Aaron Meskin

Frank Bramlett

Roy Cook

This cutting-edge handbook brings together an international roster of scholars to examine many facets of comics and graphic novels. Contributor essays provide authoritative, up-to-date overviewsof the major topics and questions within comic studies, offering readers a truly global approach to understanding the field. Essays examine: the history of the temporal, geographical, and formal development of comics, including topics like art comics, manga, comix, and the comics code; issues such as authorship, ethics, adaptation, and translating comics; connections between comics and other artistic media (drawing, caricature, film) as well as the linkages between comics and other academic fields like linguistics and philosophy; new perspectives on comics genres, from funny animal comics to war comics to romance comics and beyond. The Routledge Companion to Comics expertly organizes representative work from a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, literature, philosophy, and linguistics. More than an introduction to the study of comics, this book will serve as a crucial reference for anyone interested in pursuing research in the area, guiding students, scholars, and comics fans alike.

The Routledge Companion to Comics

Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? What is the impact of English on comics written in other languages? These questions and many more are answered in this volume, which brings together the two fields of comics research and linguistics to produce groundbreaking scholarship. With an international cast of contributors, the book offers novel insights into the role of language in comics, graphic novels, and single-panel cartoons, analyzing the intersections between the visual and the verbal. Contributions examine the relationship between cognitive linguistics and visual elements as well as interrogate the controversial claim about the status of comics as a language. The book argues that comics tell us a great deal about the sociocultural realities of language, exploring what code switching, language contact, dialect, and linguistic variation can tell us about identity – from the imagined and stereotyped to the political and real.

Linguistics and the Study of Comics

Adnan Mahmutovic

Francesco-Alessio Ursini,

Across generations and genres, comics have imagined different views of the future, from unattainable utopias to worrisome dystopias. These presaging narratives can be read as reflections of their authors’ (and readers’) hopes, fears and beliefs about the present. This collection of new essays explores the creative processes in comics production that bring plausible futures to the page. The contributors investigate portrayals in different stylistic traditions—manga, bande desinées—from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The picture that emerges documents the elaborate storylines and complex universes comics creators have been crafting for decades.

International Perspectives

Visions of the Future in Comics

Francesco-Alessio Ursini

Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? These questions and many more are answered in this new collection on linguistics and comics, which explores language and how the verbal and the visual interact.

Frank Bramlett

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