Comic Book Women Brunet, Peyton; Davis, Blair; Robbins, Trina
01/2022
eBook
The history of comics has centered almost exclusively on men.
Comics historians largely describe the medium as one built by men
telling tales about male protagonists, neglecting the many ways in
...which women fought for legitimacy on the page and in publishers'
studios. Despite this male-dominated focus, women played vital
roles in the early history of comics. The story of how comic books
were born and how they evolved changes dramatically when women like
June Tarpé Mills and Lily Renée are placed at the center rather
than at the margins of this history, and when characters such as
the Black Cat, Patsy Walker, and Señorita Rio are analyzed.
Comic Book Women offers a feminist history of the
golden age of comics, revising our understanding of how numerous
genres emerged and upending narratives of how male auteurs built
their careers. Considering issues of race, gender, and sexuality,
the authors examine crime, horror, jungle, romance, science
fiction, superhero, and Western comics to unpack the cultural and
industrial consequences of how women were represented across a wide
range of titles by publishers like DC, Timely, Fiction House, and
others. This revisionist history reclaims the forgotten work done
by women in the comics industry and reinserts female creators and
characters into the canon of comics history.
It is hard to discuss the current film industry without acknowledging the impact of comic book adaptations, especially considering the blockbuster success of recent superhero movies. Yet transmedial ...adaptations are part of an evolution that can be traced to the turn of the last century, when comic strips such as “Little Nemo in Slumberland" and “Felix the Cat" were animated for the silver screen. Representing diverse academic fields, including technoculture, film studies, theater, feminist studies, popular culture, and queer studies, Comics and Pop Culture presents more than a dozen perspectives on this rich history and the effects of such adaptations. Examining current debates and the questions raised by comics adaptations, including those around authorship, style, and textual fidelity, the contributors consider the topic from an array of approaches that take into account representations of sexuality, gender, and race as well as concepts of world-building and cultural appropriation in comics from Modesty Blaise to Black Panther. The result is a fascinating re-imagination of the texts that continue to push the boundaries of panel, frame, and popular culture.
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), Marine Berthiot (University of Edinburgh), Julia Round (Bournemouth University)Ebook available in Open Access.This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
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).
In May of 1939, DC Comics introduced their popular Batman series, but it was a year later when the iconic villain, the Joker, entered the story. What began as a lighthearted pulp comic has since ...evolved, with Batman’s enemies growing darker and more sinister. In the film, the Joker is now less “clown prince” than violent madman, determined to wreak havoc and spread his warped view of society. Through a thematic discourse analysis, this article explores how Batman films featuring the Joker routinely naturalize and reinforce sanist beliefs about mental illness and are deployed as narrative prostheses to rationalize his heinous crimes. Blending work from both disability studies and mad studies, we explore the cultural construction of madness as animated by filmic representations of the Joker and consider how these narratives inform perceptions of mental illness and subsequently rationalize the disciplining of mad people.
In the years following 1975, a group of female-created comic strips came to national attention in a traditionally male-dominated medium. Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips ...uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women’s experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women’s rights in popular comic strips.
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.
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