Funnybooks Barrier, Michael
2014., 20141128, 2014, 2014-11-27
eBook
Funnybooksis the story of the most popular American comic books of the 1940s and 1950s, those published under the Dell label. For a time, "Dell Comics Are Good Comics" was more than a slogan-it was a ...simple statement of fact. Many of the stories written and drawn by people like Carl Barks(Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge),John Stanley(Little Lulu),and Walt Kelly(Pogo)repay reading and rereading by educated adults even today, decades after they were published as disposable entertainment for children. Such triumphs were improbable, to say the least, because midcentury comics were so widely dismissed as trash by angry parents, indignant librarians, and even many of the people who published them. It was all but miraculous that a few great cartoonists were able to look past that nearly universal scorn and grasp the artistic potential of their medium. With clarity and enthusiasm, Barrier explains what made the best stories in the Dell comic books so special. He deftly turns a complex and detailed history into an expressive narrative sure to appeal to an audience beyond scholars and historians.
Starting in the mid-1980s, a talented set of comics artists changed the American comic-book industry forever by introducing adult sensibilities and aesthetic considerations into popular genres such ...as superhero comics and the newspaper strip. Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1987) revolutionized the former genre in particular. During this same period, underground and alternative genres began to garner critical acclaim and media attention beyond comics-specific outlets, as best represented by Art Spiegelman's Maus. Publishers began to collect, bind, and market comics as "graphic novels," and these appeared in mainstream bookstores and in magazine reviews.The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts brings together new scholarship surveying the production, distribution and reception of American comics from this pivotal decade to the present. The collection specifically explores the figure of the comics creator--either as writer, as artist, or as writer and artist--in contemporary U.S. comics, using creators as focal points to evaluate changes to the industry, its aesthetics, and its critical reception. The book also includes essays on landmark creators such as Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, as well as insightful interviews with Jeff Smith (Bone), Jim Woodring (Frank) and Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics). As comics have reached new audiences, through different material and electronic forms, the public's broad perception of what comics are has changed. The Rise of the American Comics Artist surveys the ways in which the figure of the creator has been at the heart of these evolutions.
Some comics fans view the industry's Golden Age (1930s-1950s) as a challenging time when it comes to representations of race, an era when the few black characters appeared as brutal savages, devious ...witch doctors, or unintelligible minstrels. Yet the true portrait is more complex and reveals that even as caricatures predominated, some Golden Age comics creators offered more progressive and nuanced depictions of black people. Desegregating Comics assembles a team of leading scholars to explore how debates about the representation of blackness shaped both the production and reception of Golden Age comics. Some essays showcase rare titles like Negro Romance and consider the formal innovations introduced by black comics creators like Matt Baker and Alvin Hollingsworth, while others examine the treatment of race in the work of such canonical cartoonists as George Herriman and Will Eisner. The collection also investigates how black fans read and loved comics, but implored publishers to stop including hurtful stereotypes. As this book shows, Golden Age comics artists, writers, editors, distributors, and readers engaged in heated negotiations over how blackness should be portrayed, and the outcomes of those debates continue to shape popular culture today.
In this writing I investigate three mechanisms of comics that can support expanded possibilities for students in art classes: the combination of words and images, gaps (or spaces between images where ...meaning is formed in comics), and the technique of masking (or representing reality through fantasy). Respectively, these qualities may facilitate possibility by offering unique modes of communication with self and others; providing agency through choices of emphasis and omissions; and escaping the confines of rationality into a boundary-pushing narrative flow. These possibilities are particularly supportive of outsider students, defined as being unrecognized by normative culture, pressured to change their usual behaviour, and dissuaded from perceiving their own value. This writing is supported by personal stories, excerpts of my own comics art, and scholarship in the fields of art education, critical disabilities, and comics studies.
Girls, gender and identity in comicsSugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice offers an innovative, wide-ranging and geographically diverse book-length treatment of girlhood in comics. The various ...contributing authors and artists provide novel insights into established themes within comics studies, children’s comics, graphic medicine and comics by and about refugees and marginalised ethnic or cultural groups. The book enriches traditional historical, narratological and aesthetic approaches to studying girlhood in comics with practice-based research, discussion and conversation. This re-examination of girls, gender and identity in comics connects with contemporary discourse on gender identity politics. Through examples from both within Europe, the anglophone world and beyond, and including visual essays alongside critical theory, the volume furthermore engages with new developments in contemporary comics scholarship. It will therefore appeal to students and scholars of childhood studies, comics scholars and creators, and those interested in addressing gender identity through the prism of comics. Contributors: Mel Gibson (Northumbria University), Martha Newbigging (Seneca College), María Porras Sánchez (Complutense University of Madrid), JoAnn Purcell (York University and Seneca College), Benoît Glaude (Ghent University/University of Louvain), Sylvain Lesage (University of Lille), Joan Ormrod (Manchester Metropolitan University), Aswathy Senan (The Research Collective Delhi), Michel De Dobbeleer (Ghent University), Sébastien Conard (KASK Ghent School of Arts and LUCA Brussels), Marthine Bertiot (University of Edinburgh), Julia Round (Bournemouth University) Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
Movie Comics Davis, Blair
2017, 20170103, 2017-01-03
eBook
As Christopher Nolan'sBatmanfilms and releases from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have regularly topped the box office charts, fans and critics alike might assume that the "comic book movie" is a ...distinctly twenty-first-century form. Yet adaptations of comics have been an integral part of American cinema from its very inception, with comics characters regularly leaping from the page to the screen and cinematic icons spawning comics of their own.
Movie Comicsis the first book to study the long history of both comics-to-film and film-to-comics adaptations, covering everything from silent films starring Happy Hooligan to sound films and serials featuring Dick Tracy and Superman to comic books starring John Wayne, Gene Autry, Bob Hope, Abbott & Costello, Alan Ladd, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. With a special focus on the Classical Hollywood era, Blair Davis investigates the factors that spurred this media convergence, as the film and comics industries joined forces to expand the reach of their various brands. While analyzing this production history, he also tracks the artistic coevolution of films and comics, considering the many formal elements that each medium adopted and adapted from the other.
As it explores our abiding desire to experience the same characters and stories in multiple forms,Movie Comicsgives readers a new appreciation for the unique qualities of the illustrated page and the cinematic moving image.
This article will attempt to answer the question 'Why aren't we talking about the Beano?' by first of all explaining what The Beano is, who 'we' are, and why there is a popular perception, in the UK ...at least, that the latter should be discussing the former. It will then provide empirical evidence that we are not talking about The Beano and offer a number of explanations for why this might be before finally demonstrating why any of it matters.
