Science fiction, fantasy, comics, romance, genre movies, games all drain into the Cultural Gutter, a website dedicated to thoughtful articles about disreputable art-media and genres that are a little embarrassing. Irredeemable. Worthy of Note, but rolling like errant pennies back into the gutter. The Cultural Gutter is dangerous because we have a philosophy. We try to balance enthusiasm with clear-eyed, honest engagement with the material and with our readers. This book expands on our mission with 10 articles each from science fiction/fantasy editor James Schellenberg, comics editor and publisher Carol Borden, romance editor Chris Szego, screen editor Ian Driscoll and founding editor and former games editor Jim Munroe.

"Across more than fifty essays, Keywords for Comics Studies provides a rich, interdisciplinary vocabulary for comics and sequential art, and identifies new avenues of research into one of the most popular and diverse visual media of the twentieth and twenty-first century. In an original twist on the NYU Keywords mission, the terms in this volume combine attention to the unique aesthetic practices of a distinct medium, comics, with some of the most fundamental concepts of the humanities broadly. Readers will see how scholars, cultural critics, and comics artists from a range of fields-including media and film studies, queer and feminist theory, and critical race and transgender studies among others-take up sequential art as both an object of analysis and a medium for developing new theories about embodiment, identity, literacy, audience reception, genre, cultural politics and more. To do so, Keywords for Comics Studies presents an array of original and inventive analyses of terms central to the study of comics and sequential art, but traditionally siloed in distinct lexicons: these include creative or aesthetic terms like Ink, Creator, Border, and Panel; conceptual terms like trans*, disability, universe, and fantasy; genre terms, like Zine, Pornography, Superhero, and Manga; and canonical terms like X-Men, Archie, Watchmen and Love and Rockets. Written as much for students and lay readers as professors and experts in the field, Keywords for Comics Studies revivifies the fantasy and magic of reading comics in its kaleidoscopic view of the field's most compelling and imaginative ideas."--

An essential introduction to a rapidly growing field of study, AN EXPLORATION OF ?SPACE: 1999? THROUGH THE LENS OF FAN FICTION gathers in one place the complete 2015-16 Online Alpha discussion of the SPACE: 1999 fan fiction corpus, with a focus on the FOREVER ALPHA fan fiction series. Collected here are central viewpoints and arguments by Online Alpha discussants that have dominated Online Alpha debates in recent years. Editor John K. Balor provides a cogent introduction that places each piece in its historical and intellectual context, mapping the discussion and suggesting future trajectories. The book has been developed on an idealistic basis. It is sold at the lowest price the publisher was willing to accept. A free e-book version can be downloaded at www.lulu.com.

Superhero films and comic book adaptations dominate contemporary Hollywood filmmaking, and it is not just the storylines of these blockbuster spectacles that have been influenced by comics. The comic book medium itself has profoundly influenced how movies look and sound today, as well as how viewers approach them as texts. Comic Book Film Style explores how the unique conventions and formal structure of comic books have had a profound impact on film aesthetics, so that the different representational abilities of comics and film are put on simultaneous display in a cinematic work. With close readings of films including Batman: The Movie, American Splendor, Superman, Hulk, Spider-Man 2, V for Vendetta, 300, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Watchmen, The Losers, and Creepshow, Dru Jeffries offers a new and more cogent definition of the comic book film as a stylistic approach rather than a genre, repositioning the study of comic book films from adaptation and genre studies to formal/stylistic analysis. He discusses how comic book films appropriate comics’ drawn imagery, vandalize the fourth wall with the use of graphic text, dissect the film frame into discrete panels, and treat time as a flexible construct rather than a fixed flow, among other things. This cinematic remediation of comic books’ formal structure and unique visual conventions, Jeffries asserts, fundamentally challenges the classical continuity paradigm and its contemporary variants, placing the comic book film at the forefront of stylistic experimentation in post-classical Hollywood.

Personal. Public. Historical. The next issue of Southern Cultures is devoted entirely to Memory. . . . . . Why We Argue So Much About Robert E. Lee . . . Alice Walker, Allan Gurganus, Elizabeth Spencer, Randall Kenan, and More Great Writers on our Favorite Films and What They Make Us Remember . . . Catfish Hunter: Baseball Legend, Small-town God . . . Life and Times: World War II–Era Appalachia . . . Growing Up in Hot Springs, Arkansas . . . New Poetry from Robert Morgan . . . What To Do About the Thomas Ruffin Statue . . . The Interview: "The Grandmother of Appalachian Studies" on the Long Women's Movement

This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.

The Culture of Building describes how the built world, including the vast number of buildings that are the settings for peoples everyday lives, is the product of building cultures--complex systems of people, relationships, building types, techniques, and habits in which design and building are anchored. These cultures include builders, bankers, architects, developers, clients, contractors, craftspeople, building inspectors, planners, and many others. The product of these cultures, which operate building after building, is the built world of cities and settlements. In this book, Howard Davis uses historical, contemporary, and cross-cultural examples to describe the nature and influence of these cultures. He shows how building cultures reflect the general cultures in which they exist, how they have changed over history, how they affect the form of buildings and cities, and how present building cultures, which are responsible for the contemporary everyday environments, may be improved. Following the development of the idea of building cultures using several historical examples, the book lays out a framework that puts such topics as craft and professionalism, the vernacular and nonvernacular, and design and construction in common frameworks. Although the book ranges widely over different cultures and historical periods, it emphasizes the transformations that took place in architecture and building practice from the late eighteenth century to the present. Finally, the book uses a series of contemporary examples that demonstrate the building culture as a living concept. These examples, which include built work as well as innovative processes that go beyond the work of architects alone, are described as the seeds that can help the emergence of a better build world. This beautiful book features over 260 color and black-and-white illustrations, most from the authors extensive collection of slides, and includes photographs, prints, and drawings from historical archives and contemporary architectural offices.

The Elemental Logic series continues with its third novel in the series, Water Logic, where the patterns of history are made and unmade. Laurie Marks’ Elemental Logic series introduced readers in Fire Logic to the realm of Shaftal, an intricately imagined land whose people operate within the boundaries of their basic natures—here defined as logics—which sometimes bequeath them with access to magical, elemental powers and sometimes embroil them in unsolvable internal conflicts. Readers will discover inside Water Logic that amid assassinations, rebellions, and the pyres of too many dead, a new government has formed in Shaftal—a government of soldiers and farmers, scholars and elemental talents, all weary of war and longing for peace. But some cannot forget their losses, and some cannot imagine a place for themselves in an enemy land. Before memory, before recorded history, something happened that now must be remembered. Zanja na’Tarwein, the crosser of boundaries, born in fire and wedded to earth, has fallen under the ice. Now, by water logic, the logic of patterns repeated, of laughter and music, the lost must be found—or the found may forever be lost.

The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies examines the history and evolution of the visual narrative genre from a global perspective. The Handbook brings together readable, jargon-free essays written by established and emerging scholars from diverse geographic, institutional, gender, and national backgrounds.