Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature

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Univ. Press of Mississippi, 12 nov 2009 - 256 páginas
In the 1980s, a sea change occurred in comics. Fueled by Art Spiegel- man and Franoise Mouly's avant-garde anthology Raw and the launch of the Love Rockets series by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez, the decade saw a deluge of comics that were more autobiographical, emotionally realistic, and experimental than anything seen before. These alternative comics were not the scatological satires of the 1960s underground, nor were they brightly colored newspaper strips or superhero comic books. In Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Charles Hatfield establishes the parameters of alternative comics by closely examining long-form comics, in particular the graphic novel. He argues that these are fundamentally a literary form and offers an extensive critical study of them both as a literary genre and as a cultural phenomenon. Combining sharp-eyed readings and illustrations from particular texts with a larger understanding of the comics as an art form, this book discusses the development of specific genres, such as autobiography and history. Alternative Comics analyzes such seminal works as Spiegelman's Maus, Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories, and Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.
 

Índice

1 Comix Comic Shops and the Rise of Alternative Comics Post 1968
3
The Otherness of Comics Reading
32
Gilbert Hernandezs Heartbreak Soup
68
The Problem of Authenticity in Autobiographical Comics
108
Two Case Studies
128
6 Whither the Graphic Novel?
152
Notes
164
Works Cited
169
Index
177
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Sobre el autor (2009)

Charles Hatfield is associate professor of English at California State University, Northridge, and is author or coeditor of many books, including The Superhero Reader and Hand of Fire: The Comic Art of Jack Kirby, both published by University Press of Mississippi.

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