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With their increasing popularity, there is a need for more research clarifying the potential strengths and weaknesses of the comic format for education. The panelled comic format may be particularly effective for educating adults on the scientific aspects of processes (sequences of events, occurring over time, in a series of discrete steps). We tested change in performance in adults (n = 879) in correctly ordering the stages in four processes before and after being exposed to educational material about these processes. The material was presented in a random selection of one of seven experimentally manipulated formats based on characteristics of comic books. Overall, participant performance improved after seeing the educational material. There were significant differences in learning between the processes, suggesting that the benefits, or detriments, of the comic format may be subject-specific. Performance was significantly better when images were subdivided into panels, and worse when an explanatory agent (character) was included, though these differences in performance did not survive adjustment for multiple comparisons. This study presents some evidence that the panelled nature of the comic format supports learning about scientific processes in adults. Given results differed notably between the specific topics to be learned, there is substantial scope for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stand-up comedy in Kenya before COVID-19 relied on close proximity between comedians and their audiences. However, COVID-19 disrupted this arrangement and subverted the performance space of 'traditional theatre.' This article examines alternative comic spaces embraced by selected Kenyan stand-up comedians during COVID-19. The article seeks to answer two fundamental questions: (1) What was the nature of the alternative spaces where the stand-up comedians performed during COVID-19? (2) How did the alternative sites of comic performances redefine how stand-up comedians engage with their audiences? To answer these questions, we conducted research on major stand-up comedians on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter to obtain primary data, which we analysed and interpreted drawing on theories of humour and of social performance. We argue that the comedians, motivated by the need to maintain the relevance of their work and their audiences, used the digital ecosystem and devised variant alternative comic spaces innovatively to push the threshold of poetics of comedic performances individually and collectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at three graphic memoirs and considers the specific ways in which the comic medium allows for the representation of complex and non-verbal interactions between the members of a family. The selected texts show how the sequencing of panels in a comic can depict the unspoken affects that circulate within a family unit. The comic medium seems to be apt for representing the distributed consciousness of a family, and also for splintering a character temporally so that older and younger versions of the character can be put into dialogue with each other in a family context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En el año 1977 se funda en Barcelona el bar-biblioteca LaSal, vibrante centro de reflexión feminista con editorial propia. Entre las obras artísticas que produce, creadas exclusivamente por mujeres, está el cómic Las Entrañablesas, serie de 7 episodios publicada en la revista Mundo de enero a febrero de 1977. Esta obra coral firmada por Montse Clavé, Mari Chordà, Amparo Tuñón y Ana Díaz-Plaja traslada al lenguaje del cómic el proyecto feminista plural en el que muchas intelectuales se encontraban inmersas en la España de mediados de los años 70. A través del análisis visual de la obra se observa una profunda crítica a la perpetuación de una imagen cosificada de la mujer que tanto los medios masivos como la sociedad en general llevan a cabo. Tomando como marco teórico el concepto écriture féminine de la feminista francesa Hélène Cixous, se analiza cómo Las Entrañablesas responde a las características de este concepto no solo en sus innovaciones formales y de contenido, sino en su propósito de desestabilizar y confrontar un lenguaje estructurado por dictados androcéntricos, convirtiendo el simple acto de crear el cómic en pura resistencia feminista. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks into the relation between the comic and anger. Specifically, the paper analyses how anger emerges as the flip side of the comic, by studying the theory of emotions as presented in Bharatamuni's Nāṭyaśāstra. The performative languages of the comic (hāsya) and anger (raudra) are closely examined. By analysing the features of hāsya and raudra the study attempts to prove the mutative tendency of the comic to anger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Draw-A-Scientist Test (DAST) has been one of the most used instruments to study conceptions of scientists and science. It has been especially useful for charting the conceptions of younger children who might lack the skills to express themselves in writing. However, recent studies suggest that instead of children's conceptions of the appearance of scientists, their conceptions about the activities are more crucial in shaping children's attitudes towards science. This study describes a new instrument, Draw-A-Science Comic (DASC), and examines the advantages and disadvantages of using a comic as a tool to collect data about children's conceptions of scientists and science. A total of 104 children aged 8 to 13 drew a comic while attending university's science camps during the summer of 2017 and 2018. Participants drew a comic about how science is made. The analysis of the drawings was based on four main categories: scientific activities, locations of research, appearance of scientists, and emotions and attitudes. Instances for each category were calculated by two researchers independently. Qualitative overviews of the categories and the methods used to convey information were formed. The children used sequential pictures to depict actions and processes, speech bubbles to depict dialogue between characters as well as text captions to provide additional details and clarifications. By drawing comics children were able to have more detailed illustrations of scientific activities than with a single picture. The sequential narratives were also used to depict emotions and attitudes related to science. In contrast to DAST, the DASC provides information about children's conceptions and stereotypes regarding scientific activities even without the use of additional or more explicit prompts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While being marginalised in mainstream American history, Japanese Americans have been aiming to elevate their status in the U.S. This is also the case in Hawaiʻi where Japanese Americans hold strong economic and political standings. Up until today, members of the Japanese community in Hawaiʻi have strived for power, and in the realm of culture, one of their attempts came into fruition as a comic book. Titled Journey of Heroes: The Story of the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team (Hawaiʻi, 2012), this comic book sheds light on Japanese American veterans who had heroically fought World War II. Journey of Heroes is functioning as an important archive through which to recuperate these heroes' memories and reinstate them in mainstream American history. However, against the backdrop of the strained relations between the Japanese community in Hawaiʻi and Native Hawaiians, the comic book is potentially facilitating the violation of Native Hawaiians' human rights, no matter how well-intended this memory project may be. Focusing on the production and distribution processes of Journey of Heroes, this paper reveals the comic book's political connotation in Hawaiʻi as a cultural product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper reviews articles in educational journals about comics and education in Ibero-American journals. Time-lapse analysis covers the years 2010 - 2019. Scientific journals of the educational field included in the virtual repository Dialnet are taken as reference. The data search is confined to the field of Psychology and Education. The terms used for the search have been'comic', in journals with full text included in Latindex. The aim is to explore state of the art, paying attention to four issues: years, journals, countries and themes. The results show a higher quantity of articles published in Spain; these articles being the best positioned in the categories CIRC and CARHUS + 2014. Contributions from Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Chile have been analyzed in all the languages found (Spanish, Portuguese and Galician). Most of the production is in the years 2010 and 2017. About the journals, the dispersion is remarkable, finding only five journals that contribute more than one. On the developed topics, they stand out: language, social and natural knowledge and other learnings. To conclude, this review can serve as a basis for deepening this issue within the Ibero-American environment and make comparisons between countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a homomorphism between algebras, there exists an isomorphism between the quotient of the domain by its kernel and the subalgebra in the codomain given by its image. This theorem, commonly known as the first isomorphism theorem, is a fundamental algebraic result. Different problems have been identified in its instruction, mainly related to the abstraction inherent to its content and to the lack of conceptual models to improve its understanding. In response to this situation, in this paper, we present an illustration that explores the narrative and graphical resources of comics with the aim of describing the set-theoretic elements that are involved in the proof of this theorem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In US schools, unproblematic acceptance of monolingual ideologies has shaped discourses of nationhood and Americanness, where deviation through racialized language varieties threatens the ideals of a unified nation. In our graphic comic, we envisioned an education that departs from the present treatment of language where whiteness has become synonymous with standard English and achievement. We asked, what would it look like if arts-based translingualism were central to the ways we theorize and enact curriculum? We argued that curriculum as revisionist ontological text can radically reimagine languaging norms in schools to catalyze border crossing and the construction of a just world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Trump-as-Infant trope is legion. This essay engages how infantilization constitutes comic diminution by dampening the magnitude of Donald J. Trump's presidency and blunting its rhetorical force via mockery and contempt. It does so by recasting an understanding of the rhetorical presidency through the lens of Trump's cartoon presidentialism. This essay conceptualizes reductio ad bairn, or the comic reduction to the infantile, as a particularly potent mode of capturing perversions in the Big Other of presidentialism and disavowals among a body politic that is stuck in a childish cycle of folding perceived oppressions and resentments into political fantasies. The concept of reductio ad bairn, which builds on Sigmund Freud's sense of the comicality in degradation (and, indeed, the degradations in comicality) and Jacques Lacan's sense of perversion, demonstrates how the specific trope of Baby Trump stands out as an exemplar of comic infantilization. Moreover, it magnifies the failures of using caricature in a manner that does little to demystify the petty tyrannies of an abject rhetorical presidency. This essay concludes with a critical reflection on the risks of overdoing these sorts of diminutions to the effect of diminishing the possibilities of rhetorical imagination in comic judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to be called Australian? How does one identify themselves as a Western Australian? This paper is an analysis of the works by students from across the University of Western Australia enrolled in a fine art elective unit that explores the medium of graphic novels. The analysis is done by comparing the student works created across the 6 years that the unit has been running. During that time several shared themes have recurred, independently of each other, by students studying different majors, from different backgrounds, and across different years. This paper seeks to posit that through the graphic novelettes that the students have a produced, a new definition has arisen of what makes a person not from Australia a 'Western Australian', one that differs from the European-centric, heroic pioneer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will look at Michael DeForge's short stories 'Canadian Royalty: Their Lifestyles and Fashions', and 'All About the Spotting Deer', examining how their content and use of grotesque parody reflect and critique the concept of Canadian identity. It will consider the intertextual strategies at play in these stories, and examine the way in which the representation of fictitious cultures reflects upon multicultural experiences within Canada. It will examine the grotesque portrayal of Canadian identity within the texts, and interpret the parodic nature of this portrayal in regards to hegemonic identity. The influence of cultural propaganda such as Heritage Minutes and Hinterland Who's Who will be outlined, emphasising DeForge's undermining of such material and its motive to establish Canadian cultural unity. The paper will question the ways in which Canadian identity is often represented in such media as a monolithic pan-national entity, the political implications of this, and the way in which DeForge addresses this hegemony through these short comics. It will be argued that these comics provide an alternative to pre-constructed hegemonic Canadian identity, and through the grotesque nature of this alternative vision, challenge the methods by which dominant identities are developed and maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conversations surrounding end of life and death can be difficult or taboo for some, meaning that matters of organ and body donation are not widely discussed. To Donate or Not to Donate? That is the Question! is a comic developed to raise awareness and challenge common misconceptions about donation by encouraging the publics to engage in informed discussions about the different options available. This case study proposes graphic medicine as an alternative method of presenting donation information to a public audience, and illustrates how the comic medium can communicate body donation information in an accessible and engaging way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses student perspectives on visualisation used as a constructionist technique for learning the law in an authentic context. Student constructions of storyboards, comics, films and animation are explored as an authentic method for personalised learning of legal professional conduct and ethics. Undergraduate law students (n = 112) were asked to select a visual format for exploration of an ethical issue of their choice. The results of this study showed most students engaged with this highly creative visual task responding very positively to the exercise as a learning activity. This study discusses why students chose different forms of visualisation, what approach they took to developing their visualisation, the amount of effort devoted to visualisation versus legal elements of their artefacts and observations on the positive and negative aspects of their approach and how the technique could be improved. A video abstract is also available at https://doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2018.1496313 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artículo explora la creación de un lenguaje icónico innovador por parte del artista gráfico Pere Joan en su obra 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014). Su trabajo crítico-visual refleja el estatus contemporáneo de los emoticonos y los emoji, signos de una creciente integración de lo digital en la vida cotidiana. Entendido a la luz de la producción reciente del artista, el lenguaje analítico visual de Pere Joan funciona como una aceptación de las posibilidades formales señaladas por lo digital y a la vez como una reivindicación de la cultura analógica y la reflexión histórica. Además, la estructura innovadora de las páginas del libro pone de manifiesto la relación entre el cómic y el arte gráfico puro. Al fin y al cabo, más que una celebración de la era digital, 100 pictogramas recupera un impulso ensayístico analógico para recalcar el potencial crítico de toda imagen. Desde el minimalismo formal, eco gráfico de los emoticonos, Pere Joan hace posible una toma de conciencia histórica que simbólicamente llevará a los lectores más allá de la inmediatez sugerida por la lógica del consumo hacia una crítica de la vida cotidiana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blurred(2014) is a comics-collage on hybridization, coldness and passion. The passage between organic and inorganic materials meets the strangeness of different forms which meld in this abstract tale. The short story/collage/drawings in which the main characters experience interspecies relations is based on the assumptions of the object-ontology. It is a visual flirt with the main topic: “Tranimacies.” The collage refers to contemporary artworks (Patricia Piccinini, Ray Caesar, Piotr Lutyński, Katarzyna Zabłocka, Jozef Robakowski) concerning hybridization, objectification, transsexualism, postmodernism and anthropomorphism, which are mixed with texts from newspapers, literature and dreams. Images and words are cut and melded to create a new, dangerous world where everything is a bit blurred and a trans-child is fighting for existence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Leonid Bol’shukhin, Maria Alexandrova: Lyrics by Majakovskij in the “Year of the Great Breakthrough”: Three Texts The article is dedicated to three major texts written by Majakovskij in 1929, the year preceding his death: “Razgovor s tovariščem Leninym” (“A Conversation with Comrade Lenin”), “Rasskaz Chrenova o Kuzneckstroe i o ljudjach Kuznecka” (“Chrenov’s Story about Kuzneckstroj and the People of Kuzneck”), and “Stichi o sovetskom pasporte” (“A Poem on the Soviet Passport”). The official literary criticism of the Soviet era regarded them as pieces of well­behaved, exemplary Soviet poetry. Subsequently, they were perceived as tendentious, which continues to be the received view in contemporary criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Seventeenth-century comic writer Cyrano de Bergerac's fictional journeys to the moon (L’Autre Monde) and to the sun (Les Etats et Empires du Soleil) include critiques of humanism and human exceptionalism that can be usefully recontextualized within twenty-first-century theoretical discourses related to ecocriticism and posthumanism. Cyrano's main weapons in his satirical attack on humanism include the critique of anthropocentrism; a poetics of misanthropy that also leads to a revitalizing rediscovery of human animality; images of hybridity and monstrosity; human/nonhuman interconnections and interactions; the personhood of animals and plants; animist materialization of natural environments and atmosphere; materialist relativism; and comic inversion. Though Cyrano's concerns were vastly different from our own, his works of early modern science fiction nonetheless resonate with the problems that define the anthropocene. The freedom of early modern comic fiction thus usefully informs the present-day era of environmental crisis with unexpected insights into humanity's existence on earth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay makes a case for ridicule as a vehicle for humoring rhetorical judgments. With an eye to the “ugly,” the “laughable,” and the “distorted” as longstandingtopoifor defying conventional appeals and wrongheaded standards, I build on contemporary interest in the politics of comedy by providing a provisional map of some of the tensions that emerge out of ridiculous appeals in public discourse. The general orientation is toward comic forms that seem to evidence the civic virtue in vulgarity. Specifically, this essay considers how ridicule bends the rules of rhetorical judgment in the formation (or reaffirmation) of cultural values. Stephen Colbert's stunt in establishing a political action committee is put forth as an example of how particularly comic judgments test the grounds of what tends to pass for acceptable political speech. In addition, broader economies of ridicule are engaged in order to consider some of our current politics of offense, the importance of occasionally disidentifying with so-called common sense, and laughter as a powerful rhetorical force in judging matters. The essay closes with a critical reflection on the stress that comic ridicule seems to put on rhetorical judgment as a site of civic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The comic scene in Spain has been growing since the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship in 1975 and has recently become more widely accepted due to (1) the influence of Hollywood films, (2) the interest in Japanese animation and (3) the rise of the graphic novel. Spanish comic books are proliferating through publications, readers and outreach in the public sphere, as well as the mainstream. Ibéroes: La guerra de las rosas (2009) by Iñigo Aguirre and Javier Tartaglia presents a group of characters as national superheroes that struggle against a massive attack from the Chinese collective already living within country's borders. This article not only analyses the relevance of popular culture, particularly comics, but also aims to unveil racism and other social concerns directly related to immigration, in the configuration of the new Spain. Taking into account these premises and focusing on the presence of Asian immigrants in the country, the study discusses how Ibéroes, in an attempt to create a parody of classic superhero comics, falls into the realm of generic pastiche while depicting a supposedly 'threatened' Spanish identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the treatment of urban space in the comic Manuel by Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester, first published in serialized form in the Spanish monthly arts magazine La Luna de Madrid in 1983-1984 and re-published in book format in 2005. My analysis suggests that within Manuel the urban, the creative, and the erotic-experiential become entangled and confused: the city of Madrid is not just a setting for the comic, but a site that allows for the transferences between lived experience (the love story between an unnamed protagonist and the eponymous Manuel) and creative activity (the protagonist's creation of a statue of Manuel) that structure and articulate the comic. Additionally, the comic's focus on urban heterotopic spaces such as parks, clubs, and Madrid's metro, as well as its destabilization of well-known landmarks (Gran Vía, Plaza Dos de Mayo, the Metrópolis building), suggest a view of the city constantly in the process of making and unmaking itself, rather than as a stable, graspable physical entity. Finally, this notion of urban space as dynamic flux can be seen to infiltrate the comic, as its narrative and structural coherence become undermined by frequent discontinuities and the collapse of different spatial and temporal planes within one single frame - features that invite a reading of the comic itself as a heterotopic site. Este artículo considera el tratamiento del espacio urbano en el cómic de Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester, Manuel, publicado inicialmente de forma serializada en la revista La Luna de Madrid durante los años 1983 y 1984 y publicado en formato libro en 2005. Mi análisis sugiere que, en Manuel, lo urbano se mezcla y se confunde con lo erótico y lo creativo. La ciudad de Madrid no sólo aparece como lugar de la acción, sino que se convierte en una presencia que permite las transferencias entre lo erótico-vivido (la historia de amor entre el protagonista anónimo y el epónimo Manuel) y lo creado y creativo (la creación, por parte del protagonista, de una estatua de Manuel) - transferencias que estructuran y articulan el cómic. Además, el énfasis del cómic en espacios urbanos heterotópicos, como parques, clubes, o el metro de Madrid, entre otros, así como la desestabilización de estampas emblemáticas de la ciudad (Gran Vía, Plaza Dos de Mayo, Edificio Metrópolis) apuntan a una visión de la ciudad como organismo en constante proceso de cambio, y no como una realidad física estable y aprehensible. Esta noción del espacio urbano como flujo dinámico infiltra el cómic, cuya coherencia estructural y narrativa se ve minada por frecuentes discontinuidades, así como por el colapso de distintos planos espaciales y temporales dentro de una misma viñeta - rasgos que invitan una lectura del cómic mismo como espacio heterotópico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The body and the gaze are of high importance in all erotic visual media, including Boys’ Love (BL) manga. But in contrast to many other visual media, comics and cartoons do not just show the human body as it appears, but as it is experienced or fantasized. Scott McCloud formulated a basic theory of the gaze in comics when he stated that, while gazing at another person, one sustains a constant awareness of one's own face, but that this mind picture is only a sketchy arrangement. Comics reflect that twofold pattern of the gaze by employing different drawing styles for the interior mind picture of the self and the exterior view of the other. This paper addresses how McCloud's model of the gaze plays out on a strictly visual level when it is applied to erotic situations in different types of comics and manga. Within that context, I ask about the form and location of the gaze in BL manga, an erotic medium that is by definition (mostly) drawn by female artists for a (mostly) female audience, but with an almost exclusively male cast, making it a textbook example of the ‘female gaze’ at male erotic objects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The increasing presence of surveillance cameras has had profound implications for comedy. Sitcom once habitually gave hints that its characters possessed an inner life, often one that was creatively inventive. 'Reality' television shares sitcom's assumption that ordinary lives are funny, but tends to create its own stereotypes and record them in ways that fail to acknowledge that they have any other dimensions. Sitcoms like The Royle Family (Aherne and Cash, 1996) and The Office (Gervais and Merchant, 2001) have developed some strategies to resist this, using the style of documentary but allowing characters to hint at their inner lives and their feelings about the camera itself. The paper explores twenty-first century BBC sitcom Miranda (2009) as a subversive new example of this practice, looking at the way the camera is 'tamed' by Miranda Hart's transparency in relating to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the fundamentals of aesthetics as it attempts to survey key moments in the history of the theory of laughter and to posit a renewed philosophical approach to the problem based on the ontology of social being, and the epistemological dimensions of its hermeneutical reception in comical texts. The author takes Socrates as a starting point, building on the notion of self-ignorance as an essential trait of the ridiculous; he then incorporates Schopenhauer's ontological hypothesis, which posits that laughter is a response to a perceived disjunction between a real object and the concepts by which it is represented mentally. This leads to an 'ontic-epistemic' theory in which the essential stimulus of laughter is deemed to be experiential manifestations of social being in perception that pass from a state of acceptance to a state of perceived contradiction and phoric non-acceptance. The stimulus of laughter is thus seen to be man disrobed of social being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Rhetoric project featured an eleven-year collaboration between Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Chaim Perelman, which culminated with their 1958 magnum opus, Traite de l'argumentation: la nouvelle rhetorique. Scholars have long speculated about Olbrechts-Tyteca's role in the New Rhetoric project and her relationship with Chaim Perelman. Building from the work of Barbara Warnick, a synchronic and diachronic analysis of their collaboration yields insight on the nature of their collaboration, putting a spotlight on the scholarship of Olbrechts-Tyteca and the role she played in the New Rhetoric project. Their collaboration pairs Perelman, the philosopher concerned about the human being reasoning, with Olbrechts-Tyteca, the literary critic who, using the theoretical frame of the New Rhetoric project, systematically developed the role of the comic in rhetorical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joy and sadness, the comic and the tragic, making jokes and telling jokes, have been known in life, literature, the theater, and art since the dawn of civilization. Following in the footsteps of classical antiquity, Freud added to the philosophical analysis of humor the insights offered by the psychoanalytic method. The bridge was the cathartic method of treating neuroses, where discharge of affect was one of the foundations of technique, and the cathartic, or discharge, function of humor. Freud's analysis of humor, that “A joke ... is the most social of all mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure” introduces Freud's first explicit formulation of an interpersonal approach to the human situation in health and disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between anthropology and identity through the process of travel writing and reading. Specifically, the article examines a range of mid to late twentieth century travel writings about the British Caribbean colony Montserrat to read into the culture of the writer and the assumed reader. These deconstructive 'glimpses into the unmentionable' often reveal an implicit racism. The travel writing texts - built upon very brief and often sponsored visits to the island - are also found to copy ideas and themes from each other such as the idea of Montserrat as an imitation of Ireland. Broadly speaking, these travel writings about Montserrat divide into two types of representation - the 'subordinate exotic' ('The Other Emerald Isle') and the 'comic exotic' (an odd ethnic spectacle of the 'Black-Irish'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]