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Cartoonist Winsor McCay (1869-1934) is rightfully celebrated for the skillful draftmanship and inventive design sense he displayed in the comic strips Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. McCay crafted narratives of anticipation, abundance, and unfulfilled longing. This book explores McCay's interest in dream imagery in relation to the larger preoccupation with fantasy that dominated the popular culture of early twentieth-century urban America. McCay's role as a pioneer of...

Presents scholars, students and general readers with the major fiction for adults, much of the best of juvenile fiction, and a selection of the educational and occasional writings of Maria Edgeworth.

The creation of the Fantastic Four effectively launched the Marvel Comics brand in 1961. Within ten years, the introduction (or reintroduction) of characters such as Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, and the X-Men catapulted Marvel past its primary rival, DC Comics, for domination of the comic book market. Since the 2000s, the company's iconic characters have leaped from page to screens with the creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which includes everything from live-action...

The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars about the comics of Chicago-based cartoonist Chris Ware (b. 1967). Both inside and outside academic circles, Ware's work is rapidly being distinguished as essential to the developing canon of the graphic novel. Winner of the 2001 Guardian First Book Prize for the genre-defining Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware has received numerous accolades from both the lit...

"Secret Identity Crisis" follows the trajectory of the breakdown of the Cold War consensus after 1960 through the lens of superhero comic books. The superhero comic books developed by Marvel, because of their conscious setting in the contemporary world, and because of attempts to maintain a continuous story line across and within books, constitute a system of signs that reflect, comment upon, and at times have interacted with the American political economy.Physicist Bruce Banner, caught in the n...

From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society. In Beautiful Fighting Girl, Saito Tamaki offers a far more sophisticated and convincing interpretation of this alluring and capable f...

William Marston was an unusual man - a psychologist, a soft-porn pulp novelist, more than a bit of a carny, and the (self-declared) inventor of the lie detector. He was also the creator of Wonder Woman, the comic that he used to express two of his greatest passions: feminism and women in bondage. Comics expert Noah Berlatsky takes us on a wild ride through the Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s, vividly illustrating how Marston's many quirks and contradictions, along with the odd disproportionate...

Exploring an overlooked era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s shines a new light on what was a dark decade, but an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults.Blurring the lines between high art and popular consumption, artists of the Italian comics scene went beyond passively documenting history and began actively shaping it throug...

Anime, the name given to Japanese superhero animation, has swept the United States. More than two dozen Japanese cartoon series already appear on U.S. television, with more on the way. And with the vast leaps being made in animation technology, the anime explosion shows no sign of abating. One of the main topics of anime is advanced technology and how it will affect the human race. Movies like Akira have touched upon the power of the atom and the advances and tragedies nuclear power will bring t...

In the 1950s and '60s, a grassroots movement arose to celebrate comic books and strips, which were becoming an increasingly important part of American popular culture. This broad group of ardent readers and collectors of comic books had little formal structure until the 1950s. As the art and literary form grew in popularity, a dedicated core began building an organized network. Profiled here are 90 people at the heart of the movement, from dealers to convention organizers to fanzine publishers....

This study offers a critical examination of the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Mexican-American brothers whose graphic novels are highly influential. The Hernandez brothers started in the alt-comics scene, where their 'Love and Rockets' series quickly gained prominence. They have since published in more mainstream venues but have maintained an outsider status based on their own background and the content of their work. Enrique Garcia argues that the Hernandez brothers have worked to create...