History Of Comics Research Articles

How to be a fanboy: Wizard magazine and the pedagogy of comic book fandom

ABSTRACT The 1990s were a pivotal time in comics history, and during this period, there was arguably no more important outlet than Wizard magazine. The magazine played an important pedagogical role as both a gateway to and a gatekeeper of fandom. Initially launched as a guide to collecting comic books, Wizard later evolved into a lifestyle and entertainment magazine for a loosely defined “fanboy” readership. While arguably more accessible than the comics it covered, it addressed its audience in exclusive terms, assuming a normatively male, heterosexual, and white fan. Based on a close reading of a sample of eight self-reflective “milestone” issues, this article assesses Wizard as not merely a purveyor of market intelligence to comic book speculators but as a cultural artifact engaged in defining the meaning of fandom for a generation of comic book readers.

TRENDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL LITERATURE AND GRAPHIC JOURNALISM IN UZBEKISTAN

The thesis offers a chronological overview of the evolution of visual literature and graphic journalism in Uzbekistan. The author provides case studies from the history of Jadid journalism, book publishing, and comics related to the media landscape of Uzbekistan.

Is Psylocke Asian? The Racial Fantasy and Ambiguity of an Uncanny Oriental

ABSTRACT: The X-Man Psylocke is often dismissed as a hopelessly problematic character: a white Englishwoman in the body of a Japanese ninja with a convoluted backstory and a sexualized costume. This essay reinterprets her as a seminal character in comics history who serves as a visual index for Asianness by revealing both America’s volatile racial politics and the enduring legacy of Orientalism in the superhero genre. Drawing on theories of racial ambiguity, Orientalist stereotyping, and interethnic transformation, I argue that Betsy Braddock’s perpetually evolving face and outfits showcase mass media’s vexed relationship with the Asian diaspora, including its obsession with Asian females, fear of miscegenation, and fascination with the martial arts. Following her original Asianification in the 1980s to her eventual return to whiteness in the 2010s, this study employs Psylocke as an illuminating figure for exploring histories of racialization, yellowface, biological essentialism, and colorblindness in mainstream comics.

In Defense of the Effete Superhero: Theorizing the First Queer Latinx Superhero, Extraño/Gregorio de la Vega

ABSTRACT: Debuting in the 1987 eight-issue miniseries Millennium , Extraño/Gregorio de la Vega lays claim to being the first gay superhero in superhero comic history. He is also one of the first queer Latinx superheroes to be depicted in the genre. This article examines the mediations and transformations of Extraño/Gregorio de la Vega’s character across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, analyzing how his disruptive queer effete superheroics runs counter to representational agendas that seek to fix or erase gender transgression and nonnormative sexualities in superhero comics. In order to do so, this article proposes a critical reading practice called superheroic minorness. By looking to one-shot issues, double-page team spreads, back covers, letters to the editors, and splash pages, this article examines how his superheroic minorness entails sleuthing across a constellation of details, minutiae, and arrangements in order to compose a comprehensive sketch of an otherwise undervalued or underexamined character who, nonetheless, helps articulate repressed, negated, and/or erased aesthetic-political possibilities. Reading for superheroic minorness is a conceptual strategy for theorizing the importance of the effete superhero and the interpretive frameworks the effete opens up for interrogating the majoritarian sphere and minoritized representation in comics, superhero aesthetics, and popular culture. Rather than situating the minorness or stereotyping of Extraño/Gregorio de la Vega as a lack or a problem for critical inquiry, this essay positions it as a means of revaluing and imagining the effete superhero, the abject, peripheral queer Latinx character who overloads straightforward notions of respectability, assimilation, and conformity.

Shared Coordinates: Writing Herstory in Ibero American Comics

This study focuses on the emergence of a transnational sisterhood under three projects originating from the cooperation between groups of female comic book writers in Spain and Latin America. After the 2016 exhibition “Presentes: Autoras de Tebeo de Ayer y de Hoy” and the publication of its catalogue by Autoras de Cómic, there was a shared need to claim back the role of female or non-male authorship, and its involvement in comic book production and business. The Argentinian group Feminismo Gráfico tapped into such endeavors, and in 2019 produced “Nosotras Contamos”, a travelling exhibition and a catalogue, with a thematic and a diachronic approach. When COVID-19 broke out, Spanish and Argentinian cooperation and development institutions (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional y Desarrollo and Centro Cultural España Córdoba) engaged in a discussion on the previous experiences. The project resulted in a publication and an online exhibition Coordenadas Gráficas (Graphic Coordinates), highlighting the work of non-male authors from Spain, Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica. The transnational perspective of this last project extends beyond the previous national experiences and includes a meaningful selection of comic stories that, regardless of the nationality of the author, can be defined as feminist. Sexism, gender discrimination, gender violence, and sexual and reproductive rights are the shared coordinates discussed by this long list of authors, who question gender normativity from its very composition. By introducing the associative experiences that gave life to the projects and analyzing them in the international context, the study will focus on the appropriate practice of sharing knowledge to pursue a similar recognition. Moreover, based on the words of the curators and the creators, the study ultimately seeks to shed light on the production and circulation of works of collective interest, meant to recover the role of women in the history of comics.

Introduction

Abstract The introductory article to this special issue on intermediality and comics focuses on exploring the richness of graphic narrative beyond the conventional understanding of comics as a multimodal medium that often combines text and images. Primarily using diverse examples of Spanish comics as its focus, this essay investigates intermedial relations between comics and music, adaptation and animation, as well as the extension of comics beyond physical and digital spaces. Drawing on existing research on intermediality more broadly and specific scholarly literature that examines comics as an intermedial cultural production or in relation to other media, the article argues that intermediality has been a consistent theme throughout the history of Iberian comics and key to new aesthetic and conceptual explorations in the medium.

A cyberpunk symphony of dystopian nightmares: Towards an archaeology of early digital comics1

This article analyses the social and technological contexts in which the first contact between comics and digital technologies occurs. The history of digital comics begins during the 1980s through the intersection of technocultural practices and innovations that had a major impact on the comics industry. Through the analysis of Michael Saenz’s Shatter (First Comics, 1985) and Iron Man: Crash (Marvel, 1988) and Pepe Moreno’s Batman: Digital Justice (DC Comics, 1990), we will try to reconstruct the media and cultural processes that paved the way for the technical and expressive modes of future digital comics. The objective of the article is to demonstrate the paradoxical co-presence, in these works, of optimism and pessimism towards the possibilities guaranteed by information technologies. Indeed, on the one hand, the authors of these works experimented with the opportunities offered by still rudimental PCs and software. On the other, they embodied worries about the sociocultural traumas triggered by the technological, which translated on the expressive level in the prefiguration of dystopian futures dominated by cyberpunk atmospheres.

Remediation processes and reading protocols: A genealogy of digital comics

This article attempts to unpack the complexity of digital comics by quickly reconstructing their salient evolutionary lines, contextualizing them within the broader media landscape and discussing the directions they are prominently developing. It begins by tracing the many remediations that have marked the history of comics, foregrounding some tensions underlying the comics form: seriality and its implications; the dialectic between popular form and artwork; and the influence of orality, most evident in their early days and again, many years later, after the digital turn. In particular, we will highlight the close relationship between cinema and comics and, after the advent of digital, between the latter and video games. In underlining affinities and divergences between diverse media forms, the article focuses on two particularly significant examples: Lorenzo Ghetti and Carlo Trimarchi’s To Be Continued, a webcomic capable of experimenting with and enlivening many of the possibilities of digital comics; and Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck, probably the most successful compromise between the complexity of plot, storyworld breadth and formal features on the one hand, and expansive, participatory transmediality on the other. In doing so, this article aims to achieve a quick yet compelling overview of digital comics from the perspective of media archaeology, situating them both diachronically throughout their history, and synchronically, in relation to the other media that feed them and are in turn fed by them, cyclically, across media boundaries.

The significance of the comics history of War refuge Busan comics in the early 1950s

한국만화는 근대만화 초기부터 질곡의 역사였으며 2000년대 이전까지도 대중문화로서의 평가가 부정적이었다. 만화사 연구도 일천해서 역사적 사실과 관련 후속연구도 쉽지 않다. 본 연구에서는 한국 현대 만화사에서 잊혀진 공간이었던 1951년 이후 2년간의 짧은 부산 피난지 만화를 발굴하고 그 의의를 새기고자 한다. 1945년 한국 현대만화가 출발한 이래 5년 만에 한국전쟁으로 명맥이 끊겼다. 더구나 전생으로 기성작가들은 모두 생업과 전쟁 홍보만화 작업에 투입되었다. 따라서 부산에서의 만화는 프로작가들을 대신한 많은 청소년 작가들로 대체되어 자생적 만화생태계가 만들어지기 시작했다. 일본만화 베끼기로 출발한 노점에서 판매되던 만화들은 점차 창작 이야기 만화로 진화했으며 아동들에게 인기 읽을거리로 진화했다. 더구나 고급단행본 서점만화까지 발매되기 시작했다. 비록 딱지, 떼기만화로 불리던 조악한 만화였지만 척박한 환경에서의 만화 창작과 유통은 새로운 대중문화의 출현이었다. 부산 동광동 인쇄소를 중심으로 한 딱지만화가 유행되었고 국제시장 일대에서 만화 판매 좌판이 활성화되기 시작했다. 더구나 〈밀림의 왕자〉가 서점 단행본으로 히트하자 정식 판매점과 만화 도매 체계도 자리 잡았다. 전문적으로 만화를 제작하는 출판사로 〈산해당〉, 〈아동 세계사〉, 〈세계문화사〉 등이 자리 잡았고 피난지에서 활동하던 작가와 출판사는 전쟁 이후 모두 서울로 이전해 한국 만화계를 이끄는 작가와 주요 출판사 및 유통, 잡지사로 자리 잡았다. 부산 피난지 만화는 자생적으로 생태계가 조성되었다는 점과 세계 문화사적으로도 유례없는 청소년 만화가들의 작업이 가장 도드라진 특징이며, 부산에서 태동한 산업이 그대로 휴전과 함께 서울로 이식되었다는 점도 여타의 문화사와 구별된다. 이러한 구분점들이 바로 피난지 부산만화의 가장 큰 특징이자 의의라 할 것이다. 따라서 한국 현대 만화사의 새로운 출발점으로 기록되어야 하며, 현대문화사 연구의 주제로서도 가치가 있다 할 것이다. 한국 현대만화가 태동기로 기억되는 1951년 이후 2년간의 부산 만화사의 후속연구가 진척되고 피난지 만화사가 곧 한국 만화사의 본류임을 새롭게 인식하는 계기가 되길 기대한다.

Журнал «Крокодил» 1940-х годов как пространство развития советского комикс-стрипа

The article is devoted to the history of Soviet comics in the 1940s through the example of the Krokodil magazine. The first part discusses stereotypes about the history of comics in the USSR, analyses the concept of the comic strip as the main form of comics in the Soviet period, and considers the use of Media studies as a framework. The purpose of the article is to examine the work of Krokodil as a space for the development of the Soviet comic strip, through R. Duncan’s and M. J. Smith’s communication model of the comic book. The second part explores the process of work of the magazine’s artists, the censorship by various gatekeepers’ actors, the typical features of the visual language of the Soviet comic strip, the distribution and perception of comic strips and the magazine itself. It is especially noted that the distinction between caricature and comic strip is not typical for the 1940s, and it will emerge only by the 1960s. The article also provides a parsing of a corpus of diaries from the 1940s, in which memories of Krokodil are highlighted. The hypothesis of H. Alaniz about the special role of comics during the Great Patriotic War is verified and questioned.

Bringing Up Mischievous Strips: The Katzenjammer Kids’ Domestication in Spanish and Italian Children’s Comics Magazines

This article examines how the comic series The Katzenjammer Kids, created by Rudolph Dirks in 1897 and whose main characters are two wicked children, has been usually altered, modified, and reframed due to its publication in Spain and Italy. By using the concept of domestication and utilizing tools of the history and formal analysis of comics and the contextual studies used in iconography, we try to study the influence and the afterlife impact of the forms, narratives, and gags of The Katzenjammer Kids and, at the same time, to provide a theoretical-methodological framework for understanding the cultural scope of these phenomena that characterize a field of study such as comics reception, which has been relatively underdeveloped.

Comic History: challenges and possibilities in the construction of Scientific Literacy in Sciences

This article, the result of a master's research carried out with a 4th year elementary school class, aims to present data collected in journals about comics in the classroom. The research aimed to reflect and enable literacy practices through didactic reading and writing strategies. The qualitative-based methodology was carried out through the application of an Investigative Teaching Sequence with the theme "Fungi". Comics were the reference genre for planning, reading and textual productions. The investigation made it possible to perceive that the students expanded their knowledge about Fungi, bringing them closer to scientific practices. We understand work with comics as viable resources in the promotion of scientific literacy in science, but little used as a pedagogical resource.

Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland by Ewa Stańczyk

Reviewed by: Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland by Ewa Stańczyk M. Jutkiewicz Stańczyk, Ewa. Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland. Studies in Comics and Cartoons. Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH, 2022. xii + 211 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $149.95; $34.95. Throughout their history, comics in Poland have been perceived as a niche and marginal art form, despite the influence the medium has had in other countries. This is why most research has focused on demonstrating that there is such a thing as Polish comics, and has been an important part of Polish culture with a history of its own. This perspective, and the overall assumption that the history of art and popular culture in Eastern European countries is unique because of historical determinants, means that historians and scholars of comics in Poland tend to portray Polish graphic storytelling as an autonomous art form, isolated from the global field of cultural production (e.g. A. Rusek, Komiks polski. Od Łapigrosza do Funky’ego Kovala. Historia komiksu polskiego do roku 1989, Warsaw, 2021). According to these analyses, there have been only two periods when Poles had access to comics as part of global popular culture — during the interwar years and after the political transformation of 1989 — leaving the comic art of the Polish People’s Republic (1945–89) as something distinct from global trends. This myth has been revised and deconstructed in Ewa Stańczyk’s book. Stańczyk’s main assumption is that Poland has never been fully isolated, and that global trends were always evident in Polish culture. According to Stańczyk, the comic medium was intertwined with modernism and the global culture that emerged during the nineteenth century. The history of comics in Poland, therefore, has to be seen as a complex narrative, a product of both global and national cultural trends, even as representative of the complexity of Polish cultural history itself (pp. 3–12). This perspective is unique in the scholarship, and is best exemplified by the section of the book that considers Polish critics’ denigration of comic art during the 1950s, which paralleled the [End Page 541] critical scepticism expressed in the United States at the same time. Stańczyk shows how Polish academics, journalists and critics used the same arguments made by their Western counterparts, even though their reasoning was based on Communist discourse and propaganda. This paradox exemplifies the way in which Stańczyk deconstructs an assumption that is dominant in the field, namely the belief that this critical position was a result of socialist states perceiving the medium as a conduit of Western decadence. Stańczyk does not forget about local culture and politics, but sets them in a bigger, global context, forcing scholars to reinterpret them as an intertwined web of relations. The history of comics in Poland, even though more peripheral than in other parts of the world, is very extensive. Stańczyk has chosen her examples carefully, but there are a few omissions that would have strengthened her narrative. There is no mention, for example, of the emergence of fan culture during the 1980s. Stańczyk does mention some aspects of the history of fandom in Poland, particularly the recent popularity of manga, but its history extends further back to the period of social unrest prior to the collapse of the Polish People’s Republic, when it was modelled after Western fan communities, and was perceived as subversive towards the state (see A. Nowakowski, Fanzin SF. Artyści – Wydawcy – Fandom, Poznań, 2017). Polish science fiction and comics fandom was political, as reflected in the comics published during this period, which were satirical and distrustful towards the state and political power in general (see J. Szyłak and J. Konefał, ‘The Influence of Local and National Press on the Comic Publishing Industry in the Polish People’s Republic between 1956 and 1989’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, February 2022 <https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2022.2032231>). Stańczyk gives little attention or else completely omits examples of graphic narratives that were critical of the state, especially after 1989. There is some mention...

Barbarella: Sexual Revolution or Editorial Revolution?

In the history of French comics, Barbarella is usually perceived as a turning point towards "adult" bande dessinée. Released as an album by avant-garde publisher Éric Losfeld in 1964, Barbarella plays a key role in the Bildungsroman narrative that structures the history of the Ninth Art. Whereas Astérix plays on the ambiguities and multilayered readings of both children and their parents, Barbarella is unquestionably targeted for an adult, male audience: the sexualized space opera created by veteran comics artist Jean-Claude Forest leaves no doubt on the matter. A closer reading of Barbarella allows us to nuance this simplistic interpretation of French comics history. The 1964 album republishes a story previously released in the pornographic V Magazine, in serial installments. When published as a book, Barbarella is deeply transformed by the materiality of the format, allowing for a new narrative rhythm, structured in chapters. The monumentality of the book enables an auteur-driven approach to comics. Barbarella, then, represents a key moment in comics publishing, and a crucial model for a literary turn in comics. Its reception, both by the then-emerging fan culture and by the Commission de surveillance et de contrôle in charge of comics censorship, enables a better understanding of the difficult rise of an "adult" comics scene. Roger Vadim's problematic adaptation (and the new version of the book released alongside the movie) plays an important part in the canonization of Barbarella as a pop icon.

EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL POTENTIAL OF INCLUSIVE COMICS

The article deals with the research on comics' educational and cultural potential, particularly inclusive comic books, and their influence on inclusive culture formation. Inclusive graphic stories have long been part of the readership abroad. Gradually, this tradition is becoming popular in the Ukrainian cultural space. The chronology of the implementation of inclusive education in Ukraine is established, a brief overview of the regulatory framework is given. There is more and more inclusive literature on the Ukrainian book market: it is both translations and works of domestic writers, it is literature for the youngest, teenagers, adults, and it is fiction and nonfiction. In 2019 the first inclusive comic book "Friends 2.0" appeared. It was published with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation within the framework of the Inclusive Art program. The comic book "Friends 2.0" is an illustrative material for the analysis. The given research identifies the features of inclusive literature and clarifies its role in forming a tolerant society. The main evolutionary steps of comics are conveyed (Egyptian drawings in the burial chambers, "Ocelot's Claw", The Bayeux Tapestry, William Hogarth’s caricatures, stories in drawings by Rodolphe Töpffer, "Max und Moritz" by Wilhelm Busch, "The Yellow kid" by Richard Outcault and others). The basic terms and concepts of comic book culture are explained, taking into account the specifics of their translation. The history of Ukrainian comics is written daily, undergoes great changes, forms the main slogans and ideas in which it operates and develops. Currently, Ukrainian comics are established as a separate literary and art genre. Inclusive "Friends 2.0". comics are five stories based on real events. Every story is a story of struggle and victory. These are the first inclusive stories in the Ukrainian cultural space. They proclaim that everyone in the world is important, that disability is not a sentence, the importance of adaptation and inclusion, faith and dreams that come true. The article highlights the structural and semantic components of the stories in the comic book "Friends 2.0", analyzes the role of the motto in the content of the stories of this book, the background of panels, characters, and more. The analysis of inclusive comic strips as achievements of comic book culture and as examples of graphic texts in which the inclusive component dominates is offered. It helps to identify a special type of superhero in "Friends 2.0". The educational potential of such comics and their influence on the context of inclusive culture are identified.&#x0D; Keywords: inclusive literature, inclusive comics, comic book, diegesis, narrative, encapsulation, motto, superhero.

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

Seeing MAD: Essays on MAD Magazine’s Humor and Legacy

Seeing <i>MAD:</i> Essays on <i>MAD</i> Magazine’s Humor and Legacy

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz

Reviewed by: Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz Matthew Brake (bio) Roy Schwartz, Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero. McFarland, 2021. x + 364 pp, $45.00. In Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero, Roy Schwartz sets out to demonstrate that despite the many Christian allegories portraying Superman as a Christ figure (made popular by the 1978 Superman movie), Superman is actually a Jewish character. Schwartz's work joins a growing body of scholarship dedicated to parsing out the Jewishness of the Man of Steel. Schwartz himself makes note of works like Danny Fingeroth's Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (2007). While Schwartz does not mention it, one could suggest Martin Lund's 2016 book, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel: Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish-Comics Connection, another text that examines Superman's supposed Jewishness (with a more critical eye toward the question). Schwartz offers three ways that his book uniquely contributes to this growing body of literature: "it examines the entirety of Superman's career, from 1938 to date, whereas others have limited themselves to his formative 'Golden Age,' ending around 1945, with a few ventures up to 1960. It also explores more deeply the Jewish parallels, including their theological, folkloric, historical and sociological meaning. And it's the first to focus exclusively on Superman" (5). One of the best ways to evaluate this book is to judge it by the criteria Schwartz lays out here. Starting with Schwartz's first point, the book is impressive in its breadth of material. Schwartz guides readers through Superman's origins and the early concepts from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster that eventually led to Superman's debut in Action Comics #1. From there, he doesn't stop until events from Brian Michael Bendis's recent run on the character, including when Superman reveals his identity to the world. Schwartz also references the recent CW television show Superman & Lois, which debuted in 2020. In between, he discusses Superman's depiction in various comic book publishing "ages" (i.e., the Golden Age, the Silver Age, etc.) as well as the various serials, television shows, movies, and other transmedia adaptations of the character. While a book like this will end up leaving some things out, Schwartz follows through [End Page 89] on his promise to explore the entirety of Superman's existence, from the early ideas leading to his creation to works that have appeared within the last two years, all the while attempting to highlight the Jewishness of the character. I will address the exploration of Jewish parallels last, but to Schwartz's claim that this book is the first to focus exclusively on Superman, that's not quite accurate. Lund's (previously mentioned) text predates Schwartz's by five years, although Lund's does confine itself to Superman's early years. Also, Schwartz's book does focus on Superman overall, although at times in deviates into a discussion, more broadly, on the history of comics in general and on Jewish contributions to the creation and growth of the industry specifically. This is fine, and is done to provide context for the claim of Superman's Jewishness, but there are places where the text veers off course into one of these other directions so that Schwartz needs to throw in a sentence to remind us that the book is about Superman's Jewishness. I direct a majority of my critiques to Schwartz's claim that the book more deeply explores Superman's Jewish parallels than many other texts. To this point, Schwartz does need to be commended for the breadth of material he has assembled in this text. It is an interesting survey of comics history as well as the Jewish presence in the comic book industry throughout this history. Many scholars studying the history of the Man of Steel may also appreciate this text as a resource to find primary and secondary sources for their own research. There are places where Schwartz makes the...

Introduction

This special issue of European Comic Art presents articles on the diversity of contemporary feminist comics in the Nordic region. The Nordic countries have seen an explosion in feminist comics and graphic novels since the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Sweden, feminist comics have become commercial successes, winning prestigious prizes, and appearing in exhibitions, Instagram, and other social media. Recently, a new generation of artists has entered the scene with a renewed focus on queer and intersectional issues. This special issue directs attention to feminist comic art throughout the Nordic region—with representation from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—by established creators as well as emerging voices. The history of feminist comics can be traced back to the social movements of the 1970s, but the energy and creativity of contemporary feminist comics is new, reflecting both international trends and conditions specific to the region and to each national context.

Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability by Eszter Szép

Reviewed by: Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability by Eszter Szép José Alaniz (bio) Eszter Szép, Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability. The Ohio State University Press, 2020. 208 pp, $129.95, $32.95. Click for larger view View full resolution Hungarian comics scholar Eszter Szép scores a home run with her first monograph, Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability, a landmark work which expands upon and productively advances the "embodied turn" in comics studies. I daresay it is destined to become a canonical book, which draws on affect/reader response theory, gender studies, analysis of the drawn line and material culture for an extended, mostly persuasive case that nonfiction comics (on both the production and reception sides) operate through an oft-unacknowledged ethical framework of bodily vulnerability. Szép has an active career as an author, instructor, curator, and popularizer of graphic narrative in a Central European country which—like some other former Soviet bloc states—has only recently and fitfully embraced comics culture in the Western sense. Szép co-organizes the annual International Comics Festival at Budapest, curated the first comics exhibition on the history of Hungarian comics in the National Széchényi Library in 2018, and co-edited Gendered Identities in Contemporary [End Page 85] Literary and Visual Cultures (2018). She graduated from the Modern English and American Literature and Culture Doctoral Program at the Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Humanities, Budapest, in 2018, and taught at the Milestone Institute, also in Budapest. Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability is partly based on her dissertation.1 In the book, Szép synthesizes concepts from Judith Butler (philosophy/ethics), Vivian Sobchak (phenomenology/Film Studies), Hillary Chute (trauma/graphic narrative), Suzanne Keen (empathy), and Aaron Kashtan (materiality), among others, to argue that comics studies has historically attended overmuch to the mind and not enough to the body. Yet there are always three bodies involved in the engagement with comics, she maintains: those of the drawer, the reader, and most provocatively the object (the comics work itself). The book's first line is in fact: "Reading comics is not only a performance of our cognitive skills, it is also a performance and interaction of bodies" (1, my emphasis). And as bodies, all bear a common fragility and mortality—in short, vulnerability. The book goes on to map out a framework "in which the embodied processes of drawing and the embodied processes of interpretation can be related in dialogical engagement" (4–5) through the common anchor of human vulnerability. Turning to nonfiction works as the best evidence for her thesis, Szép highlights vulnerability as implicitly and explicitly articulated in the graphic narrative of Katie Green, Joe Sacco, Ken Dahl, Miriam Katin, and Lynda Barry. These artists, through often brutal self-presentations/examinations and/or explorations of real-world trauma, center the precarity at the core of what Gillian Whitlock calls "autographics." Building in particular on the work of Charles Hatfield, Elisabeth El Refaie, and others, Szép argues that "drawing one's avatar in comics is based on encounters with the Other within the self, and because of this, it is inseparable from experiencing and expressing vulnerability" (81). It's important to emphasize as well that Szép intends this approach as an alternative to identificatory models of comics consumption; she stresses the "fundamental nature of vulnerability" (10) as a precondition for a dialogical, ethical recognition of the Other (both within and without). Such attention to the embodiment of comics-making/reading leads to a number of repercussions, which the author handily explores in case studies. Citing art historians like Simon Grennan and Philip Rawson, Szép maintains focus throughout on the central role played by the drawn line in graphic narrative, as both physical trace of the artist (what Jared Gardner calls "the hand") and as fabulously productive and performative agent of (re)creation. (Some of her insights resonate with those of Andrei Molotiu in his 2020 essay on cartooning in Comics Studies: A Guidebook, edited by Hatfield and Bart Beaty.) She follows Jennifer Higgie's conceptualization of Matisse's drawings as "thinking...