Animal Comics

With its international and interdisciplinary sweep, this ground-breaking volume examines the ways that comics activate animals as icons and symbols in ways that no other art form possibly can. * Bart Beaty, Professor of English, University of Calgary, Canada * If animals cannot speak, they have found in the authors of this fascinating volume the best advocates and interpreters. Animal comics are not a genre but a continent, of which the cartography is delivered here for the first time, in a truly cross-disciplinary perspective. * Thierry Groensteen, Cit internationale de la bande dessine et de limage, Angoulme, France * The essays offer a variety of critical frameworks for examining these comics; e.g., one essay provides a historical overview, with plenty of illustrative examples. Other contributors use a variety of theoretical lenses as they analyze these comics and even discuss animals in nonfiction comics. The final section (of four) should prove extremely helpful for teachers and future teachers: it offers strategies for using animal comics in various classroom settings, from a general education course to a young adult literature class. The variety of topics and texts represented here makes this collection useful across disciplines and interests The collection is a worthy complement to other books about graphic novels. Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE *

David Herman has taught at several institutions in the US and, most recently, at Durham University, UK. Growing out of his recent studies on animal narratives across media, his monograph Narratology beyond the Human will be published in 2018.

List of Figures Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: More-than-Human Worlds in Graphic Storytelling David Herman Part I. Animal Agency in the History and Theory of Comics 1. Lions and Tigers and Fears: A Natural History of the Sequential Animal Daniel F. Yezbick, St Louis Community College, USA 2. The Animalized Character and Style Glenn Willmott, Queen's University, Canada Part II. Species of Difference: Functions of Animal Alterity in Graphic Narratives 3. The Politics and Poetics of Alterity in Adam Hines's Duncan the Wonder Dog Alex Link, Alberta College of Art & Design, Canada 4. The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor for Mixed-Race Identity in Comics Michael A. Chaney, Dartmouth College, USA 5. Curly Tails and Flying Dogs: Structures of Affect in Nick Abadzi's Laika Carrie Rohman, Lafayette College, USA 6. Invasive Species: Manga's Insect-Human Worlds Mary A. Knighton, Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan Part III. Critical Frameworks for Multispecies Comics 7. Resituating the Animal Comic: Environmentalist Aesthetics in Matt Dembicki's Xoc: The Journey of a Great White Laura Pearson, University of Leeds, UK 8. Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives: From Olivier Deprez to Avril-Deprez Jan Baetens, University of Leuven, Belgium 9. Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics David Herman Part IV. Graphic Animality in the Classroom and Beyond 10. Can We Be Part of the Pride? Reading Animals through Comics in the Undergraduate Classroom Andrew Smyth and Charles E. Baraw, Southern Connecticut State University, USA 11. This is Home Bridget Brewer and Thalia Field, Brown University, USA Index