This review offers an account of journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore’s short comics, co-authored with the Ladydrawers collective, relating to the fashion industry and global apparel and sex trades, and that have been recently collected together in book form. The review argues that the resulting book, Threadbare: Clothes, Sex & Trafficking (2016), is evidence of the ability of the...
Translated editions of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira played an important role in the popularisation of manga in the Western world. Published in Japan between 1982 and 1990, editions in European languages followed as soon as the late 1980s. In the first US edition (Epic 1988–1995) the originally black and white manga was printed in colour and published in 38 issues, which were...
When originally published at the turn of the century, Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned (2000) was riding both the popularity of its reality television roots and the growing awareness of homosexuality in the popular consciousness. At that time, too, Macmillan publisher Henry Holt had its own website set up to support Winick’s work; it featured interviews, tour...
Narrative Structure in Comics builds on Postema’s PhD thesis to present for a more general audience her focus on the ‘gap’ in comics and its place in the process of reading graphic narrative, from the detailed textual level up to the level of narrative structure overall. Postema's readings of comics texts are well-argued and illuminating; the breadth of theory brought together...
Unflattening (2015) is the first comic published by Harvard University Press. It is the book version of Nick Sousanis’ PhD dissertation from Teachers College, Columbia University; a project that has commanded the attention of the comics scholarship community precisely because it is comics as scholarship. This is a collaborative book review in the form of a dialogue between two...
Graphic History: Essays on Graphic Novels and/as History (2012) is a collection of 14 unique essays, edited by scholar Richard Iadonisi, that explores a variety of complex issues within the graphic novel medium as a means of historical narration. The essays address the issues of accuracy of re-counting history, history as re-constructed, and the ethics surrounding historical...
Nicolas Labarre examines description in comics, through the “unrealized realism” of Hammett and Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9 (1934-35).
Damon Herd offers a discussion of Dieter Roth’s Solo Scenes, a multimedia presentation that echoes the form of a comic. In his discussion, Herd compares Roth’s work to autobiographical comics, raising the evocative question of whether a work created outside of the comics world can still be considered a comic.