Violence in Comics
Co-edited with Ian Horton and Nina Mickwitz
Contexts of Violence in Comics asks the reader to consider the ways in which violence and its representations may be enabled or restricted by the contexts in which they take place. It analyzes how structures and organising principles, be they cultural, historical, legal, political or spatial, might encourage, demand or prevent violence. It deals with the issue of scale: violence in the context of war versus violence in the context of an individual murder, and provides insights into the context of war and peace, ethnic and identity-based violence, as well as examining issues of justice and memory.
Contents
Contexts of Violence in Comics: Introduction (Ian Hague, Ian Horton & Nina Mickwitz)
History and Memory
1. Lynn Fotheringham: Doing justice to the past through the representation of violence: Three and ancient Sparta
2. Enrique del Rey Cabero: Comics do not forget: Historical memory and experiences of violence in the Spanish Civil War and early Francoism
3. Claire Gorrara: Legacies of War: Remembering Prisoner of War Experiences in French Comic Books about the Second World War
4. Mihaela Precup: "I think we’re maybe more or less safe here": Violence and Solidarity during the Lebanese Civil War in Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows
War and Peace
5. Michael F. Scholz: In a Growing Violent Temper: The Swedish Comic Market during World War II
6. Malin Bergström: Will Eisner and the Art of War: Educational Comics in the American Defence Industry
Urban Conflict
7. Jörn Ahrens: Bringing the War Back Home: Reflecting Violence in Brian Wood’s DMZ
8. Dominic Davies: Infrastructural Violence: Urbicide, Public Space, and Postwar Reconstruction in Recent Lebanese Graphic Memoirs
Law, Justice and Censorship
9. Golnar Nabizadeh: The Lives of Others: Figuring Grievability and Justice in Contemporary Comics and Graphic Novels
10. Alex Link: Scales of Violence, Scales of Justice, and Nate Powell’s Any Empire
11. David Huxley: Oink: The Story of a Dangerously Funny Comic
Links
Routledge webpage for Contexts of Violence in Comics
Reviews
If you review the book, please contact Ian to have a link to your review added to this page. If you would like to receive a copy of the book to review, please fill in this request form and Routledge will arrange to have one sent to you.
Representing Acts of Violence in Comics raises questions about depiction and the act of showing violence, and discusses the ways in which individual moments of violence develop, and are both represented and embodied in comics and graphic novels. Contributors consider the impact of gendered and sexual violence, and examine the ways in which violent acts can be rendered palatable (for example through humour) but also how comics can represent trauma and long lasting repercussions for both perpetrators and victims.
Contents
Representing Acts of Violence in Comics: Introduction (Nina Mickwitz, Ian Horton & Ian Hague)
Depiction
1. John Miers: Picturing National and personal acts of violence: modes of depiction in Barefoot Gen
2. Zanne Domoney-Lyttle: Bloody Murder in the Bible: Graphic Representations of the "First Murder" in Biblical Comics
3. Laurike in ‘t Veld: A Balancing Act: Didactic Spectacle in Jack Jackson’s "Nits Make Lice" and Slow Death Comix
Embodiment
4. Laura A. Pearson: Seeing (in) Red: "Thick" Violence in Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Red: A Haida Manga
5. Eszter Szép: Embodied Reading and Performing Vulnerability in Joe Sacco’s The Great War
Humour
6. Christopher J. Thompson: "Boiled or fried, Dennis?" Violence, play and narrative in ‘Dennis the Menace and Gnasher’
7. Nicola Streeten: Humour as a strategy in communicating sexual and domestic abuse of women in comics
Gendered and Sexual Violence
8. Maggie Gray: The risks of representation: making gender and violence visible in The Ballad of Halo Jones
9. Joseph Willis: Unmaking the Apocalypse: Pain, Violence, Torture, and Weaponizing the Black, Female Body
10. Jamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds: Killgrave, The Purple Man
Links
Routledge webpage for Representing Acts of Violence in Comics
Reviews
Review by Nicoletta Mandolini for Cultural Studies Leuven.
If you review the book, please contact Ian to have a link to your review added to this page. If you would like to receive a copy of the book to review, please fill in this request form and Routledge will arrange to have one sent to you.