Frederick Luis Aldama is award winning author, scholar, teacher and Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University. He is author, co-author, and editor of 48 books, including his recently published children's book The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie. In 2018, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics won the the Eisner Award for Best Scholarly Work and the International Latino Book Award. He is editor and coeditor of 8 academic press book series as well as editor of Latinographix, a trade-press series that publishes Latinx graphic fiction and nonfiction. He is creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes in comics (Amazon Prime) and director of SÕL-CON: Brown, Black, & Indigenous Comics Expo in Columbus, Ohio.

With Oxford's publication of this groundbreaking tome, the world of comics studies felt the quake of tectonic plates radically shift. Aldama's expertly curated volume travels us across and into all variety of the planet's soils that have grown wondrous stories in all genres, that touch on all themes, and that express all our resplendent identities and experiences. I've been in this game as a scholar and practitioner of comics most of my life. I've been waiting for such a definitive corpus of scholarly and scholar-practitioner work as this to shout resoundingly and definitively shout from rooftops: Comics are worldly! Comics are global! Comics are our future!

• Section 1: What is a Comic? What Kind of Studies Are Comics Studies?Why There Is No "Language of Comics"In Box: Rethinking Text in the Digital AgeWhat Else is a Comic? Between Bayeux and BeanoReading Spaces: The Politics of Page LayoutComics as ArtThe Cartoon on the Comics Page: A PhenomenologyAll By Myself: Single-Panel Comics and the Question of GenreDrawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing Section 2: Comics as Social Commentary and Response to Sociopolitical Realities Bakhtinian Laughter and Recent Political Editorial CartoonsColumbia and the Editorial Cartoon Efficacy of Social Commentary through CartooningRadical Graphics: Australian Second Phase Comics Self-Regulation and Auto-Censorship of Comics Creators in the Communist Eastern Bloc"This is Who I Am": Hybridity and Materiality in Comics MemoirAuto/biographics and Graphic Histories Made for the Classroom: Logicomix and Abina and the Important MenAmbiguity in Parallel: Visualizing History in Boxers & Saints Section 3: Key Issues in Comics Irony, Ethics, and Lyric Narrative in Miriam Engelberg's Cancer Made Me a Shallower PersonAnimals in Graphic NarrativeA Diversionary Art in Le Piano Oriental by Zeina AbirachedDisco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel's Dazzler The Replacements: Ethnicity, Gender and Legacy Heroes in Marvel ComicsA Diversionary Art in Le Piano Oriental by Zeina AbirachedHammer in Hand: Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron's ThorWhen Feminism Went to Market: Issues in Feminist Comics Anthologies in the 1980s & 90sChildren in Comics: Between Education and Entertainment, Conformity and Agency"I'm not a kid; I'm a shark!": Identity Fluidity in Noelle Stevenson's Young Adult Graphic Novels Section 4: Comic Book Transcreations Forgetting at the intersection of Comics and the Multimodal Novel: James Sie's Still Life Las Vegas My Favorite Thing is Monsters: The Socially Engaged Graphic Novel as a Platform for Intersectional FeminismPaper or Plastic?: Mapping the Transmedial Intersections of Comics and Action FiguresTransformative Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong ComicsAdaptation and Racial Representation in DellGold Key TV Tie-insCandy and Drugs for Dinner: Rat Queens, Genre, and Our Aesthetic CategoriesNon-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps: Bitch Planet, Sex Criminals and Their PublicsLiterary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels Section 5: Comic Book Studies Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow Comic Studies in America: The Making of a Field of Scholarship?Next Issue: Anticipation and Promise in Comics StudiesComics Studies as InterdisciplineComics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar