Winner of the 2016 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Academic/Scholarly WorkWinner of the 2016 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular Culture and American Culture by the Popular Culture Association/American Culture AssociationWinner of the 2016 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in LiteratureWhen many think of comic books the first thing that comes to mind are caped crusaders and spandex-wearing super-hero...

From the black and white pages of a Belgian Catholic newspaper in the late 1920s to the virtual world of a 3D CGI Hollywood movie in 2011, the young adventurous reporter Tintin has come a long way.When Georges Remi, under his nom de plume Hergé, sent the crudely drawn hero on his maiden voyage to Communist Russia, little did he know that they were both embarking on a lifelong journey - or in the case of the perpetually youthful Tintin, an eternal mythic quest.Though regard...

Will was pretty much the perfect role model.' - Beth Ditto, The Gossip In the spring of 2010, Toronto lost one of its most important queer civic heroes when local artist, DJ, activist, impresario, promoter, party-thrower, café operator, community-builder and lover Will Munro died of brain cancer at the unfathomably young age of 35. Famed for his subversive, irreverent visual art, which co-opted rock 'n' roll imagery and raunchy gay iconography, and his legendary Vazaleen dance parties, wh...

The first in-depth, behind-the-scenes book treatment of the rivalry between the two comic book giants.THEY ARE THE TWO TITANS OF THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY--the Coke and Pepsi of superheroes--and for more than 50 years, Marvel and DC have been locked in an epic battle for spandex supremacy. At stake is not just sales, but cultural relevancy and the hearts of millions of fans.To many partisans, Marvel is now on top. But for much of the early 20th century, it was ...

When Art Spiegelman's Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, it marked a new era for comics. Comics are now taken seriously by the same academic and cultural institutions that long dismissed the form. And the visibility of comics continues to increase, with alternative cartoonists now published by major presses and more comics-based films arriving on the screen each year.Projections argues that the seemingly sudden visibility of comics is no accident. Beginning with...

In 1954, the comic book industry instituted the Comics Code, a set of self-regulatory guidelines imposed to placate public concern over gory and horrific comic book content, effectively banning genuine horror comics. Because the Code applied only to color comics, many artists and writers turned to black and white to circumvent the Code's narrow confines.With the 1964 Creepy #1 from Warren Publishing, black-and-white horror comics experienced a revival continuing into the e...

Over the past forty years, American film has entered into a formal interaction with the comic book. Such comic book adaptations as Sin City, 300, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World have adopted components of their source materials' visual style. The screen has been fractured into panels, the photographic has given way to the graphic, and the steady rhythm of cinematic time has evolved into a far more malleable element. In other words, films have begun to look like c...

In December 1977, struggling Canadian comic book artist Dave Sim self-published the first issue of Cerebus the Aardvark, a Conan the Barbarian satire featuring a foul-tempered, sword-wielding creature trapped in a human world. Over the next 26 years, Sim, and later collaborator Gerhard, produced an epic 6,000-page graphic novel, the longest-running English language comic series by a single creative team. They revolutionized the comics medium by showing other artists that ...

Sixty years before the comics entered the American newspaper press, Rodolphe Töpffer of Geneva (1799-1846), schoolmaster, university professor, polemical journalist, art critic, landscape draftsman, and writer of fiction, travel tales, and social criticism, invented a new art form: the comic strip, or "picture story," that is now the graphic novel. At first he resisted publishing what he called his "little follies." When he did, they became instantly popular, plagiarized, and imitated thro...

This book explores the connections between comics and Gothic from four different angles: historical, formal, cultural and textual. It identifies structures, styles and themes drawn from literary gothic traditions and discusses their presence in British and American comics today, with particular attention to the DC Vertigo imprint.Part One offers an historical approach to British and American comics and Gothic, summarizing the development of both their creative content and critical ...

A popular sub-genre of fantasy and science fiction, steampunk re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. While often considered solely through the lens of literature, steampunk is, in fact, a complex phenomenon that also affects, transforms, and unites a wide range of disciplines, such as art, music, film, television, fashion, new media, and material culture.In Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Stea...

Winner of the 2017 Eisner Award in the Best Academic/Scholarly Work category2017 Prose Awards Honorable Mention, Media & Cultural StudiesOver the last 75 years, superheroes have been portrayed most often as male, heterosexual, white, and able-bodied. Today, a time when many of these characters are billion-dollar global commodities, there are more female superheroes, more queer superheroes, more superheroes of color, and more disabled superh...