Contributions by Lawrence Abrams, Dorian L. Alexander, Max Bledstein, Peter Cullen Bryan, Stephen Connor, Matthew J. Costello, Martin Flanagan, Michael Fuchs, Michael Goodrum, Bridget Keown, Kaleb Knoblach, Christina M. Knopf, Martin Lund, Jordan Newton, Stefan Rabitsch, Maryanne Rhett, and Philip SmithHistory has always been a matter of arranging evidence into a narrative, but the public debate over the meanings we attach to a given history can seem particularly acute in our curre...

Contributions by Dorian L. Alexander, Chris Bishop, David Budgen, Lewis Call, Lillian Céspedes González, Dominic Davies, Sean Eedy, Adam Fotos, Michael Goodrum, Simon Gough, David Hitchcock, Robert Hutton, Iain A. MacInnes, Małgorzata Olsza, Philip Smith, Edward Still, and Jing ZhangIn Drawing the Past, Volume 2: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the World, contributors seek to examine the many ways in which history worldwide has been explored and (re)represented th...

Printing Terror places horror comics of the Cold War in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently, and necessarily, subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s up to 1954, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The book examines each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and ...

According to Joss Whedon, the creator of the short-lived series Firefly (2002), the cult show is about “nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things.” The chronicles of crewmembers on a scruffy space freighter, Firefly ran for only four months before its abrupt cancellation. In that brief time, however, it established a reputation as one of the best science-fiction programs of the new millennium: sharply written, superbly cast, and set on an exotic multi...

This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of comic-books, mobilising them as a means to understand better the political context in which they are produced. Structured around key political events in the US between 1938 and 1975, the author combines analyses of visual and textual discourse, including comic-book letters pages, to come to a more complete picture of the relationship between comic-books as documents and the people who read and created them. Exploring the ways i...

Contributions by Dorian L. Alexander, Janine Coleman, Gabriel Gianola, Mel Gibson, Michael Goodrum, Tim Hanley, Vanessa Hemovich, Christina Knopf, Christopher McGunnigle, Samira Nadkarni, Ryan North, Lisa Perdigao, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Philip Smith, and Maite UcareguiThe explosive popularity of San Diego’s Comic-Con, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Rogue One, and Netflix’s Jessica Jones and Luke Cage all signal the tidal change in superhero na...

The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything—news, politics, religion, high culture—into one vast public entertainment.Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton. Real Life as Entertainment is hardly a new phe...

Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often ...

Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) is the giant imagination behind so much recent popular culture—both movies directly based on his writings, such as Blade Runner (based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and The Adjustment Bureau plus cult favorites such as A Scanner Darkly, Imposter, Next, Screamers, and Paycheck and works revealing his ...

The third edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text provides an up-to-date introduction to the most important issues in documentary history and criticism. A new chapter, "I Want to Make a Documentary: Where Do I Start?" guides readers through the steps of planning and preproduction and includes an example of a project proposal for a film that went on to win awards at major festivals. Designed for students in any field that makes use of visual evidence and persuasive strategies, Introduct...

Anime and Philosophy focuses on some of the most-loved, most-intriguing anime films and series, as well as lesser-known works, to find what lies at their core. Astro Boy, Dragon Ball Z, Ghost in the Shell, and Spirited Away are just a few of the films analyzed in this book. In these stories about monsters, robots, children, and spirits who grapple with the important questions in life we find insight crucial to our times: lessons on morality, justice, and heroism...

More than just a box office flop that resurrected itself in the midnight movie circuit, Blade Runner (1982) achieved extraordinary cult status through video, laserdisc, and a five-disc DVD collector's set. Blade Runner has become a network of variant texts and fan speculations-a franchise created around just one film. Some have dubbed the movie "classroom cult" for its participation in academic debates, while others have termed it "meta-cult," in line with the work of Umb...