ABSTRACT

Critical Approaches to Comics offers students a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing key theories and critical methods for analyzing comics. Each chapter explains and then demonstrates a critical method or approach, which students can then apply to interrogate and critique the meanings and forms of comic books, graphic novels, and other sequential art. The authors introduce a wide range of critical perspectives on comics, including fandom, genre, intertextuality, adaptation, gender, narrative, formalism, visual culture, and much more.

As the first comprehensive introduction to critical methods for studying comics, Critical Approaches to Comics is the ideal textbook for a variety of courses in comics studies.

Contributors: Henry Jenkins,  David Berona, Joseph Witek, Randy Duncan, Marc Singer, Pascal Lefevre,  Andrei Molotiu, Jeff McLaughlin, Amy Kiste Nyberg, Christopher Murray, Mark Rogers, Ian Gordon, Stanford Carpenter, Matthew J. Smith, Brad J. Ricca, Peter Coogan, Leonard Rifas,  Jennifer K. Stuller, Ana Merino, Mel Gibson, Jeffrey A. Brown, Brian Swafford

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Should We Discipline the Reading of Comics?

part |86 pages

Form

chapter |10 pages

Wordless comics

The Imaginative Appeal of Peter Kuper's The System

chapter |16 pages

Comics modes

Caricature and Illustration in the Crumb Family's Dirty Laundry

chapter |12 pages

Image functions

Shape and Color as Hermeneutic Images in Asterios Polyp

chapter |16 pages

Time and narrative

Unity and Discontinuity in The Invisibles

chapter |13 pages

Mise en scène and framing

Visual Storytelling in Lone Wolf and Cub

chapter |17 pages

Abstract form

Sequential Dynamism and Iconostasis in Abstract Comics and in Steve Ditko's Amazing Spider-Man

part |41 pages

Content

chapter |13 pages

Philosophy

“The Triumph of the Human Spirit” in X-Men

chapter |13 pages

Comics journalism

Drawing on Words to Picture the Past in Safe Area Goražde

chapter |13 pages

Propaganda

The Pleasures of Persuasion in Captain America

part |57 pages

Production

chapter |12 pages

Political economy

Manipulating Demand and “The Death of Superman”

chapter |10 pages

Culture of consumption

Commodification through Superman: Return to Krypton

chapter |11 pages

Ethnography of production

Editor Axel Alonso and the Sale of Ideas

chapter |11 pages

Auteur criticism

The Re-Visionary Works of Alan Moore

chapter |11 pages

History

Discovering the Story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster

part |64 pages

Context

chapter |18 pages

Genre

Reconstructing the Superhero in All-StarSuperman

chapter |14 pages

Ideology

The Construction of Race and History in Tintin in the Congo

chapter |17 pages

Feminism

aSecond-wave Feminism in the Pages of Lois Lane

chapter |13 pages

Intertextuality

Superrealist Intertextualities in Max's Bardín

part |38 pages

Reception

chapter |13 pages

Cultural studies

British Girls' Comics, Readers and Memories

chapter |11 pages

Ethnography

Wearing One's Fandom

chapter |12 pages

Critical ethnography

The Comics Shop As Cultural Clubhouse