Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture. While superhero comics are a distinct and sometimes disdained branch of comics creation, they are integral to the development of the North American comic book and the history of the medium. For the past half-century they have also been the one overwhelmingly dominant market genre. The sheer volume of superhero comics that have been published over the years is staggering. Major superhero universes constitute one of the most expansive storytelling canvases ever fashioned. Moreover, characters inhabiting these fictional universes are immensely influential, having achieved iconic recognition around the globe. Their images and adventures have shaped many other media, such as film, videogames, and even prose fiction. The primary aim of this reader is twofold: first, to collect in a single volume a sampling of the most sophisticated commentary on superheroes, and second, to bring into sharper focus the ways in which superheroes connect with larger social, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and historical themes that are of interest to a great many readers both in the academy and beyond. Contributions from Will Brooker, Jeffrey Brown, Scott Bukatman, John G. Cawelti, Peter Coogan, Jules Feiffer, Henry Jenkins, Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Gerald Jones, Geoff Klock, Karin Kukkonen, Andy Medhurst, Adilifu Nama, Walter Ong, Lorrie Palmer, Richard Reynolds, Trina Robbins, Lillian Robinson, Roger B. Rollin, Gloria Steinem, Jennifer Stuller, Fredric Wertham, and Philip Wylie

Ollmann has been called the best writer of short stories working in comics today. Featuring a lengthy introduction, this is the definative collection of those stories. Although the term "graphic novel" has become widely accepted in the publishing industry and the culture at large, it describes long form works. This omnibus makes obvious that there is a need for a term to describe the short story version of the graphic novel. In the same way the short story has recently had a resurgence, winning many literary awards, so too the graphica version. Ollmann won the Doug Wright Award in 2007 for This Will All End in Tears, most of which is contained in this omnibus. The best stories from Chewing on Tinfoil are included, as well as two new stories, written just for this book.

The now notorious "Maclean?s" article ?'Too Asian?'? from the magazine's 2010 campus issue has sparked a national furor about race in Canadian higher education. Since the founding of the federal policy of multiculturalism, Canadians have prided themselves on their ability to integrate diversity into a broader multicultural environment, but the often heated discussions about race point to fissures in this national project. This collection uses the controversy about the "Maclean?s" article as a flashpoint to interrogate issues about race and representation on Canadian campuses and what it means for students and learning across the country.

When Art Spiegelman's "Maus"-a two-part graphic novel about the Holocaust-won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, comics scholarship grew increasingly popular and notable. The rise of "serious" comics has generated growing levels of interest as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals continue to explore the history, aesthetics, and semiotics of the comics medium.

Yet those who write about the comics often assume analysis of the medium didn't begin until the cultural studies movement was underway. "Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium" brings together nearly two dozen essays by major writers and intellectuals who analyzed, embraced, and even attacked comic strips and comic books in the period between the turn of the century and the 1960s. From e. e. cummings, who championed George Herriman's "Krazy Kat," to Irving Howe, who fretted about Harold Gray's "Little Orphan Annie," this volume shows that comics have provided a key battleground in the culture wars for over a century.

With substantive essays by Umberto Eco, Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, Gilbert Seldes, Dorothy Parker, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, and others, this anthology shows how all of these writers took up comics-related topics as a point of entry into wider debates over modern art, cultural standards, daily life, and mass communication.

"Arguing Comics" shows how prominent writers from the Jazz Age and the Depression era to the heyday of the New York Intellectuals in the 1950s thought about comics and, by extension, popular culture as a whole.

A columnist for the "National Post" (Canada), Jeet Heer has been published in "Slate," the "Boston Globe," the "Guardian," the "Comics Journal" and many other venues.

Kent Worcester, a professor of political science and international studies at Marymount Manhattan College, is the author of "C. L. R. James: A Political Biography." His work has appeared in the "Comics Journal," "New Statesman," "Popular Culture Review," and numerous other publications.