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.

• 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