Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and his Revolutionary Comic Stripby Nevin Martell
Imprint: Continuum
Pub. date: 19 Aug 2010
ISBN: 9781441106858
272 Pages, paperback
$15.95
Description:
For ten years, Calvin and Hobbes was one the world's most beloved comic strips. And then, on the last day of 1995, the strip ended. Its mercurial and reclusive creator, Bill Watterson, not only finished the strip but withdrew entirely from public life.
In Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, Nevin Martell sets out on a very personal odyssey to understand the life and career of the intensely private man behind Calvin and Hobbes. Martell talks to a wide range of artists and writers (including Dave Barry, Harvey Pekar, and Brad Bird) as well as some of Watterson’s closest friends and professional colleagues, and along the way reflects upon the nature of his own fandom and on the extraordinary legacy that Watterson left behind. This is as close as we're ever likely to get to one of America's most ingenious and intriguing figures - and it’s the fascinating story of an intrepid author’s search for him, too.
Table of Contents:
Prologue
1. Working on a Dream
2. Making Friends
3. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
4. A Boy And His Tiger
5. Calvin in Wonderland
6. Welcome to the Machine
7. This is How You Disappear
8. Under the Influence
9. There and Back Again
10. The Future is Always Uncertain
Epilogue
Nevin Martell is the author of Standing Small: A Celebration of 30 Years of the LEGO Minifigure, Dave Matthews Band: Music for the People and Beck: The Art of Mutation. He is a Contributing Editor at Filter magazine and his music journalism has appeared in Paste, Giant, Men’s Health, High Times, and Flaunt, as well as online at RollingStone.com. Currently, he lives with his wife in Washington, DC, where he writes full time. You can find him online at www.nevinmartell.com.
by Matthew J. Costello
Imprint: Continuum
Pub. date: 01 Mar 2009
ISBN: 9780826429988
288 Pages, paperback
$26.95
Description:
What Cold War-era superheroes reveal about American society and foreign policy
Physicist Bruce Banner, caught in the nuclear explosion of his experimental gamma bomb, is transformed into the rampaging green monster, the Hulk. High school student Peter Parker, bitten by an irradiated spider, gains its powers and becomes Spiderman. Reed Richards and his friends are caught in a belt of cosmic radiation while orbiting the Earth in a spacecraft and are transformed into the Fantastic Four. While Stan Lee suggests he clung to the hackneyed idea of radioactivity in creating Marvel’s stable of superheroes because of his limited imagination, radiation and the bomb are nonetheless the big bang that spawned the Marvel universe.
The Marvel superheroes that came to dominate the comic book industry for most of the last five decades were born under the mushroom cloud of potential nuclear war that was a cornerstone of the four-decade bipolar division of the world between the US and USSR. These stories were consciously set in this world and reflect the changing culture of cold War (and post-cold War) America. Like other forms of popular entertainment, comic books tend to be very receptive to cultural trends, reflect them, comment on them, and sometimes inaugurate them.
Secret Identity Crisis follows the trajectory of the breakdown of the cold War consensus after 1960 through the lens of superhero comic books. Those developed by Marvel, because of their conscious setting in the contemporary world, and because of attempts to maintain a continuous story line across and within books, constitute a system of signs that reflect, comment upon, and interact with the American political economy. This groundbreaking new study focuses on a handful of titles and signs that specifically involve political economic codes, including Captain America, The Invincible Iron Man, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, The Incredible Hulk to reveal how the American self was transformed and/or reproduced during the late Cold War and after.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. The Cold War and the Forging of the Liberal Consensus
2. 1961-68: The Enemy Without
3. 1969-76: The Enemy Within
4. 1977-85: Retreat into Privacy
5. 1986-96: Betrayal in the Mirror
6. 1996-2007: The New World Order
7. Civil War and the Death of Captain America
Bibliography
Matthew J. Costello, PhD, is Professor of Political Science at Saint Xavier University, Chicago.
by Danny Fingeroth
foreword by Stan Lee
Imprint: Continuum
Pub. date: 01 Nov 2008
ISBN: 9780826430144
216 Pages, paperback
$19.95
Description:
In Disguised as Clark Kent, Danny Fingeroth--a long-time executive in the comics business who wrote and edited Spider-Man as well as other famous lines for Marvel--reflects on the phenomenon of the heavily Jewish elements that, consciously or not, went into the creation of the superhero.
Centering on questions of Jewish identity, which is historically about the push and pull toward and away from that very identity, Disguised as Clark Kent brings valuable insight into the fantasies that fuel our imaginations and entertainment industry, as well as many significant and often hidden aspects of our society.
Table of Contents: [NB These do not match the published version]
Foreword by Stan Lee
Introduction: My Country ‘tis of Me
Chapter 1: Coming to Terms: What’s So Jewish About Superheroes, Anyway?
Chapter 2: Superhero Genesis: Who He Is and How He Came to Be
Chapter 3: A Stranger among Us: The Birth of Superman
Chapter 4: A Great Multitude: Batman and Beyond
Chapter 5: Doctor of Doom: Frederic Wertham’s Superhero Complex
Chapter 6: Rebuilding the Temple: The Silver Age of Comics
Chapter 7: Why Are These Heroes Different?: The Marvel Revolution
Chapter 8: Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself: The X-Men and the ‘70s
Chapter 9: As a Matter of Fact, I Am Jewish: The Modern Age
Chapter 10: Unto the Next Generation: The Jewish Superhero Future
Bibliography
Index
As former Group Editor of Marvel Comics's Spider-Man line, Danny Fingeroth became intimately familiar with the key elements of superhero mythology. He is exceptionally well versed in just what it takes to breathe life into these characters. Fingeroth is currently the creator and editor of Write Now magazine. He lives in New York City with his wife, sons, and 30,000 comic books.
edited by A. David Lewis
edited by Christine Hoff Kraemer
Imprint: Continuum
Pub. date: 14 Oct 2010
ISBN: 9780826430267
336 Pages, paperback
$34.95
Description:
Comic books have increasingly become a vehicle for serious social commentary and, specifically, for innovative religious thought. Practitioners of both traditional religions and new religious movements have begun to employ comics as a missionary tool, while humanists and religious progressives use comics’ unique fusion of text and image to criticize traditional theologies and to offer alternatives. Addressing the increasing fervor with which the public has come to view comics as an art form and Americans' fraught but passionate relationship with religion, Graven Images explores with real insight the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels.
In essays by scholars and comics creators, Graven Images observes the frequency with which religious material—in devout, educational, satirical, or critical contexts—occurs in both independent and mainstream comics. Contributors identify the unique advantages of the comics medium for religious messages; analyze how comics communicate such messages; place the religious messages contained in comics books in appropriate cultural, social, and historical frameworks; and articulate the significance of the innovative theologies being developed in comics.
Table of Contents:
Foreword: Looking for God in the Gutter
Douglas Rushkoff (Creator, Testament; The New School)
Introduction
Christine Hoff Kraemer (Cherry Hill Seminary) and A. David Lewis (Boston University), editors
NEW INTERPRETATIONS
The Devil’s Reading: Revenge and Revelation in American Comics
Aaron Ricker Parks (McGill University)
London (& the Mind) as Sacred-Desecrated Place in Alan Moore’s From Hell
Emily Taylor Merriman (San Francisco State University)
Drawing Contracts: Will Eisner’s Legacy
Laurence Roth (Susquehanna University)
Catholic American Citizenship: Prescriptions for Children from Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact (1946-1963)
Anne Blankenship (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Gold Plates, Inked Pages: The Authority of the Graphic Novel
G. St. John Stott (Arab American University, Jenin)
Comics and Religion: Theoretical Connections
Darby Orcutt (North Carolina State University)
Killing the Graven God: Visual Representations of the Divine in Comics
Andrew Tripp (Boston University)
Echoes of Eternity: Hindu Reincarnation Motifs in Superhero Comic Books
Saurav Mohapatra (Creator, India Authentic)
The Christianizing of Animism in Manga and Anime: American Translations of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Eriko Ogihara-Schuck (Dortmund University of Technology)
RESPONSE & REBELLION
On Preacher (Or, the Death of God in Pictures)
Mike Grimshaw, University of Canterbury
Superman Graveside: Superhero Salvation beyond Jesus
A. David Lewis (Creator, The Lone and Level Sands)
“The Apocalypse of Adolescence”: Use of the Bildungsroman and Superheroic Tropes in Mark Millar & Peter Gross’s Chosen
Julia Round (Bournemouth University)
From God Nose to God’s Bosom, Or How God (and Jack Jackson) Began Underground Comics
Clay Kinchen Smith (Santa Fe College)
A Hesitant Embrace: Comic Books and Evangelicals
Kate Netzler (Independent Scholar)
Narrative and Pictorial Dualism in Persepolis and the Emergence of Complexity
Kerr Houston, (Maryland Institute College of Art)
POSTMODERN RELIGIOSITY
Machina Ex Deus: Perennialism in Comics
G. Willow Wilson (Creator, Cairo)
Conversion to Narrative: Magic as Religious Language in Grant Morrison’s Invisibles
Megan Goodwin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
“The Magic Circus of the Mind”: Alan Moore’s Promethea and the Transformation of Consciousness through Comics
Christine Hoff Kraemer (Cherry Hill Seminary) and J. Lawton Winslade (DePaul University)
Religion and Artesia / Religion in Artesia
Mark Smylie (Creator, Artesia)
Present Gods, Absent Believers in Sandman
Emily Ronald (Boston University)
Tell Tale Visions: The Erotic Theology of Craig Thompson’s Blankets
Steve Jungkeit (Yale University)
Selected Bibliography
Appendices
A. David Lewis is a national lecturer in Comics Studies, an award-winning graphic novelist, and a PhD candidate in Religion and Literature at Boston University.
Christine Hoff Kraemer holds a PhD in Religion and Literature from Boston University and is Department Chair of Nature, Deity, and Inspiration at Cherry Hill Seminary, South Carolina.
edited by Jörn Ahrens
edited by Arno Meteling
Imprint: Continuum
Pub. date: 11 Mar 2010
ISBN: 9780826440198
288 Pages, paperback
$24.95
Description:
Comics emerged parallel to, and in several ways intertwined with, the development of modern urban mass societies at the turn of the 20th century. On the one hand, urban topoi, self-portrayals, forms of urban cultural memories, and variant readings of the city (strolling, advertising, architecture, detective stories, mass phenomena, street life, etc.) are all incorporated into comics. On the other hand, comics have unique abilities to capture urban space and city life because of their hybrid nature, consisting of words, pictures, and sequences. These formal aspects of comics are also to be found within the cityscape itself: one can see the influence of comic book aesthetics all around us today.
With chapters on the very earliest comic strips, and on artists as diverse as Alan Moore, Carl Barks, Will Eisner and Jacques Tardi, Comics and the City is an important new collection of international scholarship that will help to define the field for many years to come.
Table of Contents:
Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling: Introduction
I. History, Comics, and the City
1. Jens Balzer: “Hully Gee, I’m a Hieroglyphe” – Mobilizing the Gaze and the Invention of Comics in New York City, 1895
2. Ole Frahm: Every Window Tells a Story: Remarks on the Urbanity of Early Comic Strips
3. Anthony Enns: The City as Archive in Jason Lutes’ Berlin
II. Retrofuturistic and Nostalgic Cities
4. Henry Jenkins: “The Tomorrow that Never Was” – Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter
5. Stefanie Diekmann: Remembrance of Things to Come: François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters’ Cities of the Fantastic
6. Michael Cuntz: Paris au pluriel: Depictions of the French Capital in Jacques Tardi’s Comic Book Writing
III. Superhero Cities
7. William Uricchio: The Batman’s Gotham City™: Story, Ideology, Performance
8. Arno Meteling: A Tale of Two Cities: Politics, and Superheroics in Starman and Ex Machina
9. Anthony Lioi: The Radiant City: New York as Ecotopia in Promethea, Book V
10. Jason Bainbridge: “I am New York” – Spider-Man, New York City, and the Marvel Universe
IV. Locations of Crime
11. Greg M. Smith: Will Eisner, Vaudevillian of the Cityscape
12. Björn Quiring: “A Fiction That We Must Inhabit” – Sense Production in Urban Spaces According to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell
13. Jörn Ahrens: The Ordinary Urban: 100 Bullets and the Clichés of Mass Culture
V. The City-Comic as a Mode of Reflection
14. André Suhr: Seeing the City through a Frame: Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s Acquefacques-Comics
15. Andreas Platthaus: Calisota or Bust: Duckburg vs. Entenhausen in the Comics of Carl Barks
16. Thomas Becker: Enki Bilal’s Woman Trap: Reflections on Authorship under the Shifting Boundaries between Order and Terror in the Cities
Jörn Ahrens teaches cultural sociology at Giessen University, Germany.
Arno Meteling teaches literature at the Westfalian Wilhelms-University Muenster in Germany.
by Randy Duncan
by Matthew J. Smith
Imprint: Continuum
Pub. date: 01 Jul 2009
ISBN: 9780826429360
360 Pages, paperback
$24.95
Description:
A comprehensive introduction to the comic arts
From the introduction by Paul Levitz
“If ever there was a medium characterized by its unexamined self-expression, it’s comics. For decades after the medium’s birth, it was free of organized critical analysis, its creators generally disinclined to self-analysis or formal documentation. The average reader didn’t know who created the comics, how or why . . . and except for a uniquely destructive period during America’s witch-hunting of the 1950s, didn’t seem to care. As the medium has matured, however, and the creativity of comics began to touch the mainstream of popular culture in many ways, curiosity followed, leading to journalism and eventually, scholarship, and so here we are.”
The Power of Comics is the first introductory textbook for comic art studies courses. Lending a broader understanding of the medium and its communication potential, it provides students with a coherent and comprehensive explanation of comic books and graphic novels, including coverage of their history and their communication techniques, research into their meanings and effects and an overview of industry practices and fan culture.
Co-authors Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith draw on their own years of experience teaching comics studies courses and the scholarly literature across several disciplines to create a text with the following features:
• Discussion questions for each chapter
• Activities to engage readers
• Recommended reading suggestions
• Over 150 illustrations
• Bibliography
• Glossary
The Power of Comics deals exclusively with comic books and graphic novels. One reason for this focus is that no one text can hope to do justice to both strips and books; there is simply too much to cover. Preference is given to comic books because in their longer form, the graphic novel, they have the greatest potential for depth and complexity of expression. As comic strips shrink in size and become more inane in content, comic books are becoming a serious art form.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Defining Comic Books as a Medium
Chapter 2: History of Comic Books, Part 1: Developing a Medium
Chapter 3: History of Comic Books, Part 2: The Maturation of the Medium
Chapter 4: The Comic Book Industry
Chapter 5: The Comic Book Creators
Chapter 6: Creating the Story
Chapter 7: Experiencing the Story
Chapter 8: The Comic Book Readers
Chapter 9: Comic Book Genres: Classifying Comics
Chapter 10: Comic Book Genres: The Superhero Genre
Chapter 11: Comic Books and Ideology
Chapter 12: Researching Comic Books
Chapter 13: Comics Culture Around the World
Glossary
Bibliography
Dr. Randy Duncan is a co-founder the Comic Arts Conference, the nation’s first annual academic conference devoted solely to the study of comics. He also wrote the entries on Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and other comics-related topics for the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture.
Dr. Matthew J. Smith is associate professor and chair of Communication at Wittenberg University where he regularly teaches comics arts courses. In 2009, Wittenberg's Alumni Association recognized him with its Distinguished Teaching Award.
