Comics Studies Here and Now marks the arrival of comics studies scholarship that no longer feels the need to justify itself within or against other fields of study. The essays herein move us forward, some in their re-diggings into comics history and others by analyzing comics-and all its transmedial and fan-fictional offshoots-on its own terms. Comics Studies stakes the flag of our arrival-the arrival of comics studies as a full-fledged discipline that today and tomorrow excavates, examines, discusses, and analyzes all aspects that make up the resplendent planetary republic of comics. This collection of scholarly essays is a testament to the fact that comic book studies have come into their own as an academic discipline; simply and powerfully moving comic studies forward with their critical excavations and theoretical formulas based on the common sense understanding that comics add to the world as unique, transformative cultural phenomena.

Contributions by Frederick Luis Aldama, Melissa Burgess, Susan Kirtley, Rachel Luria, Ursula Murray Husted, Mark O'Connor, Allan Pero, Davida Pines, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Jane Tolmie, Rachel Trousdale, Elaine Claire Villacorta, and Glenn Willmott Lynda Barry (b. 1956) is best known for her distinctive style and unique voice, first popularized in her underground weekly comic Ernie Pook's Comeek. Since then, she has published prolifically, including numerous comics, illustrated novels, and nonfiction books exploring the creative process. Barry's work is genre- and form-bending, often using collage to create what she calls "word with drawing" vignettes. Her art, imaginative and self-reflective, allows her to discuss gender, race, relationships, memory, and her personal, everyday lived experience. It is through this experience that Barry examines the creative process and offers to readers ways to record and examine their own lives. The essays in Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry, edited by Jane Tolmie, study the pedagogy of Barry's work and its application academically and practically. Examining Barry's career and work from the point of view of research-creation, Contagious Imagination applies Barry's unique mixture of teaching, art, learning, and creativity to the very form of the volume, exploring Barry's imaginative praxis and offering readers their own. With a foreword by Frederick Luis Aldama and an afterword by Glenn Willmott, this volume explores the impact of Barry's work in and out of the classroom. Divided into four sections-Teaching and Learning, which focuses on critical pedagogy; Comics and Autobiography, which targets various practices of rememorying; Cruddy, a self-explanatory category that offers two extraordinary critical interventions into Barry criticism around a challenging text; and Research-Creation, which offers two creative, synthetic artistic pieces that embody and enact Barry's own mixed academic and creative investments-this book offers numerous inroads into Barry's idiosyncratic imagination and what it can teach us about ourselves.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies is a comprehensive, global, and interdisciplinary examination of the essential relationship between Gender, Sexuality, Comics, and Graphic Novels. A diverse range of international and interdisciplinary scholars take a closer look at how gender and sexuality have been essential in the evolution of comics, and how gender and sexuality in comics demand that we re-frame and re-view comics history. Chapters cover a wide array of intersectional topics including Queer Underground and Alternative comics, Feminist Autobiography, re-drawing disability, Latina testimony, and re-evaluating the critical whiteness and masculinity of superheroes in this first truly global reference text to gender and sexuality in comics. Comics have always been an important place for the radical exploration of feminist and non-binary sexualities and identities, and the growth of non-normative comic book traditions as a field of inquiry makes this an essential text for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers studying Comics Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Redrawing the Historical Past examines how multiethnic graphic novels portray and revise U.S. history. This is the first collection to focus exclusively on the interplay of history and memory in multiethnic graphic novels. Such interplay enables a new understanding of the past. The twelve essays explore Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece's Incognegro, Gene Luen Yang's Boxers and Saints, GB Tran's Vietnamerica, Cristy C. Road's Spit and Passion, Scott McCloud's The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, Art Spiegelman's post-Maus work, and G. Neri and Randy DuBurke's Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, among many others. The collection represents an original body of criticism about recently published works that have received scant scholarly attention. The chapters confront issues of history and memory in contemporary multiethnic graphic novels, employing diverse methodologies and approaches while adhering to three main guidelines. First, using a global lens, contributors reconsider the concept of history and how it is manifest in their chosen texts. Second, contributors consider the ways in which graphic novels, as a distinct genre, can formally renovate or intervene in notions of the historical past. Third, contributors take seriously the possibilities and limitations of these historical revisions with regard to envisioning new, different, or even more positive versions of both the present and future. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that graphic novelists use the open and flexible space of the graphic narrative page-in which readers can move not only forward but also backward, upward, downward, and in several other directions-to present history as an open realm of struggle that is continually being revised.

The first guide to teaching Latino/a literature, "Latino/a Literature in the Classroom "provides tools for teaching one of the most rapidly growing areas of literary study. Essays by established scholars offer a comprehensive approach, attending to how formal techniques give idiosyncratic and particular shape to literature by and about Latinos/as. Accessible to different levels of instruction and utilizing an array of approaches, chapters focus on the teaching of the novel, short story, graphic novel, film, plays, poetry, and performance art in a variety of established and emerging storytelling shapes: postmodernism, magical realism, science fiction, young adult and children s fiction, and others. They consider the importance of historical period and region in the making and consuming of Latino/a literature, covering both popular and undervisited authors.

The essays will help teachers create courses that pay attention to:

Issues of form such as style, voice, perspective

Issues of content such as theme and character

Issues of histories of dislocation and settlement

Issues of socio-economic push and pull factors in the rural and urban relocation

of Latinos/as

Issues of linguistic, cultural, and ancestral difference

Contributors place key texts of the Latino/a teaching canon in dialogue with trends of a hemispheric, postcolonial, and transnational nature. Acknowledging the contexts of literatures from Mexico, Cuba, Dominica, Puerto Rico, and Central and South America, "Latino/a Literature in the Classroom "situates the teaching of Latino/a Literature within global theoretical paradigms and the broader humanities curriculum. This valuable collection of teaching methods will be useful to instructors and scholars seeking sources for intercultural and transnational literary courses.

The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature presents the first comprehensive overview of these popular, experimental and diverse literary cultures.

Frederick Luis Aldama traces a historical path through Latino/a literature, examining both the historical and political contexts of the works, as well as their authors and the readership. He also provides an enlightening analysis of:

• the differing sub-groups of Latino/a literature, including Mexican American, Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, Dominican American, and Central and South American migr authors
• established and emerging literary trends such as the postmodern, historical, chica-lit storytelling formats and the graphic novel
• key literary themes, including gender and sexuality, feminist and queer voices, and migration and borderlands.

The author s methodology and interpretation of a wealth of information will put this rich and diverse area of literary culture into a new light for scholars. The book s student-friendly features such as a glossary, guide to further reading, explanatory text boxes and chapter summaries, make this the ideal text for anyone approaching the area for the first time.

The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature presents the first comprehensive overview of these popular, experimental and diverse literary cultures.

Frederick Luis Aldama traces a historical path through Latino/a literature, examining both the historical and political contexts of the works, as well as their authors and the readership. He also provides an enlightening analysis of:

• the differing sub-groups of Latino/a literature, including Mexican American, Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, Dominican American, and Central and South American emigre authors
• established and emerging literary trends such as the postmodern, historical, chica-lit storytelling formats and the graphic novel
• key literary themes, including gender and sexuality, feminist and queer voices, and migration and borderlands.

The author s methodology and interpretation of a wealth of information will put this rich and diverse area of literary culture into a new light for scholars. The book s student-friendly features such as a glossary, guide to further reading, explanatory text boxes and chapter summaries, make this the ideal text for anyone approaching the area for the first time.

Latina/o popular culture has experienced major growth and change with the expanding demographic of Latina/os in mainstream media. In The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Pop Culture, contributors pay serious critical attention to all facets of Latina/o popular culture including TV, films, performance art, food, lowrider culture, theatre, photography, dance, pulp fiction, music, comic books, video games, news, web, and digital media, healing rituals, quinceneras, and much more. Features include: consideration of differences between pop culture made by and about Latina/os; comprehensive and critical analyses of various pop cultural forms; concrete and detailed treatments of major primary works from children's television to representations of dia de los muertos; new perspectives on the political, social, and historical dynamic of Latina/o pop culture; Chapters select, summarize, explain, contextualize and assess key critical interpretations, perspectives, developments and debates in Latina/o popular cultural studies. A vitally engaging and informative volume, this compliation of wide-ranging case studies in Latina/o pop culture phenomena encourages scholars and students to view Latina/o pop culture within the broader study of global popular culture. Contributors: Stacey Alex, Cecilia Aragon, Mary Beltran, William A. Calvo-Quiros, Melissa Castillo-Garsow, Nicholas Centino, Ben Chappell, Fabio Chee, Osvaldo Cleger, David A. Colon, Marivel T. Danielson, Laura Fernandez, Camilla Fojas, Kathryn M. Frank, Enrique Garcia, Christopher Gonzalez, Rachel Gonzalez-Martin, Matthew David Goodwin, Ellie D. Hernandez, Jorge Iber, Guisela Latorre, Stephanie Lewthwaite, Richard Alexander Lou, Stacy I. Macias, Desiree Martin, Paloma Martinez-Cruz, Pancho McFarland, Cruz Medina, Isabel Millan, Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes, William Anthony Nericcio, William Orchard, Rocio Isabel Prado, Ryan Rashotte, Cristina Rivera, Gabriella Sanchez, Ilan Stavans Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at the Ohio State University where he is also founder and director of LASER and the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. He is author, co-author, and editor of over 24 books, including the Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature and Latino/a Literature in the Classroom.

The first guide to teaching Latino/a literature, "Latino/a Literature in the Classroom "provides tools for teaching one of the most rapidly growing areas of literary study. Essays by established scholars offer a comprehensive approach, attending to how formal techniques give idiosyncratic and particular shape to literature by and about Latinos/as. Accessible to different levels of instruction and utilizing an array of approaches, chapters focus on the teaching of the novel, short story, graphic novel, film, plays, poetry, and performance art in a variety of established and emerging storytelling shapes: postmodernism, magical realism, science fiction, young adult and children s fiction, and others. They consider the importance of historical period and region in the making and consuming of Latino/a literature, covering both popular and undervisited authors.

The essays will help teachers create courses that pay attention to:

Issues of form such as style, voice, perspective

Issues of content such as theme and character

Issues of histories of dislocation and settlement

Issues of socio-economic push and pull factors in the rural and urban relocation

of Latinos/as

Issues of linguistic, cultural, and ancestral difference

Contributors place key texts of the Latino/a teaching canon in dialogue with trends of a hemispheric, postcolonial, and transnational nature. Acknowledging the contexts of literatures from Mexico, Cuba, Dominica, Puerto Rico, and Central and South America, "Latino/a Literature in the Classroom "situates the teaching of Latino/a Literature within global theoretical paradigms and the broader humanities curriculum. This valuable collection of teaching methods will be useful to instructors and scholars seeking sources for intercultural and transnational literary courses.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies is a comprehensive, global, and interdisciplinary examination of the essential relationship between Gender, Sexuality, Comics, and Graphic Novels. A diverse range of international and interdisciplinary scholars take a closer look at how gender and sexuality have been essential in the evolution of comics, and how gender and sexuality in comics demand that we re-frame and re-view comics history. Chapters cover a wide array of intersectional topics including Queer Underground and Alternative comics, Feminist Autobiography, re-drawing disability, Latina testimony, and re-evaluating the critical whiteness and masculinity of superheroes in this first truly global reference text to gender and sexuality in comics. Comics have always been an important place for the radical exploration of feminist and non-binary sexualities and identities, and the growth of non-normative comic book traditions as a field of inquiry makes this an essential text for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers studying Comics Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies.

First with his magisterial fantasy Bone to his mind-bending, time-warping sci-fi noir RASL, Paleolithic-Set fantasy Tuki: Save the Humans, arthouse-styled superheroic miniSeries Shazam!, and his latest children's book Smiley's Dream Book, Jeff Smith (b. 1960) has made an indelible mark on the comics industry. As a child, Smith was drawn to Charles Schulz's Peanuts, Carl Barks's Donald Duck, and Walt Kelly's Pogo, and he began the daily practice of drawing his own stories. After writing his regular strip Thorn for The Ohio State University's student paper, Smith worked in animation before creating, writing, and illustrating his runaway success, Bone. A comedic fantasy epic, Bone focuses on the Bone cousins, white, bald cartoon characters run out of their hometown, lost in a distant, mysterious valley. The self-published Series ran from 1991 to 2004 and won numerous awards, including ten Eisner Awards. This career-spanning collection of interviews, ranging from 1999 to 2017, enables readers to follow along with Smith's development as an independent creator, writer, and illustrator.

Contributions by Joshua T. Anderson, Chad A. Barbour, Susan Bernardin, Mike Borkent, Jeremy M. Carnes, Philip Cass, Jordan Clapper, James J. Donahue, Dennin Ellis, Jessica Fontaine, Jonathan Ford, Lee Francis IV, Enrique Garcia, Javier Garcia Liendo, Brenna Clarke Gray, Brian Montes, Arij Ouweneel, Kevin Patrick, Candida Rifkind, Jessica Rutherford, and Jorge Santos Cultural works by and about Indigenous identities, histories, and experiences circulate far and wide. However, not all films, animation, television shows, and comic books lead to a nuanced understanding of Indigenous realities. Acclaimed comics scholar Frederick Luis Aldama shines light on how mainstream comics have clumsily distilled and reconstructed Indigenous identities and experiences. He and contributors emphasize how Indigenous comic artists are themselves clearing new visual-verbal narrative spaces for articulating more complex histories, cultures, experiences, and narratives of self. To that end, Aldama brings together scholarship that explores both the representation and misrepresentation of Indigenous subjects and experiences as well as research that analyzes and highlights the extraordinary work of Indigenous comic artists. Among others, the book examines Daniel Parada's Zotz, Puerto Rican comics Turey el Taino and La Borinquena, and Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection. This volume's wide-armed embrace of comics by and about Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia is a first step to understanding how the histories of colonial and imperial domination connect the violent wounds that still haunt across continents. Aldama and contributors resound this message: Indigeneity in comics is an important, powerful force within our visual-verbal narrative arts writ large.

In The Latinx Files, Matthew David Goodwin traces how Latinx science fiction writers are reclaiming the space alien from its xenophobic legacy in the science fiction genre. The book argues that the space alien is a vital Latinx figure preserving Latinx cultures by activating the myriad possible constructions of the space alien to represent race and migration in the popular imagination. The works discussed in this book, including those of H.G. Wells, Gloria Anzaldúa, Junot Diaz, André M. Carrington, and many others, often explicitly reject the derogatory correlation of the space alien and Latinxs, while at other times, they contain space aliens that function as a source of either enlightenment or horror for Latinx communities. Throughout this nuanced analysis, The Latinx Files demonstrates how the character of the space alien has been significant to Latinx communities and has great potential for future writers and artists.   

The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture is the first comprehensive volume to explore the intersections between gender, sexuality, and the creation, consumption, and interpretation of popular culture in the Americas. The chapters seek to enrich our understanding of the role of pop culture in the everyday lives of its creators and consumers, primarily in the 20th and 21st centuries. They reveal how popular culture expresses the historical, social, cultural, and political commonalities that have shaped the lives of peoples that make up the Americas, and also highlight how pop culture can conform to and solidify existing social hierarchies, whilst on other occasions contest and resist the status quo. Front and center in this collection are issues of gender and sexuality, making visible the ways in which subjects who inhabit intersectional identities (sex, gender, race, class) are "othered", as well as demonstrating how these same subjects can, and do, use pop-cultural phenomena in self-affirmative and progressively transformative ways. Topics covered in this volume include TV, film, pop and performance art, hip-hop, dance, slam poetry, gender-fluid religious ritual, theater, stand-up comedy, graffiti, videogames, photography, graphic arts, sports spectacles, comic books, sci-fi and other genre novels, loteria card games, news, web, and digital media.

From the influential work of Los Bros Hernandez in Love & Rockets, to comic strips and political cartoons, to traditional superheroes made nontraditional by means of racial and sexual identity (e.g., Miles Morales/Spider-Man), comics have become a vibrant medium to express Latino identity and culture. Indeed, Latino fiction and nonfiction narratives are rapidly proliferating in graphic media as diverse and varied in form and content as is the whole of Latino culture today. Graphic Borders presents the most thorough exploration of comics by and about Latinos currently available. Thirteen essays and one interview by eminent and rising scholars of comics bring to life this exciting graphic genre that conveys the distinctive and wide-ranging experiences of Latinos in the United States. The contributors' exhilarating excavations delve into the following areas: comics created by Latinos that push the boundaries of generic conventions; Latino comic book author-artists who complicate issues of race and gender through their careful reconfigurations of the body; comic strips; Latino superheroes in mainstream comics; and the complex ways that Latino superheroes are created and consumed within larger popular cultural trends. Taken as a whole, the book unveils the resplendent riches of comics by and about Latinos and proves that there are no limits to the ways in which Latinos can be represented and imagined in the world of comics.

First with his magisterial fantasy Bone to his mind-bending, time-warping sci-fi noir RASL, Paleolithic-Set fantasy Tuki: Save the Humans, arthouse-styled superheroic miniSeries Shazam!, and his latest children's book Smiley's Dream Book, Jeff Smith (b. 1960) has made an indelible mark on the comics industry. As a child, Smith was drawn to Charles Schulz's Peanuts, Carl Barks's Donald Duck, and Walt Kelly's Pogo, and he began the daily practice of drawing his own stories. After writing his regular strip Thorn for The Ohio State University's student paper, Smith worked in animation before creating, writing, and illustrating his runaway success, Bone. A comedic fantasy epic, Bone focuses on the Bone cousins, white, bald cartoon characters run out of their hometown, lost in a distant, mysterious valley. The self-published Series ran from 1991 to 2004 and won numerous awards, including ten Eisner Awards. This career-spanning collection of interviews, ranging from 1999 to 2017, enables readers to follow along with Smith's development as an independent creator, writer, and illustrator.

Frederick Aldama's The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez (2014) was the first full-scale study of one of the most prolific and significant Latino directors making films today. In this companion volume, Aldama enlists a corps of experts to analyze a majority of Rodriguez's feature films, from his first break-out success El Mariachi in 1992 to Machete in 2010. The essays explore the formal and thematic features present in his films from the perspectives of industry (context, convention, and distribution), the film blueprint (auditory and visual ingredients), and consumption (ideal and real audiences). The authors illuminate the manifold ways in which Rodriguez's films operate internally (plot, character, and event) and externally (audience perception, thought, and feeling). The volume is divided into three parts: "Matters of Mind and Media" includes essays that use psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology to shed light on how Rodriguez's films complicate Latino identity, as well as how they succeed in remaking audiences' preconceptions of the world. "Narrative Theory, Cognitive Science, and Sin City: A Case Study" offers tools and models of analysis for the study of Rodriguez's film re-creation of a comic book (on which Frank Miller was credited as codirector). "Aesthetic and Ontological Border Crossings and Borderlands" considers how Rodriguez's films innovatively critique fixed notions of Latino identity and experience, as well as open eyes to racial injustices. As a whole, the volume demonstrates how Rodriguez's career offers critical insights into the filmmaking industry, the creative process, and the consuming and reception of contemporary film.

Contributions by Joshua T. Anderson, Chad A. Barbour, Susan Bernardin, Mike Borkent, Jeremy M. Carnes, Philip Cass, Jordan Clapper, James J. Donahue, Dennin Ellis, Jessica Fontaine, Jonathan Ford, Lee Francis IV, Enrique Garcia, Javier Garcia Liendo, Brenna Clarke Gray, Brian Montes, Arij Ouweneel, Kevin Patrick, Candida Rifkind, Jessica Rutherford, and Jorge Santos Cultural works by and about Indigenous identities, histories, and experiences circulate far and wide. However, not all films, animation, television shows, and comic books lead to a nuanced understanding of Indigenous realities. Acclaimed comics scholar Frederick Luis Aldama shines light on how mainstream comics have clumsily distilled and reconstructed Indigenous identities and experiences. He and contributors emphasize how Indigenous comic artists are themselves clearing new visual-verbal narrative spaces for articulating more complex histories, cultures, experiences, and narratives of self. To that end, Aldama brings together scholarship that explores both the representation and misrepresentation of Indigenous subjects and experiences as well as research that analyzes and highlights the extraordinary work of Indigenous comic artists. Among others, the book examines Daniel Parada's Zotz, Puerto Rican comics Turey el Taino and La Borinquena, and Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection. This volume's wide-armed embrace of comics by and about Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia is a first step to understanding how the histories of colonial and imperial domination connect the violent wounds that still haunt across continents. Aldama and contributors resound this message: Indigeneity in comics is an important, powerful force within our visual-verbal narrative arts writ large.

Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts brings together in one volume cutting-edge research that turns to recent findings in cognitive and neurobiological sciences, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines, to explore and understand more deeply various cultural phenomena, including art, music, literature, and film. The essays fulfilling this task for the general reader as well as the specialist are written by renowned authors H. Porter Abbott, Patrick Colm Hogan, Suzanne Keen, Herbert Lindenberger, Lisa Zunshine, Katja Mellman, Lalita Pandit Hogan, Klarina Priborkin, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Ellen Spolsky, and Richard Walsh. Among the works analyzed are plays by Samuel Beckett, novels by Maxine Hong Kingston, music compositions by Igor Stravinsky, art by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and films by Michael Haneke. Each of the essays shows in a systematic, clear, and precise way how music, art, literature, and film work in and of themselves and also how they are interconnected. Finally, while each of the essays is unique in style and methodological approach, together they show the way toward a unified knowledge of artistic creativity.