Goodbye, My Havana is the gripping story of everyday life, love, and sexual persecution during the early years of the Cuban Revolution as lived and seen through the eyes of a young German-American ...student, the lesbian daughter of American Communists who worked there for the government.
Comics versus art Beaty, Bart
Comics versus art,
c2012, 20120914, 2012, 2012-09-14, 2012-07-17
eBook
Comics Versus Art examines the relationship between comics and the most important institutions of the art world; including museums, auction houses, and the art press.
Manga and anime (illustrated serial novels and animated films) are highly influential Japanese entertainment media that boast tremendous domestic consumption as well as worldwide distribution and an ...international audience.Drawing on Traditionexamines religious aspects of the culture of manga and anime production and consumption through a methodological synthesis of narrative and visual analysis, history, and ethnography. Rather than merely describing the incidence of religions such as Buddhism or Shinto in these media, Jolyon BarakaThomas shows that authors and audiences create and re-create "religious frames of mind" through their imaginative and ritualized interactions with illustrated worlds. Manga and anime therefore not only contribute to familiarity with traditional religious doctrines and imagery, but also allow authors, directors, and audiences to modify and elaborate upon such traditional tropes, sometimes creating hitherto unforeseen religious ideas and practices.The book takes play seriously by highlighting these recursive relationships between recreation and religion, emphasizing throughout the double sense of play as entertainment and play as adulteration (i.e., the whimsical or parodic representation of religious figures, doctrines, and imagery). Building on recent developments in academic studies of manga and anime-as well as on recent advances in the study of religion as related to art and film-Thomas demonstrates that the specific aesthetic qualities and industrial dispositions of manga and anime invite practices of rendition and reception that can and do influence the ways that religious institutions and lay authors have attempted to captivate new audiences.Drawing on Traditionwill appeal to both the dilettante and the specialist: Fans and self-professed otaku will find an engaging academic perspective on often overlooked facets of the media and culture of manga and anime, while scholars and students of religion will discover a fresh approach to the complicated relationships between religion and visual media, religion and quotidian practice, and the putative differences between "traditional" and "new" religions.9 illus.
A troubled childhood in Iran. Living with a disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of ...considerable complexity and depth.
InAutobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles.
Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields--including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology--El Refaie shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one's self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.
The System of Comics Groensteen, Thierry; Beaty, Bart; Nguyen, Nick
01/2007
eBook
This edition of Thierry Groensteen'sThe System of Comicsmakes available in English a groundbreaking work on comics by one of the medium's foremost scholars. In this book, originally published in ...France in 1999, Groensteen explains clearly the subtle, complex workings of the medium and its unique way of combining visual, verbal, spatial, and chronological expressions. The author explores the nineteenth-century pioneer Rodolphe Töpffer, contemporary Japanese creators, George Herriman's Krazy Kat, and modern American autobiographical comics.
The System of Comics uses examples from a wide variety of countries including the United States, England, Japan, France, and Argentina. It describes and analyzes the properties and functions of speech and thought balloons, panels, strips, and pages to examine methodically and insightfully the medium's fundamental processes.
From this, Groensteen develops his own coherent, overarching theory of comics, a "system" that both builds on existing studies of the "word and image" paradigm and adds innovative approaches of his own. Examining both meaning and appreciation, the book provides a wealth of ideas that will challenge the way scholars approach the study of comics. By emphasizing not simply "storytelling techniques" but also the qualities of the printed page and the reader's engagement, the book's approach is broadly applicable to all forms of interpreting this evolving art.
Thierry Groensteen is a comics scholar and translator in Brussels, Belgium. He is the author ofLa bande dessinée: Une littérature graphiqueandLa construction de la cage, among other books. Bart Beaty is associate professor of communication and culture at the University of Calgary. Nick Nguyen is an archivist at Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, Ontario.
El Eternauta, Daytripper, and Beyond examines the graphic narrative tradition in the two South American countries that have produced the medium’s most significant and copious output. Argentine ...graphic narrative emerged in the 1980s, awakened by Héctor Oesterheld’s groundbreaking 1950s serial El Eternauta. After Oesterheld was “disappeared" under the military dictatorship, El Eternauta became one of the most important cultural texts of turbulent mid-twentieth-century Argentina. Today its story, set in motion by an extraterrestrial invasion of Buenos Aires, is read as a parable foretelling the “invasion" of Argentine society by a murderous tyranny. Because of El Eternauta, graphic narrative became a major platform for the country’s cultural redemocratization. In contrast, Brazil, which returned to democracy in 1985 after decades of dictatorship, produced considerably less analysis of the period of repression in its graphic narratives. In Brazil, serious graphic narratives such as Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá’s Daytripper, which explores issues of modernity, globalization, and cross-cultural identity, developed only in recent decades, reflecting Brazilian society’s current and ongoing challenges. Besides discussing El Eternauta and Daytripper, David William Foster utilizes case studies of influential works—such as Alberto Breccia and Juan Sasturain’s Perramus series, Angélica Freitas and Odyr Bernardi’s Guadalupe, and others—to compare the role of graphic narratives in the cultures of both countries, highlighting the importance of Argentina and Brazil as anchors of the production of world-class graphic narrative.
Marvel Comics in the 1970s
explores a forgotten chapter in the story of the rise of
comics as an art form. Bridging Marvel's dizzying
innovations and the birth of the underground comics scene in the
...1960s and the rise of the prestige graphic novel and postmodern
superheroics in the 1980s, Eliot Borenstein reveals a generation of
comic book writers whose work at Marvel in the 1970s established
their own authorial voice within the strictures of corporate
comics.
Through a diverse cast of heroes (and the occasional
antihero)-Black Panther, Shang-Chi, Deathlok, Dracula, Killraven,
Man-Thing, and Howard the Duck-writers such as Steve Gerber, Doug
Moench, and Don McGregor made unprecedented strides in exploring
their characters' inner lives. Visually, dynamic action was still
essential, but the real excitement was taking place inside their
heroes' heads. Marvel Comics in the 1970s highlights the
brilliant and sometimes gloriously imperfect creations that laid
the groundwork for the medium's later artistic achievements and the
broader acceptance of comic books in the cultural landscape
today.
