Common Book 2015-16: Persepolis: Related Books

Focusing on such acclaimed examples as Maus,Persepolis, andWatchmen, these essays successfully highlight the ways that graphic novelists and literary cartoonists have incorporated history, experience, and autobiography into their work. The result is a collection that is both challenging and innovative.

Female cartoonists are playing a central role in the evolution of "graphic novels." Some of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century, such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, are autobiographical comics by women. Aline Kominsky-Crumb pioneered the autobiographical form, showing women's everyday lives, especially through the lens of the body. Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work, while Lynda Barry uses collage and the empty spaces between frames to capture the process of memory. Satrapi experiments with visual witness to frame her personal and historical narrative, and Bechdel meticulously incorporates family documents by hand to re-present her past. These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions, particularly through the depiction of sex, gender, and lived experience. Hillary L. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.

This groundbreaking volume, written entirely by women, examines the vastly misunderstood and multilayered world of the veil. Veiling-- of women, of men, and of sacred places and objects--has existed in countless cultures and religions from time immemorial. Today, veiling is a globally polarizing issue, a locus for the struggle between Islam and the West and between contemporary and traditional interpretations of Islam. But veiling was a practice long before Islam and still extends far beyond the Middle East. This book explores and examines the cultures, politics, and histories of veiling. Twenty-one gifted writers and scholars, representing a wide range of societies, religions, ages, locations, races, and accomplishments, here elucidate, challenge, and/or praise the practice. Expertly organized and introduced by Jennifer Heath, who also writes on male veiling, the essays are arranged in three parts: the veil as an expression of the sacred; the veil as it relates to the emotional and the sensual; and the veil in its sociopolitical aspects. This unique, dynamic, and insightful volume is illustrated throughout. It brings together a multiplicity of thought and experience, much of it personal, to make readily accessible a difficult and controversial subject. Contributors: Kecia Ali, Michelle Auerbach, Sarah C. Bell, Barbara Goldman Carrel, Eve Grubin, Roxanne Kamayani Gupta, Jana M. Hawley, Jasbir Jain, Mohja Kahf, Laurene Lafontaine, Shireen Malik, Maliha Masood, Marjane Satrapi, Aisha Shaheed, Rita Stephan, Pamela K. Taylor, Ashraf Zahedi, Dinah Zeiger, Sherifa Zuhur

This essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of narrative beyond traditional literary texts. Analyzing a wide range of texts, genres, and narrative strategies from both theoretical and historical perspectives, its various contributors offer state-of-the-art research on graphic narrative in the context of an increasingly postclassical and transmedial narratology.

Too often the popularity and subject matter of comic books is perceived as a purely modern American phenomenon that only arrived in the 20th century and is virtually nonexistent outside the United States. This is certainly untrue; in fact, the world's first costumed superheroaeThe Golden Bataeappeared in Japan in 1931, seven years before Superman was created."

At a time when graphic novels have expanded beyond their fan cults to become mainstream bestsellers and sources for Hollywood entertainment, Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels serves as an exhaustive exploration of the genre's history, its landmark creators and creations, and its profound influence on American life and culture. Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels focuses on English-language comics--plus a small selection of influential Japanese and European works available in English--with special emphasis on the new graphic novel format that emerged in the 1970s. Entries cover influential comic artists and writers such as Will Eisner, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison, major genres and themes, and specific characters, comic book imprints, and landmark titles, including the pulp noir 100 Bullets, the post-apocalyptic Y: The Last Man, the revisionist superhero drama, Identity Crisis, and more. Key franchises such as Superman and Batman are the center of a constellation of related entries that include graphic novels and other imprints featuring the same characters or material.

For more than a century the comic book has been a familiar and popular artform. As vehemently criticized as it is passionately defended, it has evolved from humble beginnings into a graphically sophisticated and culturally revealing medium. Encompassing traditions from the USA, Britain, Europe and Japan, this work presents a comprehensive survey of comic art. It traces the history of the medium from comic papers for kids, through the underground comix movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to the glossy book-format graphic novels of today. Organized thematically, it investigates comic art's varied genres - including humour, adventure, underground and alternative - and charts the rise, fall and rise of the medium.

It has become an axiom in comic studies that "comics is a language, not a genre." But what exactly does that mean, and how is discourse on the form both aided and hindered by thinking of it in linguistic terms? In "Comics and Language," Hannah Miodrag challenges many of the key assumptions about the "grammar" and formal characteristics of comics, and offers a more nuanced, theoretical framework that she argues will better serve the field by offering a consistent means for communicating critical theory in the scholarship. Through engaging close readings and an accessible use of theory, this book exposes the problems embedded in the ways critics have used ideas of language, literature, structuralism, and semiotics, and sets out a new and more theoretically sound way of understanding how comics communicate."Comics and Language" argues against the critical tendency to flatten the distinctions between language and images and to discuss literature purely in terms of story content. It closely examines the original critical theories that such arguments purport to draw on and shows how they in fact point away from the conclusions they are commonly used to prove. The book improves the use the field makes of existing scholarly disciplines and furthers the ongoing sophistication of the field. It provides animated and insightful analyses of a range of different texts and takes an interdisciplinary approach. "Comics and Language" will appeal to the general comics reader and will prove crucial for specialized scholars in the fields of comics, literature, cultural studies, art history, and visual studies. It also provides a valuable summary of the current state of formalist criticism within comics studies and so presents the ideal text for those interested in exploring this growing area of research