Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes

Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes PDF Author: Josef Benson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496838351
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shortlisted Finalist for the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work American comics from the start have reflected the white supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness, and both signal and hide its presence. Even when comics creators and publishers sought to advance an antiracist agenda, their attempts were often undermined by a lack of awareness of their own whiteness and the ideological baggage that goes along with it. Even the most celebrated figures of the industry, such as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Jackson, William Gaines, Stan Lee, Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, and Frank Miller, have not been able to distance themselves from the problematic racism embedded in their narratives despite their intentions or explanations. Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels provides a sober assessment of these creators and their role in perpetuating racism throughout the history of comics. Josef Benson and Doug Singsen identify how whiteness has been defined, transformed, and occasionally undermined over the course of eighty years in comics and in many genres, including westerns, horror, crime, funny animal, underground comix, autobiography, literary fiction, and historical fiction. This exciting and groundbreaking book assesses industry giants, highlights some of the most important episodes in American comic book history, and demonstrates how they relate to one another and form a larger pattern, in unexpected and surprising ways.

Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes

Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes PDF Author: Josef Benson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496838351
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shortlisted Finalist for the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work American comics from the start have reflected the white supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness, and both signal and hide its presence. Even when comics creators and publishers sought to advance an antiracist agenda, their attempts were often undermined by a lack of awareness of their own whiteness and the ideological baggage that goes along with it. Even the most celebrated figures of the industry, such as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Jackson, William Gaines, Stan Lee, Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, and Frank Miller, have not been able to distance themselves from the problematic racism embedded in their narratives despite their intentions or explanations. Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels provides a sober assessment of these creators and their role in perpetuating racism throughout the history of comics. Josef Benson and Doug Singsen identify how whiteness has been defined, transformed, and occasionally undermined over the course of eighty years in comics and in many genres, including westerns, horror, crime, funny animal, underground comix, autobiography, literary fiction, and historical fiction. This exciting and groundbreaking book assesses industry giants, highlights some of the most important episodes in American comic book history, and demonstrates how they relate to one another and form a larger pattern, in unexpected and surprising ways.

Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes

Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes PDF Author: Josef Benson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781496838384
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
A wrestling with whiteness and white supremacy throughout the history of comics creation

Shaolin Brew

Shaolin Brew PDF Author: Troy D. Smith
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496851692
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shaolin Brew: Race, Comics, and the Evolution of the Superhero looks at how the comic book industry developed from a white perspective and how minority characters were and are viewed through a stereotypical white gaze. Further, the book explores how voices of color have launched a shift in the industry, taking nonwhite characters who were originally viewed through a white lens and situating them outside the framework of whiteness. The financial success of Blaxploitation and Kung Fu films in the early 1970s led to major comics publishers creating, for the first time, Black and Asian superhero characters who headlined their own comics. The introduction of Black and Asian main characters, who previously only served as guest stars or sidekicks, launched a new kind of engagement between comics companies and minority characters and readers. However, scripted as they were by white writers, these characters were mired in stereotypes. Author Troy D. Smith focuses on Asian, Black, and Latinx representation in the comic industry and how it has evolved over the years. Smith explores topics that include Orientalism, whitewashing, Black respectability politics, the model minority myth, and political controversies facing fandoms. In particular, Smith examines how fans take the superheroes they grew up with—such as Luke Cage, Black Lightning, and Shang Chi—and turn them into the characters they wished they had as children. Shaolin Brew delves into the efforts of fans of color who urged creators to make these characters more realistic. This refining process increased as more writers and artists of color broke into the industry, bringing their own perspectives to the characters. As many of these characters transitioned from page to screen, a new generation of writers, artists, and readers have cooperated to evolve one-dimensional stereotypes into multifaceted, dynamic heroes.

Destruction, Ethics, and Intergalactic Love

Destruction, Ethics, and Intergalactic Love PDF Author: Peter Admirand
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000750337
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Destruction, Ethics, and Intergalactic Love: Exploring Y: The Last Man and Saga offers a creative and accessible exploration of the two comic book series, examining themes like nonviolence; issues of gender and war; heroes and moral failures; forgiveness and seeking justice; and the importance of diversity and religious pluralism. Through close interdisciplinary reading and personal narratives, the author delves into the complex worlds of Y and Saga in search of an ethics, meaning, and a path resonant with real-world struggles. Reading these works side by side, the analysis draws parallels and seeks common themes around the four central ideas of seeking and making meaning in a meaningless world; love and parenting through oppression and grief; peacefulness when surrounded by violence; and the perils and hopes of diversity and communion. This timely and thoughtful study will resonate with scholars and students of comic studies, media and cultural studies, philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and popular culture studies.

From Soldier to Storyteller

From Soldier to Storyteller PDF Author: Kathleen Broome Williams
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476652074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many of the best-known and most popular children's stories of the 20th and early 21st century were written by veterans of World War I and World War II. These include works by such writers as A.A. Milne, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and J.R.R. Tolkien, among others. Although they had experienced war, most of the veterans did not overtly write about it. The seeming paradox of warriors who went through searing combat and then wrote books for children has not been addressed collectively before now. The essays in this book explore what motivated these veterans to write for children, what they wrote, and how their writing was influenced by the wars they lived through. It examines how their combat experience can be traced in their writing, however subtly, whether it was stories about a bear and his piglet companion, a World War I flying ace, or a flying car. Their reactions to war, as reflected in their writing, yield important lessons about the complicated legacy of the 20th century's two great conflicts and their long-lasting impact--through children--on society at large.

Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine

Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine PDF Author: Chinmay Murali
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100044211X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book Here

Book Description
Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine examines women’s graphic memoirs on infertility, foregrounding the complex interrelationship between women’s life writing, infertility studies, and graphic medicine. Through a scholarly examination of the artists’ use of visual-verbal codes of the comics medium in narrating their physical ordeals and affective challenges occasioned by infertility, the book seeks to foreground the intricacies of gender identity, embodiment, subjectivity, and illness experience. Providing long-overdue scholarly attention on the perspectives of autobiographical and comics studies, the authors examine the gendered nature of the infertility experience and the notion of motherhood as an ideological force which interpolates socio-cultural discourses, accentuating the potential of graphic medicine as a creative space for the infertile women to voice their hitherto silenced perspectives on childlessness with force and urgency. This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to scholars and students in comics studies, the health humanities, literature, and women’s and gender studies, and will also be suitable for readers in visual studies and narrative medicine.

Doom Patrol Book One

Doom Patrol Book One PDF Author: Grant Morrison
Publisher: Vertigo
ISBN: 1401267149
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Get Book Here

Book Description
The groundbreaking series from Grant Morrison that led American comics in a wholly unexpected direction. Originally conceived in the 1960s by the visionary team of writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani, the Doom Patrol was reborn a generation later through Grant Morrison’s singular imagination. Though they are super-powered beings, and though their foes are bent on world domination, convention ends there. Shunned as freaks and outcasts, and tempered by loss and insanity, this band of misfits faces threats so mystifying in nature and so corrupted in motive that reality itself threatens to fall apart around them-but it’s still all in a day’s work for the Doom Patrol. Written by Grant Morrison and featuring art by Richard Case, John Nyberg, Doug Braithwaite, Scott Hanna and Carlos Garzón, DOOM PATROL BOOK ONE collects issues #19-34 and includes introductions by Morrison and editor Tom Peyer.

J. D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye PDF Author: Josef Benson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 9781538184165
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a fascinating examination of J.D. Salinger and his landmark novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Focusing on Salinger and his beloved protagonist, this book reveals how the novel has affected readers in profound ways across the decades, from war protestors of the 1960s to Black Lives Matter advocates of the 21st century.

Geek Love

Geek Love PDF Author: Katherine Dunn
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307794482
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Get Book Here

Book Description
National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities—with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

Redrawing the Western

Redrawing the Western PDF Author: William Grady
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477329986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
"As the Western began to flourish in literature, it also began to appear in illustrations and early comic strips of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. William Grady charts the history of the genre in comic strips and books from its origins in this period through its mid-century heyday to its gradual decline in the 60s and 70s, ending with a brief look at the current "afterlife" of Western comics over the last few decades. In doing so, he also argues for the importance of comics in the development of the Western alongside both literature and film/television. He explains how the mythic-historical settings of Western comics allowed the young readers at whom they were aimed to explore different aspects of their contemporary society, wrestle with taboo topics, and envision different futures for the US. Grady begins by exploring the origins of the Western genre in the late 19th century and shows the importance of illustrated narratives and cartoons in helping readers visualize the West, thus establishing much of its iconic imagery of frontier life, including racist stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples. He moves forward in time to show how the West became mythologized and fantastic elements were introduced into the real landscape in comic strips such as Gasoline Alley and Krazy Kat, until the Great Depression, where strips emphasized the escapist adventures of the West in Red Ryder, Lone Ranger, and others. The postwar Western spread into comic books and was used alternately as positive and negative commentaries on the Cold War and America's place in the world, but in the era of Vietnam and Watergate, Western comics portrayed darker reflections of American culture and history and eventually more or less died out. Despite the genre's apparent demise, Grady ends by examining its ongoing influence over the last decades as its tropes are used to interrogate and subvert the idea of the mythic West and explore diverse perspectives on the genre"--