This chapter focuses on ancient Sparta as a representative case for the general reception of classical antiquity in heavy metal music. The Spartans are the basis of songs and albums by dozens of bands across the globe: their last stand at Thermopylae is the most popular ancient battle in metal music, and their king Leonidas is one of the most popular ancient figures. Their appropriation by metal bands is a product of their rise in popularity in popular culture since the premiere of the 2006 film 300, and as in pop-culture, their appeal resonates with political and nationalistic agendas, especially of Greek bands. Sparta’s wide appeal harmonises with metal’s core ethos of hypermasculinity, the liberation of animal instincts and the disruption of systems of conformity and control. As with other topics from the classical world, heavy metal music takes the Spartans from both ancient sources and modern media and remakes them in the image of its own counterculture, that of the few standing defiant against the many.

Drone metal is an extremely slow and extended subgenre of metal, developing since the 1990s at the margins of metal and experimental music scenes. Influences include minimalist composers, Indian ragas and contemporary artists alongside Black Sabbath. This echoed earlier metal musicians’ appeals to the elevated cultural status of baroque musicians in response to stereotypes of metal culture as stupid and unskilled, which often revealed class snobbery about metal’s perceived audiences. This chapter examines drone metal as a metal avant-garde, analysing how it has been received outside metal culture, and how coverage of this marginal subgenre might affect perceptions of metal music overall. Taking jazz and experimental music magazine The Wire as a case study, the chapter describes that magazine’s reproduction of stereotypes about metal until the 2000s, when it began to cover drone metal. Thereafter the magazine became more positive about metal in general, even describing it as always having been experimental. This revisionism is particularly evident in The Wire’s repeated use of an alchemical metaphor to describe drone metal as turning ‘base metal’ into avant-garde gold.

Contrary to decades of speculation about the poor mental health of heavy metal fans, newer research (and research conducted with heavy metal fans) has begun to reveal some of the more positive and nuanced outcomes of heavy metal music and culture for well-being (for examples see Dingle and Sharman 2015; Rowe and Guerin 2018). Moving beyond a focus on the music itself, this chapter builds on notions of metal as a protective factor for mental health by exploring three domains of psychosocial well-being through a lens of heavy metal identity formations. Those being stress and coping, belonging and purpose, and certainty of self in an unpredictable world. Concluding comments propose that the internal identity dialogue of metal fans and its interplay with the embodiment of metal identities have significant value for steeling oneself against some of the most pervasive social and emotional threats of modern life.

‘How does one establish and maintain a metal band?’, ‘how does a metal band produce music?’ or ‘how does it feel to be on the stage, with hundreds of people you need to win over?’ are questions a musicologist cannot answer beyond generalisations based on secondary and/or tertiary accounts since they are usually without the means to maintain the proximity to observe, let alone experiencing first-hand. For most academics, making music is a recreational process that they need as a contrast to their research life. Thus, few have investigated the ‘private life’ of a small musical unit we call the band in general, or the metal band in particular. This chapter focuses on the joy and despair of metal musicianship, picking up new skills, and experiencing all kinds of professional and personal conflicts embedded within the metal scene of Istanbul, Turkey. The experience captured in the historiography of the metal band is handled to define the thematic context by articulating phases of metal music-making: formation, songwriting, recording, gigging, publishing and reception. The author intends to assume the stance of a film director rather than a camera to provide thick description and analysis using the habitual tools of social sciences.

Viking metal is one of the few varieties of metal music defined by the songs’ contents and visual elements rather than its sonic aspects. While a band’s music can be affiliated with folk metal, death metal or black metal, the lyrics and visual elements are clearly centred around the Viking Age, Old Norse mythology and the portrayal of Nordic nature. Time is an important feature in Viking metal lyrics and imagery and appears in the shape of a ‘past’ that can be identified as the Viking Age or as a past that lacks a time stamp. Often without a specific description of the underlying idea, the past is frequently attributed with wisdom and continuity. It appears in song lyrics and is depicted in various scenes from a seeming past or with direct reference to the Viking Age in the cover artwork of Viking metal bands. Why is the past such an important feature of Viking metal? What other aspects are deemed important? What ideological aspects do the references to the past entail? To answer these questions, I will identify defining features of Viking metal to then analyse the connotations of ‘the past’ in Viking metal.

Clothing and style are important aspects of heavy metal culture, used by musicians and fans to identify with the broader values and norms of the subculture, and to communicate difference from mainstream culture. Denim and leather garments are fundamental to metal wardrobes, with band t-shirts worn nearly universally to signify particular metal preferences. For serious metal fans, battle jackets offer a unique way to demonstrate musical taste and dedication to metal. A battle jacket is a customised denim jacket (usually with the sleeves removed) embellished with band patches, badges, studs, hand-painting and other additions. Jacket customisation has been practised by fans for nearly as long as heavy metal has existed, and thrives in contemporary metal subcultures, bolstered by online jacket forums and patch trading opportunities. Historically, battle jackets can be connected with WW2 bomber jackets and custom motorcycle patch vests. For fans, battle jackets offer a way to externalise their allegiance to metal and to reinforce a sense of ‘outsider’ status. The jackets also carry highly personal meanings for their wearers and help to articulate a sense of self that extends beyond recreational fandom.

This chapter explores scholarship on comics in education, examining the following themes: teaching with comics, teaching about comics, and teaching through creating and producing comics as a way of processing and communicating information. The chapter discusses each of these interrelated approaches in turn, examining the ways in which comics can be used in various learning contexts, demonstrating how educators, academics, and creators can work together to understand how comics might be used to encourage visual literacy and multimodal thinking for students.

This chapter assesses a pivotal moment in the formation of racial stereotypes in comics in the 1890s and 1900s, when racialized caricature became a foundational element of newspaper comics in the United States. Combining theoretical reflections on stereotypes and on the stereotypical structures of comics, the chapter offers exemplary analyses of E.W. Kemble’s, Richard F. Outcault’s, Rudolph Dirks’s, and Winsor McCay’s ongoing investments in what I call racialines: the broadly entertaining and increasingly popular confluence of the drawn line and the blackened spaces it encapsulates in the graphic rendition of stereotypical “blackness.” The chapter argues that these often conflicted investments in racist visual culture at the turn of the twentieth century facilitated the emergence of new visions of “blackness,” giving rise to a print world of stereotypical depiction where comics offered a playing field for the racialized visual imagination and taught Americans to indulge in images and narratives of “race” in ways that habitually solidified yet also, at times, irritated more conventional notions of normative “whiteness.”

This chapter examines life writing in comics through the influential zine King-Cat Comics and Stories, created and independently self-published by John Porcellino since 1989. The various forms of expression employed in King-Cat generate a kind of unmediated directness between Porcellino and the reader, where the mode of address, tone, and style is constantly modulating. King-Cat is a form of life writing that uses the zine format and, in this case, comics featured within the zine, to foreground its aporetic nature. Constantly making the reader switch gears between different kinds of information in different forms, King-Cat makes the aporetic experience almost second nature for the reader. The intra- and intertextual dynamics created by Porcellino’s life writing practice implicate the reader in an animistic medium of uncertainty, where what the text “asks” of the reader shifts in register even in sections of the same page. This kind of reading process challenges traditional linear notions of time and suspends the location of identity within a text, thus suggesting a dynamic communal vision for life writing and, perhaps, for viewing life itself.

Comics inherently encompass multiple modalities and are published across numerous platforms, whether in print or digital form. In its distinct combinations of words and images, the multimodal medium of comics has encompassed numerous formats throughout its long history – typically appearing in numerous forms simultaneously in any given era. Comics exist in single-panel and multi-panel strips within newspapers and magazines, in single-issue comic books and longer graphic novel formats and in new digital forms such as webcomics and motion comics. Comics have also been adapted to cinema and television, in both live-action and animated incarnations – often drawing on the original words and imagery of their source material in direct ways. This essay traces the history of comics as a multimodal experience from the 1800s through the twenty-first century; it also examines how other media have translated them onto various types of screens while still drawing on the specific formal qualities used by comics to tell stories. Regardless of the particular format through which readers engage with the medium, comics offer amalgamations of two separate modes of content which allow for unique meanings via the unification of words and images.

Over the last twenty years, the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world. The chapter maps out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these shows, who some of the pioneers were, and how exhibition standards have developed over time.

This chapter explores some of the practices, interactions, and preferences of readers and fans as part of their lived comics cultures. Engagement with the medium has taken various forms, from casual readership and sharing titles among friendship groups in childhood, through to being a collector. Beyond simply involving reading comics, fandom can incorporate a range of other activities as part of an enhanced commitment to the medium, and various activities are touched upon. Further, it looks at how readers, both historically and today, have accessed their comics in varied formats and across many genres in Britain and the USA, linking their lived experience with production. In looking into these issues, the chapter engages with the work of various publishers, genres, and titles. It also engages with how reading comics and participating in fandom intersects with both age and gender, which this chapter adopts as lenses to look at constructions of childhood and comics reading. A final aspect of the chapter relates to how fan and reader interactions in these spaces and participation in activities often vary according to gender. Indeed, it can be argued that comics reading and collecting has been heavily gendered regarding both production and reception.