Studies in European Comics and Graphic Novels – serie

Key French-language theoretical texts on comics translated into English for the first time 'The French Comics Theory Reader' presents a collection of key theoretical texts on comics, spanning a period from the 1960s to the 2010s, written in French and never before translated into English. The publication brings a distinctive set of authors together uniting theoretical scholars, artists, journalists, and comics critics. Readers will gain access to important debates that have taken place among major French-language comics scholars, including Thierry Groensteen, Benoît Peeters, Jan Baetens, and Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, over the past fifty years. The collection covers a broad range of approaches to the medium, including historical, formal, sociological, philosophical, and psychoanalytic. A general introduction provides an overall context, and, in addition, each of the four thematic sections is prefaced by a brief summary of each text and an explanation of how they have influenced later work. The translations are faithful to the originals while reading clearly in English, and, where necessary, cultural references are clarified. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Boredom and melancholy in the experience of reading. Contemporary graphic novels show an interesting shift from the extraordinary to the ordinary in slice-of-life stories in which nothing happens. Present-day graphic accounts are inhabited by melancholic characters whining about the lack of meaning in life. This book examines this intriguing transition and brings a historical, aesthetical and narratological approach to comics in which boredom is not only a topic, but also awakens a deliberate affective response in the very experience of reading. This volume brings together close readings of work by Lewis Trondheim, Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine. With a foreword by Raphäel Baroni (University of Lausanne). This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

The French comic magazine Pilote hebdomadaire arrived in a weakening comics market in 1959 largely dominated by syndicated translations of American comics and comics inspired by a Catholic ethos. It tailored its content and tone to an older adolescent reader far removed from that of France's infant comic. Pilote's profile set it on a turbulent course subject to the vicissitudes and fickleness of fashion which situated it within an emerging teenager press under pressure to renew and innovate to survive. When it made cartoons its defining characteristic in 1963, Pilote articulated its uniqueness by channelling teenager discourse through them whilst also trying to encourage a zest for education in a modernising and economically buoyant France of exciting new opportunities. Pilote's cartoon art thus became a dynamic repository for the ideas and attitudes of France's educated youth which evolved into the radical discourses of the lifestyle and political revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s.This book tells how Pilote hebdomadaire's unique positioning in a new and fast developing youth press market for teenagers provided the forum and catalyst for the bande dessinee's stylistic evolution over the course of the 1960s and 1970s.

A new generation of European cartoonistsBringing together the work of an array of North American and European scholars, this collection highlights a previously unexamined area within global comics studies. It analyses comics from countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain like East Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine, given their shared history of WWII and communism. In addition to situating these graphic narratives in their national and subnational contexts, Comics of the New Europe pays particular attention to transnational connections along the common themes of nostalgia, memoir, and life under communism. The essays offer insights into a new generation of European cartoonists that looks forward, inspired and informed by traditions from Franco-Belgian and American comics, and back, as they use the medium of comics to reexamine and reevaluate not only their national pasts and respective comics traditions but also their own post-1989 identities and experiences.Contributors: Max Bledstein (University of Winnipeg), Dragana Obradović (University of Toronto), Aleksandra Sekulić (University of Arts in Belgrade), Pavel Kořínek (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague), Martin Foret (Palacký University), Michael Scholz (Uppsala University), Sean Eedy (Carleton University), Elizabeth Nijdam (University of British Columbia), Ewa Stańczyk (University of Amsterdam), Eszter Szép (Eötvös Loránd University)This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).In this video Martha Kuhlman discusses various aspects of the book 'Comics of the New Europe', focusing in particular on Czech authors.

Portugal's vibrant comics scene originated as early as the 19th century, bringing forth brilliant individual artists, but has remained mostly unknown beyond Portugal's borders to this day. Now a new generation employs this medium to put into question hegemonic views on the economy, politics, and society. Following the experience of the financial crisis of the past decades and its impact on social policies, access to and rules of public discourse, and civil strife, comics have questioned what constitutes a traumatogenic situation and what can act as a creative response.By looking at established graphic novels by Marco Mendes and Miguel Rocha, fanzine-level, and even experimental productions, Visualising Small Traumas is the first English-language book that addresses Portuguese contemporary comics and investigates how trauma studies can both shed a light on comics making and be informed by that very same practice.

Historical and theoretical analysis of the clear line style in comics and cinemaThe clear line, a term coined in 1977 by Dutch essayist and artist Joost Swarte, has become shorthand in the field of comics studies for the style originally developed by Herge and the Ecole de Bruxelles. It refers to certain storytelling strategies that generate a deceptively simple, lucid, and hygienic narration: in Philippe Marion's words, it is a style made out of light, fluidity and limpid clarity.By cataloguing and critically analysing clear line comics from historical and theoretical perspectives, this book offers a new outlook on the development of the style in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially focused on the context of the European bande dessinee. In addition, it pioneeringly expands the concept of clear line to other artistic domains by introducing and defending its transmedial use, which is particularly relevant for the understanding of the oeuvres of certain filmmakers of the 20th century working in the postwar period, such as Yasujiro Ozu in Japan, Jacques Tati in France and Frank Tashlin in the United States. The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema is therefore a key theoretical work for both bande dessinee enthusiasts and comics scholars, as well as a fundamental contribution to present-day film studies and transmedial narratology.

Sugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice offers an innovative, wide-ranging and geographically diverse book-length treatment of girlhood in comics. The various contributing authors and artists provide novel insights into established themes within comic studies, children's comics, graphic medicine and comics by and about refugees and marginalised ethnic or cultural groups. The book enriches traditional historical, narratological and aesthetic approaches to studying girlhood in comics with practice-based research, discussion and conversation. This re-examination of girls, gender and identity in comics connects with contemporary discourse on gender identity politics. Through examples from both within Europe and the anglophone world and beyond, and including visual essays and practice-based research alongside critical theory, the volume furthermore engages with new developments in contemporary comics scholarship. It will therefore appeal to students and scholars of childhood studies, comics scholars and creators, and those interested in addressing gender identity through the prism of comics.Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Open Research LibraryContributors: Mel Gibson (Northumbria University), Martha Newbigging (Seneca College), Maria Porras Sanchez (Complutense University of Madrid), JoAnn Purcell (York University and Seneca College), Benoit Glaude (Ghent University/University of Louvain), Sylvain Lesage (University of Lille), Joan Ormrod (Manchester Metropolitan University), Aswathy Senan (The Research Collective Delhi), Michel De Dobbeleer (Ghent University), Sebastien Conard (KASK Ghent School of Arts and LUCA Brussels), Marthine Bertiot (University of Edinburgh), Julia Round (Bournemouth University)

The Belgian photonovel is the missing link in the amazing history of the photonovel, a comics-inspired form of visual narrative that combines elements from very different genres and media, ranging from literary melodrama, cinema, and of course comics. This monograph discloses the specific Belgian contribution to the genre, in close connection with the singularities of the Belgian women's and general magazines where these photonovels appeared. If the photonovel is generally considered a typically French or Italian genre, this study demonstrates the importance of a different tradition, which appropriated the foreign models in a very original way. Belgian photonovels are distinct, not only because they tell other kinds of stories, but also because they interact with other types of magazines in ways that are very different from the mainstream forms of the genre in Italy and France. Finally, this lavishly illustrated study is also the first in scrutinizing the technical aspects of magazine printing techniques in the development of the photonovel.Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Open Research Library

The work of Frank Quitely and the role of comics art in contemporary Scottish culture, politics and society.Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity explores the life and career of Glasgow-born, Eisner Award-winning, and internationally acclaimed Marvel, DC, and Image Comics artist Frank Quitely. With a prolific career spanning more than three decades, Quitely played a pivotal role in the British superhero renaissance of the 1990s and 2000s and in the explosive emergence of the Scottish new wave of comics, a movement that included peers like Alan Grant, Mark Millar, and Grant Morrison, but has been underrepresented in both comics studies and Scottish studies. This work investigates questions of historical and contemporary expressions of Scottishness in transcultural comics genres such as superhero, science fiction, and fantasy. Framed through the lens of comics and literary genres, as well as their British and American editors, Quitely’s approach to Scottishness is oblique and self-reflexive; his expressions of Scottishness are tensely bound to current nuanced examinations of Scottish national, literary and historical subjectivity. His work oscillates between two axiomatic antipodes: the regional, provincial, and local versus the transnational, cosmopolitan, and global.This comprehensive study also features an in-depth interview with Quitely, as well as unearthed archives, sketchbooks, notes, and donated or personal artworks not available elsewhere.This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/

Includes an in-depth interview with French cartoonist Joann Sfar.Sfar So Far is the first monograph in any language devoted to the graphic novels of Joann Sfar, an artist whose abundant and innovative work has profoundly marked the contemporary French comics scene. This essay examines how, over the past two decades, Sfar has constructed an idiosyncratic universe with its own thematic and stylistic recurrences: a playful drafting style, contrasting with the thoughtful introduction of historical, theological, and philosophical matters; a sophisticated use of literary, filmic, musical, and pictorial references; an exploration of his own Jewish heritage in the context of a multicultural, postcolonial French society; an affinity for magic realism, fairy tales, heroic fantasy, the fantastique, and science fiction, often filtered through irony or parody; and a predilection for romantic musings and an interest in unconventional love stories. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

A reader’s history exploring girls’ comicsGirls’ comics were a major genre from the 1950s onwards in Britain and the most popular titles sold between 800,000 and a million copies a week. However, this genre was slowly replaced by magazines which now dominate publishing for girls. 'Remembered Reading' is a readers’ history which explores the genre, and memories of those comics, looking at how and why this rich history has been forgotten. The research is based around both analysis of what the titles contained and interviews with women about their childhood comic reading. In addition, it also looks at the other comic books that British girls engaged with, including humour comics and superhero titles. In doing so it looks at intersections of class, girlhood, and genre, and puts comic reading into historical, cultural, and educational context. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

200 years of Anthony Trollope This volume is a cross-disciplinary collection of essays in the fields of nineteenth-century history, adaptation, word/image and Victorianism. Featuring new writing by some of the most influential, respected and radical scholars in these fields, Transforming Anthony Trollope constitutes both a close companion to Simon Grennan's 2015 graphic novel Dispossession - an adaptation of Anthony Trollope's 1879 novel John Caldigate - and a forward-looking, stand-alone addition to current debates on the cultural uses of history and the theorisation of remediation, illustration and narrative drawing. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Profound analysis of French comics through a postcolonial lensPostcolonialism and migration are major themes in contemporary French comics and have roots in the Algerian War (1954–62), antiracist struggle, and mass migration to France. This volume studies comics from the end of the formal dismantling of French colonial empire in 1962 up to the present. French cartoonists of ethnic-minority and immigrant heritage are a major focus, including Zeina Abirached (Lebanon), Yvan Alagbé (Benin), Baru (Italy), Enki Bilal (former Yugoslavia), Farid Boudjellal (Algeria and Armenia), José Jover (Spain), Larbi Mechkour (Algeria), and Roland Monpierre (Guadeloupe). The author analyzes comics representing a gamut of perspectives on immigration and postcolonial ethnic minorities, ranging from staunch defense to violent rejection. Individual chapters are dedicated to specific artists, artistic collectives, comics, or themes, including avant-gardism, undocumented migrants in comics, and racism in far-right comics. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).Listen to an interview with Mark McKinney at New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/postcolonialism-and-migration-in-french-comics