Critical directions in comics studies / edited by Thomas Giddens.

Includes bibliographical references and index

Comics interlude #1. Critical comics studies: an origin story / Thom Giddens -- On violation: comic books, delinquency, phenomenology / Christopher Pizzino -- Articulating health humanities in graphic narratives by medical illustrators / Lisa Detora -- "There is a man ... with a typewriter": Deadpool as existential antihero, breaking the fourth wall of meaningful existence / Yasemin J. Erden -- Theological "seeing" of law: Daredevil, Christian iconography, and legal aesthetics / Timothy D. Peters -- Comics interlude #2. Let's get critical! / Lydia Wysocki -- The freedom of the press: comics, labor, and value in the Birmingham Arts Lab / Maggie Gray -- Hate, marginalization, and tramp-bashing: a raceclass and critical realist approach to researching British national identity through comics / Lydia Wysocki -- Comics and heteroglossia / Paul Fisher Davies -- Women's cartoons and comics in the twenty-first century: how the humor in Simone Lia's Fluffy challenges gendered assumptions around parenting / Nicola Streeten -- Politicization of life and auto-thanatopolitics in V for Vendetta / Vladislav Maksimov -- Comics interlude #3. The nested text / Paul Fisher Davies -- "Destructive interim formation" / Thomas Giddens -- The mask as anti-apparatus: on the counter-dispositif of V for Vendetta / Peter Goodrich -- "So you still believe in the future?": socialist utopianism and Marxist critique in the Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia / Matthew J.A. Green -- The parable of Bill Ayers: comics, allegory, and critical legal thinking / Adam Gearey.

"Recent decades have seen comics studies blossom, but within the ecosystems of this growth, dominant assumptions have taken root-assumptions around the particular methods used to approach the comics form, the ways we should read comics, how its "system" works, and the disciplinary relationships that surround this evolving area of study. But other perspectives have also begun to flourish. These approaches question the reliance on structural linguistics and the tools of English and cultural studies in the examination and understanding of comics. In this edited collection, scholars from a variety of disciplines examine comics by addressing materiality and form as well as the wider economic and political contexts of comics' creation and reception. Through this lens, influenced by poststructuralist theories, contributors explore and elaborate other possibilities for working with comics as a critical resource, consolidating the emergence of these alternative modes of engagement in a single text. This opens comics studies to a wider array of resources, perspectives, and modes of engagement. Included in this volume are essays on a range of comics and illustrations as well as considerations of such popular comics as Deadpool, Daredevil, and V for Vendetta, and analyses of comics production, medical illustrations, and original comics. Some contributions even unfold in the form of comics panels"--