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"Graphic novels-History and criticism"
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Death, Disability, and the Superhero
The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s, and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities--disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies-- José Alaniz seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol.
Alaniz traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series--some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar U.S. as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body's \"imperfection\" comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series asThe Human Fly, Strikeforce: Morituri, and the landmark graphic novelThe Death of Captain Marvel, all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond.
eBook
El Eternauta, Daytripper, and Beyond
El Eternauta, Daytripper, and Beyond examines the graphic narrative tradition in the two South American countries that have produced the medium’s most significant and copious output. Argentine graphic narrative emerged in the 1980s, awakened by Héctor Oesterheld’s groundbreaking 1950s serial El Eternauta. After Oesterheld was “disappeared\" under the military dictatorship, El Eternauta became one of the most important cultural texts of turbulent mid-twentieth-century Argentina. Today its story, set in motion by an extraterrestrial invasion of Buenos Aires, is read as a parable foretelling the “invasion\" of Argentine society by a murderous tyranny. Because of El Eternauta, graphic narrative became a major platform for the country’s cultural redemocratization. In contrast, Brazil, which returned to democracy in 1985 after decades of dictatorship, produced considerably less analysis of the period of repression in its graphic narratives. In Brazil, serious graphic narratives such as Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá’s Daytripper, which explores issues of modernity, globalization, and cross-cultural identity, developed only in recent decades, reflecting Brazilian society’s current and ongoing challenges. Besides discussing El Eternauta and Daytripper, David William Foster utilizes case studies of influential works—such as Alberto Breccia and Juan Sasturain’s Perramus series, Angélica Freitas and Odyr Bernardi’s Guadalupe, and others—to compare the role of graphic narratives in the cultures of both countries, highlighting the importance of Argentina and Brazil as anchors of the production of world-class graphic narrative.
eBook
Comics and Language
It has become an axiom in comic studies that \"comics is a
language, not a genre.\" But what exactly does that mean, and how is
discourse on the form both aided and hindered by thinking of it in
linguistic terms? In Comics and Language, Hannah Miodrag
challenges many of the key assumptions about the \"grammar\" and
formal characteristics of comics, and offers a more nuanced,
theoretical framework that she argues will better serve the field
by offering a consistent means for communicating critical theory in
the scholarship. Through engaging close readings and an accessible
use of theory, this book exposes the problems embedded in the ways
critics have used ideas of language, literature, structuralism, and
semiotics, and sets out a new and more theoretically sound way of
understanding how comics communicate.
Comics and Language
Comics and Language
eBook
Comics, graphic novels, and manga : the ultimate teen guide
This book provides a history of comic books, graphic novels, and manga, detailing the origins of each and providing an overview of their significance to young adult readers.
Book
From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels
This essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative – realized in various different formats, including comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels – as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture. The contributions assembled in this volume test the applicability of narratological concepts to graphic narrative, examine aspects of graphic narrative beyond the 'single work, ' consider the development of particular narrative strategies within individual genres, and trace the forms and functions of graphic narrative across cultures. Analyzing a wide range of texts, genres, and narrative strategies from both theoretical and historical perspectives, the international group of scholars gathered here offers state-of-the-art research on graphic narrative in the context of an increasingly postclassical and transmedial narratology.
eBook
Contemporary Comics Storytelling
What if fairy-tale characters lived in New York City? What if a superhero knew he was a fictional character? What if you could dispense your own justice with one hundred untraceable bullets? These are the questions asked and answered in the course of the challenging storytelling inFables,Tom Strong, and100 Bullets, the three twenty-first-century comics series that Karin Kukkonen considers in depth in her exploration of how and why the storytelling in comics is more than merely entertaining.
Applying a cognitive approach to reading comics in all their narrative richness and intricacy,Contemporary Comics Storytellingopens an intriguing perspective on how these works engage the legacy of postmodernism-its subversion, self-reflexivity, and moral contingency. Its three case studies trace how contemporary comics tie into deep traditions of visual and verbal storytelling, how they reevaluate their own status as fiction, and how the fictional minds of their characters generate complex ethical thought experiments. At a time when the medium is taken more and more seriously as intricate and compelling literary art, this book lays the groundwork for an analysis of the ways in which comics challenge and engage readers' minds. It brings together comics studies with narratology and literary criticism and, in so doing, provides a new set of tools for evaluating the graphic novel as an emergent literary form.
eBook