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Mainstream narratives of the graphic novel’s development describe the form’s “coming of age,” its maturation from pulp infancy to literary adulthood. In Arresting Development, Christopher Pizzino questions these established narratives, arguing that the medium’s history of censorship and marginalization endures in the minds of its present-day readers and, crucially, its authors. Comics and their writers remain burdened by the stigma of literary illegitimacy and the struggles for status that marke...

Richly illustrated with images from Art Spiegelman’s work, Maus Now gathers together many of contemporary culture’s leading critics, authors, and academics on the radical achievement and innovation of Maus more than forty years since its first publication. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists; it is hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture. Maus has shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and enlivened our c...

Don't miss this opportunity to own this very limited and rare hard cover edition; a very low print run will be made, so be sure to order it now to get your copy. This might be your only chance to own a true piece of Transformers history.

Some of the most noteworthy graphic novels and comic books of recent years have been entirely autobiographical. In Graphic Subjects, Michael A. Chaney brings together a lively mix of scholars to examine the use of autobiography within graphic novels, including such critically acclaimed examples as Art Spiegelman's Maus, David Beauchard's Epileptic, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Alan Moore's Watchmen, and Gene Yang's American Born Chinese. These essays, accompanied by visual examples, illuminate...

Critical Approaches to Comics offers students a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing key theories and critical methods for analyzing comics. Each chapter explains and then demonstrates a critical method or approach, which students can then apply to interrogate and critique the meanings and forms of comic books, graphic novels, and other sequential art. The authors introduce a wide range of critical perspectives on comics,...

Contributions by Jan Baetens, Alain Boillat, Philippe Bourdier, Laura Cecilia Caraballo, Thomas Faye, Pierre Floquet, Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Christophe Gelly, Nicolas Labarre, Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, Dick Tomasovic, and Shannon Wells-LassagneBoth comics studies and adaptation studies have grown separately over the past twenty years. Yet there are few in-depth studies of comic books and adaptations together. Available for the first time in English, this collection pore...

In 1906, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted the tales of the Middle Eastern trickster Nasreddin to construct a progressive anti-colonial discourse with a strong emphasis on social, political and religious reform. Using folklore, visual art and satire, their periodical Moll? Nasreddin which had full-page lithographic cartoons in colour, reached tens of thousands of people across the Muslim world, from Iran and Turkey, to India and Egypt, impacting the thinking of a generation....

Watchmen has been hailed as the quintessential graphic novel and has spawned a body of literary criticism since its 1986 release. This work explores the graphic novel's reception in both popular and scholarly arenas and how the conceptual relationship between images and words affect the reading experience. Other topics include heroism as a stereotype and social construction, the hero's journey, the role of the narrator, and the way in which the graphic layout manipulates the reader's perception...

Amid the controversy surrounding immigration and border control, the work of California cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz (b. 1964) has delivered a resolute Latino viewpoint. Of Mexican descent, Alcaraz fights for Latino rights through his creativity, drawing political commentary as well as underlining how Latinos confront discriminationon a daily basis. Through an analysis of Alcaraz's early editorial cartooning and his strips for La Cucaracha, the first nationally syndicated, political Latino daily comi...

Increasingly over the past decade, fan credentials on the part of writers, directors, and producers have come to be seen as a guarantee of quality media making - the "fanboy auteur". Figures like Joss Whedon are both one of "us" and one of "them". This is a strategy of marketing and branding - it is a claim from the auteur himself or industry PR machines that the presence of an auteur who is also a fan means the product is worth consuming. Such claims that fan credentials guarantee quality are o...

The reactionary Comicsgate campaign against alleged “forced” diversity in superhero comics revealed the extent to which comics have become a key battleground in America’s Culture Wars. In the first in-depth scholarly study of Marvel Comics’ most recent engagement with progressive politics, Superhero Culture Wars explores how the drive towards greater diversity among its characters and creators has interacted with the company’s commercial marketing and its traditional fan base. Along the way t...