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A Comics Studies Reader
A Comics Studies Reader offers the best of the new comics scholarship in nearly thirty essays on a wide variety of such comics forms as gag cartoons, editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books, manga, and graphic novels.
The anthology covers the pioneering work of Rodolphe Töpffer, the Disney comics of Carl Barks, and the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, as well as Peanuts, romance comics, and superheroes. It explores the stylistic achievements of manga, the international anti-comics campaign, and power and class in Mexican comic books and English illustrated stories.
A Comics Studies Reader introduces readers to the major debates and points of reference that continue to shape the field. It will interest anyone who wants to delve deeper into the world of comics and is ideal for classroom use.
The anthology covers the pioneering work of Rodolphe Töpffer, the Disney comics of Carl Barks, and the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, as well as Peanuts, romance comics, and superheroes. It explores the stylistic achievements of manga, the international anti-comics campaign, and power and class in Mexican comic books and English illustrated stories.
A Comics Studies Reader introduces readers to the major debates and points of reference that continue to shape the field. It will interest anyone who wants to delve deeper into the world of comics and is ideal for classroom use.
396 pages, Paperback
First published November 6, 2008
11 people are currently reading
147 people want to read
About the author
Jeet Heer
23 books11 followersJeet Heer is a senior editor at the New Republic who has published in a wide array of journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and VQR. He is the author of two books: In Love With Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (Coach House Books) and Sweet Lechery: Essays, Profiles and Reviews (Porcupine’s Quill). He has co-edited eight books and served as a contributing editor on another eight volumes. With Kent Worcester, Heer co-edited A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi), which won the Peter C. Rollins Book Award given annually to the best book in American Studies or Cultural Studies. He’s been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 28, 2021
شایدم یکم زیادی ویکی پدیا بود....
2. 5
2. 5
March 12, 2021
In general, don’t waste your time or money on this uneven collection of scholarly articles.
There are some exceptions. Robert S. Peterson’s “The Acoustics of Manga” is excellent.
While this collection points to some comics about which you might not have heard, and provides some basic theory for thinking about comics, some articles in it are trite, simple minded, and desperately lacking in rigorous scholarship. Several contributors make grand pronouncements with nary a citation or deigning to provide evidence of any kind. A number of theoretical perspectives are presented in so narrow a way as to distort the diversity of legitimately debatable perspectives in the field - this rhetorical maneuver functioning to make the author(s) look erudite and beyond question.
You might get something valuable from this collection, if you wade through it.
There are some exceptions. Robert S. Peterson’s “The Acoustics of Manga” is excellent.
While this collection points to some comics about which you might not have heard, and provides some basic theory for thinking about comics, some articles in it are trite, simple minded, and desperately lacking in rigorous scholarship. Several contributors make grand pronouncements with nary a citation or deigning to provide evidence of any kind. A number of theoretical perspectives are presented in so narrow a way as to distort the diversity of legitimately debatable perspectives in the field - this rhetorical maneuver functioning to make the author(s) look erudite and beyond question.
You might get something valuable from this collection, if you wade through it.
June 21, 2009
I was very excited about this book when I first heard about it, and now that I've read it, I don't know.... I understand that these are probably decisions related to production, and maybe this is the point of the volume, but the decision to have this be all reprints, including reprints of some very old work seems sort of odd to me.
It felt, too, like there was a lot of material here that was more along the lines of the dvd extras level, and that it took the place of more solid, foundational kind of work. In other words, the choices of some of the selections seemed random, in the sense that to me at least they didn't get at the heart of where comics studies is, or where it might be. I think, for example, that a section on craft-formal concerns doesn't need two essays on Manga and one of the Barks' Duck stories. I mean, there's a place for those, but to me, both are, in their way, outside of the mainstream of the discipline. Maybe I'm wrong, but throughout the book I had the sense that I wasn't reading the essays I thought a book like this would contain. And that's not really a slight to the essays this does have, just the way they are placed here at the emerging center of the field.
It felt, too, like there was a lot of material here that was more along the lines of the dvd extras level, and that it took the place of more solid, foundational kind of work. In other words, the choices of some of the selections seemed random, in the sense that to me at least they didn't get at the heart of where comics studies is, or where it might be. I think, for example, that a section on craft-formal concerns doesn't need two essays on Manga and one of the Barks' Duck stories. I mean, there's a place for those, but to me, both are, in their way, outside of the mainstream of the discipline. Maybe I'm wrong, but throughout the book I had the sense that I wasn't reading the essays I thought a book like this would contain. And that's not really a slight to the essays this does have, just the way they are placed here at the emerging center of the field.
May 7, 2011
Boring academic sandpaper. If you're really, truly into comics, this will probably interest you as it's a book filled with academic essays on the subject. I wish I had been able to avoid purchasing it for school. If you want to buy it - I'll sell it to you.
December 13, 2010
Excellent collection of essays on comics studies and critical theory.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews