{"title":"Drawing on Religion: Reading and the Moral Imagination in Comics and Graphic Novels, Ken Koltun-Fromm (2020)","authors":"Rae Hancock","doi":"10.1386/stic_00060_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00060_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Drawing on Religion: Reading and the Moral Imagination in Comics and Graphic Novels, Ken Koltun-Fromm (2020)\u0000University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press,\u0000ISBN 978-0-271-08775-7, p/bk, £27.95","PeriodicalId":41167,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Comics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42987086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Out of family, into history: A comparative study of the superchild in Corriere dei Piccoli, TBO and The Adventures of Tintin","authors":"Ivan Pintor Iranzo, Eva Van de Wiele","doi":"10.1386/stic_00047_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00047_1","url":null,"abstract":"Through the sagacious insights of Jean-Marie Apostolidès about Hergé’s well-known character Tintin, this article gathers a comparative investigation on the relationship between the child and the absence of family. More specifically, we address the figure defined by Apostolidès as ‘superchild’ through a comparison between the publications Corriere dei Piccoli \u0000(CdP), in Italy, TBO, in Spain and, in the Belgian case, of the figure that motivated the term used by Apostolidès, Tintin. The article forms a comparative comics exercise from a hermeneutical-historical, narratological methodology linked to the figural study of images (Brenez 1998; Bellour 2013), in order to underline some of the singularities of the bond between the superchild and the absent family.","PeriodicalId":41167,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Comics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42590958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Drawing childhood in conflict: Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir","authors":"Lan Dong","doi":"10.1386/stic_00050_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00050_1","url":null,"abstract":"Influenced by Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, Kashmiri artist Malik Sajad’s graphic narrative Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir calls the reader’s attention to the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, a South Asian region controlled by India, Pakistan and China since the 1940s. Using the hangul elk (an engendered species) to represent Kashmiris while portraying others as human characters, Sajad’s deliberate choice visually sets Kashmiris apart from the rest of the world. This article examines how the main character’s development from a boy with intermittent schooling to a cartoonist with political awareness is interlaced with the escalating violence in Kashmir from the early 1990s to the 2010s. In particular, it discusses how Sajad’s book presents massacres, curfews, crackdowns, mass graves and cover-ups as normalcy in Kashmiri daily life, how it experiments the conventions of comics, interrupts the temporal and spatial arrangements of the panels and creates gaps in the visual and verbal narratives often without foreshadowing or explanations and how it presents history as experiences lived instead of knowledge learned. Sajad’s graphic narrative does not provide a solution and ‘frustrates a reader looking for closure’. The closing panel visualizes Munnu disappearing into the all-encompassing darkness with only a flashlight guiding his way. Filling in the blanks of the ‘K-word’, the story comes to a stop without a sense of conclusion or a direction for the future, thus prompting the reader to contemplate the status of Kashmiris who have been left in a political limbo for decades and continue to be ‘endangered’.","PeriodicalId":41167,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Comics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43032088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
José Antonio Morlesín Mellado, Enrique del Rey Cabero
{"title":"A Portrait of Two Sisters by José Antonio Morlesín Mellado","authors":"José Antonio Morlesín Mellado, Enrique del Rey Cabero","doi":"10.1386/stic_00054_3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00054_3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41167,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Comics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47734835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gemma Sou, John Cei Douglas, Fernanda Díaz-Basteris
{"title":"After Maria by Gemma Sou and John Cei Douglas","authors":"Gemma Sou, John Cei Douglas, Fernanda Díaz-Basteris","doi":"10.1386/stic_00055_3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00055_3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41167,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Comics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46703530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mapping the bipolar mind through comics: An interview with Ellen Forney","authors":"Sweetha Saji, Sathyaraj Venkatesan","doi":"10.1386/stic_00057_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00057_7","url":null,"abstract":"This is an interview with comics artist Ellen Forney, author of Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir and Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life. In the interview, Forney reflects on her personal experience with bipolar disorder and its representation in the comics medium. The interview also presents recent trends in graphic medicine (intersection of comics and health) and the role and use of visual metaphors in delineating mental illness experiences, through examples drawn from Forney’s own work.","PeriodicalId":41167,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Comics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44322960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queering the palate: The erotics and politics of food in Japanese gourmet manga","authors":"Keiko Miyajima","doi":"10.1386/stic_00029_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00029_1","url":null,"abstract":"As demonstrated by a widely circulated Japanese proverb ‘men should never enter the kitchen’, kitchens, as well as food and the act of cooking, have been deeply suffused with heteronormative gender ideology. While domestic cooking has traditionally been associated with women\u0000 and femininity in Japanese society and popular media, ‘gourmet manga’, emerging in shōnen manga in the 1970s, foregrounded male chefs as figures of authenticity and authority, and ever since, have successfully constructed the site of food and cooking as a professional,\u0000 masculine domain. While shōnen manga tropes of battle, competition and victory have contributed to the construction of hegemonic masculinity in gourmet manga, some popular gourmet manga also employ female bodies to conflate food and sex, by repeatedly showcasing graphically explicit\u0000 representations of orgasm in the scenes of women eating. These texts promulgate painstakingly prepared food as a catalyst not only for masculine maturity but also for ‘healthy’ heteronormative desire and, by extension, procreation. However, in more recent gourmet manga, non-competitive,\u0000 pleasure-based cooking and eating have become salient, along with the gradual diversification of the representations of gender and sexuality. This article examines the queer interrelationship among food, gender and sexuality, in Yoshinaga Fumi’s Kinō Nani Tabeta? (What\u0000 Did You Eat Yesterday?) and Hiiragi Yutaka’s Shinmai Shimai no Futari Gohan (‘Let’s have a meal together’). In these texts, the site of ‘gourmet’ is relocated from the public/professional to the private/domestic, wherein the pleasures of cooking\u0000 and eating create new, non-heteronormative forms of intimacy and eroticism. Food is thus redefined as a catalyst for a queer kinship, which enables both the cooks and the eaters to create their own space and time outside the logics of domesticity and reproduction.","PeriodicalId":41167,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Comics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49548879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding pictorial metaphor in comic book covers: A test of the contextual and structural frameworks","authors":"Christopher A. Crawford, Igor Juricevic","doi":"10.1386/stic_00034_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00034_1","url":null,"abstract":"Conceptual metaphor theory proposes that metaphor is a mental function, rather than solely a literary device. As such, metaphors may be present in any by-product of human cognition, including pictorial art. Crawford and Juricevic previously proposed two heuristic frameworks for the\u0000 identification and interpretation of metaphor in pictures, which have been shown to be capable of describing how pictorial metaphors are identified and interpreted in the comic book medium. The present study tested artists’ preference for combinations of contextual and structural pictorial\u0000 information in comic book cover images. We analysed usages of exaggerated size in comic book cover art, as exaggerated size is a pictorial device, which may be used both literally and metaphorically. The goal was to assess how contextual and structural information is combined, and how literal\u0000 and metaphorical information interacts, both when it is congruent and incongruent. This analysis of the use of exaggerated size in comic book art indicates that artists prefer to produce images that have congruent combinations of literal and metaphoric pictorial information, or the incongruent\u0000 combination of metaphoric contextual information and literal structural information. Artists do not, however, prefer to produce images that have the incongruent combination of metaphorical structural information and literal contextual information. Taken together with the Corpus Analysis\u0000 Relevance Theory (CART) argument, this pattern suggests that when processing information, our cognitive systems prefer metaphorical interpretations over literal interpretations and contextual information over structural information.","PeriodicalId":41167,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Comics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43778383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interview with Beano writer Andy Fanton","authors":"J. Caro","doi":"10.1386/stic_00039_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00039_7","url":null,"abstract":"An interview with Andy Fanton, a current writer for the Beano UK children’s humour comic. Andy got his break writing and drawing for the sadly now-defunct Dandy weekly, and currently writes legacy characters such as Minnie the Minx and The Bash Street Kids.\u0000 The interview covers Andy’s and DC Thomson’s working practices and methods, considers the role and relevance of Beano in the transmedia age, and defends Beano from accusations that the comic has lost its edge and is no longer as cheeky or rebellious as it once was.","PeriodicalId":41167,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Comics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48676248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}