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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
Studies in Comics - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
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Illustrating Tipitip bubblegum comics in Turkey: Transformation, outreach, humour and literacy engagement
Authors: Betül Gaye Dinç and Ilgım Veryeri AlacaAbstractThis work makes an overview of the evolution of Tipitip bubblegum comics in Turkey, studying its impact on society especially on children for more than four decades. Besides its colourful and positive characteristics, Tipitip comics fostered optimism intertwined with wit tailor made for the Turkish audience at the time. Tipitip not only presented accessible visuals for its audience but also introduced rich content ranging from sports to opera, occupations to traffic, transmitting valuable visual information in each illustration. Tipitip, promoted as ‘your cheerful friend’, was not only a father figure but also an enthusiast, an adventurer and an inventor as he is seen in many roles, from a conductor to a waiter, from a scout to a drummer, which made these comics inclusive and modern. The Tipitip bubblegum comics, similar to their contemporaries, achieved more than just market success; they benefited their audience, especially children, by reaching even small towns and initiating literary engagement.
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Film, photographs and saccades: Richard Outcault’s experiments with the comic strip gutter in the Yellow Kid
Authors: Michael Schuldiner and Ruth RosalerAbstractAlthough Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid comic strip originally had no partitions between scenes, he soon began experimenting with use of empty space and different types of partition. When he began to use full gutters in Yellow Kid, they functioned differently than they had in the comic strips drawn in his previous comics. Based upon Outcault’s known familiarity with the new developments in the creation and projection of motion pictures, we argue here that, originally, Outcault intended in Yellow Kid strips to produce an effect comparable to the ‘moving pictures’ that we see today. However, he eventually came to realize the advantages of using a series of still photographs as the model for his comic strips, especially in shorter sequences of five to nine pictures. This realization was roughly simultaneous with the translation into English of important discoveries in eye movement. The discovery of the saccade, in particular, supported the view that a strip of photos, intended to be viewed in a series, is processed as seamlessly by the mind as a motion picture film strip. We postulate that Outcault’s eventual uniform adoption of full gutters might have been influenced by this contemporary shift in the understanding of visual perception.
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‘A cross burning darkly, blackening the night’: Reading racialized spectacles of conflict and bondage in Marvel’s early Black Panther comics
More LessAbstractAll superheroes embody cultural messages and negotiate cultural conflicts. Yet black bodies, introduced to the New World as property and rigorously and often violently regulated by interconnected cultural and institutional forces ever since, have always occupied an especially vexed place in American culture. While all superheroes face repeated threats to their physical integrity, America’s first black superhero, Marvel’s Black Panther, created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, faces the specific – and specifically risky – challenge of performing black embodiment without succumbing to the stereotypes of black embodiment, most notably the stereotype of black bodies being more bodily (re: more violent, more sexual, more animalistic) than white bodies. This article argues that although Black Panther’s early appearances in The Fantastic Four (1961–present), The Avengers (1963–present) and his first solo series, Jungle Action Featuring: The Black Panther (McGregor et al. 1973–76) exploit the superhero genre and comic book medium’s propensity for fantasy and iconic imagery to envision a blackness that is beautiful and liberating, depictions of Black Panther’s conflicts with racialized supervillains and animals as well as his routine depiction within gratuitous spectacles of suffering and bondage demonstrate a simultaneous – and occasionally overwhelming – tendency to appropriate the black body in the service of white desires and anxieties. Ultimately, this article asserts that Black Panther’s early stories prove both the power of comic book images and the danger of that power for subjects who are still fighting an uphill to be seen without being reduced to their visibility.
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A new face for an old fight: Reimagining Vietnam in Vietnamese-American graphic memoirs
More LessAbstractThe Vietnam War is arguably one of the most complex and significant conflicts in American history; the place it occupies in the American national story is particularly curious because it is one of the few wars that America did not win. It is also a benchmark of note because it allowed the comics form (which had been in decline since the advent of extreme censorship in the 1940s and 1950s) to be reborn; superheroes took hold of the comics mainstream again, prompted by their popularity with US troops in Asia. Since the 1970s rebirth of the mainstream, representations of Vietnam have branched off in two distinct directions: either bold, nationalistic stories of brave Americans ‘saving’ the Vietnamese or individualist stories, many of which are memoirs or follow a similar confessional structure. Contemporary renderings of Vietnam are more likely to subscribe to the second representational theme, and recent publications are now starting to tell the stories of those who were displaced and who experienced a very different war to the typical mainstream military narrative. This article will consider the trajectory of representations of the Vietnam War in American comics, concentrating specifically on the shift from gung-ho violence and patriotism to memoir. I will especially emphasise the turn from American military protagonists to Vietnamese civilians and their families. I will discuss two texts: Vietnamerica by GB Tran published in 2010 and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do published in 2017. In my analysis of these comics, I will show how the form has embraced the memoir as a central genre and, furthermore, how comics is able to tell these stories in new, dynamic ways. I will show that Tran and Bui are part of a new age of comics storytelling, that can deftly bring together nuanced personal narratives and memories of internationally impactful conflict to create a text that is at once educational, entertaining and affective. In this article, I hope to make a bold intervention into the current conversation on comics as both history and memoir, using texts that (at present) have received little academic interest.
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Sartre, Sartre and the biographical bande dessinée
More LessAbstractBiographical comics, graphic novels and bande dessinée (BD) are often seen as ‘stepping stones’ or points of entry into a subject, particularly those of literary or philosophical figures. This article seeks to demonstrate the ways in which this might be disproven by considering the verbo-visual works alongside the theories of their subjects, thus highlighting the former’s role as both independent of, and an extra layer upon, the latter. Building on a study of recent trends in comics and Comics Studies, specifically upon the work of Maaheen Ahmed in the idea of openness in comics, and taking into account classical explorations of comics theory (Groensteen 1987), this article will outline the relationship between Existentialism and comics through the biographical BD, specifically Sartrian theory and Mathilde Ramadier and Anaïs Depommier’s 2015 Sartre. Through its close analysis of verbo-visual relations and issues of representation the article will assess the possibility of using Sartre’s philosophy in conjunction with Sartre to assert the relevance of the medium of the (biographical) BD. Beyond this, I will use the example of Sartre and Sartre to posit that the creation of philosophical and literary biographical BDs can be used to inject philosophy into the medium itself, thus contributing to the notion of a ‘theory of comics’.
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Reciprocal realities: Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s and the Wonderland approach to dementia
More LessAbstractThis article looks at Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s through the Looking Glass, a recent instalment of the Graphic Medicine book series. The significance of Walrath’s work for questions regarding dementia and sociality is assessed. Walrath’s attitude towards her mother Alice’s dementia is read against Arthur Frank’s theory of illness narratives. In the second edition of his text The Wounded Storyteller ([1995] 2013), Frank introduces the category of ‘broken narratives’ into his analytical taxonomy. Frank understands a broken narrative perspective to be a subject position characterized by a condition that inhibits the subject’s ability to narrate their illness experience. The ability of Frank’s framework to engage with the dementia subject’s broken narrative position in a remedial capacity is criticized, and Walrath’s narrative theory (termed ‘the Wonderland approach’) is championed as an alternative, superior approach to the broken narrative situation of dementia. The article goes on to engage critically with Walrath’s previously un-theorized artwork. The formal composition of Walrath’s graphic vignettes is shown to be emblematic of the theory undergirding her book. Walrath’s art accommodates readings by ill people and well people alike, at once illustrating and demonstrating the patient/carer relationship she champions. This analysis supports the core claims of the Graphic Medicine movement and suggests that comics can be effectively deployed in the effort to tackle the problematic of dementia and sociality.
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Interview with MontyNero
More LessAbstractThis interview with MontyNero explores his various works, inspirations and methodologies. It discusses Death Sentence (2013), the author’s time as a Master’s student at the University of Dundee and his upcoming projects.
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Reviews
Authors: Peter Admirand and Jacob MurelAbstractFrank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism, Paul Young (2017) New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 292 pp., ISBN: 9780813563817, p/bk, $28
The Narratology of Comic Art, Kai Mikkonen (2017) New York: Routledge, 300 pp., ISBN: 978113822150, h/bk, $140.00
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