Overview

""Comics and the City"" deals with possibly the most important aspect of the aesthetics and narratives of comics - urban topography and environment. This collection of essays covers a variety of international approaches from the three main comic book cultures: the U.S., Europe, and Japan. ""Comics and the City"" deals with possibly the most important aspect of the aesthetics and narratives of comics - urban topography and environment. This collection of essays covers a variety of international approaches from the three main comic book cultures: the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Not only is the city depicted repeatedly in comic books, but it also serves as a major structural and aesthetic influence on them. Comics emerged parallel to, and in several ways intertwined with, the development of modern urban mass societies at the turn of the 20th century. On the one hand, urban topoi, self-portrayals, forms of urban cultural memories, and variant readings of the city (strolling, advertising, architecture, detective stories, mass phenomena, street life, etc.,) are all incorporated into comics. On the other hand, comics have unique abilities to capture urban space and city life because of their hybrid nature, consisting of words, pictures, and sequences. These formal aspects of comics are also to be found within the cityscape itself: one can see the influence of comic book aesthetics all around us today. With chapters on the very earliest comic strips, and on artists as diverse as Alan Moore, Carl Barks, Will Eisner and Jacques Tardi, ""Comics and the City"" is an important new collection of international scholarship that will help to define the field for many years to come.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jorn Ahrens ,  Arno Meteling
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
Dimensions:   Width: 15.30cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.80cm
Weight:   0.567kg
ISBN:  

9780826403896

ISBN 10:   0826403891
Pages:   288
Publication Date:   11 May 2010
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Availability:   In Print  
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.

Table of Contents

1. Jorn Ahrens / Arno Meteling: Introduction: The History and Structure of Comics and the City; 2. Jorn Ahrens: Vanishing Cities: Urban Cliche as Narrative in 100 Bullets; 3. Jens Balzer:,,Hully Gee, I'm a hieroglyphe : Mobilizing the Gaze and the Invention of Comics in New York City, 1895; 4. Thomas Becker: Enki Bilal's Nikopol Trilogy: New World Order and the Shifting Boundaries between Order and Terror in the City; 5. Michael Cuntz: Paris au pluriel. The representations of Paris in Tardi's comic book writing; 6. Stefanie Diekmann: Retro-Futurism. Francois Schuiten / Benoit Peeters: Cities of the Fantastic 7. Anthony Enns: Media, Memory, and the Metropolis in Jason Lutes' Berlin: City of Stones; 8. Ole Frahm: Every window tells a story: Remarks on the urbanity of early comic strips; 9. Henry Jenkins: The Tomorrow That Never Was: Retrofuturism in Contemporary Comics; 10. Pascal Lefevre: The volatile and moving city: Martin tom Dieck's hundert Ansichten der Speicherstadt; 11. Arno Meteling: A Tale of Two Cities: Myth, Politics, and Superheroics in Starman and Ex Machina; 12. Nick Nguyen: Superhero Cities; 13. Andreas Platthaus: Calisota or Bust - Duckburg vs. Entenhausen in the Comics of Carl Barks; 14. Bjorn Quiring: A Fiction That We Must Inhabit : Sense Production in Urban Spaces According to Alan Moore; 15. Greg Smith: The City and Will Eisner; 16. Andre Suhr: Marc-Antoine Mathieu's Comics: Seeing the City through a Frame; 17. David G. Surman: Memorize the City: Style, Subjectivity and Urban Transformation in Otomo/Oshii/Okiura; 18. William Uricchio: Batman's Gotham City and DC's Concept of Urbanity.

Reviews

'There is an obvious affinity between comics and the city that this welcome collection of essays explores at length from a variety of disciplinary perspectives... The anthology is broken down thematically rather than chronologically, and works all the better for it...this is an important and necessary intervention in a burgeoning area of studies.'--,

Author Information

Jorn Ahrens is Senior Lecturer at the Master of Arts in Euroculture at University of Gottingen and Privatdozent at the Dept. of Cultural Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin (HUB). Arno Meteling teaches cultural studies at the University of Cologne in Germany.

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