Comics Studies Here and Now marks the arrival of comics studies scholarship that no longer feels the need to justify itself within or against other fields of study. The essays herein move us forward, some in their re-diggings into comics history and others by analyzing comics—and all its transmedial and fan-fictional offshoots—on its own terms. Comics Studies stakes the flag of our arrival—the arrival of comics studies as a full-fledged discipline that today and tomorrow excavates, examines, discusses, and analyzes all aspects that make up the resplendent planetary republic of comics. This collection of scholarly essays is a testament to the fact that comic book studies have come into their own as an academic discipline; simply and powerfully moving comic studies forward with their critical excavations and theoretical formulas based on the common sense understanding that comics add to the world as unique, transformative cultural phenomena.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Matt Madden’s Brief Comic Book Odyssey: A Foreword
Comic Studies Here and Now: An Introduction
Part I: Words, Pictures, and Borders
Chapter 1: A Touch of Irony and Pity: Krazy Kat in the Breaks
Ben Novotny Owen
Chapter 2: In Love with Magic and Monsters: The Groundbreaking Life and Work of Rose O’Neill
Richard Graham and Colin Beineke
Chapter 3: It’s sorta wacky! But, different!: Scribbly, Inkie, and Pre-Underground Autobiographical Comics
Andrew J. Kunka
Chapter 4: How Lust Was Lost: Genre, Identity, and the Neglect of a Pioneering Comics Publication
Robert Hulshof-Schmidt
Part II Transmedial Forms
Chapter 5: Comics, Race, and the Political Project of Intermediality in Karen TeiYamashita’s I Hotel
Jennifer Glaser
Chapter 6: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as ‘cineromanzo’
Jan Baetens
Chapter 7: Articulate This!: Critical Action Figure Studies and Material Culture
Jonathan Alexandratos and Daniel F. Yezbick
Part III Institutions and Movements
Chapter 8: Singapore cartoons in the anti-comics movement of the 1950s and 1960s
Lim Cheng Tju
Chapter 9: The Institutional Support for Hong Kong Independent Comics
Kin Wai Chu
Chapter 10: Jirō Taniguchi: France’s Mangaka
Bart Beaty
Part IV Resistant Word-Drawn Acts & Transformative Reading Communities
Chapter 11: The Latina Superheroine: Protecting the Reader from the Comic Book Industry's Racial, Gender, Ethnic, and Nationalist Biases
Enrique García
Chapter 12: The Page is Local: Planetarity and Embodied Metaphor in Anglophone Graphic Narratives from South Asia
Torsa Ghosal
Chapter 13: Hands Across the Ocean: A 1970s Network of French and American Women Cartoonists
Leah Misemer
Chapter 14: Comics as Orientation Devices
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
Chapter 15: Service Dogs, Code Switching, and Interracial Polyamory: Exploring the Reclamation Narratives of Comic Fandom
Erica Massey
Part V Margins Transforming Centers
Chapter 16: Once and Again, Ack!: Epimone, Recursion, and Variation in Guisewite’s Cathy
Susan Kirtely
Chapter 17: Transnationality and Textual Mestizaje in Love and Rockets
Brittany Tullis
Chapter 18: Only a Chilling Elegy: An Examination of White Bodies, Colonialism, Fascism, Genocide, and Racism in Dragon Ball
Zachary Michael Lewis Dean
Chapter 19: From the Inner City to the Interstellar: Brian K. Vaughan’s Comix after 9/11
James J. Donahue
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Biography
Frederick Luis Aldama is the author, co-author, and editor of over 30 books, including recently Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. He is Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor, University Distinguished Scholar, and Director of the award-winning LASER (Latinx Space for Enrichment & Research) at The Ohio State University.
'Frederick Luis Aldama has put together this finely curated collection featuring the writing talents of some of the leading scholars in Comics Studies. They take us on a journey of rediscovery through often-neglected and seldom-written-about aspects of sequential art. This book brings into focus the diverse nature of Comics Studies, where we have been, where we should be, where the future is going, and obviously where the study of sequential art is right now. A joy to read!' --Robert G. Weiner, Texas Tech University, USA
