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Peter O’Donnell was a writer of comic strips, novels and short stories and is best known for the character Modesty Blaise, unbeatable all-action heroine, retired criminal and occasional field-operator for British intelligence. Modesty Blaise, her sidekick Willie Garvin, and other recurring characters from the series appeared in the comic strips of the same name in The Evening Standard from 1963 to 2001 and in eleven novels and two collections of short stories between 1965 and 1996. O’Donnell also wrote historical romance novels under the name of Madeleine Brent.

Reflecting on the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing, French astronaut Patrick Baudry (1946–), then a fighter-pilot candidate, admitted years later that he and his classmates had felt a sense of deja-vu. After all, Tintin, a world-famous comic strip character, had been there 15 years earlier.1 Though anecdotal, the comment nonetheless points to an important element of European astroculture — the comic book — where ‘bubbles’ or ‘balloons’ filled with text intertwine with pictures to move the story forward. The two volumes that cover Tintin’s lunar odyssey, along with other episodes from francophone comic strips, became a classic of the genre, reprinted and discussed years later. Because of the combined importance of the Francophone comic strip in twentieth-century European popular culture, and the fact that its golden age coincides with the beginnings of the Space Age and the associated Cold War Space Race, it is fascinating to consider the factors that account for the public interest in space-themed comics. To do so, an examination of the space episodes that were published in the Tintin, Buck Danny and Dan Cooper series will show not only the commonality of themes, but the seemingly contradictory aspirations the theme of ‘space’ elicited.

Although On the Sidewalks of New York was a short-lived cartoon series (New York Journal, 1897–1898, 1899–1900), this chapter approaches it as a significant cultural artifact that expresses Progressive Era ambivalence about the figure of the street child. Lara Saguisag argues that while the series insisted that the street child is both symptom and cause of urban ills, it also encouraged readers to sympathize with this troublesome child and delight in his antics. She also shows how On the Sidewalks simultaneously reinforced and destabilized contemporary notions of ethnicity, gender, and class difference.

‘Now my body floats over the swells of the Mapocho, my coffin navigates among the murky waters, dodging tires, branches […]. I’m traveling along a brown river. A dirty thread that carries me with ease […]’, declares the narrative voice in the first lines of Mapocho, a novel by Nona Fernandez (1971), published in 2002 (Fernandez 2006: 13). Specified in the novel’s title, the river here is the Mapocho, a major water landmark in Santiago, Chile. As for the mentioned thread, it denotes both something of excess, leftover or expendable, and also a woven fabric falling apart, becoming frayed and losing its threads. However, if skilfully sewn, the thread can be reincorporated into the fabric. In Mapocho, the river is also the open wound of a city that lived under dictatorship for 17 years since the river is a continuous flow of dead bodies.

Serialised detective narratives had been popular on radio long before original drama was produced for television. Popular examples are the radio series Dragnet (NBC, 1949–57) and The Fat Man (ABC, 1946–51). In cinema, the film series Dick Tracy (dir. James and Taylor 1937) is particularly well-remembered. The film series was an adaptation of a comic strip about a so-called G-Man (short for ‘Government Man’, a colloquial term for FBI agents), which was later also adapted as a TV series, likewise called Dick Tracy (ABC, 1950–2).1 The series, aimed at children, was popular, but was cancelled due to the sudden death of its star, Ralph Byrd. The series employs rational-scientific methods of detection and, in its gesturing towards science, seems to draw on the Sherlock Holmes stories and its many adaptations. Tracy and his ‘secretary and lab assistant’ Gwen Andrews (Kay Hughes) investigate crime scenes with tools like torches and a magnifying glass. And though Dick Tracy encounters many action-packed and life-threatening situations during his investigations and the stories are somewhat preposterous, the analysis of clues through science is always emphasised. The series often focusses on technology to analyse clues. Regularly, scenes take place in a lab space filled with technology to decode clues, though sometimes all that is needed is a lighter to make invisible ink visible. The technology in the lab seems like gadgetry — especially as some equipment does not exist in reality or is never used — but it also pre-empts the later CSI: Crime Scene Investigation’s use of technology as spectacle.

The previous chapter argued that early 20th-century literary Modernism, fascinated by the cultural discourse of science, and therefore productive of a large amount of SF

With this dramatic epigraph, Art Spiegelman begins My Father Bleeds History (1986), the first single-volume publication of the graphic novel Maus (serialised from 1980–91) that tells the story of the author’s life through the lens of the experiences of his Jewish parents in Poland in the Second World War. I quote this line in particular because it raises a central tenet of Nazi policy, the purported racial hierarchy that justified ‘The Final Solution’, and this is a fallacy that Spiegelman explores through the graphic aspect of his work: the Jewish people — Spiegelman’s parents included — are portrayed as mice, Germans are pictured as cats, and non-Jewish Poles are pigs, among other bestial representations of racial difference. I do not wish to focus extensively on the question of race in Maus, Spiegelman’s use of animal imagery, or the racial typing inherent in far-right European ideology of the early twentieth century; apart from the fact that these subjects lie beyond the bounds of this chapter, they are covered thoroughly by extensive criticism of Maus in the decade following its publication.2 Spiegelman’s foregrounding of the issue of race, through the graphical forms populating his work, though, shows how useful graphic novel literature can be in exploring relationships between those of different races.

DayZ is a transmedia storyworld. Its diegesis is expressed in multiple ways in a variety of media, including games, a website and a novel, as extracted above. Its originating form was that of a ‘mod’, a term used to describe the modification or expansion of an existing commercial videogame (Egenfeldt Nielsen, Heide Smith and Pajares Tosca 2008:159). In the case of DayZ, developer Dean Hall took the military simulator game ARMA II and its expansion pack ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead and transformed them into a multiplayer open world survival horror game (bbc.co.uk/news 2012). The scenario is that a fictional post-Soviet state called Chernarus has been attacked by a virus which has previously eradicated most of the world’s population. As a player you’re told you can either act alone or team up with fellow survivors to negotiate the hazardous wasteland. Your opponents include zombies and other players (dayzmod.com). Dean Hall and the creators of the ARMA II game, Bohemia Interactive, are currently developing a standalone version of DayZ.

In a speech to the House of Commons on 20 August 1940 Winston Churchill emphasised the reality of Total War: ‘The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children.’ As the First World War had shown, the Home Front was crucial to the modern war effort and in the 1939–45 conflict, ‘the engineers’ war’ (Croucher: 1982, ix), manufacturing was essential. In this struggle, fought out on the factory floor, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) made an impact far beyond its small membership in encouraging production and efficiency and discouraging labour conflict. At a time of ‘total war’, the party whose creed was that of ‘producer’ (Morgan et al.: 2003, 144) came into its own, but how did this emerge in its main comic strip?

Genevan author, teacher, and artist Rodolphe Topffer (1799–1846) completed Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois, a picture story that many consider to be the first comic strip or graphic novel, in 1827.1 From that time until his death, he sketched pictorial narratives that he called ‘histoires en estampes’ or stories in prints, completing seven long albums as well as unpublished fragments. While he was experimenting with comics, Topffer was composing a large corpus of published prose: travel writing and essays exploring aesthetic theory and describing the genre he invented, much of it influenced by picturesque treks in the Alps that he led for his students, the mixed text-and-image travelogues Voyages en Zigzag in which he recorded those trips, and the mixed-media art and literature prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specifically, I will argue that he drew his primary inspiration for his first two comic strips from William Gilpin’s picturesque landscape viewing and drawing techniques and that with his early comics he entered into a joust, so to speak, with Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and Charles Marie Bouton, who made the aesthetics of high-tech theatrical narrative art popular in their dioramas.2

Perhaps nothing better captures the spirit of British new wave music than the phrase, originating in 1984, ‘Frankie Say Relax.’ Emblazoned in tall black letters across oversized white t-shirts, it was a far cry from the Sex Pistols’ call for ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ just eight years earlier. The Pistols’ anthem, which advocated the wholesale destruction of cultural institutions from council tenancies to traffic lights, made a clear and urgent political statement: ‘Right! Now!’ Johnny Rotten sneers during the opening bars of ‘Anarchy.’ ‘Frankie Say Relax,’ on the other hand, borders on nonsensical (the ‘Say,’ though grammatically correct, seems wrong, helping to undermine the message), an empty set of words with no signification.

Suzuhara’s collection of yonkoma (four-panel) comic strips ‘Here in Magic Land’ are published in ‘J-BOY by Biblos’ (2006). This is an English-language anthology of original Japanese manga (comics) of the genre known as Boys’ Love (BL).1 The cast of characters and the scenarios they imply indicate some of the motifs around which BL revolves: Magic Land Friends Shiro: A boy from the cat family became Al’s apprentice in hopes of becoming a wizard. Al: A great wizard … but not a responsible adult. Always lusting after Shiro. Kett: The butler at Al’s estate. There’s a person under the bunny costume. Tora: Shiro’s older brother. Visits Al’s estate often out of worry for Shiro and desire to see Kett.