New Books in Comics and Graphic Novels

Alina Gorban is an illustrator of 22 children's books, a cartoonist, and a teaching artist. In our interview we celebrate her new graphic novel entitled, Silence, Full Stop (Street Noise Books, 2023), a very personal and explicit graphic memoir of the struggles of an adolescent girl processing the trauma of childhood sexual assault. It is her debut as an author, and it is published under the pseud...

Dr. Paul Fisher Davies' book Comics As Communication: A Functional Approach (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) explores how comics function to make meanings in the manner of a language. It outlines a framework for describing the resources and practices of comics creation and readership, using an approach that is compatible with similar descriptions of linguistic and multimodal communication. The approach...

Dr. Amy Matthewson's Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era (Routledge, 2022) explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841 to 1901. Filled with political metaphors and racial stereotypes, these illustrations served as a powerful tool in both reflecting and sha...

Dr. Halsall’s Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis (Ohio State UP, 2023) has four primary objectives.  One, it explores this visual and literary medium that is heavily invested in the representation of children and youth, especially in relation to the depiction of particular experiences (social, political, cultural, racial, sexual, ableist, etc.) that young people have undergone an...

Dr. Eszter Szép's book Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability (Ohio State UP, 2020) is the first book to examine the roles of the body in both drawing and reading comics within a single framework. Focusing on graphic autobiography and reportage, she argues that the bodily performances of creators and readers produce a dialogue that requires both parties to experience and engage w...

How can we use comics to present ethnographic research in new and unique ways? In this episode, we talk with Dr V Chitra about the fieldwork and comics in her soon-to-be-released book Drawing Coastlines. She talks about the ethnographic insights on contamination and climate change that came from sorting fish, and her process of developing comics that portray the everyday experiences and environmen...

Today’s guest is Maaheen Ahmed, who has edited a new collection of essays, The Cambridge Companion to Comics (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This book offers both a broad diachronic perspective, reaching back to the earliest print artifacts that could be called “comic books,” and a deep synchronic view, touching on mainstream and alternative comics work, from almost every continent. Contributi...

Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension (Bloomsbury, 2020) argues...

In Medievalist Comics and the American Century (UP of Mississippi, 2016), Chris Bishop surveys the medievalist comic, its stories, characters, settings, and themes drawn from the European Middle Ages. Hal Foster's Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy, but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow remains the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has beco...

Simon Grennan's book A Theory of Narrative Drawing (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) offers an original new conception of visual storytelling, proposing that drawing, depictive drawing and narrative drawing are produced in an encompassing dialogic system of embodied social behavior. It refigures the existing descriptions of visual story-telling that pause with theorizations of perception and the articula...

Valentina Marcella's Laughing Matters: Graphic Satire Reckoning with the 1980 Coup in Turkey (Istituto per l’Oriente C. A. Nallino 2022) focuses on the production of political cartoons in Turkey in the context of authoritarianism and repression that was brought about by the coup d’état of September 12 1980, and by the military rule that followed. It builds on theories of political satire as an act...

In this episode of High Theory, Margaret Galvan talks about the queer politics of Visibility. In her work the activist practices of representation take concrete form in comic books, photographs, and even drawings on lecture slides! In the episode, she discusses the photography of Nan Goldin and queer comic books in the 1980s. She quotes Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Le...

Jonathan Sandler’s The English GI: World War II Graphic Memoir of a Yorkshire Schoolboy’s Adventures in the United States and Europe, is an adaptation of his grandfather’s 1994 war memoir. His grandfather, Bernard Sandler, was a British citizen of Latvian Jewish descent who served in the American Army. The book is illustrated by Brian Bicknell. The English GI sheds light into the experience of ave...

In Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders (Syracuse UP, 2022), contributors draw upon a rich treasure trove of Jewish women’s comics to explore the representation of Jewish women’s bodies and bodily experiences in pictorial narratives. Spanning national, cultural, and artistic borders, the essays shine a light on the significant contributions of Jewish women to comics. The volume features esta...

First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure. Hero Me Not: The Containment of the...

Today’s guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for...

Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches (University of Wales Press, 2022) by Miranda Corcoran is a study in teenage witches in twentieth-century American popular culture. The teenage witch emerged in American fiction in the late twentieth century, quickly becoming a cultural touchstone. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture reveals how novels, films, t...

Beloved culinary and cultural institutions, Jewish delis are wonderlands of amazing flavors and great food—bright, buttery, briny, sweet, fatty, salty, smoky. . . . In The Jewish Deli: An Illustrated Guide to the Chosen Food (Chronicle Books, 2023), comics artist and deli aficionado Ben Nadler takes a deliciously entertaining deep dive into the history and culture of this food and the places that...

I am excited to welcome Eliot Borenstein to the podcast today to discuss his new monograph, Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, published through Cornell University Press in 2023. Eliot is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He has published a number of books: Soviet-Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism (Cornell University Press, 2023)...

Today I interview Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart about their new collaboration, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature (Rose Metal Press, 2023). The book brings together 28 of today’s most innovative creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and image-text hybrids. With original craft essays, corresponding exercises, and full-color examples of their work, each contributor offers r...

Yoshiko Okuyama's book Tōjisha Manga: Japan’s Graphic Memoirs of Brain and Mental Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) defines tōjisha manga as Japan’s autobiographical comics in which the author recounts the experience of a mental or neurological condition in a unique medium of text and image. Yoshiko Okuyama argues that tōjisha manga illuminate otherwise “faceless” individuals and humanize their in...

John Jennings—Hugo Award winner, New York Times bestselling author, curator, scholar, and Artist—is keenly aware that in adapting novels for the graphic format, his decisions turn what has only been imagined into facts drawn on the page. In this conversation with critic, translator, and teacher of a creative course on the art of making comics, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Jennings explores how he mak...

Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, A Graphic Novel (Beacon Press, 2023) is a comic adaptation of Rediker’s now classic 2004 Villains of all Nation: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, one of the foundational texts in serious pirate studies. David Leter’s art offers a graphic exploration of action, resistance, and radicalism among eighteenth-century pirates. The book dramatize...

Superman is the original superhero, an American icon, and arguably the most famous character in the world--and he's Jewish! Introduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and Joe Shuster, an immigrant. They based their hero's origin story on Moses, his strength on Samson, his mission on the golem, and his nebbish...

For this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Norbert Danysz, a PhD candidate at Université Lumière Lyon 2. We chatted about recent developments related to comics in Taiwan – the definition of “Taiwan comics”, their typology, and state promotion of this medium with the aim of building Taiwan’s soft power. To find out more about niche and mainstream comics, who reads them, how and for whom t...