The Rise of the American Comics Artist
Creators and Contexts
Publication Year: 2010
Published by: University Press of Mississippi
Contents
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pp. -
Acknowledgments
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pp. ix-
We would like to express our gratitude to Seetha Srinivasan and Walter Biggins at the University Press of Mississippi for their enthusiasm, encouragement, and support—and our anonymous readers for helping to guide and hone...
Introduction: In the Year 3794
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pp. xi-xxvi
Salvador Dali’s prediction invites one to hypothesize what the world of 3794 will look like—and whether any of its social coordinates will correlate to the ones we recognize at the start of the twenty-first century. Not so long ago, admirers of...
I: Marketing Creators
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pp. 3-56
1. How the Graphic Novel Changed American Comics
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pp. 3-13
The American comic book landscape changed dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s primarily because of two factors: first, the creation of the “direct market,” a system where publishers sold comic books directly to specialty comics stores, and second, challenges to the Comics Code Authority that regulated the...
2. “Is this a book?” DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s
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pp. 14-30
Not only comics publishing but also perceptions of it have changed radically during this century, and the comic book has become a graphic novel, invoking notions of permanence, literariness, ...
3. Signals from Airstrip One: The British Invasion of Mainstream American Comics
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pp. 31-45
When The Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, the American press proclaimed the “British Invasion” of rock and roll. Exactly twenty years later DC Comics ...
Interview: Jeff Smith
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pp. 46-56
To date, Jeff Smith’s commercial success and critical attention has concentrated on his black-and-white bimonthly series Bone, published by Cartoon Books. Bone narrates the adventures of the three Bone cousins, who are slowly drawn into the political machinations and history of a valley filled with humans, dragons, rat creatures, talking bugs, and other fantastical beings. ...
II: Demo-Graphics: Comics and Politics
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pp. 57-89
4. State of the Nation and the Freedom Fighters Arc
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pp. 57-67
Comic books have generated increased critical, scholarly, and popular attention; in 2007, Daniel McCabe wrote that they are “much more sophisticated since the advent of Archie or Superman and are now a legitimate area of scholarship.”Recent scholarly studies of the...
5. Critique, Caricature, and Compulsion in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism
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pp. 68-89
Since the early 1990s, when Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir in comic book form, Maus, won a Pulitzer Prize, comics creators have gained increasing attention for producing comics about contemporary events. Joe Sacco’s comics..
III: Artists or Employees?
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pp. 90-134
6. Too Much Commerce Man? Shannon Wheeler and the Ironies of the “Rebel Cell”
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pp. 90-134
In the end pages of Wake Up and Smell the Cartoons of Shannon Wheeler (1996), a collection of the comics artist’s early work, Wheeler provides a short professional biography that is worth...
7. Comics Against Themselves: Chris Ware’s Graphic Narratives as Literature
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pp. 103-123
The recent rise in scholarly interest regarding graphic narratives has been precipitous and remarkable. This intellectual ferment is evidenced both by the strength, volume, and range of the comics produced, as well as an attendant enthusiasm and productivity ...
Interview: Jim Woodring
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pp. 124-134
Jim Woodring was born in Los Angeles in 1952. His early work found print in various alternative publications such as The Los Angeles Free Press . During his time working in an LA animation studio, he self-published the first issue of
IV: Creative Difference: Comics Creators and Identity Politics
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pp. 135-164
8. Questions of “Contemporary Women’s Comics”
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pp. 135-149
In the graphic novel The Sandman: A Game of You (published as an edited collection in 1993), a young female character—provocatively named Barbie—ventures into a comic book store, where the adolescent ....
9. Theorizing Sexuality in Comics
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pp. 150-163
The study of representations of sexuality—even specifically the study of visual representations of sexuality—is nothing new. Clustered mainly around refrains such as liberatory potential through psychoanalytic models (Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane) or agendas...
10. Feminine Latin/o American Identities on the American Alternative Landscape: From the Women of Love and Rockets to La Perdida
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pp. 164-177
The fall 2007 volume of the academic journal MELUS, which discusses multi-ethnic literature in the United States, was dedicated to graphic narratives and featured essays and reviews of comic works and graphic novels by such authors...
V: Authorizing Comics: How Creators Frame the Reception of Comic Texts
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pp. 177-203
11. Making Comics Respectable: How Maus Helped Redefine a Medium
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pp. 179-193
Over the last twenty years comic books have undergone a substantial change in terms of types and content available and in their critical reception. The genesis of this shift can be traced to certain events in the production and distribution...
12. “A Purely American Tale”: The Tragedy of Racism and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth as Great American Novel
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pp. 194-209
In the last ten years, few comics have garnered enthusiastic critical attention equal to Chris Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000). In his book, Chris Ware (2004), Daniel Raeburn hails Ware as a “luminary...
13. “That Mouse’s Shadow”: The Canonization of Spiegelman’s Maus
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pp. 210-234
On May 26, 1985, The New York Times published an important document in the history of the American comic book. In “Cats, Mice and History—the Avant-Garde of the Comic Strip,” Ken Tucker discussed ...
Interview: Scott McCloud
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pp. 235-242
Scott McCloud was born in Boston in 1960. The major work of his early career was the Eclipse-published superhero drama Zot! (1984–1991), but international fame and academic attention has focused on McCloud’s graphic-novel-length comics...
Contributors
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pp. 243-246
Index
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pp. 247- 253
E-ISBN-13: 9781604737936
E-ISBN-10: 160473793X
Print-ISBN-13: 9781604737929
Print-ISBN-10: 1604737921
Page Count: 256
Publication Year: 2010
