Comics Studies

Panels, grids, gutters, and pages—graphic narratives rests firmly on practices of setting apart and framing spaces. At the same time, frames—in the sense of cognitive categories as well as semiotic and material manifestations—form basic prerequisites of meaning-making. In contrast to virtually all other media in comics, frames represent not only general communicative aspects; they form its very basic grammar. The essays collected in this volume discuss some of these medial characteristics of comics and cartoons as materialized through their particular carrier media, and they investigate works that range from the inception of the form in the nineteenth century up until its most recent incarnations.


Table of Contents:

Johannes C.P. SCHMID/Christian A. BACHMANN
Framing [in] Comics: A Preface

Christina MEYER
»Enclosures for Looking«? Medial, Material,
and Aesthetic Frames|Framings

Sebastian BARTOSCH
How To Not Freeze the Frames of Mediality:
Looking Back at Old Comic Books

Lukas R.A. WILDE
Falling in Line: Framing 9/11 and the »War on Terror« in Editorial Cartoons

Johannes C.P. SCHMID
Framing Documentary Comics: Considering Prologues

Astrid BÖGER
»Things Are Different Now«: Re-Framing Australian Identity in Pat Grant’s Blue

Roger SABIN
Framing pre-1914 British Comics

Christian A. BACHMANN
Panoptical Spaces: Cross-sections in Nineteenth-Century Visual Satire and Early Comics

Jeff THOSS
»Through the Proscenium Arch of the Comic Panel«: Intermedial Frames in Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland

Tobias YU-KIENER
Musée du Louvre: When the Picture Does Not Fit the Frame: Three Problems With the Graphic Novel Le Ciel au-dessus du Louvre

Monika SCHMITZ-EMANS
Museum Comics: Drawn Reflections on Images and Image-Spaces, Framings and Transgressions

Comic books have increasingly become a vehicle for serious social commentary and, specifically, for innovative religious thought. Practitioners of both traditional religions and new religious movements have begun to employ comics as a missionary tool, while humanists and religious progressives use comics’ unique fusion of text and image to criticize traditional theologies and to offer alternatives. Addressing the increasing fervor with which the public has come to view comics as an art form and Americans' fraught but passionate relationship with religion, Graven Images explores the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels.

In essays by scholars and comics creators, Graven Images observes the frequency with which religious material—in devout, educational, satirical, or critical contexts—occurs in both independent and mainstream comics. Contributors identify the unique advantages of the comics medium for religious messages; analyze how comics communicate such messages; place the religious messages contained in comic books in appropriate cultural, social, and historical frameworks; and articulate the significance of the innovative theologies being developed in comics.

Full content of this issue is available at: https://www.sic-journal.org/CurrentIssue.aspx?iid=17. Years after the Frankfurt School, Roland Barthes’s work, Laura Mulvey’s film analysis, The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, various essential books and readers on popular culture, countless conferences and gatherings on popular culture that have taken place all over the world, it may seem that trying to point out the importance of popular culture in yet another scholarly journal is mundane. However, certain phenomena prove that this kind of topic is a necessity: the omnipresence of comic-book adaptations – such as the recent Black Panther phenomenon that has many global and local social, cultural, political, and economic implications, not least through the money-making promotions of certain kinds of active citizenship (NGOs’ promoted voter registration in theaters) – or videogame adaptations and rampant sexism and racism in one of the most successful industries of the day, or constant claims about the connection between mental health issues and video games, as well as the ongoing on- and offline struggle to give the neglected, minor voices their representation in popular products, or the timely #MeToo movement that called out Hollywood first and then almost entire creative industries on violence, coercion, and taking advantage over women. Popular culture is an industry as well as a community; it is profitable and it is marginal; it is equally monumental and trivial. The truth behind one of the most analyzed aspects of human culture today shows that it is ever-changing, transformative, that it is one of the most productive praxes for creators and audience alike, and, in the end, that it has important social, cultural, political, and economic effects, simultaneously producing affects and emotionality.
While previous 16 issues of [sic] offered various analyses and treatments of popular culture (predominantly focusing on the issue of power in American, and other, popular culture), Praxes of Popular Culture is seen as [sic]’s first concentrated (and contained) attempt to point out the potential of different popular cultures, diverse topics they entail, and to open up a diverse discussion on how various knowledges and truths about race, gender, nationality, class, sexuality, ethnicity, among other things, are being produced.
This issue, therefore, brings detailed analyses of specific popular culture phenomena and products. Kevin Drzakowski explores determinism and free will within the universe of TV show Lost. Olfa Gandouz studies Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf from the perspective of corpus linguistics and discusses the approach’s potential when it comes to analyzing literary texts. Iva Šarić provides a narratologist’s approach to the comic-book adaptation of novel See You Up There, and Melodie Cardin, in “The ‘problem’ of Male Friendship in Supernatural and its Fan Fiction,” provides an invaluable insight into the phenomenon of fandom and fan fiction, an aspect of literary production that has led us, in some cases, to new movie hits and pop-culture products. Frances Tuoriniemi discusses representations of queerness, its “elisions and illusions” in Black Panther and Wonder Woman, as indicative of the need to appeal to the audience. When it comes to the role of popular culture in social changes, their interconnectedness and causality, Petra Požgaj presents an analysis of Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Florida Project. Shalini Harilal’s analysis of the hit video-game The Last of Us offers a specific new approach to video-game narratives, while Marko Lukić explores and furthers the discourse on Foucault’s dispositive and apparatus in his analysis titled “Gazing over Chaos: Panoptic Reflections of Gotham and the Failure of the Dispositive.”
The book reviews presented in this issue offer an overview of the latest multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work in the field of vampire studies (Emilia Musap), an interesting insight into the historical and contemporary traditions of Japanese samurai (Marko Lukić), as well as a review about citizenship studies, sexuality, and popular culture (Pavao Parunov). This section is complemented by a review of Ivana Čagalj’s poetry collection titled Paralaksa (Diana Njegovan) and a review which outlines the latest developments in theatre studies (Mirna Sindičić Sabljo).
Whether you are waiting for the conclusion of the 14th season of Supernatural, the first superheroine standalone movie from Marvel, the new reboots of Northern Exposure, new adaptations of fan fiction, or are taking pleasure in the wilderness and unpredictability of Red Dead Redemption 2, we hope that Praxes of Popular Culture will serve as intellectually provocative, challenging, and useful resource for your own study of popular culture, a study always containing some emotionality.
With this emotionality in mind we would like to conclude with a somewhat unexpected and non-traditional addition to this introduction. We would like to end by dedicating this particular issue to Stan Lee. The death of this artist, who was by many defined as the father of the modern (American) mythology, and whose work has inspired innumerable generations as well as entire industries, defined the end of an era. Popular culture will continue to grow and develop, and we will continue to consume it, enjoy it, debate it, and analyze it. However, from this point on, it will never feel the same. Thank you, once again, for all the adventures. Excelsior!