The Craze for American Literature and Comics, and the Plight of the English Language

Having grown up, academically speaking, in the shadow of Arthur Hobson Quinn, who lived roughly half an hour from my college, Ursinus, and with so many of my college teachers having studied their American literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where Quinn was supreme when American literature was still a fairly new subject in university instruction, and now with myself looking like I might well be a contemporary of Quinn, or even Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier, and being from a family in which genealogy was important, it may be natural that I should represent historical memory and share my recollections of some persons who pioneered in and opened up Poe studies. Some may be surprised to learn that Professor Quinn was, first and foremost, not a Poe specialist, but that his preeminent scholarly love was American drama. For pre-twentieth-century American plays, Quinn’s studies typically remain, after nearly a century, almost the only informed commentaries. Many have become increasingly aware that William Dunlap, America’s first major playwright, and the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, might each properly be deemed the Adam to American literary Gothicism. To return to Professor Quinn: when I began my own academic studies, he was in his eighties, ill, and housebound. He spent most of his time nestled in a chair, swathed in blankets and quilts, and wearing a sun shade, claiming that reading so many early American plays had ruined his eyesight. Before such ills befell him, Quinn was active in having established the Clothier Collection of American Drama at the University of Pennsylvania, which remains one of the foremost collections of early American plays. The Poe interest emerged from Quinn’s own work in American drama—Poe’s parents being actors—and from his aim to furnish an accurate biographical portraiture of Poe which would demolish the long-standing depiction by Rufus Griswold. Spending more than twenty years in preparing that biography, which appeared first in 1941 but has stood the test of time well enough to go through several reprintings, Quinn achieved a solid narrative account, though many of his critical opinions have been modified or superseded in the work of others. A Quinn student, J. Albert Robbins, followed his mentor’s practices in determining to present factually accurate scholarship, as some early volumes in the American Literary Scholarship journal attest. Robbins often recounted to me anecdotes of his days as Quinn’s student. Those who know Quinn primarily for

French children's periodicals underwent some significant changes between the years 1933 and 1954. French publishing houses and press agencies came under attack for being unduly influenced by and saturated with subversive American cartoons and comics. Numerous French comic strips created and endorsed by different morality leagues and Communist political groups appeared. The new French comic strips during this period were modeled after their more popular American counterparts; however, they were drawn by French authors and displayed Communist ideals. The strips utilized the brightly colored techniques of the American strips, trying to capture the imagination and attention of the children that read them. These French-born strips were designed to combat the widespread appeal of the American strips. The French comic strips and comic books were used as tools for the supposed intellectual and political education of the youths they targeted. American comic strips during this period were campaigned against, being painted as highly corruptive, perverse publications that assaulted the morality of the youth of France. Repeated attempts to get legislation passed that would enforce the newly created offense of "youth demoralization via the press" were made but were never entirely successful. The result was that the influence of American comic strips was never completely replaced and still had a devoted following among French youth during this time period.

Picasso, Comics, and Cultural Divides: Why Krazy Kat Is a Kubist Kat Kevin Cooley (bio) Pablo Picasso had a weakness for comic strips. In Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein records a humorous incident in which Picasso and his lover Fernande quarreled over the latest Katzenjammer Kids strip, a comic featuring the rambunctious troublemakers Hans and Fritz who made constant mischief to the chagrin of a series of bumbling authority figures. When Fernande bumped into the painter on the street and asked him to share the supplement that The Kaztenjammer Kids appeared in, Picasso was having none of it. Fernande said that he “brutally refused” her the comic supplement and, according to Stein, Fernande “roused like a lioness defending her cubs” while relating these circumstances. Fernande called the affair “a piece of cruelty” she would “never forgive.”1 Poor Stein, the couple’s frequent hookup for American comics, hoped the pair would be reconciled “before the next comic supplements of the Katzenjammer kids” came out, reasoning: “if I do not give them to Pablo he will be all upset and if I do Fernande will make an awful fuss” (The Autobiography, 24). This anecdote might amuse popular, academic, and high cultural audiences alike. For many members of all of these groups, the very name “Picasso” is and has been metonymical for high art itself. Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes “he’s no Picasso,” to characterize a personified version of the Spanish city Segovia as somewhat artless.2 Leonard Cohen’s poem “Kanye West Is Not Picasso” rebukes West’s frequent self-comparisons to the painter by calling its speaker Picasso, and it claims that speaker is “the Kanye West that Kanye West thinks he is / When he shoves your ass off the stage.”3 Even the hidden camera show Impractical [End Page 595] Jokers feeds into the narrative around the name, featuring the cast pulling pranks in a sketch called “Picass-holes” on the “future Picassos” shopping at Blick Art Materials.4 Picasso himself treated his own name as a metonym for artistic mastery, claiming “my mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ . . . Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.”5 In all of these disparate texts from different cultural niches, to be a “Picasso” is to be a high artist. To hear of Picasso behaving like a child over a newspaper comic strip called The Katzenjammer Kids, then, will surely register with some readers as nothing more than an extraneous factoid (albeit an amusing one) about Picasso’s reading tastes. I will suggest another reading: that this anecdote is one nugget to be found of a mineful of contextual, thematic, and formal evidence that indicates Picasso was inspired by American comic strips. His most prominent influence was George Herriman, the cartoonist behind the bizarre anthropomorphic animal comic Krazy Kat and a contemporary of Katzenjammer Kids creators Rudolph and Gus Dirks. As comics and cubism stumbled through their early days at the beginning of the twentieth century, they played together in a sandbox of paradoxical visual temporalities. Michael Tisserand, Herriman’s biographer, claims that Marcel Duchamp’s landmark cubist piece Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was “in many ways . . . just catching up” to the innovative techniques for simulating motion and interrogating the fixity of images that newspaper cartoonists like Herriman experimented with.6 The two art forms shared a collective sense of new possibilities for the visual still image to do what the photograph could not: offer a multiplicity of perspectives on the same physical plane of the flat surface. I argue here, then, that the most responsible reading of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat is as a narrative not only indebted to the work of Pablo Picasso and the members of his social circle, but inspirational to that company. That Krazy Kat ultimately casts the comics form itself into the central logic of cubism and of Picasso’s work (predominantly through its consistent presentation of the dissonance between signifiers and signified) will be crucial to my historical re-reading. This weaving together of the comics form and cubist...

Over the past several years, there has been rapidly growing interest in Jews and comics- not comics of the Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, and Jerry Seinfeld variety, but those as presented on the paneled pages of the newspaper funnies, comic books, and graphic novels.1 In the past four years alone, there have been no less than seven titles devoted exclusively to the history and analysis of Jews and comic art, and these books do not even include the many recent comics-related texts with substantive portions devoted to specific Jewish authors.2 Part of this interest can be read as an outgrowth, or the natural consequence, of scholarly studies in Jews and popular culture. The past decade has seen a number of significant studies that highlight the presence, and even the essential contributions, of Jews in a variety of popular media.3 Comics, the argument goes, is one of those mass outlets- along with television and Hollywood films- in which Jews could not only thrive, but also largely define according to particular ethnic themes and sensibilities. This nascent interest in Jewish comics and graphic novels can also be linked to another recent phenomenon, a broader scholarly focus on comics and the ways in which they represent ethnoracial identity.4 Many of these analyses have not only chronicled the history of racial and ethnic caricatures in American comic strips, comic books, and film animation, but they have also explored the relatively recent rise in ethnic ownership of the comic image, i.e., how traditionally marginalized writers and illustrators have become more a part of the comics industry and have thereby exerted more control over representations of their own ethnic communities. In terms of Jewish Americans, this involvement in the industry has been in place since the comic book's inception. As comics historian Arie Kaplan points out, Maxwell Charlie Gaines (ne Max Ginsberg) put together what many consider the first American comic book. In 1934, he, along with his friend Harry L. Wildenberg, persuaded Eastern Color Printing to collect the comic strips that had previously been published in Sunday newspapers, print them in half tabloid size and distribute them first through chain department stores, then when that proved successful, sell them on newsstands. There had been earlier attempts to collect and distribute comic strips in magazine form, but this was the first time anyone had done so on the retail level and not as a promotional giveaway.5 The result was Famous Funnies, and as critics such as Kaplan, Danny Fingeroth, and Paul Buhle have pointed out, thus began the Jewish association with comics and their shaping of the medium. Indeed, many of the early pioneers of American comics were Jews, including Jerome Siegel, Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Gil Kane, Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, and Joe Kubert. This brief list of artists and writers created, or famously illustrated, most of the memorable characters of the 1930s and 1940s, including Superman, Batman, Captain America, the Guardian, the Boy Commandos, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the X-Men, Iron Man, the Green Lantern, the Spirit, and Sgt. Rock. And editors such as Stan Lee, Mort Weisinger, Julius Schwartz, William Gaines, AI Feldstein, and Harvey Kurtzman put their indelible stamp on most of the significant comic books coming out of the industry's leading publishers: DC Comics, Marvel, and EC Comics. One of the reasons for this Jewish dominance in the comics industry is due in large part to the occupational opportunities, or lack thereof, in the first half of the twentieth century. As both Kaplan and Fingeroth have pointed out, most of the prominent and respectable fields where artists and writers could express their creativity- such as magazines, newspaper strips, and advertising-were closed to Jews at the time, or at least difficult to enter, due to antisemitism, both overt and subtle. …

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Writers of color in the U.S. have been producing novels, poetry, and essays in American letters since the eighteenth century, particularly African American writers.1 But before the social, cultural, and political movements and forces of the 1960s, very little literature by writers of color was institutionalized and/or in print. For example, before the 1970s, Three Negro Classics, comprising of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, was the most visible text by African Americans readily available. Although Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1953) remained in print, the bulk of African American literature was out of print until the 1970s. Although American Indians had been writing fiction, which was also consistently out of print, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was the publication of N. Scott Momaday's (Kiowa) House Made of Dawn in 1968, which garnered the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Vine Deloria, Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969, and Dee Brown's best-selling revisionist historical account Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) that initiated a renaissance in Native American history and literature in the 1970s. And although there were scattered out-of-print literary and autobiographical texts by Asian American writers from the early and middle parts of the twentieth century such as Korean-American Younghill Kang's The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West (1937), Japanese-American John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), Chinese-American Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), and some autobiographies (Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1945, and Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter, 1953), Asian American literature becomes visible and begins to emerge as a legitimate field of inquiry with the publication of some ground-breaking anthologies and of Maxine Hong [End Page 173] Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976). The situation with Latino/a literature in print was equally as dismal. As the Hispanic Recovery Project informs us, there were unpublished and/or out-of-print Mexican/Mexican American testimonials at the turn of the twentieth century. But before the 1960s there were only a scattering of Latino/a texts in print such as Pocho (1959) by the Mexican American writer Jose Antonio Villareal. But with the transformative Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s—including the Chicano movement and the groundbreaking work of the Chicano/a Arts movement, the Puerto Rican labor activist movement and the Nuyorican Arts movement, American Indian Movement (AIM) and the American Indian literary renaissance, the nationalist/Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Asian American movement, and the Women's movement, the 1970s and 1980s were renaissance periods for the literatures of American Indians, Latinos/as, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Thus, by the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s the literature of writers of color in the U.S. had grown and matured, successfully challenging and transforming American literature, which continues until today. The literatures that emerged from this period were further developed and institutionalized with the re-printing of pre-1960s literary texts, the establishment of ethnic studies programs and departments on the campuses of American colleges and universities, and the inclusion of ethnic literature in mainstream American literature courses, allowing the literatures to be taught, studied, assessed, written about, and therefore to remain in print. Although some of the literatures written by people of color in the 1960s and 1970s overtly protested institutional, legal, and de facto racism, and captured the experiences of oppression/victimization, of colonization, and of the pain and confusion of being caught between two cultures, by the 1980s and 1990s many writers of color had come to assume the centrality of their race or ethnicity in their literature. This shift allowed them to move beyond protest, the white gaze, and the various binaries that positioned them as lower halves of binary oppositions, to take on the literary styles and issues of modernity/post-modernity, to...

A content analysis of 490 Father's Day and Mother's Day comic strips published from 1940 to 1999 indicates that the culture of fatherhood has fluctuated since World War II. “Incompetent” fathers appeared frequently in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and late 1960s but were rarer in the late 1950s, early and late 1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s. Fathers who were mocked were especially common in the early and late 1960s and early 1980s but were less common in the late 1940s, early and late 1950s, and early and late 1970s. Fathers who were nurturant and supportive toward children were most evident in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and early and late 1990s, with the longitudinal pattern resembling a U‐shaped curve. Differences between fathers and mothers also oscillated from one decade to the next.

Observed from a distance, the prevalence of ethnic stereotyping in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cartooning in the United States is disturbing. All one can see, initially, is that turn-of-the-century readers seemed to enjoy seeing blacks, Native Americans, and non-Anglo immigrants reduced to simplistic caricatures and made to say and do outrageously stupid things. The Distorted Image, the Balch Institute's exposé on the evils of ethnic caricature, agrees with this assessment, suggesting that “the strips from the early years of this century [the twentieth] are inevitably suffused with crude, even gross stereotypes” in which blacks and ethnic immigrants are “maligned and mistreated with blithe insouciance.” However, a closer inspection of particular characters, mediums, and creators, reveals that there was greater complexity to these “crude” images – a rich history, in fact, of shifting meanings and uses. There were, of course, some blatantly racist depictions of ethnic minorities in cartoons and comic strips during this period, but there was also a complex spectrum of ethnic characters who played out shifting comedic and social roles. By properly contextualizing some of these cartoons – considering how meanings and uses changed according to where the cartoons appeared, who created them, and who read them – many images that initially seem just like more entries in a long line of gross stereotypes begin to reveal layered, ambivalent, and even sympathetic codings.

A comparison between humour and ageing from the 1970s to the 1990s and findings from a historical study of how American artists portray older adults showed what appears to be little change in stereotypical representations of older people in one of the most widely read forms of humour in American popular culture, the comic strip. Variables were age, gender, and roles of people 56 years and over in strips published in the Washington Post during April of 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, and 1992.The number of older characters in American comic strips declined in the last ten years of the study. Men were more frequently represented than women. Women were almost equal to men in strong, positive roles despite the fact that they were represented 870 times and men 1511 times. Most women were portrayed in either positive or negative roles while a quarter of men were portrayed in indeterminate roles. The negative roles of women were double those of positive or strong roles, while the number of negative roles for men was three times the number of positive roles.

As the Second World War drew to a close, CPUSA members began to discuss the Communist Party's future. In the summer of 1945, the pages of the New York Daily Worker were packed with an intense debate on the usefulness of the Popular Front policy that Earl Browder had initiated a decade before.1 An article on July 28, 1945, under the headline A Quick Look at the American Comic Strip, formed part of that debate. The piece began as an overview that, predictably enough, favored strips that satirized mid dle-class foibles over strips that promoted fantasy superheroes. But it quickly narrowed its focus, and with a relish that was barely dis guised, pronounced an end to one of the few comic strips in the Daily Worker that had lasted more than a few months:

It is widely assumed that the American comic strip “begins” in the 1890s with the multipanel sequences appearing in Sunday newspapers. This essay challenges this periodization by looking to an archive of humor magazines from the 1850s and 60s. As early as 1852, artists including Frank Bellew, John McLenan, and Augustus Hoppin experimented with the multipanel sequences they encountered in the Francophone “picture story.” However, rather than replicating the Francophone genre, these artists sought to adapt it in ways that conveyed the rhythms and cadences of everyday American life. What emerges from this study is a newly coherent picture of recurring forms, conventions, and themes that constitute a distinctively American style of comic strip. From one perspective, this is a record of visual conventions that would dominate twentieth- and twenty-first-century comics. But it is also a history of visual languages that failed to take hold—lost literacies and potential trajectories in American comics.

Review Article| September 01 2008 A Turning Point in Native American Fiction? Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, by Treuer, David, St. Paul: Greywolf Press, 2006. 212 pages. Karl Kroeber Karl Kroeber Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2008) 54 (3): 388–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-4006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Karl Kroeber; A Turning Point in Native American Fiction?. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2008; 54 (3): 388–395. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-4006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

COMMONPLACE REALITY AND THE ROMANTIC PHANTOMS: HOWELLS' A MODERN INSTANCE AND THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM Rosalie Murphy and Seymour Gross* When in 1884 Henry James characterized William Dean Howells as "the great American naturalist" while yet acknowledging his fellow novelist's "romantic phantoms" and "tendency to facetious glosses,"1 he was locating if not quite defining the counter-impulses of Howells' fiction through the 1880s. Howells himself had years before begun his battle against the distortions and excesses of what he called the "romanticistic novel" and by the late 1880s had even come to regard Zola, the patron saint of naturalism whom Howells had helped to introduce to the American reading public, as "romantic" because of what Howells saw as Zola's distortions of reality. Throughouthis writing career Howells displayed a propensity and downright love for realism, committing himself to the belief that the moral function of fiction was "to picture life just as it is, to deal with character as we witness itin living people, and to record the incidents that grow out of character." The "romance" he acknowledged as a separate form of literature, one which "deals with life allegorically and not representatively . . . employs types rather than characters and studies them in the ideal rather than the real";2 it is, he says elsewhere, "like the poem, at once more elevated and a little more mechanical than the novel."3 But for all his periodic defenses of the romance as alegitimateform, Howells regarded the novel as the important literary work, that which delt with the "lifelike," the "true to life," the "probable," the "natural," the "real": 'Seymour Gross, Burke O'Neill Professor of American Literature at the University of Detroit, has published over sixty articles on American and English literature. Among his books are Images of the Negro in American Literature (with John Edward Hardy) and American Literature Survey (with Milton Stem). Rosalie Murphy is adoctoralcandidateat the University ofDetroit and is theeditor of ContemporaryPoets of theEnglish Language. Gross and Murphy are preparing an edition of The Blithdale Romance to be published by the Norton Publishing Co. in 1976. Rosalie Murphy and Seymour Gross Let no intending novelist suppose this fidelity to life can be carried too far. . . . I think the effectis like that in those cycloramas where up to a certain point there is real ground and real grass, andthen carried indivisibly on to the canvas the best that the painter can do to imitate real ground and real grass. We start in our novels with something we have known of life, that is, with life itself; and then we go on and imitate what we have known of life. If we are very skillful and very patient we can hide the joint. But the joint is always there, and on one side of it are real ground and real grass, and on the other are the painted images of ground and grass. Despite his intense longing and his strenuous efforts "to make the painted ground and grass exactly like the real," Howells feels he has not succeeded: "Some touch of color, some tone or texture is always wanting; the light is different; it is all in another region."4 The joint was not hidden, and it was the "romantic phantoms" (often leading to "factitious glosses") which were largely responsible. For Howells, the imitation of real grass and ground necessitated an authorial selection of detail which reflected his concern with the commonplace ("the small round of daily events") rather than with the unusual, the superior, or the eccentric; an emphasis on character, with plot growing out of character; a demand for literature which reflected the "peculiarly American," which to Howells' mind meant the "more smiling aspects of life" since America offered most Americans a "large, cheerful average of health and success and happy fife"; and an insistence upon the novelist's fidelity to his "own knowledge of things," not merely to the surface of things. But Howells's "knowledge of things," that material to which he must give "truthful treatment," included a literary tradition of romance and a cultural-historical tradition that was basically romantic.5 Such works as A Modern Instance (1882) and The Rise of...

In April 2017, Marvel Comics vice president of sales David Gabriel told an interviewer that the company’s recent slump was due to its move toward a more diverse roster of characters over the preceding year: What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales. We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked. (Griepp 2017)After a quick backlash, Gabriel issued a correction. Even so, his framing and phrasing are enlightening; when he says “people didn’t want any more diversity,” he is staking a claim to having a monocultural audience. When he calls the situation “difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked,” he is suggesting that bringing diversity to comics is an innovation and one that has not worked out for his company financially.The assumption embedded in Gabriel’s statement, that the audience for comics is limited to straight white men who want the same kind of superhero story with characters from their childhood handed to them year after year, is common to both the popular discourse about comics and certain strains of academic discourse on the subject. With the growth in academic comics studies over the last decade, however, there has been a shift in the latter. Recent comics scholarship has emerged from many different kinds of academic departments—the traditional liberal arts disciplines, the fine arts, art history, communications studies, and information science—as well as from interdisciplinary scholars working primarily in ethnic studies, black studies, American studies, and women’s and gender studies, among others. With important work coming out of a variety of discourses, one of the most exciting aspects of recent developments in the field is its necessary interdisciplinarity. While it has taken more than a century of academic scholarship to arrive at the idea that text, paratext, context, audience, and reception are all necessary components for understanding cultural production, comics studies is in a position to grow as a discipline in which scholars are and have always been able to close read a text itself and then discuss the way that text was produced, disseminated, and circulated. Scholarship within the field, like Ramzi Fawaz’s The New Mutants (2016), Jeffrey Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (2001), and Tahneer Oksman’s How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses? (2016), has taken extraordinary advantage of this possibility. One of the important consequences of this interdisciplinary method is that it becomes impossible to imagine an ideal audience for comics in the way that Gabriel does. Instead, this mode has enabled scholars to establish that comics, far from being only a popular cultural form that circulates among a particular audience and in particular ways, have been used and enjoyed by a variety of audiences through a variety of different but related forms (comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, webcomics, and so on).Comics studies, therefore, is a discipline in which good work requires the acknowledgment of the multiplicity of audiences that comics reach. In particular, it demands acknowledgment that fans with many different kinds of intersectional identities exist and have always existed. In this context, it is easy to see that Marvel’s strategy, which maintained a narrow view of the demographics of its audience, was always doomed to fail. Half-hearted, ahistorical gestures toward diversity are not enough to remediate the comics industry, the comics underground, or the academic comics discourse’s mutual long-standing issues with the representation of women, people of color, and LGBTQ characters. Recent studies of comics and identity elucidate the obstacles that make it difficult for the voices of women, people of color, and LGBTQ cartoonists to make headway. What the following books show is that, against those obstacles, diverse voices have emerged anyway.We can see this, for example, in José Alaniz’s monograph Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. Although the discourse on ability has clear and important political valences, the notion of disability as a kind of identity is often left out of conversations about diversity, both within the academy and outside of it, that focus on gender, race, and sexual orientation. One of the major tasks of Death, Disability, and the Superhero is to show that the scholarship on disability and disability activism is important to defining the intersectional frameworks that construe identity as a matrix rather than a data point.In Death, Disability, and the Superhero, disability emerges as a particularly compelling lens through which to view superhero narratives because considering it means reconsidering the important but facile understanding of superhero narratives as adolescent male power fantasies. Instead, the book places the vulnerability of the body at the center of its understanding of the superhero. Focusing on the period of comics history beginning in the late 1950s, which comics fans know as the silver age, Alaniz demonstrates how the “anxieties and desires of the [post–World War II] age” (20) begin in this moment to assault the previously nigh-invulnerable superhero body. A comparison between the superhero and the “inspirational” figure of the supercrip, whose disability should elicit pity but instead provides an obstacle that, once overcome, renders the supercrip beyond pity, establishes the superability of the superbody as an important site for the examination of postwar anxieties and desires. What the superbody can and cannot do and how it arrives at a position outside of the bodily norm reveal for Alaniz exactly how postwar Americans, and in particular postwar American men, were afraid of what might become of their bodies in a changing world.Death, Disability, and the Superhero includes an extraordinary wealth of images and takes a broad range of examples from the last half century of mainstream superhero comic books, but its most compelling cases are drawn from the Marvel comics of the 1960s and 1970s. Alaniz considers, among others, the Thing (whose exposure to galactic radiation turned him into living stone), Daredevil (an acrobatic hero who, as a boy, suffered an industrial accident that led to both blindness and supersenses that compensate for that blindness), and Dr. Doom (a supervillainous scientist who hides the disfiguring results of a lab accident behind a metal mask). Alaniz combines acute visual and textual observation with insights from the analysis of fan reactions that caused the early ending of storylines and the abandonment of characters like the She-Thing (a striking athlete and superhero who is cast as the Thing’s love interest and is eventually turned into living rock herself) to understand the way that the “supercrip” archetype is reinscribed within the superheroic body. This archetype forces characters with disabilities to either paper over their experience of the world by attempting to pass as able-bodied or go into isolation on the fringes of culture and society, situations that mirror many of the challenges that disabled people face. In each chapter, Alaniz is particularly attentive to how disability reads in ways that are gendered and racialized, stressing that it appears above all as an assault on the typical white male body. Extending a perspective on how the undesirably racialized and feminized disabled come to be represented either as deserving of hatred and fear or as inspirational—rather than as individuals with important perspectives on the world, not all of which are informed by their bodies—Death, Disability, and the Superhero clarifies important issues in the study of the early twenty-first century’s most important genre.Situated in the context of a significant and growing scholarship, Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González’s anthology Graphic Borders: Latino Comics Past, Present, and Future is an important intervention that recognizes that the category of Latina/o comics represents a range of output that is as broad as the medium itself. In their introduction, Aldama and González run through examples of common genres of Latina/o graphic narrative—science fiction, noir, erotica, superheroes, and autobiography, among others—to demonstrate that identifying a comic as Latina/o, either because the cartoonist is or the characters are, will explain little about the work in question. In this way, they resist the notion, common among both academic and popular discussions of ethnic literature, that in literary terms race and ethnicity represent a kind of genre with identifiable forms and tropes. Instead, they write that “Latino comic book creators” use the form to “open the reader’s eyes to different ways of being in the world—ways typified by the respective Latino (Chicano, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban) experience” (16). Common to the creators and characters discussed in the collection, then, is an alienation caused by their identity, which is perceived by the culture at large as being outside the national mainstream. The essays in Graphic Borders largely deal with the specifics of this alienation, which takes not only the national forms of Aldama and González’s list but also those that intersect with culture, race, gender, sexuality, and class.Graphic Borders is an entry in the University of Texas Press’s World Comics and Graphic Novels and Nonfiction series, of which Aldama and González are also the editors. Given the laudatory transnational goals of that series, the essays’ focus on comics artists from the United States and Mexico and on works produced for those markets presents an opportunity for further work on comics and creators with ties to other parts of Latin America. Similarly, although it is difficult to overstate the importance of Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, and Mario Hernandez (fondly known to comics fans as “Los Bros”) and their 1980s comics anthology series Love and Rockets on both Latina/o comics and US alternative comics more generally, their presence here is overwhelming. Essays and an interview about their work make up the whole of the book’s first section, and another deals in part with some of Gilbert’s stories. Four out of the volume’s fourteen pieces are explicitly about Los Bros. Essays on cartoonists like Roberta Gregory, Graciela Rodriguez, and Liz Mayorga, who are mentioned in the introduction, would have been a welcome addition.Given the nearly impossible task of capturing the whole of the Latina/o experience in just one volume, however, Graphic Borders is admirably capacious. Importantly, it emphasizes intersections that make up Latina/o experience, with standout essays on blatinos in US popular culture, by Adilifu Nama and Maya Haddad, and gay Latina/o superheroes, by Richard T. Rodríguez. It also thinks across types of comics publishing, from mainstream superhero comics (Isabel Millán’s essay on Marvel’s Mexican–Puerto Rican Spider-Girl, Anya Sofía Corazón, and Brian Montes’s essay on the blatino Miles Morales, otherwise known as the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man) to less covered but equally important forms like indie publishing (the essays on Los Bros), the comic strip (Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste’s essay on Baldo), and the political cartoon (Juan Poblete’s essay on the cartoons of Lalo Alcaraz). The picture of Latina/o comics that appears in Graphic Borders is a bright one, with recent growth in production and audience showing no signs of stopping. Even while celebrating these developments, however, Aldama and González are realistic about the importance of Latina/o creators to keeping the trend moving. “Simply put,” they write, “mainstream DC and Marvel publishers are not interested in innovation—unless it sells. . . . For working Latino creators, maintaining control over their product is essential” (15).Frances Gateward and John Jennings’s edited collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, while similar in construction to Graphic Borders, in some ways takes the opposite tack. While Graphic Borders is built around the idea that it is important to separate the identity of the creator from the genre of the work, Gateward and Jennings make “an attempt to start constructing ideas around ‘Blackness’ as a type of medium,” later clarifying, “Blackness is a medium that Black people of the world have inherited and have added on to as the story has unfolded throughout history” (4). Interestingly, the volume puts forth a notion of the construction of blackness as an identity that resembles the collaboration common to the production of mainstream US comic books, which often feature contributions from separate writers, pencillers, inkers, colorists, and letterers, all of whom provide essential input. Gateward and Jennings make a compelling argument for the long-standing and continued relevance of sequential art as a method of understanding African and diasporic African identities, which sometimes speak with “one voice” and sometimes “ha[ve] a collection of many voices” (3). In this way, Gateward and Jennings suggest, there are both fundamental and contingent qualities of blackness that are essential to understanding black experience, and both of these can be seen by examining the history and form of black comics.The essays in this volume generally deal with comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels and range across a wide swath of time periods and contexts. Although the collection is mostly focused on production in the United States, it notably features an essay by Sally McWilliams on Aya, a series of French graphic albums written by the Ivorian author Marguerite Abouet. More essays on international black creators and characters would have made a welcome addition. In other ways, though, the volume deals with many varieties of black identity, strains of black thought, and ways that black bodies have been represented in comics, including a piece by Patrick F. Walter on the intersection of postcoloniality and queer theory in the Vertigo series Unknown Soldier and another by Rebecca Wanzo on humor, citizenship, and the challenge to the cultural illegibility of black heroism in the comic strip The Boondocks and the superhero comic Icon. Importantly, although Gateward and Jennings begin and end their introduction by discussing Power Man, the urban superhero who has recently entered the broader cultural conversation as the subject of the Netflix / Marvel Studios television series Luke Cage, only a few of the essays deal with well-known mainstream superhero characters; for Gateward and Jennings, the crucial work on blackness being done in comics comes from other directions.Although individual essays in both Graphic Borders and The Blacker the Ink deal with female characters or creators, they do so in the context of other categories. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s strikingly designed Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime is one of the first book-length works to deal specifically with the construction and experience of black women in sequential art rather than treating that experience as a subset of broader black or women’s experiences. Although there is a distinct paucity of African American female characters and creators in mainstream and independent American comics,1 it is simply untrue to say that they are not present. Indeed, Black Women in Sequence takes us beyond well-known characters like the X-Men’s mutant weather goddess Storm to characters like Nubia (Wonder Woman’s black sister) and the Butterfly (a character from a series of 1970s exploitation comics that Whaley identifies as the first black superheroine). Similarly, it is in the book’s first and last chapters, in which Whaley considers the creation and consumption of sequential media by black women, often erased from conversations about fan culture, where Black Women in Sequence makes its most important contribution. There she acknowledges innovators in the field like Jackie Ormes, who drew comic strips for the Pittsburgh Courier in the context of early twentieth-century cultural-front leftism; Barbara Brandon-Croft, whose comic strip, Where I’m Coming From, was the first syndicated comic strip by a black female cartoonist; and the community of black creators and consumers of sequential media Whaley calls “Afrofans” (xi).Black Women in Sequence is an extraordinarily ambitious work that draws on a range of discourses and methodologies to examine the way that black women are figured as what Whaley calls “sequential subjects” (8) across a broad range of time periods and media. In order to explore this topic, however, Whaley draws a rigid distinction between comics studies—which she says is narrowly focused on comic books, comic strips, and so on—and what she calls “sequential art studies” (13), which includes adjacent forms like animation and comics adapted into film. Approaching the topic in this way allows Whaley to include a significant number of examples from media outside of comics and graphic novels, but it also elides crucial differences among related forms and among disparate temporal and spatial contexts. Even so, Black Women in Sequence is an important addition to the literature on identity within comics, as it suggests possibilities for further research on a subject with very little coverage and in particular on figures like Ormes and Brandon-Croft. Whaley’s work serves as an admonition to the field at large, a reminder of the vast variety of experiences contained within the matrices of intersectional identity and of the importance of specific attention to those experiences.Although not primarily a book on comics, André M. Carrington’s work in Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction is focused on an adjacent paraliterary field. Speculative fiction, as a genre, encompasses many of the subgenres—superheroes, science fiction, utopia, fantasy, horror, paranormal romance—common in mainstream comics publishing, and the book’s argumentative through-line is applicable to understandings of blackness within the medium of comics. As in The Blacker the Ink, which includes an essay by Carrington, Speculative Blackness is interested in teasing out blackness as a kind of mode. It is important, Carrington argues, that we consider a plurality of audiences when we talk about genre: “Whole segments of society experience genre traditions in different ways according to their sense of how these mediations pertain to their lives and the lives of others” (15). In order to make these arguments, Carrington draws on a long history of black speculative fiction fandom, providing a counterpoint to fan studies scholarship, which largely considers examples contemporaneous to its writing. His historical study of black fandom, which reaches the present in a consideration of the participatory practice of fan fiction, both honors the fact that black fans (who in debates about diversity within comics and genre fiction are often assumed to be newcomers) have been around for as long as there has been speculative fiction and clarifies the fact that fandom is historically contingent, responding to the differing needs of black audiences at different points in time. In order to work this point through, Carrington reads popular science fiction reparatively. Rather than focusing on the variety of ways that speculative genres are racist, already well-trod ground, he seeks out examples of the genre that have something to say about what a black future or a different version of a black past might mean for black identity in the present. In the encounter between blackness and speculative fiction, Carrington argues, we can see both the overwhelming whiteness of the genre, usually hidden from view, and the ways in which black people have found in speculative fiction a way to imagine otherwise.In making his case, Carrington situates himself not only in the context of fan studies but also within the history of feminist science fiction critique, seeking to apply arguments made by writers and scholars on the role of women in speculative fiction to race. He honors this legacy by centering two chapters on black women—Nichelle Nichols’s Lieutenant Uhura from the original Star Trek series and Storm. He has an additional chapter that focuses on the African American–driven publisher Milestone Comics’s comic book Icon, which features the titular African American superhero. His focus on cultural production that is outside of much of the scholarship on speculative fiction, like television and comics, is also notable for what he chooses to leave out; even as he acknowledges the importance of black writers of science fiction like Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler, he seeks to move the study of black speculative fiction beyond the scholarship on those two authors.Indeed, books like Carrington’s mark an important point of for the study of comics within academic literature, that their use as in scholarship outside the specific field of comics As the field and as the academic study of comics of this will become more and not all of them will be as as Carrington’s Even so, the books in this a future for the field, one that takes it from narrow understandings of the medium like Gabriel’s and toward broader and more and methodologies of is a in the of American at the University of Texas at He serves on the of the Comics and is the president of the of the Comics

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

IN RECENT times, the study of the content of the mass media of communications has been used to an increasing extent to obtain information concerning cultural differences. Changes in cultural emphasis in the selection of popular figures for the writing of biographies have been studied by Lowenthal.' Berelson and Salter described the way in which majority and minority Americans were described in the American short story.2 The study of the content of the mass media of communications is often predicated on the assumption that they exert influence on their public. To achieve their objectives, to appeal, they must to some degree at least, reflect the culture of which they are a part, reflect its reality or its needs. It may, therefore, be assumed that the American comic strip, though largely caricatured, depicts American men and women, parents and children. Termin and Miles probably describe the culturally determined ideas rather than the reality of male and female behavior in this country. Their description certainly applies to middle class American society more than to lower class American society. They say: