Overview

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: 2.20cm , Length: 22.80cm
Weight:   0.434kg
ISBN:  

9780826440198

ISBN 10:   0826440193
Pages:   288
Publication Date:   11 May 2010
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

"Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling: Introduction I. History, Comics, and the City 1. Jens Balzer: ""Hully Gee, I'm a Hieroglyphe"" - Mobilizing the Gaze and the Invention of Comics in New York City, 1895 2. Ole Frahm: Every Window Tells a Story: Remarks on the Urbanity of Early Comic Strips 3. Anthony Enns: The City as Archive in Jason Lutes' Berlin II. Retrofuturistic and Nostalgic Cities 4. Henry Jenkins: ""The Tomorrow that Never Was"" - Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter 5. Stefanie Diekmann: Remembrance of Things to Come: François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters' Cities of the Fantastic 6. Michael Cuntz: Paris au pluriel: Depictions of the French Capital in Jacques Tardi's Comic Book Writing III. Superhero Cities 7. William Uricchio: The Batman's Gotham City™: Story, Ideology, Performance 8. Arno Meteling: A Tale of Two Cities: Politics, and Superheroics in Starman and Ex Machina 9. Anthony Lioi: The Radiant City: New York as Ecotopia in Promethea, Book V 10. Jason Bainbridge: ""I am New York"" - Spider-Man, New York City, and the Marvel Universe IV. Locations of Crime 11. Greg M. Smith: Will Eisner, Vaudevillian of the Cityscape 12. Björn Quiring: ""A Fiction That We Must Inhabit"" - Sense Production in Urban Spaces According to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell 13. Jörn Ahrens: The Ordinary Urban: 100 Bullets and the Clichés of Mass Culture V. The City-Comic as a Mode of Reflection 14. André Suhr: Seeing the City through a Frame: Marc-Antoine Mathieu's Acquefacques-Comics 15. Andreas Platthaus: Calisota or Bust: Duckburg vs. Entenhausen in the Comics of Carl Barks 16. Thomas Becker: Enki Bilal's Woman Trap: Reflections on Authorship under the Shifting Boundaries between Order and Terror in the Cities"

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.'--New Formations

'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.'--,

<p> This rich collection -- as multi-faceted as the twentieth-century city itself -- proves that comics are a remarkably apposite medium to convey the rich multiplicity of the urban environment. Essays here take up the ways that comics have engaged with urban language, the spatial and temporal experience of city life, aspirational (and dystopian) visual designs, and a broad range of urban types. The range of topics is remarkable, and the scholarship is first rate. <p>-- Scott Bukatman, author of Matters of Gravity: Special Effects & Supermen in the 20th Century

Author Information

Jörn Ahrens teaches cultural sociology at Giessen University, Germany. Arno Meteling teaches literature at the Westfalian Wilhelms-University Muenster in Germany.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions