Folklords #1 Jim Campbell (letterer), Matt Kindt (writer), Chris O’Halloran (colorist), and Matt Smith (artist) BOOM! Studios November 13, 2019 “Once upon a time… / No… Just this one time.” Right from the jump, Folklords sets out to deconstruct the fantasy genre through the story in which its suit-and-tie wearing protagonist, Ansel, is coming of…
Look! Up in the Sky! Superman Smashes the Klan!
Superman Smashes the Klan: Part One Kyle Baker (variant cover artist), Janice Chiang (letterer), Gurihiru (interior and main cover artists), Gene Luen Yang (writer) DC Comics October 16th, 2019 Set in 1946, Gene Luen Yang, Gurihiru, and Janice Chiang’s Superman Smashes the Klan is a loose adaptation of the sixteen-episode “Clan of the Fiery Cross”…
Con(ference) Diary: CSS19 Comics/Politics
The Comics Studies Society held its second annual conference at Toronto’s Ryerson University over the last weekend of July. Drawing on the theme, Comics/Politics, CSS19 attendees from around the world participated in a conference that foregrounded Canadian comics scholarship and practice in plenaries featuring Tara Audibert, Cole Pauls, Camille Callison, Jillian Tamaki, and Fiona Smyth.
Not with a Shabang but a Whimper: Ms. Marvel Annual #1
Ms. Marvel Annual #1 Joe Caramagna (lettering), Stefano Caselli and Andres Mossa (cover), Jon Lam (artist), Msassyk (colorist), Magdalene Visaggio (writer) Marvel Comics July 3, 2019 “We’re living like refugees on a planet we barely know!” Super-Skrull shouts this at Ms. Marvel as she embiggens, meeting violence with violence despite just pages before asking for a…
Aliens, Immigration, Race, and Assimilation in DC: The New Frontier
I love Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier. I think it’s a love letter not just to the superhero genre, but also to its medium: the comic book, even though my 520-page 2016 paperback edition neither looks nor feels like a floppy when I pick it up to read. There is a sequence in The…
Review: Experiencing Comics Will Change the Way We Teach Comics
Experiencing Comics Written and edited by Rachelle Cruz Cognella 2019 I can say, with confidence, that there has never been a better time to be a comics studies scholar than now. The Comics Studies Society hosted its first annual conference this past summer, and the International Comic Arts Forum is getting ready to have its…
Digital Reading and Reading Digitally
You are a digital reader. You’re probably reading this on a smartphone, tablet, or computer screen, but even if you were to read this off of a piece of paper, you’d still be a digital reader, because this essay was digitally mediated: typed into a word processing program before it was uploaded onto the website…
About Those J. Scott Campbell X-Men Black Covers – Social Media Discourse in the “Blue Age” of Comics
A week ago, I was presenting original research at the first annual Comics Studies Society Conference. My paper, “The Blue Age of Comic Books,” was about the digitization of comic books and comic book culture (you can read an early version here). [Update: you can read the full, peer-reviewed “The Blue Age of Comic Books”…