The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (New Directions in Aesthetics)

The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Introduction is the first-ever collection of essays published in English devoted to the philosophical questions raised by the art of comics. The volume, which includes a preface by the renowned comics author Warren Ellis, contains ten cutting-edge essays on a range of philosophical topics raised by comics and graphic novels. These include the definition of comics, the nature of comics genres, the relationship between comics and other arts such as film and literature, the way words and pictures combine in comics, comics authorship, the “language” of comics, and the metaphysics of comics.

The book also contains an in-depth introduction by the co-editors which provides an overview of both the book and its subject, as well as a brief history of comics and an overview of extant work on the philosophy of comics.

In an area of growing philosophical interest, this volume constitutes a great leap forward in the development of this fast expanding field, and makes a major contribution to the philosophy of art.

The Editors

Aaron Meskin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on aesthetics and other philosophical subjects. His work on comics has been published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the British Journal of Aesthetics. He was the first aesthetics editor for the online journal Philosophy Compass, and he co-edited Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). He is a former Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is Treasurer of the British Society of Aesthetics.

Roy T. Cook is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, a Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, and an Associate Fellow of the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on philosophical logic, mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics, and more recently on the aesthetics of comics. He previously edited The Arché Papers on the Mathematics of Abstraction (2007), and is the author of A Dictionary of Philosophical Logic (2009).