Search

This article examines two recent Israeli webcomics and explores how each has introduced new modes of graphic communication in Israeli comics. Both are rooted in the Israeli cultural milieu but they reject the forms and substance traditionally associated with Israeli comics and graphic novels. In particular, I analyse Barlev's use of anthropomorphism and Nachmany's use of superhero parody in order to offer novel critiques of Israeli society while also expanding the range and scope of the Israeli comic book and graphic narrative marketplace. I conclude the article by offering a tentative assessment of what it is about webcomics that has facilitated both of these works and how Nachmany's and Barlev's popularity can lead to future novel expressions in Israeli comics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon her introduction as the new Ms. Marvel in 2013, the Pakistani-American superhero Kamala Khan was celebrated, by audiences and critics alike, as a welcome addition to the world of superhero comics. Familiar superhero tropes and ethical dilemmas were given an added twist for Marvel's first Muslim protagonist as the teenage girl strives to reconcile her newfound powers with the moral authorities of her family and her faith. Many comics scholars reserved special praise for the nuanced and unobtrusive way in which the new Ms. Marvel introduces American readers to Muslim culture by following its eminently 'relatable' heroine on her search for moral guidance, whereas others were more sceptical of the extent to which the comic's representation of Muslims can be considered progress. This article probes this ambivalence by analysing the cultural authorities invoked in the first eleven issues of the series. Instead of resolving the critical disagreement, a close reading of Kamala Khan's implicit and explicit appeals to authority allows for a more complicated and richer understanding of the comic's, as well as its eponymous intersectional superheroine's, ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of Tibetan refugees retains a unique matrix in world history. Though many Tibetans have fled from their motherland and settled in various parts of the world, they still believe themselves to be Tibetan citizens. Aaniya Asrani, through her three-part graphic non-fiction series Portraits of Exile, looks at the lives of Tibetans in exile residing in Bylakuppe. It is a geoGraphic novel that combines the spatial qualities of comics with geographical methods and is the first graphic narrative produced in India concerning the Tibetan experience. Asrani uses landscapes as fabrics for expressing the truth of refugeehood, and cultural trauma recalled through individual experiences. The paper attempts to look at Asrani's mapping project from the perspective of Geohumanities; her use of maps, structuring of landscapes, and assertion of identities is looked upon using the lens of narrative cartography, cultural geography, and place identity, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the intersection of Gothic Medicine and Graphic Medicine in Ian William's graphic novel, The Bad Doctor, this article discusses the ways in which gothic aesthetics, particularly representations of the abject encounter, contribute to an understanding of mental illness whilst also interrogating dominant paradigms within medical discourse. Further, this study suggests that the gothic aspects of comics as a medium contribute to the effectiveness of Gothic Medicine as a genre by offering insight into visual and verbal representations of the body. Detailed close readings indicate that Williams's work draws a parallel between the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder on an individual level and the hostility toward the Gothic that formed a cornerstone in the foundation of modern medicine as a discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at three graphic memoirs and considers the specific ways in which the comic medium allows for the representation of complex and non-verbal interactions between the members of a family. The selected texts show how the sequencing of panels in a comic can depict the unspoken affects that circulate within a family unit. The comic medium seems to be apt for representing the distributed consciousness of a family, and also for splintering a character temporally so that older and younger versions of the character can be put into dialogue with each other in a family context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses two exhibitions in Canada, "THIS IS SERIOUS" and "Comic Sans," which showcase the recognition and visibility of comics in Canadian Anglo-culture. The exhibitions feature a diverse range of Canadian comics and challenge traditional notions of art. The article provides insights into the curatorial decisions and includes essays that offer a snapshot of the perception of comics at the time of the exhibits. It suggests that group shows should be a core part of future museum and gallery projects to showcase the richness and diversity of Canadian comics. [Extracted from the article]

This article provides an overview of the research and study of comics and bande dessinée (comic strips) in Canada, with a focus on the development of Canadian comics and the influence of American syndicates. It also explores the cultural transfers and diversity within the Canadian comics industry, including the representation of Indigenous creators and the impact of manga. The article highlights the need to move beyond a binary view of Canadian comics and examine the cultural world and transfer within the industry. It concludes with an exploration of Indigenous resurgence in comics and features interviews with young comics artists from diverse backgrounds. [Extracted from the article]

This article focuses on the adaptation of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's graphic novel The Killing Joke. While the original graphic novel is heralded as a foundational text in the artform, audiences and critics alike were less enthusiastic about its adapted form as an animated film release in 2016. This study explores how shifts in medium can alter what rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke terms frames of acceptance, or how audiences relate texts to their everyday lived experiences. I offer an analysis of both forms of The Killing Joke examining how the different mediums articulate specific frames for audiences to interpret. Ultimately, this article argues that certain mediums offer audiences more opportunity for self-reflection, which helps explain why some adaptations of graphic novels fail to satisfy audiences. This study offers scholars a new lens in which to research adaptations of graphic novels and comics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autobiography and self-reflection on Jewish identity are recurring subjects of the works of Miriam Libicki, a third-generation American-Israeli comic artist. Drawing on a semi-structured interview with Libicki, this article explores how the concept of Jewish identity, both personal and collective, has influenced the artist's creative process throughout her career. Libicki's positionality as a third-generation artist is examined, alongside her oeuvre's place within the current trends of third-generation comics. Libicki's recent work on an SSHRC-funded Holocaust graphic novel project, A Kind of Resistance (2022), led her to undertake a more personal project which examines her grandmother's survival experience, Glasnost Kids (forthcoming). This most recent work on Holocaust narratives has brought Libicki closer to her own Jewish ancestry and has allowed her to further analyse and position her own Jewish identity within both historic and contemporary contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In teaching our first-year university students to understand what Shakespearean language is and what it does, we asked them to edit the three different early modern editions of Hamlet and then adapt their edits into a comics spread. Using some of the numerous graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare and a platform that we forked from Willian Carvalho's 2012 project 'comicgen', our first-year university students create their own visual representations of Shakespearean dialogue. This article explores the early modern texts that often coalesce to form a modern edition of Hamlet, the many Shakespearean graphic novels available today, the pedagogical comics platform created for our students, and the results of our pedagogical project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All bodies are governed by principles of temporality, yet regarding their roles as (potential) mothers, female bodies are kept under particularly strict observation. I argue that comics' power to offer 'a more inclusive perspective of medicine' can be made fruitful to interrogate the impact that implicit temporal regimes that govern pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period have on new mothers. Analysing two autobiographical comics, Teresa Wong's Dear Scarlet and Lucy Knisley's Kid Gloves, I examine how Knisley's struggles with pre-eclampsia and Wong's postnatal depression turn their time as new mothers into a period of 'crip time' in which their chrono-normative time experience is altered. Both artists use different aesthetic means to illustrate experiences that differ from the positive image of an easy birth, swift recovery and blissful postnatal period perpetuated by contemporary discourses. I suggest that the medium of comics is particularly suited to illustrate these shifts in their subjective time experience. My paper explores how Knisley's and Wong's graphic narratives create alternative representations of the corporeal experience of the postpartum period, providing a social commentary on the discursive constraints of motherhood and an underrepresented time in women's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interview with comic book writer-artist Tim Seeley was conducted in July 2021 and explores his work, career and influences within the context of comics as a creative industry based around visual art, relations of production, communication, interactions, interpretations, and collaboration between author(s) and audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term Post-Western has been used since the 1970s to refer to books and films that are not Westerns but use conventions of the Western genre to analyse contemporary conflicts and issues. The most important contribution to the establishment of this subgenre has been Neil Campbell's monograph Post-Westerns (2013), in which they are described as films coming after and going beyond the traditional Western genre while at the same time engaging with its deeply haunting assumptions and values. This article seeks to adapt the concept of post-Westerns to Comics Studies and focuses on a recent graphic work that can be considered post-Western, Scalped, a 60-issue comic-book series written by Jason Aaron and illustrated by R. M. Guéra, published by Vertigo between 2007 and 2012. It tells a contemporary story of crime, violence and corruption in an Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where the Lakotas live in an environment of utter poverty, drug abuse and hopelessness. Making use of constant flashbacks and different points of view, Scalped makes references to the Western myth and establishes a dialogue with American history and the Western genre to show the contrast with post-Western contemporary nightmares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'What would the world be like without queer and trans* comics, countercultural comics?' Conducted in July 2020, this interview with writer, illustrator, editor and educator Ellen Lindner discusses her passion for creating comics and teaching about comics, The Strumpet, why comics are so well suited for communicating personal stories and non-fiction, comics and activism, and 'the political principle that telling personal stories IS political, and activist.' Within this interview she shares her thoughts on the potential of comics in relation to communicating experiences, and discusses the power of comics as a medium that provides opportunities for voice, expression and activism while fostering new ways of seeing and understanding, as well as empathy and connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transgenerational trauma refers to the situation where children are trauma)tized by the experiences of their (grand) parents. It is a unique combination of individual, familial, and collective (cultural) traumatic processes. The inter-twining of these processes poses a particular representational challenge, one that could be overcome by the comics medium. It was proposed by various authors that the visual language of comics is particularly useful for portraying traumatic experiences, such as the fragmentation of time, trauma’s belatedness and the haunting presence of the past. In this article I analyse two graphic novels, Heimat: A German Family Album by Nora Krug and Sunday’s Child by Serena Katt, both of which explore the transgenerational perpetrator trauma, and the roles the authors’ families had during the Second World War. I show how the authors use representational and aesthetic choices that help them convey the process of fact-searching as well as emotional engagement and imagination that is characteristic for transgenerational trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic libraries' graphic novel and comic book collections hold a wide appeal for both scholarly study and personal reading. Programming around these materials can attract diverse audiences to promote library services and resources in a distinctive way. Wichita State University Libraries hosted their first Halloween ComicFest in 2017 and it has grown into an annual event from the success of this initial endeavor. In this article, the authors discuss the challenges of planning and hosting a comic convention in an academic library as well as the potential benefits such events hold for both libraries and their patrons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical interpretive synthesis of research on the efficacy of comics in educating consumers on communicable diseases. Using this review methodology, the authors drew from empirical as well as non-empirical literature to develop a theoretical framework exploring the implications of comics' combination of images and text to communicate this health promoting information. The authors examined selected works' alignment with the four motivational components of Keller's ARCS Model (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction) to evaluate research within the context of learner motivation. Findings of this research indicate comics offer a useful method for providing consumer health education, particularly regarding topics that individuals may have difficulty in discussing openly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of extracting and analyzing character networks from works of fiction, such as novels and movies, has been the object of a number of recent publications. However, only a very few of them focus on graphic novels, and even fewer on European graphic novels. In this paper, we focus on Thorgal, a bande dessinée, i.e. a comic of the French-Belgian tradition. We manually annotate all the volumes of this series, in order to constitute a corpus allowing us to extract its character network. We perform a descriptive analysis of the network structure and compare it to real-world and fictional social networks. We also study the effect of character filtering over the network structure. Finally, we leverage complex network analysis tools to answer two research questions from the literature, related to the similarity between Thorgal and the Saga of Icelanders; and to the position of women in the series. Our data and source code are both publicly available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bishakh Som is an Indian-American trans femme visual artist, author and exarchitect. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Autostraddle, We're Still Here (the first all-trans comics anthology), Beyond, vol. 2, The Strumpet, The Boston Review, VICE, The Brooklyn Rail, The Graphic Canon vol. 3 and Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, amongst other publications. She received the Xeric grant in 2003 for her comics collection Angel. In 2020 her graphic novel Apsara Engine (published by The Feminist Press) won an LA Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel and a Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Comics. Her graphic memoir Spellbound (published by Street Noise Books) was also a 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalist. This interview features discussion of art-making, images and narrative, and exploring complexity, diversity, and autobiographical stories in comics. The interview begins by presenting Som's replies to several questions at the outset, followed by the questions themselves. This is followed by more questions, answers and conversation, structured within a more conventional Q&A format. The presentation and structure of the interview are designed to align with the originality, creativity and spirit of non-conformity that define Som's comics art and storytelling to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this academic comic (or acadomic) I reflect on impacts to the creative process when reconceptualizing and recontextualizing a comics-based research (CBR) project as an acadomic for an edited book during the Covid-19 pandemic. The lockdowns intensified computer-mediated-communication (CMC) and I am compelled by two years of virtually exclusive engagement with digital technologies to explore the impact unrestrained online activities have on my creative comics practice, on my conceptions of research, and on my experiences as a teacher. Analysis of this process and its impacts is realized through a mixed research methodology that explores the impacts of conceptualizing and making an earlier acadomic, which in turn documents a comics-based research project between university students and a national charity as they successfully collaborate on the creation of a graphic novel. I probe the boundaries of academic writing by visualizing and performing Baudrillard's theoretical violence to critique digital intensification through metaphor, semiotics, and comics. The work for this article was undertaken during the rolling pandemic lockdowns in the UK and around the world from 2020 to 2022. Academic theory and the medium of comics problematize the digital simulacrum as I action a utopian pedagogy that supports balance between traditional and digital techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Antonio Altarriba's presentation of his deceased mother's life-story in the graphic novel El ala rota (2016) claiming that the author's personal trauma of mourning reveals the collective trauma of non-politically-engaged Spanish women throughout Spain's 20th century. El ala rota contributes to the recovery of a new kind of memory by paying homage to a woman who was relegated to the private sphere and who herself believed her stories were not worth telling – a woman who was in the back room of history and lacked the means and mechanism to chronicle her life. The paper demonstrates that, not only does the content of El ala rota give voice to those who did not have one, thus philosophically paralleling the aims of the Recovery of Historical Memory and the exhumations of mass graves in Spain, but also, that its specific form of comics calls attention to the way society engages with the recovery of historical and collective memory specifically with regard to gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to map a social history through examining children and 'childish' or child-like drawing styles, and hence the presence of children, in comics. Traced across different print formats, this history reflects the changing readership of different kinds of comics, ranging from the mixed, primarily adult readership of newspaper comics, the young readers of comics albums and magazines, and the mature readers of contemporary book-length comics or graphic novels. Unfolding through a changing matrix of affects incarnated by comics children, this social history shows how different kinds of power relationships between adults and children are articulated in the comics discussed. The carnivalesque liberty and laughter of early newspaper comics contrasts with the nostalgic gaze towards childhood imbuing many graphic novels that cater to a mature readership. Unfolding across a select corpus of key comics formats, this sociohistorical reading of comics children is channeled through affects and power struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not a genre to write a "graphic novel." Fiction, nonfiction, historical fiction, fantasy and anything in between can all be found in graphic books. Sequential art is used to tell a story in graphic novels, just like in comic books. While comic books tend to be one-off stories, graphic novels tend to be stand-alone with more complicated plots. This study is a critical analysis of the graphic Novels regarding violence. The research on social information processing in aggressive youngsters provides an explanation for the connection between reading violent comic books and violence. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of the many uses of violence in graphic novels. A larger focus could include comparisons with other media, such as film, literature, and the fine arts. Particular approaches of violence, such as a closer examination of violent language or imagery, or their omission from several perspectives, could be the subject of more in-depth research. The violence in graphic novels is a valuable source for research and is far more nuanced than in Boom, Zack, Pow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children find verbal irony difficult to understand. Yet they need to acquire the skill of comprehending it in order to become proficient communicators and to master deep reading. Graphic novels and comics can expose children to non-literal expressions, including verbal irony. In the paper, I argue that graphic novels and comics may be used as a powerful tool for teaching irony to children, using Phoebe and her Unicorn by Dana Simpson as an example of a literary source of children's exposure to ironic language. While I analyse chosen instances of irony used in the comic, I postulate that in consideration of recent studies on figurative language comprehension, irony should be taught to children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article answers the question, 'What are the pathways that Australian creators of comic books and graphic novels commonly follow in order to be published by international publishing houses?' This research question is significant because it combines two historically distinct fields of research—comics studies and publishing studies—and because it identifies the business practices that determine the comic books and graphic novels by Australian creators that are read by both Australian and international audiences. This article reveals that the interactions of creators and publishing professionals prior to a submission have a formative influence on the pathways to successful publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the historiographical and methodological opportunities and challenges of graphic history to represent, interpret, and interrogate Canada's past. Graphic history is a research-creation approach that combines word and picture to produce illustrated texts and comic book-style narratives. While I address important critiques about academic rigour, pedagogical value, and practical viability, I argue that graphic history has much potential to offer historians. By broadening our understanding of scholarly work, graphic histories can be accessible sources for wider audiences, critical resources for teaching and learning, and/or imaginative methods for engaging with historiographical issues. After examining the theories and practices of graphic history, I illustrate a graphic-text essay on the contested images of John A. Macdonald. Pictures of the first prime minister are well known to most Canadians in photograph, caricature, and statue, but his legacy has come under greater academic and public scrutiny, particularly regarding policies towards Indigenous peoples. I focus on Macdonald because debates over his commemoration are relevant to the ways in which historians represent and confront complicated pasts. I use related debates over statue removal and anxieties about erasure of history to explore deeper historiographic questions about representation, truth, presentism, and perspective. I argue that a graphic history approach is a medium for deconstructing, or, as I call it, de-picturing, a one-dimensional, dominant image of Macdonald on a pedestal, exhibited in bronze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines current usage of comics and graphic novel collections in public libraries, including shelving practices, merchandising, promotion, and how readers interact with comics collections. It explores how public libraries can utilise these collections for outreach efforts, creating partnerships with local schools, and fostering a sense of community among comics readers. This article argues that public libraries can and should leverage comics collections to engage comics readers of all ages and specifically explores potential funding opportunities through grants in order to create comics-related programmes that promote comics as literacy tools, such as a Comic Book Club that was formed by the Toledo Lucas County Public Library in partnership with local schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with scenic readings in primary school. A close look at characteristics of graphic storytelling reveals that comics, graphic novels, and graphic picture books provide play values for scenic reading. From a didactic perspective, the article focuses on the opportunities and challenges of scenic readings of graphic stories that come with the shift from the spatial order of the book to a temporal sequence of staging. Through the example of the graphic stories Detektiv John Chatterton and Lehmriese lebt! the article shows how scenic readings can be arranged in primary schools. Insights into concrete classroom discussions make learning potentials for dealing with space and time in graphic stories visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay traces the growth of comics anthologies in India after Independence to the present time. The post-millennial works are particularly interesting as they break away from conventional subjects and experiment both in terms of content and form. The ideological trigger that most often draws the collaborators together results in subversive shorter pieces that allow the creators to express themselves in an unfettered way. This trajectory of evolution also provides a context to the personal experience of the author, a key member of the Longform Collective. The journey from Drighangchoo, a comics magazine that originated in Jadavpur University, Kolkata to Longform: An Anthology of Graphic Narratives Vol 1 is a long one, full of trials and tribulations. The processes and the work-flows that are involved in the making of Longform while it sought to cater to readers across the country and abroad are discussed here which in turn provide a robust template of how such potential collaborations can happen in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual storytelling culture of India is eclectic, multifaceted, and ever-growing. It is marked by the country's multilingualism, the religious as well as cultural diversities and its politics. From the origination of an Indian comic book series to the contemporary age of digital graphic narratives and webcomics, there has always been a strong socio-political dimension to this storytelling tradition. This paper traces the nation's long history of graphic narratives to explore the different resistances which have given rise to new waves of printed comics, graphic novels and then, webcomics. By employing the theories of subculture, the paper examines the nature of these resistances. While the study begins with Anant Pai's Amar Chitra Katha comics series, it gradually proceeds to understand how the printed comics and later, the graphic novels have been subsumed by the dominant culture/ the market. It is at this point when another wave of graphic narratives appears, which is in the digital space, and is carrying forward the resistance, the subcultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A story in a comic book employs different visual elements such as images, text, speech balloons, caption boxes, symbols, and sound effects. These elements work in harmony to convey the narrative to the reader. The Sound-Symbolic Words (SSWs), popularly studied as onomatopoeias, represent various sounds to enhance the visual narrative. This paper presents an analysis of examples from popular comics and graphic novels to provide an understanding of SSWs beyond their usage for conveying sound. It investigates the contribution of SSWs to carry forward the narrative, thus bringing SSWs to the forefront at par with image and text. This study attempts to redefine the role of SSWs and their significance in visual narratives. Various narrative functions of SSWs are identified and named as temporal-marker, spatial-marker, action-marker, emotion-marker, and identity-marker. The analysis helps to draw inferences about represented sound and its importance in printed comics. The study opens up possibilities for comic book artists to deliberate on the idea of SSWs as a narrative element and to implement them creatively to produce better visual narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rae Joyce (Rachel Fenton) is a working-class graphic poet from Yorkshire, UK, currently living in Aotearoa New Zealand. After winning the Auckland University of Technology Graphic Fiction Prize, she was selected to participate in the New Zealand Book Council Graphic Novelist Exchange Residency in association with the Publishers Association of New Zealand and the Taipei International Book Exhibition, the resulting collaboration was published as Island to Island (Dala). Co-Editor of Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa Women's Comics (Beatnik), Rae was also awarded a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant to research, write and illustrate a graphic biography of Mary Taylor, early feminist, unsung novelist, New Zealand businesswoman and best friend of Charlotte Bronte, for which she is seeking publication. Also known as Rachel J Fenton, she is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apsara Engine, Bishakh Som's new collection of short comics was published in April 2020 from The Feminist Press. Her graphic memoir, Spellbound, will be published by Street Noise Books in the autumn of 2020. This interview, undertaken throughout May and June of 2020, features discussion of the possibilities of comics to tell new stories in new ways, particularly in relation to works created by queer, and specifically trans artists; possibilities for new genres, concerns, approaches to the form, and voices, especially more queer and trans POC creators; comics as visual poetry; the roles and functions of art in society; expressing ideas and provoking new ways of seeing and feeling; and bringing into art a focus on issues and topics with contemporary resonance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diverse affordances of the medium of comics like spatio-temporality and visual rhetorical devices enable artists/patients who suffer from mental illnesses to approximate their experiential reality via graphic narratives. The graphic narratives analysed in this essay are reflections of the authors' experiences of dealing with friends and family members who suffer from mental conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia. Weaving together dreams, myths and reality, Nate Powell and Glyn Dillon create complex narratives that bring to life the patients' subjective worlds through the medium of comics. In so doing, these narratives vindicate the significance of graphic medicine in negotiating an alternate reality which is not captured in reductive biomedical and popular accounts of the illness conditions. Spatial and stylistic visual metaphors are used in these narratives to depict specific psychological experiences in viscerally engaging ways. Drawing theoretical insights from Elisabeth El Refaie, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, this essay explores the middle ground between triumphalist and fatalist narratives through grey metaphors that stylistically encapsulate the patient's lived experience. It also investigates how Powell's Swallow Me Whole and Dillon's The Nao of Brown use visual metaphors to intersperse multiple temporal and spatial dimensions that mimic patient's altered inner world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi engage in a conversation with Sarah Lightman. They discuss her strategies in creating comics with particular reference to her recent graphic narrative The Book of Sarah. In the concluding section, they unveil comics which she has recently sketched and posted on social media (Facebook, Instagram) after her father's demise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of the available narratives in fantasy fiction, the noble hero clashing with a maniacal villain – often over a helpless damsel – is easily recognisable and easily critiqued for its reliance on patriarchal, heteronormative logic and binary notions of good and evil. Noelle Stevenson's charmingly queer graphic novel Nimona takes the additional step of reorienting the familiar commitments, relations, and actions of the fantasy hero to invite its characters (and readers) to reimagine the human beyond the parameters of what the genre typically allows it to be. This article reads Nimona as a 'monster' figure whose presence instigates the reformulation of fantasy masculinity made available to both ostensible hero and ostensible villain. It analyzes the consequences of Nimona's marginalisation and the implications of Stevenson's representation of queer trauma. Ultimately, I suggest that through the comics medium, Stevenson reinvents the fantasy genre as a site of inquiry that encourages self-reflection and asks all who engage it what we have overlooked in its traditionally straight world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore images of Shakespeare and his characters in Neil Gaiman's Sandman (1989–1996) and Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col's Kill Shakespeare (2010–2014). Gaiman's series follows Morpheus, the personification of dreams, who endows Shakespeare with creative power he comes to regret. Alternatively, in McCreery and Del Col's series Shakespeare simply is a god, but one who shuns his creations and regrets his creative power. Worshipped and relentlessly sought, this Shakespeare is the mythic engine of a series that follows characters from across his plays who speak in a pastiche of Shakespearean lines through alternate story lines. I demonstrate that Shakespeare's coexistence with his characters in both series complicates our collective idealisation of Shakespeare in the contrast between a playwright-god and his monstrous character-creations through their problematic construction and shifting images as gods and monsters within and across both series. Illustrating the limitations and possibilities of divinity and monstrosity allows them to shift from creation to destruction through the multimodality of graphic novels, and the pitting of gods against monsters common to fantasy and science fiction. Through images of shifting power and frailty, both interrogate these constructions, and ultimately, question the consequences of our historical Bardolatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]