BOBC

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.

Table Of Contents

Notes on the Contributors (vii)

John A. Lent: Foreword (xiii)

Shane Denson, Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein: Introducing Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (1)

I. Politics and Poetics
1. Michael A. Chaney: Not Just a Theme: Transnationalism and Form in Visual Narratives of US Slavery (15)
2. Elisabeth El Refaie: Transnational Identity as Shape-shifting: Metaphor and Cultural Resonance in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (33)
3. Georgiana Banita: Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence (49)
4. Aryn Bartley: Staging Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Encounter in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (67)
5. Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt: “Trying to Recapture the Front”: A Transnational Perspective on Hawaii in R. Kikuo Johnson’s Night Fisher (83)
6. Daniel Wüllner: Folding Nations, Cutting Borders: Transnationalism in the Comics of Warren Craghead III (95)

II. Transnational and Transcultural Superheroes
7. Katharina Bieloch and Sharif Bitar: Batman Goes Transnational: The Global Appropriation and Distribution of an American Hero (113)
8. Shilpa Davé: Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives (127)
9. Daniel Stein: Of Transcreations and Transpacific Adaptations: Investigating Manga Versions of Spider-Man (145)
10. Jochen Ecke: Warren Ellis: Performing the Transnational Author in the American Comics Mainstream (163)
11. Stefan Meier: “Truth, Justice, and the Islamic Way”: Conceiving the Cosmopolitan Muslim Superhero in The 99 (181)

III. Translations, Transformations, Migrations
12. Florian Groß: Lost in Translation: Narratives of Transcultural Displacement in the Wordless Graphic Novel (197)
13. Frank Mehring: Hard-Boiled Silhouettes: Transnational Remediation and the Art of Omission in Frank Miller’s Sin City (211)
14. Lukas Etter: The “Big Picture” as a Multitude of Fragments: Jason Lutes’s Depiction of Weimar Republic Berlin (229)
15. Mark Berninger: “Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together”: The Cultural Crossovers of Bryan Lee O’Malley (243)
16. Jean-Paul Gabilliet: A Disappointing Crossing: The North American Reception of Asterix and Tintin (257)

Shane Denson: Afterword: Framing, Unframing, Reframing: Retconning the Transnational Work of Comics (271)

Index (285)