writer Chris Claremont's ongoing engagement with feminist politics and theory.

In this paper, I study the narrative structure of comics as a means to describe the ways that indeterminate modes of representation can allow the reader to imagine that which in childhood can never be fully expressed. Analyzing a number of panels from Gilbert Hernandez's graphic novel, Marble Season, I describe a conceptual link between the psychoanalytic idea of sublimation (referencing the theories of Freud, Loewald, and Winnicott), and Raymond Williams’ notion of a “structure of feeling.” In particular, I examine the latency stage of childhood as a time where the challenges of individual development involve a struggle to channel into the social world, in potentially productive ways, the internalizations of lost love. I also explore how the gutter, the space between the panels in comics, may function as a zone of sublimatory reconciliation between the self and the object world, and where, in their interactions with the space in the middle, the reader invariably engages with the structure of childhood feeling as a product of their own reading.

In her book Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Kamilla Elliott writes that "the figurative positioning of one art as another or inside another gestures to the process by which one art raises the cognitive effects of another" (215). By extension, films attempting to not only adapt but to filmically remediate a text previously conceived and executed in another medium rely on the use of figures and figuration to bridge the gap between the specificities of the original text's medium and that of film. Such issues of figuration and transtextuality are precisely those that most impact comic books-to-film adaptations in the present moment. Increasingly, filmmakers that choose to adapt comic books and graphic novels to the screen are trying not to evoke something in their films that is particular to the cinema, but rather something that is particular to comic books.

This essay reads the museum-in-a-book-format of publications such as The Marvel Vault: A Museum-in-a-Book with Rare Collectibles from the World of Marvel and The Batman Vault: A Museum-in-a-Book Featuring Rare Collectibles from the Batcave as part of a historiographic turn in superhero comics and as one prominent answer to the challenges of digital culture. Drawing on historian Andreas Huyssen’s theories of
musealisation, the essay suggests that these museum-books simulate the tactile pleasures and potentially auratic qualities of earlier forms of comic book production and reception in an attempt to thwart the looming demise of the printed superhero comic book as a popular medium.

In "Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels" (2006), Scott McCloud proposes that the use of specific drawing techniques will enable viewers to reliably deduce different degrees of intensity of the six basic emotions from facial expressions in comics. Furthermore, he suggests that an accomplished comics artist can combine the components of facial expressions conveying the basic emotions to produce complex expressions, many of which are supposedly distinct and recognizable enough to be named. This paper presents an empirical investigation and assessment of the validity of these claims, based on the results obtained from three questionnaires. Each of the questionnaires deals with one of the aspects of McCloud’s proposal: face expression intensity, labelling, and compositionality. The data show that the tasks at hand were much more difficult than would have been expected on the basis of McCloud’s proposal, with the intensity matching task being the most successful of the three.

The cumulative effect of the (post)colonial predicament is to see cultural productions in the global South such as films, comics and artworks, as imitative, transformations or, at worst, travesties of originals in the West, thus denying agency to those who develop them. Eurocentric legacies impel the development of discursive approaches that can enable an appreciation of postcolonial cultural productions without seeing them as shadows of a master print. In this article, I propose that theories of mimesis need to be shifted away from planar mirrors of reflection and adaptation to coeval vectors of parabolic intersections where the ontological status of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ is put under question. With this approach, I consider the emergence of superhero comics in the context of a post-liberal and nuclearized India with a particular focus on fictions of science, superheroism, the state and gendered universes with respect to the comic book series on the atomic superhero Parmanu.


International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol 15, Issue 4, 2012, pp. 329–347.
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ics

Commentators largely agree that the character Superman is rooted in his creators’ Judaism. The present article supplements such research by historicizing Superman’s Jewishness vis-à-vis the populist politics of the left from which he emerged, namely the social movement known as the Popular Front (1934-39) – a leftist political coalition marked by significant Jewish involvement. Examining the first year of Superman comic books (Action Comics #1-12; June 1938-May 1939), this article will suggest that the creators of Superman may have deployed the Kryptonian hero to delineate the “proper” relationship between ethnic and religious Jewish identity in the context of the Popular Front. It will be suggested that the authenticity politics in these Superman stories subordinate ethnic identity to leftist populism under the aegis of a loosely Marxist conception of “history.”

Recent literature suggests that a growing number of comics are being published on health-related topics, including aspects of mental health and social care (Williams 2012; Czerwiec et al 2015) and that comics are increasingly being used in higher education settings as information resources. This article offers insights from comics creators and disseminators and explores the wider context of comics production and distribution (with a focus on 'Graphic Medicine' or health-related comics) as part of a larger study examination of the interface between these documents and potential academic audiences. Original data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with 15 participants actively involved in comics creation and production. Elements of domain analysis (Hjørland 2002) were used to obtain insights into attitudes to the creation, dissemination and use of mental health-related comics. Though potentially useful comics material is being produced in the mental health domain, significant challenges remain for producers in enabling their work to be accessed within higher education settings. This paper suggests that comics producers need to make a concerted effort to reach academia, and academia – including information professionals – need to embrace new types of material to enhance teaching.

Since its inception in 2006, Islam’s most popular comic strip, The 99, and its creator, Naif al-Mutawa, have both been the subject of much media scrutiny. Despite eschewing references to the most significant texts, figures, and symbols of Islam—readers of the comic find no mention of the Qur’an or the Prophet—neither its fiercest critics nor its most fervent supporters doubt the essentially Islamic nature of The 99. Drawing on the responses of students at the American University in Dubai (AUD), this paper explores how and why, within this modern Gulf setting, The 99 resonates as a profoundly Islamic publication.
Attention is paid, first, to The 99’s origin saga, through which Muslim history is smoothed over, then re-spun in ways familiar to our students; and, second, to a number of special editions of The 99, through which al-Mutawa offers a new understanding of Islam’s
role—with remarkable implications for political leadership—in contemporary society, both Muslim and non-Muslim.

From the very beginning of his adventures in the DC universe, the Joker has been associated with science, particularly (bio)chemistry and microbiology. Exploring some recently published narrative examples of Joker science together with the insight provided by virology and chemistry, this paper examines the scientific and cultural ideas of science conveyed by the violent clown and his scientific extravaganzas. Psychopathic, mannerist Joker science, this paper shows, is intrinsically linked to the realms of hypnotism, hysteria, ecstasy and the 'hysterical realities' of different historical, physical, medial and cultural settings. Joker science is not only about how chemistry and virology might affect the human body but it also explores notions of possession and control-contemporary notions of what was once investigated as 'criminal suggestion' or 'hypnotic crimes' on science stages and in early film. Joker science 'jokerises': it leads to loss of motor control, muscular contortions, cramps, fatal convulsions and frenetic, deadly laughter, reminiscent of the 'strange spectacle' of hysterics and the 'science performances' and 'hystericulture' developed by the showman and researcher Charcot and his many fictional revenants, all characterised by a peculiar position between science, entertainment and the occult.
***co-authored with virology Prof David Tscharke and chemistry Prof Jochen Brocks***

This article advances a three-fold argument in an equal number of sections. The first and most concise part presents a critical introduction to Alain Badiou’s philosophy of art for a scholarly field, that of comics studies, that has rarely engaged with his thought to this date. This is followed, at somewhat greater length, by a re-thinking of the ontological and formal specificity of comics. I contend that comics are constituted by a visual ontology of subtraction, both with regard to the single panel and a compositional space characterized by a constitutive de-stabilization of time and meaning. The final section fleshes out these theoretical propositions to argue against the reduction of Joe Sacco’s graphic journalism to an ethics of witnessing and understand his comics as a form of what Badiou has recently termed “militant art”, the artistic formalization of a political novelty.

The graphic narrative 99 Days couples the American detective noir genre with a backstory that deals with the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This article explores two strategies of representation used in this comic: the blurring of genres and the use of an animal metaphor. The comic uses visual and verbal transition points, a fusion of iconographies, and thematic links between the genocide in Rwanda and the violent conflicts in Los Angeles to connect these two disparate geographical locations and genres. In doing so, there is a constant appropriation of the Rwandan genocide into an American context. Furthermore, the comic uses the animal metaphor of the hyena to deal with moral questions around genocide survival. These strategies might seem to distance the Rwandan genocide, but this article argues that it is exactly through the inclusion of the detective format and the animal figure that the audience can productively engage with the genocide narrative.

This paper details the visual responses created by a group of preservice
teachers reading a series of contemporary graphic novels about adolescence. Visual response is here understood as an interpretive methodology of transmediation, informed by theorists of multimodal literacies as well as particular forms of psychoanalytic inquiry related to creative symbolization. Over the course of 5 months, six readers collaboratively interpreted four novels, each of which took a unique glance at the emotional and developmental challenges of adolescence: Tamaki and Tamaki’s “This One Summer,” Barry’s “My Perfect Life,” DeForge’s “Big Kids,” and Yang’s “American Born Chinese.” Responding in visual form, readers were able to reacquaint themselves with the emotional value of adolescence, a value that is often unavailable to strictly linguistic modes of expression.

In this paper, I discuss the nostalgic encounters that a group of
preservice teachers experienced while reading two graphic novels
about adolescent life: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One
Summer and Lynda Barry’s My Perfect Life. Using the conceptual
touchstones of psychoanalytic theory, I pay close attention to the
psychic uses (those that deal with unconscious processes) these
readers make of nostalgia about adolescence, asking: How do
these readers/preservice teachers use their feelings of nostalgia
to guide their understandings of adolescent experience? In this
exploration, I question how the nostalgic past may help to reveal
the latent anxieties of the present. Nostalgia is theorised as a
complex, undetermined and ambivalent affective category,
where instances of bitter and sweet emotion interact in the various
uses that readers make of their memories and imaginings of
childhood and adolescence.

This article explores the ways in which Josh Neufeld’s documentary comic, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which was published first online from 2007 to 2008 and then collected in book form in 2009, offers a radical visual commentary on the processes of dis- aster capitalism and tourism gentrification that have reshaped New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Whilst A.D.’s biblical ima- gery evokes the proto-corporate language of the ‘blank canvas’ in order to critique regimes of disaster capitalism, its vertical multi- scalar perspectives meanwhile resist the racism of media coverage of the event. Through colouring and other aesthetic choices, the comic also challenges the subsequent propagation of an ‘authentic image’ of New Orleans that promotes tourism gentrification. Where previous critics have emphasised the emotional appeal A.D.’s makes on its readers, I instead discuss the comic’s identification of the structural conditions that have violently impacted the city’s most marginalised inhabitants. Nevertheless, the article qualifies these contentions by acknowledging that A.D. also contributes to an ‘affect economy’ that has exacerbated the privatisation of previously public infrastructure and social services, often to the detriment of pre-Katrina residents simply trying to return to their city.