Comics is…: Debating the Subject of Comics Studies

by Martin Lund (Editor)

Taking the contested and contestable meaning of “comics” as its starting point, Comics is… brings together ten comics scholars from different disciplines and with different approaches to what some of us call comics, to debate and discuss the foundations of Comics Studies in a provocative and thought-provoking way.


The book is built around a three-part each contributor writes a sentence or brief statement, starting from the prompt “Comics is…”; a colleague replies to the statement with a reflection, critique, or application of the statement or the position it advances; and, finally, the author of the statement responds to the reply in a brief essay.


Through its dialogical format, the book is likely to spark new conversations in the field; the statement–response–reply format will illustrate that the ways we think as comics scholars are processual, and any reader will find things they agree and disagree with in its pages - and, more importantly, will find occasion to reevaluate their own thinking.


Furthermore, when taken together, the “Comics is…” statements along with the responses and replies provide a barometer of the state of Comics Studies at present, exemplifying current approaches within the field and some of the thinking behind why some of us do our work in certain ways, while others choose sometimes radically different ones.

252 pages, Hardcover

Published January 3, 2026

About the author

Martin Lund holds a Ph.D. in Jewish studies from Lund University in Lund, Sweden. His thesis, titled Rethinking the Jewish–Comics Connection, is a study of configurations of identity in American mainstream comics by Jewish writers and a critical dialogue with the extant literature on the subject. In it, he situates the comics studied within historical American identity formations and Jewish American and American history, arguing that the oft-claimed Jewish–comics connection most clearly emerges as an expression of what it meant for the discussed writers to be Jewish Americans in their own time.

Lund is currently Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Malmö University. His main research interests are religion and comics, the representation of race and ethnicity in popular culture, and the role that the specific ethno-racial and socio-political conditions of geographical place play in textual production. He has published articles and reviews in academic and popular science journals on a range of subjects. Lund's current research focuses on representations of New York City in American comics.