Graphic Novels

CFP: Undead in the West: They Just Keep Coming

by Cynthia Miller

Memória e HQ: a representação do anti-semitismo nas Histórias em Quadrinhos

by Odilon Caldeira Neto

Article Published in: "História, imagem e narrativas", No 8, abril/2009

“CACHALOTE” EO INCÔMODO HEROÍSMO DE SOBREVIVER

by Ricardo Postal

Memoir as Iranian exile cultural production: A case study of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis series

by Amy Malek

Cartoons and Extremism: Israel and the Jews in Arab and Western Media (review)

by Pamela Rader

Comparison of Reading Lolita in Tehran and Persepolis

by Helen Donahue

Der Comic als 'labyrinthisches' Medium. Zu Chris Wares selbstbezüglichen Bilderzählungen

by Christian Bachmann

in: Monika Schmitz-Emans/Christian A. Bachmann (Ed.): Labyrinthe als Texte - Texte als Labyrinthe. Bochum: Bachmann 2009, S. 157-162.

Wonder(ing) Women: Investigating Gender Politics and Art Education within Graphica.

by Courtney Weida

published in 2011 Journal of Visual Culture and Gender 6 (11).

Problems of gender representation persist within many superhero comics, but interventions of critical pedagogy with... more Problems of gender representation persist within many superhero comics, but interventions of critical pedagogy with alternative sources from graphica can address certain inequalities. In this feminist review of graphica, I have selected several examples of contemporary comic books and graphic novels to introduce educators to potential sites of critical feminist public pedagogy. Graphica, if considered as sequential art as well as products of youth and adult subcultures, may be many people’s first literacy experience, and many devotees continue reading comics for their whole lives. My goal in this feminist graphica review is to introduce readers to a spectrum of comic books and graphic novels that are often peripheral to art education, gender studies, and graphica studies.

The Power of Myth and Metal: Captain Nemo as the New Ancient Mariner in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume I

by Lydia Ferguson

The missions undertaken by the ultimate ensemble of Victorian literary characters that completes Alan Moore and Kevin... more The missions undertaken by the ultimate ensemble of Victorian literary characters that completes Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 1, are only made possible by the good grace of Captain Nemo and the scientific Steampunk wonder that is his Nautilus. In the first appearances of Nemo in League, Volume I, Moore wastes no time pointing out the obvious irony of a murderous postcolonial “pirate” in employment as the most unlikely of saviors of the English empire. As the novel progresses, the language and actions of Nemo suggest a grand mythological past, directly connected to the scientific present—and Nemo is the god of both. At times he speaks like the vengeful God of the Old Testament, and at other times like a mythological Titan, whose rightful place in the world was usurped and ruined by the aspirations of empire. In defiance of past helplessness and defeat at the hands of the crown, Nemo never relinquishes his power as the man behind the curtain, and he remains in total control of the ultimate success or failure of every League mission. When the mythos of Nemo’s character meets the metal of the anachronistic gilded age, he becomes a new, more violent type of prophet. Whereas Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, like the Wandering Jew, must endlessly tell his ghastly tale in order to relay the importance of the consideration of life and faith, Nemo is a modern example of wrath embodied—he not only serves as the purveyor of a tale of colonization, but of the aftermath that is sure to ensue and the ultimate balance that is achieved therein.

Talking, Thinking, and Seeing in Pictures: Narration, Focalization, and Ocularization in Comics Narratives

by Derik Badman

published in International Journal of Comic Art 12.2 (Fall 2010)

Individual Trauma Representation in Graphic Novels. The Case of Paul Hornschemeier's 'Mother, Come Home' and Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's 'Signal to Noise'

by Andres Romero-Jodar

published in "Between the Urge to Know and the Need to Deny. Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British and American Literature", edited by Dolores Herrero and Sonia Baelo-Allué, 2011, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, pp. 249-263.

Narrative-iconical genres, especially comic-books and graphic novels, have proved an excellent medium for portraying... more Narrative-iconical genres, especially comic-books and graphic novels, have proved an excellent medium for portraying obsessive characters’ mental unease as well as their traumatic experiences. This essay aims to show how two contemporary graphic novels in English seek to represent the effects of traumatic events in their characters’ minds by means of different techniques and iconic values. The use of repetitive icons with traumatic content in these works may be said to reproduce the repetition compulsion of traumatic memory, as these icons translate the characters’ suffering into images clogged with symbolic meaning. In order to approach this genre within the scope of Trauma Studies, this essay centres on Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother, Come Home (2002) and Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Signal to Noise (1989), two examples of graphic novels representing individual, punctual trauma.

The Book of Genesis–By R. Crumb and Robert Alter

by Isaac Alderman

“Is There an African American Graphic Novel?” In MLA Approaches to Teaching the Graphic Novel, ed. Stephen Tabachnick. 2009. 69-75.

by Michael Chaney

Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels

by Michael Chaney

from MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 32.3 (2007): 175-20

Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel

by Michael Chaney

from College Literature 38.3 (2011): 129-149.

Terrors of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography

by Michael Chaney

from College Literature 38.3 (2011): 21-44.

A Hammer to Shape Reality: Alan Moore’s Graphic Novels and the Avant-Gardes

by Andres Romero-Jodar

Published in Studies in Comics, Volume 2 Issue 1, May 2011, pp. 39-56

Alan Moore’s graphic novels have marked essential standpoints in the history of narrative iconical genres. Works like... more Alan Moore’s graphic novels have marked essential standpoints in the history of narrative iconical genres. Works like Watchmen or V for Vendetta helped reorient the 1980s Anglo-American comic book into the graphic novels of the 1990s by pushing the boundaries of the comic-book genre into the realm of postmodernity. Moore’s graphic novels depict characters that are suffocated by the grand narratives of capitalist societies, Orwellian dystopias and totalizing ideologies. In this vein, his works may be placed in the context of postmodernist thinking postulated by Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard or Fredric Jameson. However, the rebellious attitude shown in his narratives against those globalizing definitions of the self and homogenizing social orders strongly recalls the efforts of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes to provoke their bourgeois audiences into action by fostering their radical distaste. The aim of this article is to consider certain examples of Alan Moore’s graphic novels as direct inheritors of the committed ideology and technical experimentalism proposed by avant-garde movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Brecht famously argued, ‘art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it’. This article will thus centre on Moore’s works that best reflect the same experimental spirit of revolutionary art forms fostered by Cubism, Modernism, Futurism and other European avant-garde movements. These movements, by using the power of artistic creation, called audiences to social action against the rising fascist discourses of the first decades of the twentieth century. It is my contention that graphic novels like Lost Girls, Watchmen, From Hell and V for Vendetta connect with the recovery of avant-garde ethics and aesthetics, and seem to renew their attacks against the moral double standard of bourgeois, accommodated social classes. Then, Moore’s graphic novels raise public awareness and serve as social denunciation, becoming, at certain moments, examples of intellectual terrorism against the status quo.

Os surfistas

by Manuel Joao Ramos

The Library After Dark: Creating a graphic novel for the promotion of collections and services

by Gwen Evans

Book Chapter published in Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives: Essays on Readers, Research, History and Cataloging. 2010. Robert G. Weiner, ed. McFarland Publications

For the online version of The Library After Dark, the graphic novel produced by six student artists, see more For the online version of The Library After Dark, the graphic novel produced by six student artists, see http://issuu.com/litslabs/docs/libraryafterdark.

Apocalypse to Apocatastasis: Comics, Memory and Meaning in Signal to Noise

by Megen Molé

Written for a class entitled "Theorizing the Graphic Novel" in 2011.

On a structural level comics are relatively easy to create and distribute, and yet, with their combination of words... more On a structural level comics are relatively easy to create and distribute, and yet, with their combination of words and images, they unite the ‘freedom of notation’ in literature with the ‘analogical’ immediacy of cinema. Their at once pictorial and textual nature means that the brain must process the information differently, and yet the comic book narrative necessarily takes place on the page, giving the reader all the time he could want or need to process said information. As its title would suggest, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's "Signal to Noise" is constantly at play with the borders between signal and noise, meaning and meaninglessness.These two base elements of Signal to Noise, the narrative and the structural, notational and analogical, combine to produce a text which effectively uses a simple apocalyptic narrative and themes to discuss the relationship between signal, noise, and art in the Barthesian sense, creating a work charged with meaning and capable of being interpreted on a number of levels. In my essay, I analyse these two components, and the specific ways in which they work together to discuss the interplay between signal and noise in art, particularly in the comic book form.This combined form takes on new meaning, and turns every bit of noise into signal.