Comics

This book engages with the myriad meanings of “comics” through a wide range of texts and approaches, offering educators, students, and more a view of comics’ many nuances and complexities.

• The collection presents comics as physical objects: it incorporates dozens of physical and digital comics texts from around the globe.

• It presents comics as an artistic medium: it engages with a wide range of artistic styles, formats, materials, and production methods.

• It presents comics as a cultural phenomenon: it describes the ways in which comics have shaped, and have been shaped by, their historical, geographical, and cultural contexts.

Through examinations of genre, context, form, and transmediality, the volume provides both a broad overview of “comics” as a concept and a collection of close readings of individual texts, many of which have been overlooked or underdiscussed in existing scholarship.

Comics: A Companion expands the field and provides a point of entry for students and scholars looking to read comics beyond the mainstream.

Madeline B. Gangnes is Associate Professor of English at the University of Scranton. She is coeditor of Studies in Comics and Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies (2024). Her work has appeared in Studies in Comics, Inks, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, the Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Popular Fictions, and The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals (2024).

Aidan Diamond is a doctoral candidate in comparative media at the University of Southern California. Her publications may be found in Studies in Comics, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, The Ascendance of Harley Quinn, and Politics in Gotham. Her current research examines transmedia apocalypse narratives in the age of climate change.

Lauranne Poharec holds a PhD in English with a focus on visual engagement in comics. Her work appears in Uncanny Bodies, Gestes et bandes dessinées, Studies in Comics, and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. She now works as a UX Researcher at Webtoon Entertainment (Wattpad Brand).