ABSTRACT

Comics Studies Here and Now marks the arrival of comics studies scholarship that no longer feels the need to justify itself within or against other fields of study. The essays herein move us forward, some in their re-diggings into comics history and others by analyzing comics—and all its transmedial and fan-fictional offshoots—on its own terms. Comics Studies stakes the flag of our arrival—the arrival of comics studies as a full-fledged discipline that today and tomorrow excavates, examines, discusses, and analyzes all aspects that make up the resplendent planetary republic of comics. This collection of scholarly essays is a testament to the fact that comic book studies have come into their own as an academic discipline; simply and powerfully moving comic studies forward with their critical excavations and theoretical formulas based on the common sense understanding that comics add to the world as unique, transformative cultural phenomena.

chapter |6 pages

Comics Studies Here and Now

An Introduction

part I|60 pages

Words, Pictures, and Borders

chapter 1|24 pages

A Touch of Irony and Pity

Krazy Kat in the Breaks

chapter 2|13 pages

In Love with Magic and Monsters

The Groundbreaking Life and Work of Rose O’Neill

chapter 3|13 pages

Cranky Bosses, Rebellious Characters, and Suicidal Artists

Scribbly, Inkie, and Pre-Underground Autobiographical Comics

chapter 4|10 pages

How Lust Was Lost

Genre, Identity, and the Neglect of a Pioneering Comics Publication

part II|54 pages

Transmedial Forms

part III|40 pages

Institutions and Movements

part IV|78 pages

Resistant Word-Drawn Acts & Transformative Reading Communities

chapter 11|19 pages

The Latina Superheroine

Protecting the Reader from the Comic Book Industry’s Racial, Gender, Ethnic, and Nationalist Biases

chapter 12|11 pages

The Page Is Local

Planetarity and Embodied Metaphor in Anglophone Graphic Narratives from South Asia

chapter 13|20 pages

Hands across the Ocean

A 1970s Network of French and American Women Cartoonists

chapter 15|13 pages

Service Dogs, Code-Switching, and Interracial Polyamory

Exploring the Reclamation Narratives of Comic Fandom

part V|94 pages

Margins Transforming Centers

chapter 16|13 pages

Once and Again, Ack!

Epimone, Recursion, and Variation in Guisewite’s Cathy

chapter 18|14 pages

Only a Chilling Elegy

An Examination of White Bodies, Colonialism, Fascism, Genocide, and Racism in Dragon Ball

chapter 19|17 pages

From the Inner City to the Interstellar

Brian K. Vaughan’s Comix after 9/11

chapter 20|19 pages

“Am I Doing the Right Thing?”

Milestone Comics, Black Nationalism, and the Cosmopolitics of Static

chapter 21|16 pages

Juvenile, Cruel, and MAD

In Defense of Immature Comics