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Notes Part I 1. Because comic books are so deeply rooted in the childhood experiences of many of us, examples abound of this confessional mode that kicks in when writing about them. In “Borders and Monuments,” Jared Gardner recalls the homogeneous world of comic book shops before Los Bros Hernandez hit the scene. The confessional essays collected in Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! edited by Sean Howe, also offer pages upon pages of resplendent accounts on how comic books formatively shaped their identities. 2. Third World War, the longest-running feature in the British anthology Crisis, follows the adventures of a multicultural ragtag team that is hired to supposedly liberate a Third World country. However, what the team actually finds is that a multinational interest controls the markets of the country. While issue 1 sold 80,000 copies nearly instantaneously, Third World War ended its run with issue 53, and within a year the comic book had ended with issue 63. (For more details on the history of this comic and other British-mades, see Graham Kibble-White, The Ultimate Book of British Comics.) 3. In Mexico, 80 percent of all periodical publishing is in the form of comics for an adult audience; India produces thousands of comic book titles for all ages; in the Philippines, we also see the large-scale publishing of comic books, and over a million comic books are sold each week. For more worldwide comic-book reading habits and statistics, see Roger Sabin, Adult Comics. 4. Recall, too, that it was not until 1966, after sustained protests by black actors beginning in the early 1950s, that the racist Amos and Andy minstrel show (first broadcast on the radio in 1928) ended its run. It was the large-scale events of the civil rights movement that helped open doors to nonwhites moving into areas of study and work otherwise blocked; this in turn led to the overturning of demeaning characterizations and to a large scale assault on mainstream cultural representations . For more on the importance of the social in influencing comic and cartoon art, see John J. Appel, “Ethnicity in Cartoon Art.”  notes to pages 6–13 5. Mario Saraceni considers the verbal to be visual: the shape of the lettering, panel, balloon, and caption box, all convey, like language, meaning. According to Bart Beaty, in Europe in the 1990s it was the author-artists “raised in art schools” who used “techniques borrowed from the fine arts” that “transformed the field of comic book creation” (Unpopular Culture, 7). Beaty continues, “No longer would comic book artists seek legitimacy in relation to literature, but in relation to the visual arts. This shift in orientation meant abandoning the novelistic ideal for one more closely related to the traditions of the artist’s book” (7). 6. While forms like the novel, short story, and even film have all experienced their moments at the scholarly and media-pundit margins—I think of those arguments of yesterday and even today that novel reading is less serious than that of history , for example—the comic book has been played against these others as a lesser art form: comic books are for children and adolescents, and novels are for adults. 7. The comic book itself crosses borders. It has a massive appetite, metabolizing other storytelling forms such as Shakespeare’s plays (Othello published by Workman in 1983, and Macbeth by Puffin Books in 2005, for instance), Dante’s The Divine Comedy (Chronicle Books, 2005), and poetry (Lewis Carroll and Alfred Noyes, KCP Press in 2004 and 2005 respectively). 8. While cultural studies gained momentum in the 1980s in the United States, the identification of comic books as a site of conformity or resistance to so-called grand narratives (in this case, U.S.-identified imperialist hegemony) had already appeared in 1971, when Armand Mattleart and Ariel Dorfman published How to Read Donald Duck. 9. We see such moves also in the realm of film studies. I mention only one recent example of many here. In Action Figures: Men, Action Films, and Contemporary Adventure Narratives, Mark Gallagher discusses how popular cultural phenomena like film and literature “employ numerous strategies to define particular spaces and environments as settings for action and male agency, to reestablish men’s privileged position in active space, and to code a range of activities as inherently masculine, even in the relatively rare cases in which women undertake those activities” (3). For Gallagher , such...

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