Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives Comics at the Crossroads [Hardcover]

Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book charts and analyzes the ways in which comic book history and new forms of graphic narrative have been impacted by aesthetic, social, political, economic, and cultural interactions that reach across national borders in an increasingly interconnected and globalizing world.

Exploring the tendencies of graphic narratives - from popular comic book serials and graphic novels to manga - to cross national and cultural boundaries,Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narrativesaddresses a previously marginalized area in comics studies. Placing graphic narratives in the global flow of cultural production and reception, the book investigates controversial representations of transnational politics, examines transnational adaptations of superhero characters, and maps many of the translations and transformations that have come to shape contemporary comics culture on a global scale.

Shane Denson is Research Associate in American Studies at Gottfried Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. He has published on a range of topics in film and media studies.

Christina Meyer is Assistant Professor at the University of Osnabr?ck, Germany. She is the author of War and Trauma Images in Vietnam War Representations (Olms, 2008).

Daniel Stein is Research Associate in American Studies at Georg-August-University G?ttingen, Germany. He is the author of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (University of Michigan Press, 2012).

Notes on the Contributors

Foreword, John A. Lent

Introducing Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads,Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, Daniel Stein

Part I: Politics and Poetics

1) Not Just a Theme: Transnationalism and Form in Visual Narratives of U.S. Slavery,Michael A. Chaney

2) Transnational Identity as Shape-shifting: Metaphor and Cultural Relór