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Adventure comics and youth cultures in India
This pioneering book presents a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India with a particular focus on vernacular superheroism. It chronicles popular and youth culture in the subcontinent from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary era dominated by creative audio-video-digital outlets. The authors highlight early precedents in adventures set by the avuncular detective Chacha Chaudhary with his `faster than a computer brain', the forays of the film veteran Amitabh Bachchan's superheroic alter ego called Supremo, the Protectors of Earth and Mankind (P.O.E.M.), along with the exploits of key comic book characters, such as Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu, Doga, Shakti and Chandika. The book considers how pulp literature, western comics, television programmes, technological developments and major space ventures sparked a thirst for extraterrestrial action and how these laid the grounds for vernacular ventures in the Indian superhero comics genre. It contains descriptions, textual and contextual analyses, excerpts of interviews with comic book creators, producers, retailers and distributers, together with the views, dreams and fantasies of young readers of adventure comics. These narratives touch upon special powers, super-intelligence, phenomenal technologies, justice, vengeance, geopolitics, romance, sex and the amazing potentials of masked identities enabled by navigation of the internet. With its lucid style and rich illustrations, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of popular and visual cultures, comics studies, literature, media and cultural studies, social anthropology and sociology, and South Asian studies.
Book
Super Bodies
An examination of the art in superhero comics and how
style influences comic narratives. For many, the idea of
comic book art implies simplistic four-color renderings of stiff
characters slugging it out. In fact, modern superhero comic books
showcase a range of complex artistic styles, with diverse
connotations. Leading comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown assesses six
distinct approaches to superhero illustration-idealism, realism,
cute, retro, grotesque, and noir-examining how each visually
represents the superhero as a symbolic construct freighted with
meaning.
Whereas comic book studies tend to focus on text and narrative,
Super Bodies gives overdue credit to the artwork, which is
not only a principal source of the appeal of comic books but also
central to the values these works embody. Brown argues that
superheroes are to be taken not as representations of people but as
iconic types, and the art conveys this. Even the most realistic
comic illustrations are designed to suggest not persons but
ideas-ideas about bodies and societies. Thus the appearance of
superheroes both directly and indirectly influences the story being
told as well as the opinions readers form concerning justice,
authority, gender, puberty, sexuality, ethnicity, violence, and
other concepts central to political and cultural life.
eBook
Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts
Marvel is one of the hottest media companies in the world right now, and its beloved superheroes are all over film, television and comic books. Yet rather than simply cashing in on the popularity of iconic white male characters like Peter Parker, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, Marvel has consciously diversified its lineup of superheroes, courting controversy in the process. Panthers, Hulks, and Ironhearts offers the first comprehensive study of how Marvel has reimagined what a superhero might look like in the twenty-first century. It examines how they have revitalized older characters like Black Panther and Luke Cage, while creating new ones like Latina superhero Miss America. Furthermore, it considers the mixed fan responses to Marvel's recasting of certain \"legacy heroes,\" including a Pakistani-American Ms. Marvel, a Korean-American Hulk, and a whole rainbow of multiverse Spidermen. If the superhero comic is a quintessentially American creation, then how might the increasing diversification of Marvel's superhero lineup reveal a fundamental shift in our understanding of American identity? This timely study answers those questions and considers what Marvel's comics, TV series, and films might teach us about stereotyping, Orientalism, repatriation, whitewashing, and identification.
eBook
A Language of Scratches and Stitches: The Graphic Novel between Hyperreading and Print
Orban presents graphic narrative as a site of reading that merits attention precisely because of the cultural contestation and rival practices it dramatizes in its embodied, multisensory reading process, though in this case he abandons the different weaving (and unraveling) methods of text and textile for paper and screen. When viewed in a broad cultural-historical context, the increasing prominence of graphic narrative in mainstream and even canonical culture--particularly through the invention and development of the graphic novel genre--pinpoints the intersection of two often-related processes. One is the increasing prevalence of hyperreading and hyperattention, and the other is a move away from stable material forms to increasingly volatile and adaptable digital, virtual forms. While these two processes often go hand in hand, there seems to be a tension between the hyperreading encouraged by the multimodality of graphic narrative (its use of different systems of signification) and its enduring reliance on the printed book.
Journal Article
X-Men ethics
A modern form of narrative, comic books are used to communicate, discuss, and critique issues in business ethics and social issues in management. A description of comic books as a legitimate medium is followed by a discussion of the pedagogical uses of comic books and assessment techniques. The strengths of the pedagogy include crossing cultural barriers, understanding the complexity of individual decision-making and organizational influences, and the universality of dilemmas and values. We provide an initial source for educators on the topics, comic books, plotlines, and other commentary for consideration of use in the classroom from high school to graduate business ethics and social issues in management courses.
Journal Article
Culture and Stigma: Popular Culture and the Case of Comic Books
This paper argues that a better articulated conception of stigma can enhance the analysis of popular culture. Beginning with the work on stigma by Erving Goffman and other scholars, the article contends that the stigma sometimes attached to the production and consumption of popular culture is distinct from the low status associated with certain forms of popular culture. Unlike low status, stigma discredits cultural forms and practitioners often rendering them problematic. This reassessment of stigma is applied and developed further through a study of comic books, showing the various ways stigma can operate in popular culture. The analysis suggests that stigma significantly impeded the evolution of the comic book as an art form, illustrating the potential negative effects of stigma in popular culture.
Journal Article
This Is Our Enemy
During World War II, the U.S. government, through the Writers’ War Board (WWB), co-opted comic books as an essential means of disseminating race-based propaganda to adult Americans, including members of the armed forces. Working with comic creators, the WWB crafted narratives supporting two seemingly incompatible wartime policies: racializing America’s enemies as a justification for total war and simultaneously emphasizing the need for racial tolerance within American society. Initially, anti-German and anti-Japanese narratives depicted those enemies as racially defective but eminently beatable opponents. By late 1944, however, WWB members demanded increasingly vicious comic-book depictions of America’s opponents, portraying them as irredeemably violent. Still, the Board embraced racial and ethnic unity at home as essential to victory, promoting the contributions of Chinese, Jewish, and African Americans.
Journal Article
Introduction: Comics and Modernism
[...]Michael Wood, in an essay on modernism and film, points out that despite the temptation \"to argue that all films are Modernist, that the cinema itself is an accelerated image of modernity,\" the medium has demonstrated a \"yearning to become the twentieth century's version of the nineteenth century's novel\" by consistently embracing realism's narrative coherence (269). [...]while it must be said at the outset that the cluster is hardly comprehensive in its coverage of modernism and comics - it does not extend beyond Anglo-American contexts, and the authors discussed are all white and male - the essays included here nevertheless helpfully sketch out some of the currently underexplored approaches to reading comics and modernism together, and thus offer a starting point for new critical conversations. [...]my own contribution, \"The Integrity of the Work: Alan Moore, Modernism, and the Corporate Author,\" extends the burgeoning body of scholarship on modernism and copyright, led by scholars such as Paul K. Saint-Amour and Robert Spoo, to comics studies.
Journal Article
Hot Pants and Spandex Suits
The superheroes from DC and Marvel comics are some of the most iconic characters in popular culture today. But how do these figures idealize certain gender roles, body types, sexualities, and racial identities at the expense of others? Hot Pants and Spandex Suits offers a far-reaching look at how masculinity and femininity have been represented in American superhero comics, from the Golden and Silver Ages to the Modern Age. Scholar Esther De Dauw contrasts the bulletproof and musclebound phallic bodies of classic male heroes like Superman, Captain America, and Iron Man with the figures of female counterparts like Wonder Woman and Supergirl, who are drawn as superhumanly flexible and plastic. It also examines the genre's ambivalent treatment of LGBTQ representation, from the presentation of gay male heroes Wiccan and Hulkling as a model minority couple to the troubling association of Batwoman's lesbianism with monstrosity. Finally, it explores the intersection between gender and race through case studies of heroes like Luke Cage, Storm, and Ms. Marvel. Hot Pants and Spandex Suits is a fascinating and thought-provoking consideration of what superhero comics teach us about identity, embodiment, and sexuality.
eBook
SELF-REGARDING ART
This Introduction to the Biography Special Issue on \"Autographics\" maps a field of texts and critical practices which are emerging in the rapidly changing visual and textual cultures of autobiography. Beginning with a survey of current thinking about the comics, it argues for autographic criticism as a practice that engages with new modes and media, such as graffiti and online social networking, where autobiographical narrative proliferates through fusions of the visual and the textual.
Journal Article