Critical Directions in Comics Studies

Recent decades have seen a blossoming of academic and scholarly concern with comics. Within the ecosystems of this growth, dominant assumptions have taken root—assumptions around the particular methods and approaches used to approach the comics form, around 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 amidst this verdant landscape of comics studies. These approaches seek to question the reliance on structural linguistics and the tools of English and cultural studies in the examination and understanding of comics. They turn instead to politics, to aesthetics, to law, to critical theory. This collection seeks to grow, and to grow within those more critical directions in comics studies; to fertilize and help sustain them, to multiply them, and continue to cultivate a healthy skepticism, creativity, and openness in the approach to comics knowledge. Accordingly, this volume contains a collection of indicative and provocative essays, accumulated and compiled for readers to explore and make meaning out of: to get lost in, and hopefully find new and enriching directions forward in their encounters with the rich possibilities that comics enable. Traversing phenomenological, existential, material, legal, contextual, political, and revolutionary meanings in their engagements with both comics form and examples of comics work, and interspersed with critical comics interludes, these essays seek to consolidate, exemplify, and open up potential futures for the fecund and amorphous fields of critical comics studies.