In this brief discussion of McKaughan and Howard-Snyder’s “How Does Trust Relate to Faith?” I call into question the authors’ finding that faith is necessarily resilient while trust is not. To do this, I demonstrate how the constraints of McKaughan and Howard-Snyder’s inquiry screen out a particular kind of trust, two-place trust, which does manifest resilience. Turning then to two-place trust, I offer two positive reasons—proportionality and the value of relationships—to think that trust may be essentially resilient after all. If this is correct, it takes us a step closer to understanding how trust relates to faith.

In Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, the text describes its main character as witty, brave, and resourceful. The drawings of the story’s main character which accompany this text, however, present a unique kind of harm that only becomes clear when the work is read as a collection of single-panel comics rather than an illustrated book. In this chapter, I show what happens when we read drawings in books as textless comics, and, based on how things turn out from this reading, motivate why we have some substantive reason to read both Little Black Sambo and other books with drawings-as-comics.

Fictional realism is the view that creatures of fiction exist. Mythical realism is the view that creatures of myth and mistaken theories exist. Call the combined view “Ecumenical Realism.” We critically evaluate three arguments for Ecumenical Realism and argue they are unsound because fictional storytelling differs from mistaken theorizing in important ways. We think these considerations support a more conservative view, “Sectarian Realism,” which results from subtracting “creatures of mistaken theorizing” from Ecumenical Realism. We close by considering an important challenge to Sectarian Realism involving immigrants in fiction.

Genetically complete yet authorless artworks seem possible, yet it is hard to understand how they might really be possible. A natural way to try to resolve this puzzle is by constructing an account of artwork completion on the model of accounts of artwork meaning that are compatible with meaningful yet authorless artworks. However, I argue that such an account of artwork completion is implausible. Therefore, I leave the puzzle unresolved.

In this paper, I consider a peculiar feature of the aesthetics of collecting comics: collecting to complete a narrative. Unlike other forms of narrative engagement, comics are often read out of narrative sequence, and so collectors hunt for missing issues to fill in an incomplete story, leading to a “gappy” experience of the narrative. This “gappy” experience, I argue, has its own aesthetic quality and value, and I connect my analysis of the experience to both classical Kantian aesthetics and contemporary neuropsychology.

Many comics are aesthetically trashy: They are immediately grasped and easily available. Historically, this trashiness is lobbed as an aesthetic defect of many comics, a defect for both their production and their appreciation. To defend these comics, some point to non-aesthetic values, like sociality. I argue that there is aesthetic value to these comics, and that it lies precisely in their trashy characteristics: their immediacy and availability. Many comics have these characteristics because many comics are cartooned. The immediacy of cartooning is precisely what makes so many ordinary comics beautiful in an ordinary way.

In this article, I argue, adverting to critical practices, that film adaptations are comparable with the comics that serve as their sources. The possibility of comparison presumes the existence of covering values according to which these comparisons are made. I raise four groupings of covering values for comics—narrative, pictorial, historical, and referential—and show how they apply to film adaptations as well, and argue that a fifth kind of value, fidelity, is relevant to comparisons of source comics to film adaptations. I close with a discussion of different types of fidelity that might be brought to bear in evaluation.

I examine Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s adaptation of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World in the comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I interpret philosophical aspects of Cavendish’s fictional landscape, including her vitalist materialism and naturalized talking animals, as they appear in series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, rendered through 3-D images and corresponding 3-D glasses worn by readers. Through this world adaptation, Moore and O’Neill onboard themes of naturalness, experimentation, technology-aided perceptual processes, and travel to intersecting worlds to enhance The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s commentary on the formative influence of fiction on authors and audiences.

Roderick Chisholm (1916–1999) was among the most creative and influential figures in twentieth-century American philosophy. This essay considers how Chisholm’s cartooning contributed to his philosophical charisma.