The rise of the American comics artist

University Press of Mississippi

2010

xxiv, 253 p.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9781604737929

In the year 3794 / Paul Williams and James Lyons -- How the graphic novel changed American comics / Stephen Weiner -- «Is this a book?» DC Vertigo and the redefinition of comics in the 1990s / Julia Round -- Signals from airstrip one : the British invasion of mainstream American comics / Chris Murray -- State of the nation and the Freedom fighters arc / Graham J. Murphy -- Critique, caricature, and compulsion in Joe Sacco's comics journalism / Adam Rosenblatt and Andrea A. Lunsford -- Too much commerce man? Shannon Wheeler and the ironies of the «Rebel cell» / James Lyons -- Comics against themselves : Chris Ware's graphic narratives as literature / David M. Ball -- Questions of «contemporary women's comics» / Paul Williams -- Theorizing sexuality in comics / Joe Sutliff Sanders -- Feminine Latin/o American identities on the American alternative landscape : from the women of Love and rockets to La perdida / Ana Merino -- Making comics respectable : how Maus helped redefine a medium / Ian Gordon -- «A purely American tale» : the tragedy of racism and Jimmy Corrigan : the smartest kid on earth as great American novel / Paul Williams -- «That mouse's shadow» : the canonization of Spiegelman's Maus / Andrew Loman.

Starting in the mid-1980s, a talented set of comics artists changed the American comic-book industry forever by introducing adult sensibilities and aesthetic considerations into popular genres such as superhero comics and the newspaper strip. Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1987) revolutionized the former genre in particular. During this same period, underground and alternative genres began to garner critical acclaim and media attention beyond comics-specific outlets, as best represented by Art Spiegelman's Maus. Publishers began to collect, bind, and market comics as "graphic novels" and these appeared in mainstream bookstores and in magazine reviews. The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts brings together new scholarship surveying the production, distribution and reception of American comics from this pivotal decade to the present. The collection specifically explores the figure of the comics creator-either as writer, as artist, or as writer and artist--in contemporary U.S. comics, using creators as focal points to evaluate changes to the industry, its aesthetics, and its critical reception.

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