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Comics and the U.S. South offers a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman's Metropolis or Chris Ware's Chicago to the swamps, back roads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Some essays seek to discover what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly (Pogo), Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld (A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Comics and the U.S. South contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Contents
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  1. Introduction
  2. pp. vii-xvi
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  1. I. The South in the National Imagination
  1. Li’l Abner, Snuffy, and Friends: The Appalachian South in the American Comic Strip
  2. pp. 3-28
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  1. Bumbazine, Blackness, and the Myth of the Redemptive South in Walt Kelly’s Pogo
  2. pp. 29-61
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  1. Southern Super-Patriots and United States Nationalism: Race, Region, and Nation in Captain America
  2. pp. 62-88
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  1. “The Southern Thing”: Doug Marlette, Identity Consciousness, and the Commodification of the South
  2. pp. 89-110
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  1. II. Emancipation and Civil Rights Resistance
  1. Drawing the Unspeakable: Kyle Baker’s Slave Narrative
  2. pp. 113-137
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  1. “Black and White and Read All over”: Representing Race in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery
  2. pp. 138-160
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  1. Everybody’s Graphic Protest Novel: Stuck Rubber Baby and the Anxieties of Racial Difference
  2. pp. 161-183
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  1. III. The Horrors of the South
  1. Of Slaves and Other Swamp Things: Black Southern History as Comic Book Horror
  2. pp. 187-213
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  1. Crooked Appalachia: The Laughter of the Melungeon Witches in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: The Crooked Man
  2. pp. 214-241
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  1. Meat Fiction and Burning Western Light: The South in Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher
  2. pp. 242-265
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  1. IV. Revisualizing Stories, Rereading Images
  1. A Visitation of Narratives: Dialogue and Comics in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits
  2. pp. 269-292
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  1. A Re-Vision of the Record: The Demands of Reading Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
  2. pp. 293-323
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  1. About the Contributors
  2. pp. 325-327
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 329-342
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