Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives Comics at the Crossroads

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 Narratives addresses 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 Osnabrück, 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 Göttingen, 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 Resonance in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Elisabeth El Refaie

3) Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence, Georgiana Banita

4) Staging Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Encounter in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, Aryn Bartley

5) “Trying to Recapture the Front”: A Transnational Perspective on Hawaii in R. Kikuo Johnson’s Night Fisher, Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt

6) Folding Nations, Cutting Borders: Transnationalism in the Comics of Warren Craghead III, Daniel Wüllner

Section II: Transnational and Transcultural Superheroes

7) Batman Goes Transnational: The Global Appropriation and Distribution of an American Hero, Katharina Bieloch and Sharif Bitar

8) Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives, Shilpa Davé

9) Of Transcreations and Transpacific Adaptations: Investigating Manga Versions of Spider-Man, Daniel Stein

10) Warren Ellis: Performing the Transnational Author in the American Comics Mainstream, Jochen Ecke

11) “Truth, Justice, and the Islamic Way”: Conceiving the Cosmopolitan Muslim Superhero in The 99, Stefan Meier

Section III: Translations, Transformations, Migrations

12) Lost in Translation: Narratives of Transcultural Displacement in the Wordless Graphic Novel
Florian Groß

13) Hard-Boiled Silhouettes: Transnational Remediation and the Art of Omission in Frank Miller’s Sin City, Frank Mehring

14) The “Big Picture” as a Multitude of Fragments: Jason Lutes’s Depiction of Weimar Republic Berlin, Lukas Etter

15) “Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together”: The Cultural Crossovers of Bryan Lee O’Malley, Mark Berninger

16) A Disappointing Crossing: The North American Reception of Asterix and Tintin, Jean-Paul Gabilliet

Afterword

Framing, Unframing, Reframing: Retconning the Transnational Work of Comics, Shane Denson

Index