Christina Meyer – Page 2 – medieninitiative

Coming Soon: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives

[UPDATE March 28, 2013: The book is now available; see here for more info]

We’re in the home stretch now with Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (eds. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein). The manuscript is almost through the production phase at Bloomsbury, and everything is set for the book to appear on time in March 2013. A description can be found on the publisher’s website (here), and the book is already up on amazon (US site here; British site here; German site here). A more affordable e-book version is in preparation, and a paperback is planned as well (contingent upon sales of the hardcover — so please ask your library to purchase a copy)!

Here is the final Table of Contents:

Foreword

John A. Lent

Introducing Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads

Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein

Part I: Politics and Poetics

1          Not Just a Theme: Transnationalism and Form in Visual Narratives of US Slavery

Michael A. Chaney

2          Transnational Identity as Shape-Shifting: Metaphor and Cultural Resonance in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese

Elisabeth El Refaie

3          Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence

Georgiana Banita

4          Staging Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Encounter in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza

Aryn Bartley

5          “Trying to Recapture the Front”: A Transnational Perspective on Hawaii in R. Kikuo Johnson’s Night Fisher

Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt

6          Folding Nations, Cutting Borders: Transnationalism in the Comics of Warren Craghead III

Daniel Wüllner

Part II: Transnational and Transcultural Superheroes

7          Batman Goes Transnational: The Global Appropriation and Distribution of an American Hero

Katharina Bieloch and Sharif Bitar

8          Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/Transcreating of American Cultural Narrative

Shilpa Davé

9          Of Transcreations and Transpacific Adaptations: Investigating Manga Versions of Spider-Man

Daniel Stein

10         Warren Ellis: Performing the Transnational Author in the American Comics Mainstream

Jochen Ecke

11         “Truth, Justice, and the Islamic Way”: Conceiving the Cosmopolitan Muslim Superhero in The 99

Stefan Meier

Part III: Translations, Transformations, Migrations

12         Lost in Translation: Narratives of Transcultural Displacement in the Wordless Graphic Novel

Florian Groß

13         Hard-Boiled Silhouettes: Transnational Remediation and the Art of Omission in Frank Miller’s Sin City

Frank Mehring

14         The “Big Picture” as a Multitude of Fragments: Jason Lutes’s Depiction of Weimar Republic Berlin

Lukas Etter

15         “Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together”: The Cultural Crossovers of Bryan Lee O’Malley

Mark Berninger

16         A Disappointing Crossing: The North American Reception of Asterix and Tintin

Jean-Paul Gabilliet

Afterword

Framing, Unframing, Reframing: Retconning the Transnational Work of Comics

Shane Denson

Out Now: American Comic Books and Graphic Novels

American Comic Books and Graphic Novels is a special issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies (issue 56.4), edited by Daniel Stein and Christina Meyer (my co-editors on the forthcoming Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads), together with Micha Edlich from the University of Mainz. The special issue, which I just found in my mailbox, has turned out to be a very nice collection of essays, bringing together theorizations of comics and graphic narratives as a medium or medial form and close readings of specific case studies. Also included is an interview with David Mack, conducted by Henry Jenkins. Daniel Stein has posted the full table of contents at his academia.edu page (here).

My own contribution, “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein: A Case Study in the Media of Serial Figures,” continues my recent explorations of the nexus of seriality and/as mediality. Here’s the abstract:

This essay argues that Marvel’s Frankenstein comics of the 1960s and 1970s offer a useful case study in the dynamics of serial narration, both as it pertains to comics in particular and to the larger plurimedial domain of popular culture in general. Distinguishing between linear and non-linear forms of narrative seriality—each of which correlates with two distinct types of series-inhabiting characters—I argue that Marvel’s staging of the Frankenstein monster mixes the two modes, resulting in a self-reflexive exploration and interrogation of the comics’ story- telling techniques. Furthermore, I contend that this process sheds light on the medial dynamics of serial figures—that is, characters such as the monster (but also superheroes like Batman and Superman or other figures like Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes) that are adapted again and again in a wide variety of forms, contexts, and media. Though narrative continuity may be lacking between the repeated stagings of serial figures, non-diegetic traces of previous incarnations accumulate on such characters, allowing them to move between and reflect upon medial forms, never wholly contained in a given diegetic world. Accordingly, Marvel’s depiction of the Frankenstein monster leads to a self-reflexive probing of comic books’ forms of narrative and visual mediality, ultimately problematizing the very building blocks of comics as a medium—the textual and graphic framings that, together, narrate comics’ serialized stories.

Comics at the Crossroads: Update

[UPDATE March 28, 2013: The book is now available; see here for more info]

I am pleased to announce that editorial work on Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads has been completed, and the manuscript has been turned over to the Bloomsbury production department. The book is now scheduled to appear in March 2013.

The above image is an early mock-up of the cover; I will post the final version, along with any further info, as soon as it becomes available.

Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads

[UPDATE March 28, 2013: The book is now available; see here for more info]

[Update: our publisher, Continuum, now has an official announcement, complete with table of contents: here.]

I am excited to announce Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, an essay collection co-edited by Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, and myself, which is now officially under contract with Continuum, an international publisher with a strong comics program (you can browse some of their graphic narrative-related titles here). We hope to see the volume appear in 2012; more info will follow before then, but in the meantime here is a short abstract for the collection:

Transnational Approaches to Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads

Editors: Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein

Scholarship on graphic narratives has rarely looked beyond the confines of national borders. While a growing body of studies has turned to different national traditions (Anglo-American comics, Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, Japanese manga, etc.), most critics still treat graphic narratives from different cultures as relatively self-contained phenomena. In fact, scholarship in the emerging field of Comics Studies offers very little analysis of what Shelly Fisher Fishkin has called “the broad array of cultural crossroads shaping the work of border-crossing authors, artists, and cultural forms that straddle multiple regional and national traditions.” (“Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 32.)

The overall aim of this collection is to close the gaps in (at least) two major fields of research: 1) in American Studies, broadly defined, where graphic narratives are increasingly accepted as a hybrid, visual-verbal literature that is worthy of critical analysis but where they are frequently placed in an exclusively American context despite the opening of the field towards transcultural and transnational research; and 2) in Comics Studies, which is currently one of the liveliest and most dynamic young fields of critical inquiry but which has, by and large, marginalized the transcultural and transnational dimensions of graphic narratives.

The essays in this collection read graphic narratives as texts that are virtually predisposed towards crossing cultural and national boundaries because their unique visual-verbal interface translates more readily – though not without transformative distortions – across cultures than mono-medial forms of literature, non-narrative artworks, and even film. Our understanding of these texts and their history thus foregrounds the transnational flux of authors and graphic styles as well as the transcultural work that individual works and genres have performed for more than a century. As Paul Williams and James Lyons write: “There are good reasons to understand North American comics in a transnational context: the institutional transaction of texts, creators, and capital across national borders has contributed to observable productive tensions in the comic texts themselves.” (The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010, xiii.) Following this challenge to consider the transnational exchange of creative energies and their transcultural effects, the first aim which all of the essays in our collection pursue is to engage in the study of American graphic narratives as texts that question and potentially transcend the ideological limitations of national borders.

A second aim of this volume is to situate American graphic narratives in a truly interdisciplinary space in which literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, as well as political and sociological approaches may contribute to redefining the fields of American literature as a truly transnational field of inquiry in which graphic narratives are a major, and increasingly prominent, element. Instead of following uni-directional approaches, all of the essays in this volume follow a notion of multi-directional relationality that has shaped the field of American graphic narratives from its inception (from Japanese woodcuts to early American newspaper comics; from the Eastern European origins of Superman’s inventors to the British authors and artists drawing most contemporary superhero characters) and that has always been at the center of this inherently transcultural and transnational literature.

Christina Meyer, “Popular Visions of War, Gender, and Nation in [High]-Art-Advertising-Comics”

Abstract for Christina Meyer’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Popular Visions of War, Gender, and Nation in [High]-Art-Advertising-Comics: Reading Nell Brinkley’s Newspaper Romance Serials

Christina Meyer (American Studies, Osnabrück)

This paper will engage with the female newspaper illustrator, artist, and writer Nell Brinkley (1886-1944). It will focus on her graphic serials, asking how they locate themselves in the discourse of gendered mass culture and how, while drawing on conventions of sentimental fiction and the conventionalized cliffhanger continuity of nineteenth-century serialized narratives, they defy the ideology of feminine domesticity mediated, for example, in the visual language of the well-known and popular Gibson Girl illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson.

Looking at Nell Brinkley’s serialized First World War saga “Golden-Eyes and Her Hero, Bill” (1918-1919) and situating it within the wider socio-historical context, this paper seeks to trace the intersections of the following discourses: patriotism, female identity, and representation in the battles over standards of taste in art and advertising and modern nation swirling around Brinkley’s popular success. It will further be argued that these and Brinkley’s other pages exemplify the cross-infiltrations of cultural forms (e.g. vaudeville, film, advertisement, poster art); in the debate about women’s social and political roles that took place across a range of media, Brinkley’s romance serials interact with, negotiate, and re-mediate, the widely disseminated images of (at times allegorical) female figures of the era. An analysis of Brinkley’s “serial queen heroines” (Lambert, 2009: 6) reveals not only the changing attitudes about the roles available to women during the 1910s and 1920s; it also allows for new insights into the interconnection between sentimental themes, commercial success and the economic context of (cultural) consumption in the first two decades of the twentieth century.