...Students and teachers constitute an increasingly important public for comics and graphic novels. While comics and education have not always had a positive history, now it seems that the relationship has blossomed. Teachers employ graphic novels and comic book adaptations to address a changing...

...Drawing from recent controversies around Robert Crumb and his legacy in contemporary comics culture, chapter contributor Jason S. Polley reflects on the complex discourse that circulates around Crumb in comics studies and in comics culture more broadly. Crumb’s so-called uncompromising art—which...

... with the counter-cultural desire to find a space outside or beyond the reach of state power; and a resigned awareness that such a space cannot be established in the corrupt and corrupting world of capitalist modernity. Crumb Robert gender Graphic Festival Australia race racism sexism sexuality Weirdo comics...

...In this chapter, Julian Lawrence adopts an “a/r/tographical methodology” to research and create an 8-10 page comics essay that investigates the ways R. Crumb challenges scholars in an age of political correctness. This visual essay combines autobiographical, theoretical, and methodological...

... Hogarth.” More recently Bart Beaty has pointed out that Crumb holds a unique position for a comic book artist, that “on the basis of specifically art-world prestige, Crumb is an elite cartoonist.” In this chapter, David Huxley analyzes the way in which Crumb’s drawing style developed, through his early...

...American comics have for most of their existence reflected the white-supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness that both signal and hide its presence, blending into the cultural landscape as myths that serve to buttress and sustain...

...Chapter Four argues that beginning in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement advanced, publishers such as EC Comics and later Marvel Comics began to impugn racism and discrimination in their comics. However, their efforts, along with those of the civil rights activist and anti-comics crusader...

...This chapter introduces and contextualizes the gradual emergence and flourishing of LGBTQ+ comics in varied regional publication, commercial, and sexual cultures. From comics' earliest days, their queerness was emergent, incipient, and implicit. Now, LGBTQ+ comics proliferate across every genre...

...Responding to individual or collective threats, celebrating shared expressions of pride, culture, and identity, acknowledging common experiences of self-discovery, sex, friendship, and love, and affirming queer histories, LGBTQ+ comics demonstrate the literal and notional power of personal...

...During the first decade of the AIDS crisis, British and American LGBTQ+ cartoonists formed community through the work of producing comics anthologies and foregrounded activism as integral to their comics. The anthologies, Strip AIDS (1987) and Strip AIDS U.S.A...

...This overview of German-language LGBTQ+ comics deepens and complements studies of the LGBTQ+ European comics and bande dessinée scene. Tracking the development of German queer comics from their consolidation after the Weimar era’s crackdowns, the Nazis’ efforts to eradicate gays...

...Prompted by fandom, the creators of the French gay comics zine Dokkun seek to emulate and understand the comics of the Japanese artists whom they encounter at fanzine conventions in Europe and Japan. The resulting “contact zones” among geographically far-flung gay comics communities suggest...

...From 1988 to 1994, BLK, the monthly American newsmagazine for African-American LGBTQ+ readers, regularly featured single-panel comics that visualized the lives of Black lesbians. In pages that mingled investigative journalism, news coverage, and profiles of major contemporary Black...

... Vasilyevich Scheinin Richard Schulz Meredith Rise Scott Beck musician Björk Thain Douglas Whitehouse Kieran Wilco Patty Peanuts character Shermy Happiness Is a Warm Puppy Violet Hogan’s Alley Outcault Kopin Joshua Abraham Outcault Richard Yellow Kid Outcault Archie comic strip Cronin Brian...

...This chapter discusses the importance of Art Spiegelman as a creator, editor, and theorist of comics. It argues that his work has, by many accounts, brought a new sophistication and reflexivity to comics, and he has created an astonishing range of work in a variety of formats and styles across half...

... overlapping modernist efforts over twenty years, the chapter aims to show how he extended the logic of visual parataxis to radically reshape the possibilities of comics, their presentation, and their cultural cachet. It first investigates some of Spiegelman's early experimental comics, including “Don't Get...

...This chapter focuses on how the sheer range of modernist forms that Art Spiegelman has built on becomes apparent. It particularly looks at jazz as soundtrack and signature key for Spiegelman's improvisational renditions of cross-racial, lowbrow Americana. Like jazz, comics mixes high and low...

...This chapter applies a different lens to Art Spiegelman's September 11 comics, one that organizes the role of visual media in Spiegelman's memorialization of personal experience and world-historical trauma. The history of comics is imbued with nostalgia—for simpler times and truths...

... photography's much-touted facticity, the chapter insists, in representing an event like the Holocaust, comics are better placed to convey the inaccessibility of the past. The chapter then focuses on the questions raised by the actual and simulated photographs in the graphic memoir. Needless to say...

... of Spiegelman's aesthetic of trauma in both the contemporary comics world and the wider fields of trauma art and Holocaust representation. Adorno Theodor W affect Auschwitz concentration camps culture Holocaust Maus Negative Dialectics Adorno Nietzsche Friedrich Nuit et Brouillard trauma Aetiology...