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Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings offers an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to analyzing Latinx studies and comics studies. The book draws together groundbreaking critical essays, practical pedagogical reflections, and original and republished short comics. The works in this collection discuss the construction of national identity and memory, undocumented narratives, Indigenous and Afro-Latinx experiences, multiracial and multilingual identities, transnational and diasporic connections, natural disasters and unnatural colonial violence, feminist and queer interventions, Latinx futurities, and more. Together, the critical and creative works in this collection begin to map out the emerging and evolving field of Latinx comics studies and to envision what might be possible in and through Latinx comics. This collection moves beyond simply cataloguing and celebrating Latinx representation within comics. It examines how comics by, for, and about Latinx peoples creatively and conceptually experiment with the very boundaries of “Latinx” and portray the diverse lived experiences therein.

Alongside superheroes, supervillains, too, have become one of today's most popular and globally recognizable figures. However, it is not merely their popularity that marks their significance. Supervillains are also central to superhero storytelling to the extent that the superhero genre cannot survive without supervillains. Bringing together different approaches and critical perspectives across disciplines, author Nao Tomabechi troubles overly hero-centered works in comics studies to reconsider the modern American myths of the superheroes. Considering the likes of Lex Luthor, the Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Loki, Venom, and more, Supervillians explores themes such as gender and sexuality, disability, and many forms of Otherness in relation to the notion of evil as it appears in the superhero genre. The book investigates how supervillains uphold and, at times, trouble dominant ideals expressed by the heroism of our superheroes.

Jean Giraud (1938–2012) started drawing comics in the late 1950s for a variety of French comics magazines. Under his real name, he found success in 1963 with the western series Blueberry, written by Jean-Michel Charlier and published in Pilote magazine. In the 1970s, he started producing science fiction works under the name of Moebius, which brought him international success, and which included works such as Arzach. He died in 2012 as a global celebrity in the comics world and a major influence across visual media. This first book-length, English-language study of Moebius finally brings international attention to an artist whose influence on the medium was profound and immediate, making him a role model for aspiring comics creators throughout his career. He was widely imitated while at Métal Hurlant in the 1970s, was “prominent among the spiritual fathers of the comic book rebels” in the 1990s, and again an example for the independent artists identified as the “new bande dessinée” in France in the early 2000s. Featuring close readings of key texts, including Blueberry, The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius, and “The Long Tomorrow,” this volume examines Moebius's style and aesthetic achievement. Notably, the volume explores the tension between Giraud and Moebius—one name for westerns, the other for science fiction; one name for the domestic market, another as a global brand; one name for the brush, another for the pen; one for the mainstream and the other for the underground. Nicolas Labarre challenges those dichotomies, especially in the later phases of Moebius's career, unveiling the complex evolution of this understudied but influential artist.

This accessible, up-to-date textbook covers the history of comics as it developed in the US in all of its forms: political cartoons and newspaper comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, minicomics, and webcomics. Over the course of its six chapters, this introductory textbook addresses the artistic, cultural, social, economic, and technological impacts and innovations that comics have had in American history. Readers will be immersed in the history of American comics—from its origins in 18th-century political cartoons and late 19th-century newspaper strips to the rise of the wildly popular comic book, the radical, grassroots collectives that grew out of the underground comix movement of the 1960s and 1970s, all the way through contemporary longform graphic novels, the vibrant self-publishing scene, and groundbreaking webcomics. The Routledge Introduction to American Comics guides students, researchers, archivists, and even fans of the medium through a contemporary history of comics, attending to how a diverse range of creators and researchers have advanced the art form in key ways since its inception as a foundational art of American popular culture. In this way, it is uniquely suited to readers engaged in the study of comics, as well as those interested in the creation of comics and graphic narratives.

Steen Ledet Christiansen's Storytelling in “Kabuki” explores the series created by David Mack—a slow, recursive narrative that focuses on the death of Kabuki and her past. The series ran from 1994 to 2004 in a variety of miniseries, one-shots, and spin-offs, rather than following a conventional American monthly release schedule. Most of the series explores different perspectives on the same event and adds background to Kabuki's past, usually through surreal sequences, dreams, and near-death experiences. The flexibility of comics'approach to chronology, space, focalization, narrative, and fictionality enabled Mack to produce an unusual experience. Kabuki tells a story that can only exist via comics. Christiansen analyzes the visual design of the series, a heterogeneous collection of styles depending on the story. To understand Kabuki, it is crucial to explore the visual styles, as well as the use of visual and spatial rhymes and mixed media forms. Because Kabuki employs a complex layering of focalizations, diegetic levels, and metafictional self-reflectivity that is rare in mainstream American comics, it utilizes a narrative poetics that focuses on constant repeating, restating, and returning to the same events.Kabuki's unique compositional layering allows Christiansen to provide a clear example of how comics work while also expanding on critical vocabulary, especially in terms of spatial poetics. By exploring spatial form, Christiansen illuminates and gives a critical framework to a different and underexamined aspect of comics.

Dive into the world of manga and discover 50 of the most influential and essential series and standalone titles—from Boys Run the Riot to Chainsaw Man to Sailor Moon—with this must-have guide for manga fans by Crunchyroll senior editor Briana Lawrence. With profiles on 50 unforgettable series and ground-breaking single volume stories written by an expert in the anime and manga field, The Essential Manga Guide provides a comprehensive, behind-the-scenes look into the history and growing legacy of manga. Both casual fans and serious otaku alike will discover an entertaining and personal look at the impact of these outstanding manga titles and their authors, as well as great recommendations of what to read next. From classic series to contemporary favorites, this guide includes: Berserk, Bleach, Fruits Basket, Haikyu!!, Inuyasha, Jujutsu Kaisen, Kuroko's Basketball, My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, Naruto, One Piece, Paradise Kiss, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Sailor Moon, The Way of the House Husband, Tokyo Babylon, Uzumaki, Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku, What Did You Eat Yesterday, Yu Yu Hakusho, and many more.

This book aims to study the Batman narrative, or Bat-narrative, from the point of view of its nodal relationship to modern narrative. To this end, it offers for the first time a new type of methodology adequate to the object, which delves both into materials scarcely studied in this context and well-known materials seen in a new light. This is a multidisciplinary work aimed at both the specialist and the global reader, bringing together comic studies, philosophical criticism, and literary criticism in a debate on the fate of our current global civilization.

Contributions by José Alaniz, Ian Blechschmidt, Paul Fisher Davies, Zanne Domoney-Lyttle, David Huxley, Lynn Marie Kutch, Julian Lawrence, Liliana Milkova, Stiliana Milkova, Kim A. Munson, Jason S. Polley, Paul Sheehan, Clarence Burton Sheffield Jr., and Daniel Worden From his work on underground comix like Zap and Weirdo, to his cultural prominence, R. Crumb is one of the most renowned comics artists in the medium's history. His work, beginning in the 1960s, ranges provocatively and controversially over major moments, tensions, and ideas in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the counterculture and the emergence of the modern environmentalist movement, to racial politics and sexual liberation. While Crumb's early work refined the parodic, over-the-top, and sexually explicit styles we associate with underground comix, he also pioneered the comics memoir, through his own autobiographical and confessional comics, as well as in his collaborations. More recently, Crumb has turned to long-form, book-length works, such as his acclaimed Book of Genesis and Kafka. Over the long arc of his career, Crumb has shaped the conventions of underground and alternative comics, autobiographical comics, and the “graphic novel.” And, through his involvement in music, animation, and documentary film projects, Crumb is a widely recognized persona, an artist who has defined the vocation of the cartoonist in a widely influential way. The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum is a groundbreaking collection on the work of a pioneer of underground comix and a fixture of comics culture. Ranging from art history and literary studies, to environmental studies and religious history, the essays included in this volume cast Crumb's work as formally sophisticated and complex in its representations of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and history, while also charting Crumb's role in underground comix and the ways in which his work has circulated in the art museum.

Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847–1870 enters deep into an era of comic history that has been entirely neglected. This buried cache of mid-Victorian graphic humor is marvelously rich in pictorial narratives of all kinds. Author David Kunzle calls this period a “rebirth” because of the preceding long hiatus in use of the new genre, since the Great Age of Caricature (c.1780–c.1820) when the comic strip was practiced as a sideline. Suddenly in 1847, a new, post-Töpffer comic strip sparks to life in Britain, mostly in periodicals, and especially in Punch, where all the best artists of the period participated, if only sporadically: Richard Doyle, John Tenniel, John Leech, Charles Keene, and George Du Maurier. Until now, this aspect of the extensive oeuvre of the well-known masters of the new journal cartoon in Punch has been almost completely ignored. Exceptionally, George Cruikshank revived just once in The Bottle, independently, the whole serious, contrasting Hogarthian picture story. Numerous comic strips and picture stories appeared in periodicals other than Punch by artists who were likewise largely ignored. Like the Punch luminaries, they adopt in semirealistic style sociopolitical subject matter easily accessible to their (lower-)middle-class readership. The topics covered in and out of Punch by these strips and graphic novels range from French enemies King Louis-Philippe and Emperor Napoleon III to farcical treatment of major historical events: the Bayeux tapestry (1848), the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Artists explore a great variety of social types, occupations, and situations such as the emigrant, the tourist, fox hunting and Indian big game hunting, dueling, the forlorn lover, the student, the artist, the toothache, the burglar, the paramilitary volunteer, Darwinian animal metamorphoses, and even nightmares. In Rebirth of the English Comic Strip, Kunzle analyzes these much-neglected works down to the precocious modernist and absurdist scribbles of Marie Duval, Europe's first female professional cartoonist.