Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives

Shane Denson is Assistant Professor/Post-Doc Research Associate in American Studies at Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. He has published on a range of topics in film and media studies. Christina Meyer is Assistant Professor/Post-Doc Research Associate in American Studies at Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. She is the author of War and Trauma Images in Vietnam War Representations (2008).Daniel Stein is Assistant Professor/Post-Doc Research Associate at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (2012) and co-editor of From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative (2013).

Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives offers a wealth of concepts and perspectives for the study of the transnational in comics research ... [and] signals the arrival of the 'transnational turn' in comics studies. Ralf Kauranen, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2013) This useful and penetrating collection of essays by a suitably international array of scholars seeks, in the words of its editors, to 'chart the ways in which graphic narratives have been shaped by aesthetic, social, political, economic and cultural interactions that reach across national boundaries in an interconnected and globalizing world'. It does that and more, presenting sixteen insightful analyses situating the practice and circulation of graphic narrative within a 'global flow' of cultural processes that privileges hybridity and the porousness of borders ... The contributions, by specialists in English, American studies, media studies and communications, are consistently illuminating and well written ... Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives advances a very welcome interdisciplinary, cross-border perspective to the study of graphic narrative. -- Jose Alaniz, University of Washington European Comic Art Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives is an essential volume for both comics scholars and scholars of literature in general, because it places the most popular emerging medium in conversation with cutting-edge contemporary scholarship, and makes a strong case for the ways in which comics are necessary in considerations of a transnational, cosmopolitan 21st century world. -- Kate Polak ImageTexT

• Notes on the ContributorsForeword, John A. LentIntroducing Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, Daniel Stein Part I: Politics and Poetics1) Not Just a Theme: Transnationalism and Form in Visual Narratives of U.S. Slavery, Michael A. Chaney2) Transnational Identity as Shape-shifting: Metaphor and Cultural Resonance in Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, Elisabeth El Refaie3) Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence, Georgiana Banita4) Staging Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Encounter in Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza, Aryn Bartley5) “Trying to Recapture the Front”: A Transnational Perspective on Hawaii in R. Kikuo Johnson's Night Fisher, Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt6) Folding Nations, Cutting Borders: Transnationalism in the Comics of Warren Craghead III, Daniel WüllnerSection II: Transnational and Transcultural Superheroes7) Batman Goes Transnational: The Global Appropriation and Distribution of an American Hero, Katharina Bieloch and Sharif Bitar8) Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives, Shilpa Davé9) Of Transcreations and Transpacific Adaptations: Investigating Manga Versions of Spider-Man, Daniel Stein10) Warren Ellis: Performing the Transnational Author in the American Comics Mainstream, Jochen Ecke11) “Truth, Justice, and the Islamic Way”: Conceiving the Cosmopolitan Muslim Superhero in The 99, Stefan MeierSection III: Translations, Transformations, Migrations 12) Lost in Translation: Narratives of Transcultural Displacement in the Wordless Graphic NovelFlorian Groß13) Hard-Boiled Silhouettes: Transnational Remediation and the Art of Omission in Frank Miller's Sin City, Frank Mehring14) The “Big Picture” as a Multitude of Fragments: Jason Lutes's Depiction of Weimar Republic Berlin, Lukas Etter15) “Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together”: The Cultural Crossovers of Bryan Lee O'Malley, Mark Berninger16) A Disappointing Crossing: The North American Reception of Asterix and Tintin, Jean-Paul Gabilliet AfterwordFraming, Unframing, Reframing: Retconning the Transnational Work of Comics, Shane DensonIndex