Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are not. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody’s edited volume explores the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. To analyze monstrous women is not only to examine comics, but also to witness how those constructions correspond to women’s real material experiences. Each section takes a critical look at the cultural context surrounding varied monstrous voices: embodiment, maternity, childhood, power, and performance. Featured are essays on such comics as Faith, Monstress, Bitch Planet, and Batgirl and such characters as Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman. This volume probes into the patriarchal contexts wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject, such that women frequently become monsters.

This interdisciplinary volume seeks to trace the diverse ways in which stories of biblical women have been reimagined in and as comic books. Feminist biblical scholarship has previously addressed the tradition that relegates female biblical characters to secondary roles, merely enabling the male characters to attain their own goals. Using examples from both secular and religious comic Bibles, and comic Bibles aimed at children and older audiences, Zanne Domoney-Lyttle now fully considers contemporary remediations of biblical narratives to the same degree. Remediating ancient, biblical text into modern, graphical comic books affects the reception of the text in several ways. This book aims to investigate how the production, format, and function of comic Bibles encourages the depiction of biblical characters from a contemporary perspective, while also showing some fidelity to the text. By presenting a focused analysis on women in the Bible, wider issues concerning popular-cultural retellings of the Bible in general begin to surface, including matters concerning reception history, the space between art and literature inhabited by biblical comics, and issues of translation and interpretations within contemporary remediations.

Art can be used in education to assist in engagement, comprehension, and literacy. For years, comics and graphic novels have been written off as simple sources of entertainment. However, comics and graphic novels have tremendous value when utilized in the classroom as unique texts that can be approached philosophically and cognitively. Exploring Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom highlights voices from a number of disciplines in education, showcasing research and practice using both popular and lesser-known examples of comics across time in terms of publishing history and across geographic contexts. It explores comics from multiple viewpoints to share the efficacy of these texts in descriptive, narrative, and empirical ways. Covering topics such as intersectional identity representation, sequential visual art, and critical analysis, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for educational administrators, teacher educators, preservice teachers, faculty of both K-12 and higher education, librarians, teaching artists, researchers, and academicians.

Despite the constant changes in contemporary popular media, the horror genre retains its attraction for audiences of all backgrounds. This edited collection explores modern representations of gender in horror and how this factors into the genre's appeal.

Marvel, like other media "universes," is a collection of highly profitable and audience-satisfying products that exist not only as individual items of popular culture but coalesce to form a unique and all-encompassing identity. Within media studies, elements of popular culture once dismissed as low-brow entertainment are now studied with the seriousness that has always been afforded classics like Shakespeare's plays and ancient myth. Indeed, DC and Marvel might be thought of as competing myth systems. This book is a collection of diverse essays covering all aspects of the Marvel Universe, from in-print graphic novels to film and television variations. Contributors present in-depth, original and inclusive interpretations of numerous individual elements of Marvel, including analysis of key characters, themes and aesthetic elements. They also offer a vision of the essential "meaning" of Marvel, including aspects that set it apart from the DC Universe and other media. Individual readings apply feminist, ethnic, and queer theory, among others, and deal with the lesser known aspects of Marvel's offerings in order to provide the definitive collection on this subject. Beginning with an introduction by the editor that provides a complete overview of the Marvel canon, this book offers the broadest and most in-depth collection on the subject to date.

This book examines the fictional female bodies of four stylistically distinct comics artists in the United States—Chris Ware, Emil Ferris, Ebony Flowers, and Tillie Walden—whose work has attracted significant attention. These bodies showcase how comics and its unique visual language can both critique and re-envision some of the most challenging social issues of our time. The characters analyzed in this book illustrate diverse techniques for projecting the complex humanity and "truth" of U.S. women’s unruly bodies onto a two-dimensional page. All of the protagonists qualify as "outsider" in some way, whether by gender identity, sexuality, ability, religion, race, class, ethnicity, age, or a combination of these and other categories. These bodily expressions of outsider identity both resist traditional categorization and stereotypes, and sometimes harness and employ those stereotypes for the purposes of parody or social critique. The language of comics affords a unique opportunity for complex representation of these disparate women’s bodies, especially when comics artists use the full range of tools at their disposal, such as style, materials, narrative direction, the space of the gutter, and the friction between word and image. This is an a timely and important intervention suitable for researchers and students in comics studies, gender studies, literature and queer studies.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies is a comprehensive, global, and interdisciplinary examination of the essential relationship between Gender, Sexuality, Comics, and Graphic Novels. A diverse range of international and interdisciplinary scholars take a closer look at how gender and sexuality have been essential in the evolution of comics, and how gender and sexuality in comics demand that we re-frame and re-view comics history. Chapters cover a wide array of intersectional topics including Queer Underground and Alternative comics, Feminist Autobiography, re-drawing disability, Latina testimony, and re-evaluating the critical whiteness and masculinity of superheroes in this first truly global reference text to gender and sexuality in comics. Comics have always been an important place for the radical exploration of feminist and non-binary sexualities and identities, and the growth of non-normative comic book traditions as a field of inquiry makes this an essential text for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers studying Comics Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Alongside superheroes, supervillains, too, have become one of today’s most popular and globally recognizable figures. However, it is not merely their popularity that marks their significance. Supervillains are also central to superhero storytelling to the extent that the superhero genre cannot survive without supervillains. Bringing together different approaches and critical perspectives across disciplines, author Nao Tomabechi troubles overly hero-centered works in comics studies to reconsider the modern American myths of the superheroes. Considering the likes of Lex Luthor, the Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Loki, Venom and more, Supervillians explores themes such as gender and sexuality, disability, and many forms of Otherness in relation to the notion of evil as it appears in the superhero genre. The book investigates how supervillains uphold and, at times, trouble dominant ideals expressed by the heroism of our superheroes.

2023 Ray and Pat Browne Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Popular and American Culture, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA) 2023 Ray and Pat Browne Best Edited Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular Culture Award (Honorable Mention), Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA) 2023 Peter C. Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations (SWPACA) A revisionist history of women's pivotal roles as creators of and characters in comic books. The history of comics has centered almost exclusively on men. Comics historians largely describe the medium as one built by men telling tales about male protagonists, neglecting the many ways in which women fought for legitimacy on the page and in publishers’ studios. Despite this male-dominated focus, women played vital roles in the early history of comics. The story of how comic books were born and how they evolved changes dramatically when women like June Tarpé Mills and Lily Renée are placed at the center rather than at the margins of this history, and when characters such as the Black Cat, Patsy Walker, and Señorita Rio are analyzed. Comic Book Women offers a feminist history of the golden age of comics, revising our understanding of how numerous genres emerged and upending narratives of how male auteurs built their careers. Considering issues of race, gender, and sexuality, the authors examine crime, horror, jungle, romance, science fiction, superhero, and Western comics to unpack the cultural and industrial consequences of how women were represented across a wide range of titles by publishers like DC, Timely, Fiction House, and others. This revisionist history reclaims the forgotten work done by women in the comics industry and reinserts female creators and characters into the canon of comics history.

Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.