Overview

Comics and serial print have a long, closely intertwined history, with the earliest comics proliferating in newspapers before gradually migrating to children’s magazines. In positioning itself between the booming research on comics and periodicals and comics and children’s culture, this book offers a transnational perspective on the diverse connections between the ninth art and magazines. Beginning with the heyday of children’s periodicals and their incorporation of comics since the late nineteenth century in the UK, the book ends with a survey of paratextual reader engagement in Topolino issues until the 2010s. Its eight chapters showcase different possibilities for analysing vast, serial corpora, ranging from thematic and formal approaches to more distant readings mapping evolutions across magazine issues. It covers the impact of American comics on the Corriere dei Piccoli magazines from the 1920s and 1930s, forms of editorial communication in French and Belgian magazines from the 1930s and 1940s, the interplay of artistic pursuit, commercial needs, and national identity in the American Camera Comics from the mid-1940s, the comics scare in Italy read through the Italian Western comic Pecos Bill, the changing editorial policies of French magazine Lisette, and the construction of post-war national identity in Greek comics. This book will be of great interest to comic and children’s literature enthusiasts along with researchers of comic studies, cultural studies, literature and art. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

Full Product Details

Author:   Maaheen Ahmed ,  Giorgio Busi Rizzi
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
ISBN:  

9781041245407

ISBN 10:   1041245408
Pages:   186
Publication Date:   11 May 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  General ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Comics and Children’s Magazines 1. Stories and Pictures for Boys and Girls: Identifying the Child Reader in British Comics 1890-1920 2. Domesticating American Serial Characters in European Children’s Comics Magazines: The Case of Corriere dei Piccoli in the 1910s 3. Editorial Communication: Letter Columns in the French-language (Comics) Magazines (1934-1949) 4. Cameras and young people belong together: Camera Comics (1944-46) as an imaginative, ideological and commercial space for addressing and depicting American child photographers 5. Pecos Bill and the Campaign against Children’s Comics in Postwar Italy 6. Lisette and the disappearance of illustrés for girls 7. 1953-1970. Stories of Young Orphans in the Service of National Reconciliation 8. “Topolino” beyond comics: fostering readership engagement and parasocial relationship through the paratextual apparatus (1960–2010)

Reviews

Author Information

Maaheen Ahmed is an associate professor of comparative literature at Ghent University specializing in comics, periodicals, and children’s culture. Giorgio Busi Rizzi is FWO senior postdoctoral fellow and adjunct professor at Ghent University, teaching the comics and graphic novels course. His current project investigates authorship in post-digital comics; his previous research analyzed nostalgic aesthetics and practices in comics, and experimental digital comics.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Countries Available

All regions