BOOM! SPLAT!

From Captain America punching his way into the American consciousness to Phoebe Gloeckner’s depictions of childhood sexual abuse, representations of violence have remained integral to the formal, narrative, and visual foundations of the comic medium and language. Though scholars including Hillary Chute, Harriet Earle, and Martin Barker have addressed specific trends and/or themes related to violence in comics, such as war, trauma, and horror comics, scholars have only recently begun to explore the formal, structural, thematic, and ideological machinations of violence in a sustained way. This collection intervenes into the emerging discourse on violence in graphic narrative by providing readers with fifteen accessible chapters across multiple genres, including superhero comics, underground comix, newspaper strips, journalism, memoir, and fiction. BOOM! SPLAT!: Comics and Violence is both global and interdisciplinary in scope, concerned with extricating the histories and forms of violence alongside representations of political, interpersonal, racial, and gendered violence in comics. BOOM! SPLAT!: Comics and Violence expands the geographic parameters of works under consideration outside the boundaries of comics in the United States. As M. Thomas Inge has argued, “the comic strip as we know it perhaps represents America’s major indigenous contribution to world culture”(xi). And while it is true that comics in the U.S. found their beginnings in early twentieth century American newspapers, subsequent years have shown us how truly versatile and enduring the comics form is, and how its malleability and modes of expression allow for participation from any number of global cultures; as such, this collection assembles an international repertoire of texts and scholars. In crafting a capacious and inclusive collection of essays, the book intentionally highlights varied contributions and approaches to comics scholarship around the world. Through conscious duration of scholarship on artists, texts, and subject matter by scholars from both within and outside of the United States, BOOM! SPLAT! strives to explore violence in graphic narrative in the interest of expanding the scope of its consideration.