100 Years of American Newspaper Comics by
Copiously illustrated, comprehensive encyclopedia of all the great daily and Sunday newspaper comics and their creators. This spectacular volume, edited by a highly respected international authority, presents the evolution and history of the comics and features all of America's favorite strips: Blondie, Peanuts, Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, Beetle Bailey, and many more. 64 pages of color comics and 300 black-and-white strips.
The 101 Best Graphic Novels by
This concise guide to the best of what is out there and available now is updated considerably with half of the listings all new and a significant representation of the best in manga. Because there is so much being published in this exploding field, this guide shows readers what is worth concentrating on and owning.
The Art of the Book: From Medieval Manuscript to Graphic Novel by
Celebrating the marriage of word and image on the written and printed page, The Art of the Book presents rarely examined treasures from the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Featuring a huge range of material spanning six centuries—including illuminated manuscripts, fine bindings, the classics of children’s literature, comic novels, and artists’ books, it explores the ways in which books not only transmit information but become works of art in their own right.
Thematic sections illustrate the key aspects of book design and production over the ages. With medieval books of hours sitting alongside contemporary paperback novels, the choice of artists, designers, subjects, and authors is wonderfully varied—from Leonardo da Vinci to Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, Aesop to Charles Dickens, and de Brunhoff’s Babar the Elephant to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Strikingly illustrated with 100 colorplates, this absorbing compendium will be of interest to collectors, graphic designers, and booklovers.
Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels by
"As teachers, we're always looking for new ways to help our students engage with texts. James Bucky Carter and the contributors to this collection have found an effective approach: use graphic novels!
Carter and his contributors tap into the growing popularity of graphic novels in this one-of-a-kind guidebook. Each chapter presents practical suggestions for the classroom as it pairs a graphic novel with a more traditional text or examines connections between multiple sources. Some of the pairings include The Scarlet Letter and Katherine Arnoldi's The Amazing "True" Story of a Teenage Single Mom; Oliver Twist and Will Eisner's Fagin the Jew; Young adult literature and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis; Dante's Inferno and an X-Men story; classic fantasies (Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland) and Farel Dalrymple's Pop Gun War; traditional and graphic novel versions of Beowulf.
These creative pairings open up a double world of possibilities--in words and images--to all kinds of learners, from reluctant readers and English language learners to gifted students and those who are critically exploring relevant social issues. A valuable appendix recommends additional graphic novels for use in middle and high school classrooms.
Packed with great ideas for integrating graphic novels into the curriculum, this collection of creative and effective teaching strategies will help you and your students join the fun." (Amazon)
Caped Crusaders 101: Composition Through Comic Books by
"This textbook inspires an appreciation for literature by studying important literary themes found in comics. Chapters discuss DC, Marvel and other comics' varied attempts at portraying race, politics, economics, business ethics and democracy; responses to the Cold War and the events of September 11; and portrayals of prisons and capital punishment. Each chapter offers a series of questions."
Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence: The Evolution of a National Icon by
"Captain America's adventures span from World War II through the Cold War to the American War on Terror. In Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence, Stevens reveals how the hero evolved to maintain relevance to America's fluctuating ideas of masculinity, patriotism, and violence. Tracking the history of Captain America's adventures, Stevens places them in dialogue with the comic book industry as well as American politics, showing how the hero represents the ultimate American story: permanent enough to survive for more than seventy years with a history fluid enough to be constantly reinterpreted to meet the needs of an ever-changing culture."
Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America by
As American as jazz or rock and roll, comic books have been central in the nation's popular culture since Superman's 1938 debut in Action Comics #1. Selling in the millions each year for the past six decades, comic books have figured prominently in the childhoods of most Americans alive today. In Comic Book Nation , Bradford W. Wright offers an engaging, illuminating, and often provocative history of the comic book industry within the context of twentieth-century American society.
From Batman's Depression-era battles against corrupt local politicians and Captain America's one-man war against Nazi Germany to Iron Man's Cold War exploits in Vietnam and Spider-Man's confrontations with student protestors and drug use in the early 1970s, comic books have continually reflected the national mood, as Wright's imaginative reading of thousands of titles from the 1930s to the 1980s makes clear. In every genre--superhero, war, romance, crime, and horror comic books--Wright finds that writers and illustrators used the medium to address a variety of serious issues, including racism, economic injustice, fascism, the threat of nuclear war, drug abuse, and teenage alienation. At the same time, xenophobic wartime series proved that comic books could be as reactionary as any medium.
Wright's lively study also focuses on the role comic books played in transforming children and adolescents into consumers; the industry's ingenious efforts to market their products to legions of young but savvy fans; the efforts of parents, politicians, religious organizations, civic groups, and child psychologists like Dr. Fredric Wertham (whose 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, a salacious expos#65533; of the medium's violence and sexual content, led to U.S. Senate hearings) to link juvenile delinquency to comic books and impose censorship on the industry; and the changing economics of comic book publishing over the course of the century. For the paperback edition, Wright has written a new postscript that details industry developments in the late 1990s and the response of comic artists to the tragedy of 9/11. Comic Book Nation is at once a serious study of popular culture and an entertaining look at an enduring American art form.
Crime Comics: The Illustrated History by
Profusely illustrated in color. Beginning in the 1930s with Dick Tracy, the author traces the history of crime comics through the Depression-era battles between the FBI and public enemies like Dillinger, the 1960s and 70s TV detectives such as Napoleon Solo and Peter Gunn, up to today's breed of sleuth. Contains an alphabetical comic checklist including publisher, dates, and a brief description.
The Encyclopedia of American Comics by
The celebration of this American art form is (deservedly) a growth industry. This alphabetical reference contains some 600 entries on comic strips and comic books, the characters who people them, the artists who create them, and the syndicates that license them, as well as a 16-page color photo insert and 117 bandw photos.
Graphic Novels and Comic Books by
Comics, graphic novels, sequential art have gained unprecedented legitimacy. The articles collected in this volume provide an overview of this wildly diverse, increasingly popular, and widely accepted form of literature. --from editor's preface.
MetaMaus by
In the pages of MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman re-enters the Pulitzer prize–winning Maus, the modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since it was first published twenty-five years ago.
He probes the questions that Maus most often evokes—Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics?—and gives us a new and essential work about the creative process.
MetaMaus includes a bonus DVD-R that provides a digitized reference copy of The Complete Maus linked to a deep archive of audio interviews with his survivor father, historical documents, and a wealth of Spiegelman’s private notebooks and sketches.
Compelling and intimate, MetaMaus is poised to become a classic in its own right.
On the Graphic Novel by
A noted comics artist himself, Santiago García follows the history of the graphic novel from early nineteenth-century European sequential art, through the development of newspaper strips in the United States, to the development of the twentieth-century comic book and its subsequent crisis. He considers the aesthetic and entrepreneurial innovations that established the conditions for the rise of the graphic novel all over the world. García not only treats the formal components of the art, but also examines the cultural position of comics in various formats as a popular medium. Typically associated with children, often viewed as unedifying and even at times as a threat to moral character, comics art has come a long way. With such examples from around the world as Spain, France, Germany, and Japan, García illustrates how the graphic novel, with its increasingly global and aesthetically sophisticated profile, represents a new model for graphic narrative production that empowers authors and challenges longstanding social prejudices against comics and what they can achieve.
The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines by
A cultural history of comic book heroines. Is their world of fantasy different from our own-- or an alternative saga of modern American women?
Teaching the Graphic Novel by
Graphic novels are now appearing in a great variety of courses: composition, literature, drama, popular culture, travel, art, translation. The thirty-four essays in this volume explore issues that the new art form has posed for teachers at the university level.
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by
In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created--in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. Comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress. This book opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority, showing how--years before rock 'n' roll--comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards.-- From publisher description.
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by
Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, this innovative comic book provides a detailed look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning.
101 Outstanding Graphic Novels by
Stephen Weiner is the director of the Maynard Public Library in Maynard, Massachusetts, and a comics historian and critic who has been a pioneering advocate for graphic novels in public libraries and education and has published numerous articles and reviews about comic art. He is the author of 100 Graphic Novels for Public Libraries, The 101 Best Graphic Novels, and Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. He is coauthor of Hellboy: The Companion, Using Graphic Novels with Children and Teens: A Guide for Teachers and Librarians, and The Will Eisner Companion. He is a recipient of the Comic Creator’s Guild Award. He lives in Maynard, Massachusetts. Daniel J. Fingeroth is a former writer and editor at Marvel Comics and has written stories for comics anthologies including Studs Terkel’s Working. He is the author of Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero; and Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society; The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels. He is a creative consultant to Will Eisner Studios and Wizard World Comics Conventions.
Asian Comics by
Grand in its scope, Asian Comics dispels the myth that, outside of Japan, the continent is nearly devoid of comic strips and comic books. Relying on his fifty years of Asian mass communication and comic art research, during which he traveled to Asia at least seventy-eight times and visited many studios and workplaces, John A. Lent shows that nearly every country had a golden age of cartooning and has experienced a recent rejuvenation of the art form. As only Japanese comics output has received close and by now voluminous scrutiny, Asian Comics tells the story of the major comics creators outside of Japan. Lent covers the nations and regions of Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Organized by regions of East, Southeast, and South Asia, Asian Comics provides 178 black-and-white illustrations and detailed information on comics of sixteen countries and regions--their histories, key creators, characters, contemporary status, problems, trends, and issues. One chapter harkens back to predecessors of comics in Asia, describing scrolls, paintings, books, and puppetry with humorous tinges, primarily in China, India, Indonesia, and Japan. The first overview of Asian comic books and magazines (both mainstream and alternative), graphic novels, newspaper comic strips and gag panels, plus cartoon/humor magazines, Asian Comics brims with facts, fascinating anecdotes, and interview quotes from many pioneering masters, as well as younger artists.
Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form by
It has become an axiom in comic studies that "comics is a language, not a genre." But what exactly does that mean, and how is discourse on the form both aided and hindered by thinking of it in linguistic terms? In Comics and Language, Hannah Miodrag challenges many of the key assumptions about the "grammar" and formal characteristics of comics, and offers a more nuanced, theoretical framework that she argues will better serve the field by offering a consistent means for communicating critical theory in the scholarship. Through engaging close readings and an accessible use of theory, this book exposes the problems embedded in the ways critics have used ideas of language, literature, structuralism, and semiotics, and sets out a new and more theoretically sound way of understanding how comics communicate. Comics and Language argues against the critical tendency to flatten the distinctions between language and images and to discuss literature purely in terms of story content. It closely examines the original critical theories that such arguments purport to draw on and shows how they in fact point away from the conclusions they are commonly used to prove. The book improves the use the field makes of existing scholarly disciplines and furthers the ongoing sophistication of the field. It provides animated and insightful analyses of a range of different texts and takes an interdisciplinary approach. Comics and Language will appeal to the general comics reader and will prove crucial for specialized scholars in the fields of comics, literature, cultural studies, art history, and visual studies. It also provides a valuable summary of the current state of formalist criticism within comics studies and so presents the ideal text for those interested in exploring this growing area of research
Contemporary Comics Storytelling by
What if fairy-tale characters lived in New York City? What if a superhero knew he was a fictional character? What if you could dispense your own justice with one hundred untraceable bullets? These are the questions asked and answered in the course of the challenging storytelling in Fables, Tom Strong, and 100 Bullets, the three twenty-first-century comics series that Karin Kukkonen considers in depth in her exploration of how and why the storytelling in comics is more than merely entertaining. Applying a cognitive approach to reading comics in all their narrative richness and intricacy, Contemporary Comics Storytelling opens an intriguing perspective on how these works engage the legacy of postmodernism—its subversion, self-reflexivity, and moral contingency. Its three case studies trace how contemporary comics tie into deep traditions of visual and verbal storytelling, how they reevaluate their own status as fiction, and how the fictional minds of their characters generate complex ethical thought experiments. At a time when the medium is taken more and more seriously as intricate and compelling literary art, this book lays the groundwork for an analysis of the ways in which comics challenge and engage readers’ minds. It brings together comics studies with narratology and literary criticism and, in so doing, provides a new set of tools for evaluating the graphic novel as an emergent literary form.
American Splendor by
The classic collection of the comics that inspired the movie American Splendor, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. American Splendor is the world's first literary comic book. Cleveland native Harvey Pekar is a true American original. A V.A. hospital file clerk and comic book writer, Harvey chronicles the ordinary and mundane in stories both funny and touching. His dead-on eye for the frustrations and minutiae of the workaday world mix in a delicate balance with his insight into personal relationships. Pekar has been compared to Dreiser, Dostoevsky, and Lenny Bruce. But he is truly more than all of them; he is himself.
Masterful Marks by
In a first-of-its-kind collection, award-winning illustrators celebrate the lives of the visionary artists who created the world of comic art and altered pop culture forever. No one has told the story of comic art in its own medium, until now. In Masterful Marks, top illustrators--including Drew Friedman, Nora Krug, Denis Kitchen, and Peter Kuper--reveal how sixteen visionary cartoonists overcame massive financial, political, and personal challenges to create a new form of art that now defines our world. Superhero comics didn't exist until two teenagers from Cleveland created the first superhero of all time: Superman. Advertising artist Theodor Geisel released his first book in 1937 as Dr. Seuss--and children's literature was never the same. Charles M. Schulz's perseverance and passion gave the world Peanuts, the world's most famous comic strip. Featuring these tales, and profiling such giants as Walt Disney, Robert Crumb, and the creators of MAD, Tintin, and manga, Masterful Marks illustrates how graphic storytelling became such a rich and popular medium. Masterful Marks is a stunning portrait of the comic art's aesthetic heritage and a powerful story of how creative vision can change the world"-- "Masterful Marks is a first-of-its-kind collection of graphic biographies of the visionary artists who pioneered the modern era of comics, drawn by today's foremost illustrators and edited by the award-winning creator of the cult-favorite BLAB art books, Monte Beauchamp. In Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World, sixteen award-winning illustrators shed light on the lives of the pioneer artists who most influenced them--and who created the world of modern comic art. Covering comic strips, manga, graphic novels, gag cartoons, children's books, and animation--and featuring such giants as Charles Schulz and the creators of Superman, Walt Disney, Hergé, Charles Addams, Robert Crumb, and Dr. Seuss--Masterful Marks is a tribute to the visionary creators whose work left an indelible mark upon the world. Had it not been for these monumental characters, the billion-dollar cartoon and comics industries would not exist as we know them today. Masterful Marks tells the stories of: * Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (creators of Superman) by Ryan Heshka and Monte Beauchamp * Edward Gorey (celebrated author of children's books) by Greg Clarke * Winsor McCay (animation pioneer) by Nicolas Debon * Charles Schulz (creator of Peanuts) by Sergio Ruzzier * Chas Addams (creator of The Addams Family) by Marc Rosenthal * Jack Kirby (co-creator of Captain America) by Mark Alan Stamaty * Harvey Kurtzman (creator of MAD magazine) by Peter Kuper Masterful Marks is at once a visually stunning portrait of the cartoon world's aesthetic heritage, and a powerful story of how creative vision can change the world.
Comic Book Artists by
Profiles of 150 major illustrators with listings and values for their comics (in 1993).
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures by
A course on comic creation--for college classes or for independent study--that centers on storytelling and concludes with making a finished comic. With chapters on lettering, story structure, and panel layout, the fifteen lessons offered--each complete with homework, extra-credit activities and supplementary reading suggestions--provide a solid introduction for people interested in making their own comics. Additional resources, lessons, and after-class help are available on the accompanying website, http://www.dw-wp.com. --From publisher description.
The Lexicon of Comicana by
"Written as a satire on the comic devices cartoonists use, [this] book quickly became a textbook for art students. Walker researched cartoons around the world to collect this international set of cartoon symbols. The names he invented for them now appear in dictionaries."--Page 4 of cover.
Making Comics by
Scott McCloud tore down the wall between high and low culture in 1993 with Understanding Comics, a massive comic book about comics, linking the medium to such diverse fields as media theory, movie criticism, and web design. In Reinventing Comics, McCloud took this to the next level, charting twelve different revolutions in how comics are generated, read, and perceived today. Now, in Making Comics, McCloud focuses his analysis on the art form itself, exploring the creation of comics, from the broadest principles to the sharpest details (like how to accentuate a character's facial muscles in order to form the emotion of disgust rather than the emotion of surprise.) And he does all of it in his inimitable voice and through his cartoon stand–in narrator, mixing dry humor and legitimate instruction. McCloud shows his reader how to master the human condition through word and image in a brilliantly minimalistic way. Comic book devotees as well as the most uninitiated will marvel at this journey into a once–underappreciated art form.
