Overview

In The Expanding Art of Comics: Ten Modern Masterpieces, prominent scholar Thierry Groensteen offers a distinct perspective on important evolutions in comics since the 1960s through close readings of ten seminal works. He covers over half a century of comics production, sampling a single work from the sixties (Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt), seventies (The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius by Moebius), eighties (Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons), and nineties (Epileptic by David B.). Then this remarkable critic, scholar, and author of The System of Comics and Comics and Narration delves into recent masterpieces, such as Building Stories by Chris Ware. Each of these books created an opening, achieved a breakthrough, offered a new narrative model, or took up an emerging tendency and perfected it. Groensteen recaptures the impact with which these works, each in its own way, broke with what had gone before. He regards comics as an expanding art, not only because groundbreaking works such as these are increasing in number, but also because it is an art that has only gradually become aware of its considerable potential and is unceasingly opening up new expressive terrain.

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9781496808028

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Reviews

Thierry Groensteen brings the eyes of a fierce critic to ten comics that should be on every reader's shelves. As one of the most acclaimed scholars and theorists of the ninth art, Groensteen in this exciting new translation turns his attention to the evolution of the form through the close reading of some of its most celebrated works: Watchmen, Epileptic, Fun Home, and more. Insightful, eclectic, and wide-ranging, Groensteen demonstrates once again why he is one of the most important comics scholars in the world. --Bart Beaty, professor of English at the University of Calgary and author of Comics Versus Art Thierry Groensteen is undoubtedly the leading voice in comics theory of the last decades. This book is a wonderful opportunity to also discover his numerous close-reading skills and qualities. Groensteen's work has the ideal mix of theoretical framing and analytical sharpness, and his direct yet utterly precise style ideally matches his commitment to an art we'd better start writing with a capital A. --Jan Baetens, professor of cultural studies at the University of Leuven and coauthor of The Graphic Novel: An Introduction

Author Information

Thierry Groensteen, Brussels, Belgium, is a prominent comics scholar and author of numerous books including The System of Comics and Comics and Narration, both published by University Press of Mississippi. He has held a number of prestigious positions over the years: editor of Les Cahiers de la bande Dessinée; director of the comics museum housed in the Cité international de la bande dessinée et de l'image in Angoulême, where he is now a project director and curator; editor in chief of 9ème Art; founder and editor of a comics collection for Actes Sud and lecturer on the comics masters course at the École européenne supérieure de l'image in Angoulême. Ann Miller, Oxford, United Kingdom, is University Fellow in French at the University of Leicester. She is joint editor of European Comic Art, author of Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip, and coeditor of Textual Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography and The French Comics Theory Reader.

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