History Of Comics Research Articles

Maus, la bande dessinée et le dessin comme témoignages sur la shoah

ABSTRACTIf Maus is nowadays unanimously acclaimed as a masterpiece, numerous questions were raised since its publication, which show several misunderstandings due to Maus genre itself: a comic book. When it was published, for the first time the testimony of an Holocaust survivor was genuinely narrated through a comic book. Nonetheless, questions were raised regarding the nature of Maus and whether it was a biography or a fiction. A comic book, even more a comic book depicting the Holocaust with animals representing humans, couldn't be a representation of reality, while a text, or a movie, cause no such question regarding the transposition of reality through a way or another. Such questions surrounding Maus shed light on a broader topic, the common perception of drawing. It can be summarized by a simple statement: drawing is art. While tens of thousands drawings were drawn by Holocaust (or Third Reich) victims, they are usually seen has illustrations, pieces of art, while they should be seen for what they are really: first and foremost draw testimonies, i.e. sources, which should be analyzed and used as such. Maus is also milestone in comic book history. Then the comic industry, both in Europe and the US, was perceived essentially as a children media. Maus is one of the comic books published in the 1980's which changed the perception of the genre and gave to it credibility. If Maus had a major impact on the public opinion regarding comic books, it had also a major impact on the genre itself and is by many aspects a turning point. It innovates on various aspects: one of the first autobiographical comic books, the project was conducted during almost two decades, from the beginning of the 1970's until 1991 and the publication of the second, and final, volume, with a format previously unseen. And while before its publication only a handful of comic books dared to address the Holocaust, since dozens comics books did so.

초기 순정만화와 소녀만화의 스토리 형식에 대한 비교연구

한국의 순정만화와 일본의 소녀만화는 독특한 특징을 가지고 있으며 서로 밀접한 연관성을 가지고 있다는 것은 여러 선행연구에서 강조되어 왔다. 본 연구는 순정만화와 소녀만화의 스토리 형식에 대한 연구이다. 순정만화는 1950~1960년대의 작품을, 소녀만화의 경우 잡지 "소녀 클럽"에 연재된 작품으로 그 연구 대상을 한정했다. "소녀 클럽"의 경우 창간호부터 폐간될 때까지 휴간 없이 발행된 거의 유일한 소녀잡지이며 일본 최초의 장편 소녀만화인 테즈카 오사무의 '리본의 기사'가 연재된 잡지이기도 하기 때문이다. 연구 결과 순정만화와 소녀만화는 시공간적 배경, 이야기의 장르, 이야기의 길이 등에서 뚜렷한 차이점을 찾을 수 있었다. 그리고 이러한 차이점은 당시의 사회적 배경과 만화의 역사, 작가들, 연재 매체의 특징에서 기인함을 알 수 있었다. Korean Shunjung Manhwa and Shojo Manga have a unique characteristics. These genres have a close relationship each other. This study is story form of Shunjung Manhwa and Shojo Manga. In this article, a subject of study for Shunjung Manhwa is the works between 1950s and 1960s. I set limits to the works from "Shojo Club" the case of Shojo Manga. "Shojo Club" is the only girl's magazine without suspend publication. Furthermore, that magazine is the one that Japan's first Shojo Manga, Tezuka Osamu's 'Princess Knight' was published serially. The results of my research work is that Shunjung Manwha has a remarkable difference on a spatio-temporal background, a genre of story, a length of story as compared with Shojo Manga. In addition, this difference is based on the social background, history of comics, authors, media published serially at that time.

A Review of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics 1941–1948

Wonder Woman is one of the world’s most recognisable comic book superheroines, yet the history of her creation and the unique universe of the early Wonder Woman comics are often eclipsed by television shows, and limited edition merchandise; whilst scholars simply focus upon Wonder Woman as the first mainstream comic book superheroine, a mere placeholder in the tapestry of comic book history. In Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics 1941–1948 (Rutgers University Press; 2015), Noah Berlatsky examines the original Wonder Woman comics and creators William Moulton Marston and Harry Peter, revealing a comic ahead of its time, capable of handling taboo subjects where other comics could not.

Sources: Comics Through Time: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas

Comics Through Time: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas is an ambitious, four-volume title that "seeks to capture some of the richness" of comics history and "provide information on this history for a wide range of users, from casual fans of comics to professional scholars of the form" (xxiii). Each of the four volumes covers a specific time period, beginning in the 1900s with comic strips and continuing to the present. Just as the volumes cover a broad expanse of time, they also deal with a diverse array of subjects, including comic strips, comic books, comics creators both well-known and obscure (often accompanied by large photographs), comics publishers, and genres such as science fiction and horror.

De los cómics a la cinematografía = From Comics to Cinematography

From a multidisciplinary perspective we immerse ourselves into the History of Art, to dive into the background of the history of comics and, from there, to follow along the way the interaction that has existed between this and the main media that are specialized in images and creating visual icons, painting, photography and especially the cinema. It analyses the step from the static image to the moving image, in both high culture and popular culture, and shows how all these visual arts have been interrelating and have nurtured themselves, even more so nowadays. A long journey that aims to track the processes, the dynamic and the evolution that exist around the vignette from their ancestral origins to the cinematic world, their similarities and their differences, its interactivity and especially the influence and links between one another in the pursuit and development of a narrative visual language.

Chris Ware’s Epiphanic Comics

This paper reads Chris Ware’s Building Stories in light of his many references to art and literature, especially to Cornell, Courbet, Duchamp, and James Joyce. The author argues that Building Stories requires intermedial reading, knowledge of both the “high” canon of modernist literature and art and the history and iconology of twentieth and twenty-first century comics. In Building Stories Ware incorporates the work and ideas of canonical art history through an allusive play that is hybrid, layered and subversive. The paper claims that Ware’s citation of Duchamp and Courbet reframes a dissociated and dissociating trope, the dismembered female nude, in a story critical of the objectification of women, the mask of femininity, and the traps of gender. Ware ultimately does so in the service of a sentimental and redemptive narrative frame the paper calls the epiphanic mode. As used by Ware, the epiphanic mode marries one of the most sacred and revered concepts of modernism, the epiphany, to the formal device of the comics capsule as used by Bil Keane, one of the most maligned and popular comics artists of the last fifty years. The turn towards a devalued device — the Bil Keane capsule, or epiphanic circle, and a devalued experience — the domestic, rejects the internal hierarchies not only of the art world but also of the comics world, which is so often associated with masculine and public models of heroism.

Batman returns, again and again: An exploratory enquiry into the recent ‘Batman’ film franchise, artistic imitation and fan appreciation

Abstract For many scholars, critics as well as fans, fidelity to the source material is the key word in a debate on film adaptation. This article, however, scrutinizes the issue of fidelity by reflecting on the character and story of Batman that has been so often rebooted and reinvented in its long history of comics and movies that one can wonder what the original is. Acknowledging today’s widespread cross-media exchange of narratives, the article shows that fans’ reactions to the filmic adaptations are as diverse as is the range of retellings of the Batman story. Focusing on the different interpretations of the villain Bane in the recent film franchise, it demonstrates that most fans prefer a sense of faithfulness towards the ‘essence’ of the character rather than an accurate resemblance in appearance or look. The study further acknowledges the growing importance of fans in the creative and economic process of adaptation.

All at Once

All at Once Austin English (bio) School Spirits Anya Davidson PictureBox www.pictureboxinc.com 144 Pages; Print, $19.95 Comics, maybe more than other popular mediums, are mired with pastiche narratives passed off as mature artistic statements. For corporate fare featuring beloved archetypes (think Spider-Man, Batman, etc), a well-played riff on a beloved style of drawing or plotting from the (not all that distant) past hits the pleasure zone of the readership hard. An artist like Darwyn Cooke, rather than receiving his due as a virtuosic nostalgia master (nothing wrong with it, after all), is perceived more as the living, breathing real thing—maybe more beloved then whoever it is in the first place that is the basis for his entire career. Cartoonists who make more personal work aren’t immune to this. The pastiche just tends to be more insular, skipping fewer generations and employing a more of-the-moment, collage-as-style, less “scholarly” approach. Anya Davidson’s debut book School Spirits confronts this problem head on. Pastiche, at first glance, seems to be in Davidson’s artistic DNA. Yet to call her work deeply reminiscent of any other artist somehow seems to miss the point (however, many artists who fall into this discussion make it the entire conversation). A recent review of her work mentioned Milt Gross, and Percy Crosby’s name also has been batted around. Davidson’s comics have, at times, the line quality and the particular energy of both these men. Love and passion for prewar comedic newspaper cartooning seems obviously embedded in what Davidson serves us. Old time men’s magazine gag cartooning is part of her vocabulary, and we can also check off Kirby-krackle (rampant in artsy and mainstream circles now and forever). X-Men character Rogue is referenced, suggesting even a passing affinity for superhero artist Marc Silvestri. In terms of drawing, she’s a virtuoso. If she wanted, she could line herself up with someone like Cooke and pad out a nice career politely invoking the popular styles she admires. And yet, at second and third and all glances after, School Spirits reveals the pastiche tag to be irrelevant when discussing Davidson’s work. It’s irrelevant partly because Davidson is such a high level virtuoso that she’s able to synthesize a lot at once, and she synthesizes so much because she is a comics history omnivore. But Davidson doesn’t want to re-mix the past to modernize or make it “cool” or “as fun as it should have been.” Her narrative concerns and themes are wild and totally her own. So what emerges is something deeply potent: a graphic novel drawn with incredible skill that hits old style cartooning trope buttons hard and assertively, all in service of Davidson’s own native intellect. School Spirits’s plot, on the most straightforward level, concerns high school student Oola and her friends as they bounce around their campus with Looney Tunes-esque elasticity. Davidson lets them flirt with the supernatural in a breezy way, as deep philosophical discussions with rock gods and mystics fade in and out. It’s a very loose plot, designed as a structure for Davidson to put all of her cartooning concerns into motion with as little feedback as possible. Thematically, the title undersells us: School Spirits sounds like the name of a book that invokes both horror and teen romance genres and mixes them together into something zeitgeisty. But the actual plot is so loose and open that any multi-genre parody enthusiast is sure to walk away flummoxed. Yes, friends Oola and Garf are high school students, and yes, there are brushes with the macabre. About as on the nose as it gets: fellow student Inga plans on throwing a party. “There’s gonna be food and music and I decorated the whole house” says Inga. In response, Oola imagines a ghoul offering up human head with the telegraphed punch line: “Bon Appetit!” But that’s a throwaway gag, as is the title. The book fluctuates between school happenings and Oola’s rich daydream reactions. It’s within this set-up that Davidson’s compound style of cartooning...

Detalles realistas para una guerra idealizada. Una aproximación a las Hazañas Bélicas de Boixcar

Hazañas Bélicas has been studied by some of the main specialists on the history of the Spanish comics. However, there are questions that require a more detailed study, as the successive publish of this comic, the election of wars as contexts for the stories and the fascination on war technology. This article analyzes these subjects taking a selection of the comics published between 1950 and 1956. Among its main conclusions, it’s to be noted the preference of the Second World War as context for the stories, the preeminence of American and German heroes and the minuteness of the representation of war technology.

‘Who do you think you are kidding…?’ German comedy from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries

‘With a smart joke, I have let you see an easy game.’ Reuchlin in SergiuThe Germans have no sense of humour, have contributed nothing to the history of comedy and are arrogant compared to the English [sic!]. This article tests the veracity of such myths and statements and presents a history of German comedy from the tenth century through to the development of comic forms and characters in the eighteenth century. The Roman playwright Terence had a lasting influence on German comedy, from the adaptations of Hrotsvitha to the fifteenth-century playwrights when the complexity of his plots and clear moralising chimed with the ideals of the Reformation. From the sixteenth century, performative modes were established, such as the epic poetry of the minnesingers who performed at court, the more public Schwanke’s comic anecdotes that gave way to the farcical Fastnachtspiel and the Nachtspiel. Recurrent comic figures were used to draw the audience in and comment on proceedings: but the popular clown Pickelhäring was supplanted by the commedia-influenced Harlekin, who was replaced by the homegrown rustic Hanswurst, who in turn was superseded by the more domestic comic servant. The clown figure was eventually excised from eighteenth-century bourgeois theatre, signalling the end of German ‘rough theatre.’ This article argues against the crude stereotyping of Germans and their ‘lack of humour’ to present a map of neglected comic history.

Peanuts, Pogo, and Hobbes: A Newspaper Editor's Journey through the World of Comics GeorgeLockwood. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013.

Peanuts, Pogo, and Hobbes: A Newspaper Editor's Journey through the World of Comics Lockwood. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013.Peanuts, Pogo, and Hobbes is a loose and baggy monster of a book, cobbled together mostly from republished and lightly revised essays that seem randomly organized. But the result is nonetheless a joy to savor because the material was selected and arranged by a savvy connoisseur. Lockwood, a child of the Great Depression, never lost his love for the newspaper's daily black-and-white strips and the color Sunday inserts. When he became a newspaper editor of the Milwaukee Journal in the 1960s, one of his jobs was deciding which strips to add and drop. Because of that, he got to meet legendary comics artists like Walt Kelly (who wrote him into a strip by drawing his nickname OF Journal George on the side of Pogo's swamp rowboat), Al Capp, Milton Caniff, Bill Mauldin, Chester Gould, Charles Schultz, Garry Trudeau, and Bill Watterson. This book is his charmingly chatty comic strip memoir (xv).Lockwood has an insider's understanding for how things worked in the business. For instance, artists create their strip but traditionally don't own it. Instead they draw for middlemen syndicates like King Features and Scripps, which hawk each strip to newspapers. Happily, some artists may get involved in marketing by sending sample artwork to entice editors. Lockwood devotes one memorable chapter to his private stash of one-off drawings (some custom-made for him) that promote or introduce classic strips.He revels in gossipy personal details about artists. Take for instance Milton Caniff, who had the first successful comeback in comics history. In 1946 Caniff quit Terry and the Pirates, the syndicate-owned strip that had made him famous. He wanted to control his own work, which he did a year later with his second big-hit strip, Steve Canyon. The keys to his fame were threefold: the best artwork in the business, cliffhanging military plotlines for each episode, and-most of alltantalizingly drawn gorgeous dames. Caniff's pinup pizzazz could stop the breath of adolescent and adult males. Aficionados cherish the likes of Terry's femme fatale Dragon Lady, Steve's sweet Summer Smith (and perhaps the sexiest comics dame ever, scantily clad Miss Lace from the strip Male Call, published exclusively for WWII GIs). Unfortunately Caniff's work was so strongly associated with the armed forces that the Vietnam antiwar backlash killed his popularity. …

Beyond Graphic Novels: Illustrated Scholarly Discourse and the History of Educational Comics

Comics are increasingly being used in higher education for teaching and research, as demonstrated by the recent publication of comics in The Annals of Internal Medicine and other academic journals. This article examines how the ascendance of graphic novels to the realm of ‘proper’ literature has simultaneously paved the way for this acceptance of comics as scholarly discourse while obscuring the much longer tradition of pedagogical comics dating to before World War II. In the process, it will highlight some of the ways comics can be used in education, and suggest the benefits of using comics as multimodal scholarship.

Be Part of the Story: A popular geopolitics of war comics aesthetics and Royal Air Force recruitment

This paper provides an analysis of images associated with the British Royal Air Force's recent ‘Be Part of the Story’ war comic-styled military recruiting campaign. Set around literatures in popular geopolitics, the paper builds on the concept of comic book visualities to suggest that the ‘Be Part of the Story’ images reproduce longstanding war comics conventions, and coherently represent the complex, relational and spatially disparate battlespaces of the present. The paper, firstly, provides a detailed history of war comics as they have mediated war to publics, and argues that war comics should figure more strongly in future studies of popular geopolitics. Secondly, it argues that more than simply part of a pervasive ‘cultural condition’ of militarization, military recruitment is a vital medium through which states and militaries view, and choose to represent their role in the world. Lastly, it demonstrates that ‘Be Part of the Story’ reproduces the violent visions, metaphors and cultural designations integral to state-centric narratives of global politics, and specifically, spatial principles inherent to network-centric warfare.

Caring about legacy: an interview with Canadian comic book creator Ty Templeton

Ty Templeton is an award-winning Canadian comic book creator who has worked as a writer, artist, inker, editor, letterer and colourist since the mid-1980s. His credits include Stig’s Inferno, Gotham Adventures, Batman Adventures, Hoverboy, Justice League Unlimited, The Simpsons, Ultimate Spider-Man, and many other titles for DC Comics, IDW, Marvel, Vortex and a range of other publishers. This interview details how he first came to work in the comic industry and explores his thoughts on the history of comics, Jack Kirby’s contributions to the medium, what elements make for great superhero comics and how superhero comics have changed over time, the trend towards decompression in comics, Batman as the ultimate ‘control freak’, and why Selina Kyle just might actually be Bruce Wayne’s perfect soul-mate.

디지털만화에 대한 학술연구의 동향과 함의

The purpose of this study is to verify the status of current digital comics research trends and the characteristics in Korea. For this purpose, 87 articles and dissertations published between 19900 to 2012 were analysed by a meta-analysis methods. Digital comics platforms, topics, methods were examined to understand the landscape of the digital comics in Korean context. The main results of this study are as follow. First of all, the number of researches on the digital comics has been in the rise, and the various academic journals have published articles to understand the digital comics on the basis of their own academic background. Despite of the short history of digital comics researches, the range of research subjects has been broaden, and more integrated approaches have been taken from the various research fields. The content of articles, however, was skewed to a certain platform, topic and the method such as the website based comics, the text analysis, and the qualitative methodology. Thus, the more systematic and integrated approaches are needed to understand the digital comics issues and to build up the digital comics studies.

Beyond Persepolis: a bibliographic essay on graphic novels and comics by women

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to encourage and assist collection of adult‐level, graphic novels and book‐length comics by women, and to demonstrate the breadth and depth of such work.Design/methodology/approachThis paper provides a brief history of women and independent comics, tracing the medium's development from the 1970s underground comix movement to the present day. Individual creators and their works are discussed.FindingsIn the early years of independent comics, many of the women creating them were consciously reacting to an overwhelmingly male‐dominated profession. There was a high degree of shock value in these early works. As time went on the comics still tended towards the autobiographical, but storytelling gained importance. Most of the women creating comics today are still doing so from a woman's point of view, but their target audience seems more universal.Originality/valueGraphic novels are in increasing demand, both for scholarly and leisure reading. Guides to collecting graphic novels exist; however, the vast majority of the artists included in these guides are men. This paper fills a gap by introducing librarians to several women graphic novelists who have been overlooked thus far.

Chaperoning Words: Meaning-Making in Comics and Picture Books

Understanding who chaperones the words as they narrow the meaning of images offers a reliable theory for distinguishing between two otherwise fundamentally similar kinds of books: comics and picture books. The resulting distinction helps explain the form, history, and ideological implications of comics and picture books.

Josep Escobar, el clàssic de la historieta catalana

Summary: This article presents and analyzes Josep Escobar’s contribution and his importance as a leading figure in the history of Catalan comics. The text first reviews his biography as well as his participation in the historic events that have marked the 20th century and then continues with a detailed analysis of his contribution to the world of comics, thereby highlighting his most popular creations Carpanta and Zipi y Zape. The essay then analyzes the multifaceted dimension of Josep Escobar and his contribution to other fields such as teaching, drama and animated cartoons. [Keywords: Escobar; Carpanta; Zipi y Zape; comic; Catalan magazines; animated cartoons; Catalan plays]

‘You can make them liars’ – the world war two funny pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, American's leading African American weekly newspaper

The Pittsburgh Courier, the leading African American-produced newspaper of the segregation era, had a double mission: to show the American normality of African American life and culture and to show the injustice of mainstream America. The tension between the conservative former and the progressive latter informs all parts of the paper. With America's entry into World War II, this tension becomes acute. Reviewing the comics page at the end of each issue, this essay hopes to introduce a neglected area of comics history and show its relationship to the larger world of the Courier and African American experience.

Wokker. Notes on a Surrealist comic strip

This essay explores the creation and development of a British comic strip, Wokker (1971-1999), and its connections with the surrealist movement. Although the strip is remarkable for its content and formalist properties, it remains obscure both because of its publishing circumstances, and because it does not fit easily into a history of comics. Rather it can be argued that its conceptual roots can be traced to the artistic ferment that happened in Paris in the 1920s (with Breton as a key reference point), and that it represents a very English, and late-flowering, example of the surrealist idea.