Critical Directions in Comics Studies
Critical Directions in Comics Studies
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Abstract
Recent decades have seen a blossoming of academic and scholarly concern with comics. Within the ecosystems of this growth, dominant assumptions have taken root—assumptions around the particular methods and approaches used to approach the comics form, around the ways we should read comics, how its ‘system’ works, and the disciplinary relationships that surround this evolving area of study. But other perspectives have also begun to flourish amidst this verdant landscape of comics studies. These approaches seek to question the reliance on structural linguistics and the tools of English and cultural studies in the examination and understanding of comics. They turn instead to politics, to aesthetics, to law, to critical theory. This collection seeks to grow, and to grow within those more critical directions in comics studies; to fertilize and help sustain them, to multiply them, and continue to cultivate a healthy skepticism, creativity, and openness in the approach to comics knowledge. Accordingly, this volume contains a collection of indicative and provocative essays, accumulated and compiled for readers to explore and make meaning out of: to get lost in, and hopefully find new and enriching directions forward in their encounters with the rich possibilities that comics enable. Traversing phenomenological, existential, material, legal, contextual, political, and revolutionary meanings in their engagements with both comics form and examples of comics work, and interspersed with critical comics interludes, these essays seek to consolidate, exemplify, and open up potential futures for the fecund and amorphous fields of critical comics studies.
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Front Matter
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Comics Interlude #1: Critical Comics Studies An Origin Story
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1
On Violation: Comic Books, Delinquency, Phenomenology
Christopher Pizzino
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2
Articulating Health Humanities in Graphic Narratives by Medical Illustrators
Lisa Detora
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3
“There Is a Man … with a Typewriter”: Deadpool as Existential Antihero, Breaking the Fourth Wall of Meaningful Existence
Yasemin J. Erden
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4
Theological “Seeing” of Law: Daredevil, Christian Iconography, and Legal Aesthetics
Timothy D. Peters
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1
On Violation: Comic Books, Delinquency, Phenomenology
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Comics Interlude #2 Let’s Get Critical!
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5
The Freedom of the Press: Comics, Labor, and Value in the Birmingham Arts Lab
Maggie Gray
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6
Hate, Marginalization, and Tramp-Bashing: A Raceclass and Critical Realist Approach to Researching British National Identity through Comics
Lydia Wysocki
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7
Comics and Heteroglossia
Paul Fisher Davies
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8
Women’s Cartoons and Comics in the Twenty-First Century: How the Humor in Simone Lia’s Fluffy Challenges Gendered Assumptions around Parenting
Nicola Streeten
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9
Politicization of Life and Auto-Thanatopolitics in V for Vendetta
Vladislav Maksimov
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5
The Freedom of the Press: Comics, Labor, and Value in the Birmingham Arts Lab
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Comics Interlude #3 The Nested Text
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10
“Destructive Interim Formation”
Thomas Giddens
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11
The Mask as Anti-Apparatus: On the Counter-Dispositif of V for Vendetta
Peter Goodrich
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12
“So You Still Believe in the Future?”: Socialist Utopianism and Marxist Critique in The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia
Matthew J. A. Green
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13
The Parable of Bill Ayers: Comics, Allegory, and Critical Legal Thinking
Adam Gearey
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10
“Destructive Interim Formation”
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End Matter
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