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"Comic book superheroes, fantasy kingdoms, and futuristic starships have become inescapable features of today's pop-culture landscape, and the people we used to deride as "nerds" or "geeks" have ridden their popularity and visibility to mainstream recognition. It seems it's finally hip to be square. Yet these conventionalized representations of geek culture typically ignore the real people who have invested time and resources to make it what it is. Getting a Life recentres our understanding of...

How children and children’s literature helped build America’s empire America’s empire was not made by adults alone. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, young people became essential to its creation. Through children’s literature, authors instilled the idea of America’s power and the importance of its global prominence. As kids eagerly read dime novels, series fiction, pulp magazines, and comic books that dramatized the virtues of empire, they helped entrench a growing belief in Americ...

Iron Man! Thor! The Hulk! Wasp! Ant-Man! These five iconic characters made their debut as the first incarnation of the most exciting super-team ever assembled in September 1963, in The Avengers No. 1. From Captain America to Black Panther to Beast and Mockingbird and She-Hulk, they gained and lost members, added former super villains to the team, and fought every threat imaginable—each one bigger than the last. From the West Coast to the Secret teams (not to mention the Dark and Young and Might...

The end of the twentieth century and the turn of the new millennium witnessed an unprecedented flood of traumatic narratives and testimonies of suffering in literature and the arts. Graphic novels, free at last from long decades of stern censorship, helped explore these topics by developing a new subgenre: the trauma graphic novel. This book seeks to analyze this trend through the consideration of five influential graphic novels in English. Works by Paul Hornschemeier, Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman,...

Contributions by Eric Bain-Selbo, Jeremy Barris, Maria Botero, Manuel “Mandel” Cabrera Jr., David J. Leichter, Ian MacRae, Alfonso Muñoz-Corcuera, Corry Shores, and Jarkko S. Tuusvuori In a follow-up to Comics as Philosophy, international contributors address two questions: Which philosophical insights, concepts, and tools can shed light on the graphic novel? And how can the graphic novel cast light on the concerns of philosophy? Each contributor ponders a well-known graphic novel to illuminate...

Despite the growing importance of heroines across literary culture-and sales figures that demonstrate both young adult and adult females are reading about heroines in droves, particularly in graphic novels, comic books, and YA literature-few scholarly collections have examined the complex relationships between the representations of heroines and the changing societal roles for both women and men. In Heroines of Comic Books and Literature: Portrayals in Popular Culture, editors Maja Bajac-Carter...

Media in general and narrative media in particular have the potential to represent not only a variety of both possible and actual worlds but also the perception and consciousness of characters in these worlds. Hence, media can be understood as "qualia machines," as technologies that allow for the production of subjective experiences within the affordances and limitations posed by the conventions of their specific mediality. This edited collection examines the transmedial as well as the medium-sp...

A significant expansion of the critically acclaimed first edition, Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History, 2d ed., carries the story of the Kanter family's series of comics-style adaptations of literary masterpieces from 1941 into the 21st century. This book features additional material on the 70-year history of Classics Illustrated and the careers and contributions of such artists as Alex A. Blum, Lou Cameron, George Evans, Henry C. Kiefer, Gray Morrow, Rudolph Palais, and Louis Zansky. New c...

Meanwhile, back in the darkened alleys of a city near you . . . trouble is brewing. A fight breaks out. A mugger shakes down an innocent tourist. Inequality is on the rise. Enter our heroes. Dark Guardian chases off an angry drug dealer in Manhattan. Mr. Xtreme charges in and breaks up a San Diego bar brawl. T. O. Ronin hugs a homeless man on the snowy streets of Toronto. These aren't the big-screen or comic-book heroes that have been increasingly dominating pop culture. They're real-life super...

American comics from the start have reflected the white supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness, and both signal and hide its presence. Even when comics creators and publishers sought to advance an antiracist agenda, their attempts were often undermined by a lack of awareness of their own whiteness and the ideological baggage that goes along with it. Even the most celebrated figures of the industry, such as Jerry Siegel and Jo...

The author of the hit parody The Panda, the Cat and the Dreadfully Teddy draws on the simple, idyllic world of Beatrix Potter to shed light on some of the most pertinent issues of our time. Beatrix, a refined and gentle lady, decides to relocate to the countryside to escape the chaotic city and exorbitant house prices of London, in search of a simpler, more holistic life. Looking forward to painting cute rural animals and writing stories about their charming way...

Contributions by José Alaniz, Jessica Baldanzi, Eric Berlatsky, Peter E. Carlson, Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins, Antero Garcia, Aaron Kashtan, Winona Landis, A. David Lewis, Martin Lund, Shabana Mir, Kristin M. Peterson, Nicholaus Pumphrey, Hussein Rashid, and J. Richard Stevens Mainstream superheroes are becoming more and more diverse, with new identities for Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man. Though the Marvel-verse is becoming much more racially, ethnically, and gender diverse, many...

Framing Gotham City as a microcosm of a modern-day metropolis, Gotham City Living posits this fictional setting as a hyper-aware archetype, demonstrative of the social, political and cultural tensions felt throughout urban America. Looking at the comics, graphic novels, films and television shows that form the Batman universe, this book demonstrates how the various creators of Gotham City have imagined a geography for the condition of America, the cast of characters acting as catalysts for a rev...

In the late 1500s in Florence, aristocrats of the Renaissance renovated classical Greek dramas into dramatic musicals and gave birth to the first operas. After centuries of transformation, the opera is still appreciated as a historically dynamic paradigm of the fine arts. Composers of the twentieth century have worked hard to fashion a voice distinct from the romantic composers of the nineteenth century and the traditions that preceded them, and this volume explores the extent of their success....

In Graphic Medicine, comics artists and scholars of life writing, literature, and comics explore the lived experience of illness and disability through original texts, images, and the dynamic interplay between the two. The essays and autobiographical comics in this collection respond to the medical humanities' call for different perceptions and representations of illness and disability than those found in conventional medical discourse. The collection expands and troubles our understanding of t...