gettinggraphical

[gettinggraphical]

The Figure of the Teacher in Comics: A Psychoanalytic Study of Immaterial and Fragmented Education

This book explores the distinctive narrative and representational gestures used to portray the personal and professional lives of teachers in comics. While serving as a reference for conceptualizing teachers in literary and popular culture, this book also turns to comics as a means to better understand and interpret lived, emotional experiences of teaching. Lewkowich discusses the cultural history of teachers in North American comics, and provides a series of thematic studies on the split and secret identities of teachers, teacher’s deaths by murder, and the teacher’s relationship to the thought bubble. He also outlines the psychic and social consequences of reading and making comics with preservice teachers.

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The Routledge Introduction to American Comics

This accessible, up-to-date textbook covers the history of comics as it developed in the US in all of its forms: political cartoons and newspaper comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, minicomics, and webcomics. Over the course of its six chapters, this introductory textbook addresses the artistic, cultural, social, economic, and technological impacts and innovations that comics have had in American history. Readers will be immersed in the history of American comics—from its origins in 18th-century political cartoons and late 19th-century newspaper strips to the rise of the wildly popular comic book, the radical, grassroots collectives that grew out of the underground comix movement of the 1960s and 1970s, all the way through contemporary longform graphic novels, the vibrant self-publishing scene, and groundbreaking webcomics. The Routledge Introduction to American Comics guides students, researchers, archivists, and even fans of the medium through a contemporary history of comics, attending to how a diverse range of creators and researchers have advanced the art form in key ways since its inception as a foundational art of American popular culture. In this way, it is uniquely suited to readers engaged in the study of comics, as well as those interested in the creation of comics and graphic narratives.

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*Association of comics researchers holds its first international event in Campo Grande*

The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UEMS) in Campo Grande will host the 1st International Meeting of the Association of Researchers in Sequential Art (I EIASPAS) which will be held along with the VII National Research Forum on Sequential Art (FNPAS) between November 5th and 8th, 2024. The event will be attended by foreign and national researchers and with the participation of people linked to the Brazilian publishing market, as well as comic book artists.

This edition aims to promote discussions and reflections on research with comics, both in terms of artistic creation and art in education and/or scientific research.. The proposal is to discuss issues linked to the ninth art that involve the interrelations between languages in terms of artistic practices, research on comics and teaching through sequential art, always keeping in mind the idea of “why study comics at the university?” in the contemporary scenario in which art has suffered retaliation from different social propositions.

Submissions for the event for short courses propositions and workshops, as well as communications or just listeners can now be made using this formand the complete program will be available on September 5, 2024 on the website www.eiaspas.com.br.

At the same time, ASPAS invites the community of comics and fanzine producers to participate as exhibitors at Feira Suplemento, the association's sequential art fair, which will take place on Thursday and Friday, November 7th and 8th, 2024. Selected participants will not need to pay for the space to sell their work. The Suplemento: Comics Fair aims to combine research and comics practices, bringing academics closer to people who make comics in Brazil. Thus, a more direct dialogue is created, in which researchers can learn about new developments in comics production and comic creators can get in touch with the proposals and results of research on comics carried out in Brazil and internationally. Registration for the Suplemento: Comics Fair will be available between August 12th and September 13th, 2024 on this form.

ASPAS (Association of Researchers in Sequential Art) is a congregation of academics based in the city of Leopoldina/MG and founded in 2012, aiming to popularize and highlight researches carried out in Brazil and around the world on comic books. Another of ASPAS' efforts is to decentralize academic production on comics in Brazil, with members from all federative units in the country. From the beginning, the combination of these efforts has produced at least one event and one academic book per year related to comics research.

Press contact: aspascontato@gmail.com

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Comics as Big Data: The transformation of comics into machine-interpretable information

Like so many generic literary reconstructions, comics are now being transformed into information -- a process that, for postdoctoral scholar Ilan Manouach, is concomitant with the expansion of tools and services in the field of generative AI. Like so many AI emergences (and emergencies), this one poses important challenges to the comics industry and the careers of comics professionals.

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Rest in peace, Peter B. Gillis

The co-creator of ‘Strikeforce: Morituri’ and writer of ‘Doctor Strange,’ ‘Defenders’ and ‘Micronauts’ has passed away at the age of 71.

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Vol. 10 No. 2 (2023): Maravilha comic. Redefining Gender in Ibero-American Graphic Narratives

"This thematic issue is titled Wonder Comics. Redrawing Gender in Ibero-American Graphic Narratives. It aims precisely at this exercise of critical redirection by investigating the role of gender in the production, consumption and circulation of graphic narratives created in the Ibero-American context, a vast and heterogeneous container of cultural spaces linked by common historical, linguistic and political traits. In Ibero-American countries (Spain, Portugal and the vast array of countries of Latin America), comics (otherwise called cómic, historietas, historias emquadrinhos or banda desenhada) have traditionally represented a significant share of the cultural productions and communication modes..... Despite the abundance of interconnections between gender politics and the creation of comics in the Ibero-American context, only scattered articles or book chapters have been published on the subject. No systematic analysis, monograph or special collections have been dedicated to the topic. This special issue aims to provide a first contribution that will, we hope, stimulate research and methodical reflections on the matter." (pp. 9-10).

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“His Numbering Clock”: Clockwork Men in Literary and Popular Culture

The image of a man turning into a clock has haunted literary and popular culture for the last four hundred years. This essay surveys the trope of the clockwork man from Shakespeare’s Elizabethan age to the modernist era and beyond. I explore two modernist examples of the trope, E. V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man (1923) and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), before turning to the postwar example of a DC comic book supervillain named the “Clock King,” who adorns his costume with clock dials and whose traumatic backstory involves the failure of mechanical devices to accurately measure human existence. Bookended by two examples of “clockwork kings,” this essay charts the relationship between a persistent cultural trope and the technological/ sociocultural history of time measurement.

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Captain America made his debut in 1940, just two years behind the first comic book superheroes and five years before the United States’ emergence as the world’s primary superpower at the end of World War II. His journey has been intertwined with America’s progress throughout the decades. Known as the “Sentinel of Liberty,” he has frequently provided socio-political commentary on current events as well as inspiration and warnings concerning the future.

This work explores the interconnected histories of the United States and Captain America, decade-by-decade, from the character’s origins to Chris Evans’ portrayal of him in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It examines how Captain America’s story provides a guide through America’s tenure as a global superpower, holds a mirror up to American society, and acts as a constant reminder of what America can and should be.

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On using Conversational Interfaces to Improve the Accessibility of a University Campus

Moving around a university campus may seem an activity of little importance: students are young, they walk and run without problems, with a simple glance they know where they are and where to go, they understand where a lesson is held, when a teacher is available or where to go when they are hungry. Activities that millions of students do every day. But what about students with some form of physical impairments? For them, moving around a university campus is a daily challenge. Can conversational interfaces improve the accessibility of a University campus? is the research question we address in this study. We involved students (with and without disabilities) in the development and evaluation of a skill for the Amazon Alexa platform. Results show that conversational interfaces are highly appreciated by most of the participants and confirm that such interfaces might improve the daily experience of users within a university campus.

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BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence

In 1954, the culture, distribution, and content of comics forever changed. Long a mainstay of America’s reading diet, comic books began to fall under the scrutiny of parent groups, church leaders, and politicians. The bright colors and cheaply printed pulp pages of comic books that had once provided an escape were suddenly presumed to house something lascivious, insidious, and morally corrosive. While anxieties about representations of violence in comics have largely fallen to the wayside since the moral panic of the 1950s, thematic and symbolic visual depictions of violence remain central to the comics form. BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence examines violence in every iteration—physical violence enacted between people and their environments, formal and structural violence embedded in the comics language itself, representations of historical violence, and ways of reading and seeing violence.

BOOM! SPLAT! is composed of fifteen essays from renowned comics scholars and is organized thematically into four sections, including an examination of histories of violence, forms of violence, modes and systems of violence, and political and social violence. Chapters focus on well-known comics and comics creators, such as Steve Ditko, Hulk, X-Men, and the Marvel universe, to newspaper cartoon strips, postwar graphic novels, revolution, civil rights, trauma, #blacklivesmatter, and more. BOOM! SPLAT! serves as a resource to scholars and comics enthusiasts who wish to contemplate and confront the permutations, forms, structures, and discourses of violence that have always animated cartoons.

Through this interrogation, our understanding of violence moves beyond the immediately physical and interpersonal into modes of ephemeral, psychological, and ideological violence. Contributors fill critical gaps by offering sustained explorations of the function of manifold violences in the comics language—those seen, felt, and imagined. The essays in this collection are critically necessary for understanding the current and historical role that violence has played in comics and will help recognize how cartooning imbricates, resists, and expands our thinking about and experiences of violence.

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Data and Doctor Doom: An Empirical Approach To Transmedia Characters

This book defines a straightforward way to analyse fictional characters through data. It shows how a data-led approach can produce rich analyses of characters, their surrounding storyworlds, and their authors across time and different types of media. It uses the Marvel Comics’ character, Doctor Doom as its main case study, and demonstrates the advantages of this approach by comparing the results to those taken from a survey of fan attitudes. It also uses the methodology to analyse the differences between the American and British characters who share the name "Dennis The Menace". Finally, it offers a range of further uses for the tool. All datasets and tools are made available to download, so that other researchers can use the methodology and compare their own results to those generated in the book.

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Transnational Conflicts and Dialogs in Japanese Manga Consumption

FROM THE EDITED VOLUME

Comics and Graphic Novels - International Perspectives, Education, and Culture [Working Title]

Dr. Adam I. Attwood

The purpose of this chapter is to identify the impact of the transnational consumption of Japanese manga on today’s international society. Advances in information technology and the popularization of online platforms lead to economic and market growth for the content industry and transnational conflicts between global fans from different cultural backgrounds. By analyzing the typical cases, these conflicts could be categorized into three types of background: the different perspective of history, the old feud with the other country, and the image of the war memories. On the one hand, these cases reveal the different ways of reading that are rooted in different cultural backgrounds and sometimes reinforce stereotypical images of other countries. On the other hand, this situation also provides an opportunity to create dialogs that lead to mutual understanding among global manga fans.

Keywords

Japanese manga

transnational consumption

conflict

dialog

global pop-culture fan

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Disallowed Truths: Race, Shadow Books, and Captain America

This article examines a series of Captain America stories by Black creators and locates these works in the tradition of "shadow books," as defined by Kevin Young in his study of Black culture and artistic expression, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Truth: Red, White, and Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker; The Crew, written by Christopher Priest and drawn by Joe Bennett; and Morales' truncated 2004 run on Marvel's flagship Captain America title are all examples of what Young calls "shadow books," works by Black creators that subvert conventional meanings and are in turn "disallowed, vanished": out of print for years, sometimes with plots that were cut short and never completed, their events only glancingly recognized (or retroactively altered) in Marvel's continuity. This article focuses, in particular, on the retroactive revision of a key plot point from Truth: Red, White, and Black, and the way in which this editorial revision functions as an act of erasure in a broader struggle over the representation of American history.

KEYWORDS

Captain America, Black culture, shadow books

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The manga whisperer: Automatically generating transcriptions for comics

In the past few decades, Japanese comics, commonly referred to as Manga, have transcended both cultural and linguistic boundaries to become a true worldwide sensation. Yet, the inherent reliance on visual cues and illustration within manga renders it largely inaccessible to individuals with visual impairments. In this work, we seek to address this substantial barrier, with the aim of ensuring that manga can be appreciated and actively engaged by everyone. Specifically, we tackle the problem of diarisation i.e. generating a transcription of who said what and when, in a fully automatic way.

To this end, we make the following contributions: (1) we present a unified model, Magi, that is able to (a) detect panels, text boxes and character boxes, (b) cluster characters by identity (without knowing the number of clusters apriori), and (c) associate dialogues to their speakers; (2) we propose a novel approach that is able to sort the detected text boxes in their reading order and generate a dialogue transcript; (3) we annotate an evaluation benchmark for this task using publicly available [English] manga pages. The code, evaluation datasets and the pre-trained model can be found at: this https URL.

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Growing Up Speculative: Comics, Spiders, and Child Subjectivities in Rabindranath Maharaj’s The Amazing Absorbing Boy and Imam Baksh’s Children of the Spider 

This chapter applies ideas from comic book studies and folklore to the young adult speculative fiction novels The Amazing Absorbing Boy, written by Trinidadian Rabindranath Maharaj, and Children of the Spider, written by Guyanese Imam Baksh. Each novel attends to experiences of migration, identity formation, and personal growth through narratives focalized on children. Whether it is Samuel of The Amazing Absorbing Boy migrating from Trinidad to Canada, or Mayali of Children of the Spider moving through the fictional portal of Zolpash to Georgetown, Guyana, readers are invited to consider the ways in which Caribbean children negotiate their belonging in unfamiliar worlds. The use of speculative fiction tropes such as shape-shifting and superhero personas allow the child protagonists of each novel to overturn power dynamics involving adults and children. Thus, the author considers the Caribbean speculative fiction genre to constitute a power that represents the world anew, empowering readers to appreciate the perspectives of Caribbean children in literature.

Keywords: Caribbean speculative fiction, comic books, Caribbean folklore, Migration, young adult literature

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Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives

While most US-based comics studies anthologies tend to neglect race, Beyond the Icon brings it to the foreground through an analysis of the vibrant and growing body of graphic narratives by Asian North American creators in the twenty-first century. By demonstrating how the forms and styles of the comics genre help depict Asian Americans as nuanced individuals in ways that words alone may not, Beyond the Icon makes the case for comics as a crucial artistic form in Asian American cultural production—one used to counter misrepresentations and myths, rewrite official history, and de-exoticize the Asian American experience.

An interdisciplinary team of contributors offers exciting new readings of key texts, including Ms. Marvel, George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s The Shadow Hero, works by Adrian Tomine and Jillian Tamaki, and more, to uncover the ways in which Asian American comics authors employ graphic narratives to provide full and complex depictions of Asian diasporic subjects and intervene in the wider North American consciousness. Beyond the Icon initiates vital conversations between Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and comics.

Contributors: Monica Chiu, Shilpa Davé, Melinda Luisa de Jesús, Lan Dong, Jin Lee, erin Khuê Ninh, Stella Oh, Jeanette Roan, Eleanor Ty

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Schwartz, B.Y. (2023). The Cosmopolitics of Belonging: Model Minority Superheroes and Theological Imagination. In: Pae, Kj.C., Lee, B. (eds) Embodying Antiracist Christianity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37264-3_4

This essay examines the process of shaping and reshaping US theological imagination through comic book superheroes and the role that Asian and Asian North American superhero characters play in that theological work. Comic book superheroes are not merely products of pop culture, but are characters that reveal shifting social, political, and theological understandings about individual and national identity, belonging, and power. Asian and Asian American superheroes have participated—or have been foreclosed from participating—in the creation, maintenance, and shifting of those theological and political understandings about national belonging and power. Asian American superheroes can act as model minority characters whose narratives sometimes expose what Cathy Park Hong labeled as “minor feelings”: affective experiences that are deemed as ugly, unsettled, and unassimilable into structures of white colonial capitalism and imperialism. Additionally, the serial nature of comic book superhero stories participates in this exposure of minor feelings. Asian American superhero narratives that dwell within minor feelings—specifically the minor feeling of shame—reveal the contradictions and hybridities, capacities and limitations, and critical choices about identity, power, and care that make communal belonging possible.