Considers how comics display our everyday stuff-junk drawers,
bookshelves, attics-as a way into understanding how we represent
ourselves now For most of their history, comics were widely
understood as disposable-you read them and discarded them, and the
pulp paper they were printed on decomposed over time. Today, comic
books have been rebranded as graphic novels-clothbound high-gloss
volumes that can be purchased in bookstores, checked out of
libraries, and displayed proudly on bookshelves. They are reviewed
by serious critics and studied in university classrooms. A medium
once considered trash has been transformed into a respectable, if
not elite, genre. While the American comics of the past were about
hyperbolic battles between good and evil, most of today's graphic
novels focus on everyday personal experiences. Contemporary culture
is awash with stuff. They give vivid expression to a culture
preoccupied with the processes of circulation and appraisal,
accumulation and possession. By design, comics encourage the reader
to scan the landscape, to pay attention to the physical objects
that fill our lives and constitute our familiar surroundings.
Because comics take place in a completely fabricated world,
everything is there intentionally. Comics are stuff; comics tell
stories about stuff; and they display stuff. When we use the phrase
"and stuff" in everyday speech, we often mean something vague,
something like "etcetera." In this book, stuff refers not only to
physical objects, but also to the emotions, sentimental
attachments, and nostalgic longings that we express-or hold at
bay-through our relationships with stuff. In Comics and Stuff, his
first solo authored book in over a decade, pioneering media scholar
Henry Jenkins moves through anthropology, material culture,
literary criticism, and art history to resituate comics in the
cultural landscape. Through over one hundred full-color
illustrations, using close readings of contemporary graphic novels,
Jenkins explores how comics depict stuff and exposes the central
role that stuff plays in how we curate our identities, sustain
memory, and make meaning. Comics and Stuff presents an innovative
new way of thinking about comics and graphic novels that will
change how we think about our stuff and ourselves.
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