Reference, guides and reviews Books

Crockett Johnson (born David Johnson Leisk, 1906-1975) and Ruth Krauss (1901-1993) were a husband-and-wife team that created such popular children's books as The Carrot Seed and How to Make an Earthquake. Separately, Johnson created the enduring...

Get ready to blast off into a world of adventure with Ace O'Hara: Scifi Hero! This beloved classic strip has been thrilling readers for generations with its pulse-pounding action and intergalactic intrigue.Follow Ace O'Hara, the daring space pilot, as he...

The essays in this collection discuss how comics and graphic narratives can be useful primary texts and learning tools in college and university classes across different disciplines. There are six sections: American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Women's...

Some film and novel revisions go so far beyond adaptation that they demand a new designation. This critical collection explores movies, plays, essays, comics and video games that supersede adaptation to radically transform their original sources...

As with all other forms of popular culture, comics in East Germany were tightly controlled by the state. Comics were employed as extensions of the regime's educational system, delivering official ideology so as to develop the "socialist personality" of...

Adapting the Canon brings together some of the most recent and exciting research in the growing field of adaptation studies, charting the passage of canonical texts across time, cultures and different media. Spanning several Humanities disciplines, the...

In October 1931, Dick Tracy made his debut on the pages of the Detroit Mirror. Since then America's most famous crime fighter has tangled with a variety of protagonists from locations as diverse as the inner city and outer space, all the time...

This book focuses on non-fictional, visual narratives (including comics; graphic narratives; animated documentaries and online, interactive documentaries) that attempt to represent violent experiences, primarily in the Levant. In doing so it explores,...

The Cartoon History of the Modern World is a wickedly funny take on modern history. It is essentially a complete and up-to-date course in college level Modern World History, but presented as a graphic novel. In an engaging and humorous graphic style,...

Legendary artist, Dell Barras is a 40 year veteran in the comic book industry having worked with Marvel UK, DC Comics, Antarctic Press and other indie publishers. He spent most of his career as a storyboard artist for Warner Bros., Dreamworks,...

Ispirato ai film degli anni 40 e spunto da un racconto italiano degli anni 60, questa graphic novel raccoglie tutti gli ingredienti della migliore tradizione del noir: brama di denaro, sesso e potere che giocano attorno ad una misteriosissima giacca...

Courtship and Marriage is a novel by Annie S. Swan that explores the themes of love, family, and social class in Victorian England. The story follows the life of the protagonist, Margaret, as she navigates the complexities of courtship and marriage...

One of the most eclectic and distinctive writers currently working in comics, Grant Morrison (b. 1960) brings the auteurist sensibility of alternative comics and graphic novels to the popular genres--superhero, science fiction, and fantasy--that dominate...

This book is the follow-up to Thierry Groensteen's ground-breaking The System of Comics, in which the leading French-language comics theorist set out to investigate how the medium functions, introducing the principle of iconic solidarity, and showing the...

A History of Ancient Sculpture is a comprehensive book written by Lucy Myers Mitchell in 1883. The book provides a detailed overview of the history of sculpture from the earliest times to the end of the Roman Empire. It covers the development of...

Astounding, Mysterious, Weird and True: The Pulp Art of Comic Book Artists is the first-ever book about the pen and ink artists who worked in both pulps and comics, and what happened to them. This informative and entertaining volume offers an...

"Now iconic to Canadian, if not global culture, Cape Breton Island underwent a metamorphosis of sorts during the 1970s and 1980s. Long marginalized by geography, economics and predominant mainland political culture, a countercultural sea change brought...

Shaolin Brew: Race, Comics, and the Evolution of the Superhero looks at how the comic book industry developed from a white perspective and how minority characters were and are viewed through a stereotypical white gaze. Further, the book explores how...

Copyright Vigilantes: Intellectual Property and the Hollywood Superhero explains superhero blockbusters as allegories of intellectual property relations. In movies based on characters owned by the comics duopoly of DC and Marvel, no narrative recurs more...

Born in the South Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, artist and writer George Pérez (1954-2022) cut his teeth in the 1970s as an artist at Marvel who worked on lesser titles like The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu and Creatures on the Loose, and then mainstays like...

Best known for her Eisner Award-winning graphic novels, Exit Wounds and The Property, Rutu Modan's richly colored compositions invite readers into complex Israeli society, opening up a world too often defined only by news headlines. Her strong female...

Contributions by Ofra Amihay, Madeline Backus, Samantha Baskind, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Scott S. Elliott, Assaf Gamzou, Susan Handelman, Leah Hochman, Leonard V. Kaplan, Ken Koltun-Fromm, Shiamin Kwa, Samantha Langsdale, A. David Lewis, Karline McLain,...

With their rakish characters, sensationalist plots, improbable adventures and objectionable language (like swell and golly), dime novels in their heyday were widely considered a threat to the morals of impressionable youth. Roundly criticized by...

 Between the covers of Vixens, Vamps & Vipers, fans will rediscover the original bad girls of comics-as fierce and full of surprises as they were when the comic book industry was born. From murderous Madame Doom to He-She, dubbed by io9 as "the...

Alex Miller's novels are increasingly regarded as classics of Australian literature. This collection of critical essays offers a systematic introduction to the work of one of Australia's best known authors.

Contributions by Jan Baetens, Alain Boillat, Philippe Bourdier, Laura Cecilia Caraballo, Thomas Faye, Pierre Floquet, Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Christophe Gelly, Nicolas Labarre, Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, Dick Tomasovic, and...

Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa,...

The marvelous recovery of neglected black artists and their awesome body of comics creativitySyndicated cartoonist and illustrator Tim Jackson offers an unprecedented look at the rich yet largely untold story of African American cartoon artists. This...

Mention Shaft and most people think of Gordon Parks' seminal 1971 film starring Richard Roundtree in a leather coat, walking the streets of Manhattan to Isaac Hayes' iconic theme music. But the black private dick who inspired the blaxploitation film...

Millions of Americans know and love Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Blondie and Dagwood, Doonesbury, Li'l Abner, Garfield, Cathy, Beetle Bailey and other such comic strip characters. Thanks to the cartoonists--the people who have brought and still bring...

Advances in Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry pays homage to two prominent scholars, Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, for their formative and formidable contributions to autoethnography, personal narrative, and alternative forms of scholarship.Their...

Captain America made his debut in 1940, just two years behind the first comic book superheroes and five years before the United States' emergence as the world's primary superpower at the end of World War II. His journey has been intertwined with...

This book investigates how graphic medicine enables sufferers of mental illness to visualise the intricacies of their internal mindscape through visual metaphors and reclaim their voice amidst stereotyped and prejudiced assumptions of mental illness as a...

L'ouvrage interroge les postures d'auteurs de bande dessinée dits engagés et fait le point sur une production pléthorique qui allie les genres les plus divers et qui affiche les styles les plus diversifiés. Les supports, labels et collections...

Focusing on the art and literary form of manga, this volume examines the intercultural exchanges that have shaped manga during the twentieth century and how manga's culturalization is related to its globalization. Through contributions from leading...

In the less than eight decades since Superman's debut in 1938, comic book superheroes have become an indispensable part of American society and the nation's dominant mythology. They represent America's hopes, dreams, fears, and needs. As a form of...

Superhero films are one of the most enduring genres of cinema, and their popularity is only increasing in the 21st century. These ten critical essays explore the phenomenon through the lenses of numerous academic disciplines, and cover topics such as...

The first half of the twentieth century was a golden age of American storytelling. Mailboxes burgeoned with pulp magazines, conveying an endless variety of fiction. Comic strips, with their ongoing dramatic storylines, were a staple of the papers,...

This volume explores comics as examples of moral outrage in the face of a reality in which precariousness has become an inherent part of young lives. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters devote attention to the expression and representation of...

Created in 1941 by the psychologist William Marston, Wonder Woman would go on to have one of the longest continuous runs of published comic book adventures in the history of the industry. More than 70 years after her debut, Wonder Woman remains a...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United...

Fans and scholars have long regarded the 1980s as a significant turning point in the history of comics in the United States, but most critical discussions of the period still focus on books from prominent creators such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and...