Transnational perspectives on graphic narratives : comics at the crossroads

311 Pages·2014·7.889 MB·English

by  Daniel Stein (editor), Shane Denson (editor), Christina Meyer (editor)

Transnational Perspectives on

Graphic Narratives
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Transnational Perspectives on

Graphic Narratives
Comics at the Crossroads
Edited by
Shane Denson, Christina Meyer,
and Daniel Stein
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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WC1B 3DP NY 10010
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www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2013
© Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, Daniel Stein, and Contributors, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
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in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted
by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN: 978-1-4411-6146-8

Library of Co n gress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt, Ltd, Chennai, India
Contents

Notes on the Contributors vii
Foreword John A. Lent xiii
Introducing Transnational Perspectives on Graphic
Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads Shane Denson,
Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein 1
Part I Politics and Poetics
1 Not Just a Theme: Transnationalism and Form in
Visual Narratives of US Slavery Michael A. Chaney 15
2 Transnational Identity as Shape-Shifting: Metaphor and
Cultural Resonance in Gene Luen Yang’s
American Born Chinese Elisabeth El Refaie 33
3 Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and
Graphic Silence Georgiana Banita 49
4 Staging Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Encounter in
Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza Aryn Bartley 67
5 “Trying to Recapture the Front”: A Transnational
Perspective on Hawaii in R. Kikuo Johnson’s
Night Fisher Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt 83
6 Folding Nations, Cutting Borders: Transnationalism
in the Comics of Warren Craghead III Daniel Wüllner 95
Part II Transnational and Transcultural Superheroes
7 Batman Goes Transnational: The Global Appropriation and
Distribution of an American Hero Katharina Bieloch and
Sharif Bitar 113
8 Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/
Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives Shilpa Davé 127
vi Contents
9 Of Transcreations and Transpacific Adaptations:
Investigating Manga Versions of Spider-Man Daniel Stein 145
10 Warren Ellis: Performing the Transnational Author
in the American Comics Mainstream Jochen Ecke 163
11 “Truth, Justice, and the Islamic Way”: Conceiving the
Cosmopolitan Muslim Superhero in The 99 Stefan Meier 181
Part III Translations, Transformations, Migrations
12 Lost in Translation: Narratives of Transcultural
Displacement in the Wordless Graphic Novel Florian Groß 197
13 Hard-Boiled Silhouettes: Transnational Remediation
and the Art of Omission in Frank Miller’s
Sin City Frank Mehring 211
14 The “Big Picture” as a Multitude of Fragments:
Jason Lutes’s Depiction of Weimar Republic Berlin Lukas Etter 229
15 “Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together”: The Cultural
Crossovers of Bryan Lee O’Malley Mark Berninger 243
16 A Disappointing Crossing: The North American
Reception of Asterix and Tintin Jean-Paul Gabilliet 257
Afterword: Framing, Unframing, Reframing:
Retconning the Transnational Work of Comics Shane Denson 271
Index 285
Notes on the Contributors

Georgiana Banita is Assistant Professor of US Literature and Media Studies at the
University of Bamberg, Germany, and Honorary Research Fellow at the United
States Studies Centre, University of Sydney. She is the author of Plotting Justice:
Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 (University of Nebraska Press,
2012) and “Chris Ware and the Pursuit of Slowness” (in The Comics of Chris
Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, University Press of Mississippi, 2010).
Aryn Bartley is Assistant Professor of English at Radford University, USA. Her
research explores depictions of human rights violations in twentieth-century
fiction and literary journalism. She has published articles in Modern Fiction
Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, and Literary Journalism Studies.
Mark Berninger teaches English literature at the University of Bamberg,
Germany. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Mainz, Germany, for a study
on new forms of the history play in Great Britain and Ireland since 1970. He
has published widely on contemporary drama and on comics, including the
essay collection Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media,
Disciplines and International Perspectives (with Gideon Haberkorn and Jochen
Ecke; McFarland, 2010), and is currently finishing a book on the impact of
John Milton on later writers, with a special focus on present-day references to
Paradise Lost.
Katharina Bieloch majored in Slavic and English Studies at Carl-von-Ossietzky
University, Oldenburg, Germany, where she received her B.A. degree for a thesis
on contemporary Polish drama. She has worked for the Kestnergesellschaft
in Hannover, where she was in charge of the press office and translated the
exhibition catalog Eric Fischl: Ten Breaths (Kerber, 2007). She has been a research
assistant in Oldenburg since 2010 and has worked on various projects, such as
the anthology EthniCities: Metropolitan Cultures and Ethnic Identities in the
Americas (WVT, 2011).
Sharif Bitar is a graduate student in English and American Studies at
Carl-von-Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany. His main research field is
viii Notes on the Contributors
American popular culture, with a special interest in representations of the Batman
character in and across diverse media. His first academic endeavors include
a paper on Frank Miller’s Holy Terror presented at the Annual Conference of
the German Association for American Studies (University of Mainz, Germany,
June 2012) and his contribution to this collection, coauthored with Katharina
Bieloch.
Michael A. Chaney is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College,
Hanover, USA. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He is the author
of Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative
(Indiana University Press, 2009) and editor of Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays
on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). His
essays have appeared in African American Review, American Literature, College
Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, MELUS, Modern Fiction Studies, and
Journal of Narrative Theory.
Shilpa Davé is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University,
USA. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She is
the author of Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American
TV and Film (University of Illinois Press, 2013.) and coeditor of East Main Street:
Asian American Popular Culture (New York University Press, 2005).
Shane Denson is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Leibniz University Hannover,
Germany, and a member of the Research Unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics
and Practice” (funded by the German Research Foundation). His dissertation,
completed in 2010, is titled Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the
Anthropotechnical Interface. Currently, he is writing a monograph, titled Figuring
Serial Trajectories, on the roles and functions of popular serial characters at
times of media change and transition. Topics of research, teaching, and past
publications include media theory, seriality, film, comics, and philosophy of
technology.
Jochen Ecke teaches English literature at the Johannes Gutenberg University,
Mainz, Germany. He has written his master’s thesis on concepts of time and
space in Alan Moore’s later works and is currently preparing his doctoral thesis
on the so-called British Invasion of American mainstream comics in the 1980s
and 1990s. In addition to coediting Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on
the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives (with Mark
Berninger and Gideon Haberkorn; McFarland, 2010), he has done extensive
Notes on the Contributors ix
work in the German comics industry, serving as German editor and occasional
translator of works by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Alan Moore. He has also
published a number of essays on topics closely connected to his thesis.
Elisabeth El Refaie is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Language and
Communication Research, Cardiff University, Wales. The focus of her research
is on new literacies and visual/multimodal forms of metaphor, narrative, and
humor. She is the author of Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures
(University Press of Mississippi, 2012), and her articles have appeared in Visual
Communication, Visual Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Studies in
Comics, and several other journals and edited volumes.
Lukas Etter studied German and English and Comparative Literatures in Bern,
Geneva, and Paris. He is currently writing his dissertation on aspects of serial
storytelling in recent US-American alternative graphic narratives. He is a member
of the University of Bern’s Institute of the Advanced Study in the Humanities and
Social Sciences (IASH), and his research interests include intermedial narration
(specifically text-picture relations) and autobiographical graphic narratives.
Jean-Paul Gabilliet is Professor of North American Studies at the University of
Bordeaux, France. He specializes in the cultural history of comics in America and
Europe. His latest publications include Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History
of American Comic Books (University Press of Mississippi, 2010; trans. B. Beaty
and N. Nguyen), the chapter on comics in the Cambridge History of Canadian
Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and the biography R. Crumb
(Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2012).
Florian Groß studied English, American Studies, and Political Science at Leibniz
University Hannover, Germany, earning his master’s degree in 2006 with a thesis
on the representation of television in the works of Don DeLillo and David
Foster Wallace. He is now working as a lecturer in Hannover’s American Studies
division. His research interests include popular culture (especially television and
comics) and recent American fiction. He is currently writing his Ph.D. thesis on
contemporary American television series.
Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt is a postdoctoral candidate and lecturer for American
Studies and British Studies at the TU Dortmund, Germany. She is currently
working on her postdoctoral project on American literature of the 1940s. Further
research interests are Transnational and Transpacific Studies with a special focus
on Hawaiian history, literature, and culture.