This chapter provides an overview of the variety of contemporary digital comics.

Digital comics encompass diverse objects, both online and offline, ranging from print comics that are digitized to webcomics that resist print publications and have greater affinities with video games or animation. The chapter regroups these different formats into three main categories; it reconstructs the history of digital comics, isolating four partially overlapping phases connected to the evolution of digital culture. It traces the similarities and divergences between digital and print comics, identifying their formal specificities and contextualizing them in the analog/digital debate; and discusses their different characteristics in terms of immersion and agency. Finally, it reflects on the relationship between digital media and participatory practices on the one hand, and comics preservation on the other, elaborating on the issue of copyright infringement.

In doing so, the chapter offers a multidisciplinary and comprehensive account of the heterogeneous nature and stratified history of digital comics.

Taking the narrow notion of manga outside of Japan as its starting point, this chapter refrains from introducing the diversity of comics in Japan in support of a transculturally open approach. From a form-conscious perspective, it conceptualizes manga as a highly affective type of comics that share characteristics with non-Japanese comics far beyond the “manga” label. Following a brief historical survey of what “manga” has meant in English since the 1980s, the device of affective eyes takes center stage. Graphic narratives by Osamu Tezuka, Keiji Nakazawa, Keiko Takemiya, and Jirō Taniguchi serve as examples for how extreme close-ups of eyes have operated across periods and genres, namely, not only as representations of interiority or ethnicity, but also as material signposts and guides of visual perception: eyes draw attention, get readers involved prior to critical interpretation, establish intimacy with characters, provide a node for a page’s visual fragments, help to obscure the divide between inside and outside, subject and object, self and other. Moving gingerly into an ocular history of manga as an affective form of comics, the chapter seeks to turn away from essentialist, as well as culturalist, definitions of what manga is in favor of how it operates.

Countering popular assumptions about comics being made for and by men, this chapter begins by offering a brief alternative comics history focusing on women artists, covering comics production from the mainstream to the underground. Taking cues from recent exhibitions on women artists and comics history by women authors and artists, the chapter provides insight into the different contexts and communities, covering political cartoonists and illustrators, mainstream and underground artists.

The second half of the chapter focuses on the graphic novel and examines works by Lynda Barry and a new generation of women comics artists, Ebony Flowers and Weng Pixin. It elaborates on the possibilities of reading the graphic novels in light of the rich history of women artists and comics storytelling, building bridges between individual and collective stories while pointing out the innovations unfolding through drawing, writing, and collage.

Considering genres from a meta-perspective, this chapter elaborates on the mechanisms of comics genres, their specific codes, and their differences and similarities with genres in other media. It shows how genres are a practical tool for categorizing fiction and even more useful in highlighting the economic and cultural underpinnings of publishing contexts and media. As already suggested in Chapter 2, comics genres are particularly useful for understanding the relationships between comics and other media since they help delineate the parameters of the medium-specificity, or mediageny, of comics.

The chapter turns to the hybrid genre of the superhero and uses Fantastic Four as an example to examine the way genres evolve and are redefined by their users over time. It also elaborates on the long history of comics producing meaning for their readers by openly performing genres in addition to adhering to them. In showing how genre has become a less defining entity in contemporary comics production since it is often replaced by transmedial franchises or trademark styles and stories attached to successful authors and artists, the chapter also delineates the limits of generic analysis. For this, it turns to Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics and the Mignolaverse in general.

Discourses about comics focus very often on their narrative dimension to the extent that they are frequently considered as narratives per se. Driven by the ambition to rethink established formulas, alternative publishers show examples of works that invite to move beyond this approach. This chapter looks at comics that do not tell a story (in the narrow sense of the word) or question familiar narratives. It focuses on abstract comics or comics made of series of unrelated images. Building on the works of creators that tend to remain under the radar such as Rosaire Appel, Renée French, Tim Gaze, or Bianca Stone, this chapter delineates possibilities for understanding these creations and the specific kinds of pleasure they generate. By highlighting their links with other media, in particular music and poetry, it emphasizes how the reader’s response is closely linked to their horizon of expectations. Finally, it shows that the study of comics that are at the limits of narration allow to reassess how we see comics in general, including those that privilege the story.

The aesthetics of comics is deeply linked to the history of media serialities. Modern comics were born in the newspaper and followed its periodic rhythms and exploited its logic of reader loyalty. The two historically dominant models of comics, the comic strip and the comic book, are each linked to a publication medium or format – the newspaper and the magazine, respectively – and to their logics of consumption. Many characteristics of the comic strip – the principle of gag variations, the importance of generic conventions, recurring characters, spin-off series, crossover logics – can be reinterpreted according to the industrial and media contexts in which they appear and which are aesthetically exploited by the authors. Reflection on the seriality of comics can therefore not be limited to analyses of plots or modes of graphic narration. It needs to consider media logics, including the industrial and commercial dynamics and modes of consumption they encourage. Ultimately, comics seriality engages with, on the one hand, the principles of generic seriality, which thematize these logics of production and consumption. On the other, diegetic seriality, of the recurrent character and the fictional universe, also determines the strategic choices of industrial and media players.

As popular print ephemera, comics hold a complex and precarious relationship to preservation and duration, which has marked their status as “archivable” (or “non-archivable”) materials. This chapter sketches some of the different ways that institutions, producers, and audiences have coped with this fragility and have defined practices of preservation and collection. The chapter subsequently analyzes comics in libraries and archives, collecting practices by readers and fans, uses of archives in comics production. At each step, it pays particular attention to the importance of materiality, senses, formats, manipulation in the preservation of comics, connecting them to matters of copyright, library policies, and commercial interests. The importance of these parameters is set out against changing notions of archives and archival practice, especially under the impulse of their digital transformation. The broader picture considers the importance of medium specificity in an age of online archival plenitude.

What makes a comic a graphic novel? Is it having a long, complete narrative? Being published as a book? Having a complex storytelling technique that leads to literary awards and critical acclaim? All these criteria have been deployed at some time or another to define the graphic novel, and they recur throughout this chapter as we follow a history of the ways in which comics have been hailed as novels since the mid-nineteenth century. With an emphasis on the United States, key moments are considered such as the woodcut novels of the 1920s and 1930s, the start of the direct market in the 1970s, the first graphic novel boom of the 1980s, and the popularity of graphic novels in the twenty-first century. Notable texts, creators, and publishers are discussed, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Raw Books & Graphics, and we see the changing economic contexts out of which graphic novels have emerged. This chapter ends by outlining how the Internet has transformed the production, distribution, and selling of graphic novels, with contemporary creators unshackled from the idea that a graphic novel has to be a book.

Until the 1990s, comic books rarely served anything other than a deeply conflicted, even paradoxical role in American public libraries. With rare exceptions, comic books as actual objects did not exist in libraries, but as emblems, comics appeared repeatedly in the professional and public conversations in which librarians participated. To librarians of the mid-century, comic books served the important role of symbolizing everything that libraries opposed, thereby reinforcing librarians’ sense of their own professional identity. Comics represented first and foremost an ephemeral and inferior product of junk culture that took up the finite amount of time and attention that children were imagined to have to spend on reading, meaning that librarians saw them as something that interfered with real reading of legitimate books. Further, comics represented a threat to the authority of children’s librarians, who had crafted a professional identity based on their knowledge of good literature for children. Because comics were imagined to interfere with children’s interest in such literature and because children could access comics without librarian expertise, librarians saw comics as a significant threat. However, comics themselves presented a much more complicated vision of literature, literacy, and even public libraries.

This chapter contextualizes narrative drawing, first identifying the types of drawing that are specific to comics. It proposes that the comics medium intervenes in the long history of drawing, by introducing polygraphy as a recurrent feature of comics. Referring to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony (or multiple voices) in the novel, polygraphy accounts for the techniques of accumulating diverse graphic indices of the labor and ideas of drafters and comics producers and distributors. The chapter shows how polygraphy produces comics, considering the work of William Hogarth, Katsushika Hokusai, Rodolphe Töpffer, Marie Duval, George Herriman, Winsor McCay, and Osamu Tezuka. Through this cast of creators, the chapter also foregrounds important moments in comics history such as the boom in periodical print in the nineteenth century, the influence of acting and performance practices, and, later, movie. This chapter equips readers with the necessary tools to understand the fundamental means of visualizing stories in comics – drawing – and offers a comics history contextualized through relevant developments in popular visual and print culture.

The introduction offers an overview of recent scholarly discourse and approaches to comics and graphic novels. It provides brief close readings of panels from Rodolphe Töpffer’s L’Histoire d’Albert, the anonymous comic strip, Lucy and Sophie Say Good Bye, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, and Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters, which apply comics methodologies of reading language (Hannah Miodrag) and analyzing graphic novels (Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey), among others. To further highlight the scope of comics analyses across the variety of forms of the medium, the introduction discusses the comics in the light of Rita Felski’s concepts of knowledge and enchantment.

The introduction ends with an overview of the Companion’s seventeen chapters, from the first part on Forms, to the second one on Readings, and ending with Uses.

Literary adaptions in comics are not a recent phenomenon, but until recently the cultural status of this kind of work has always been very low, and a certain distrust has dominated the debates for many decades, the main reason of this suspicion being the fear that “fidelity” to the adapted model might jeopardize the proper creative possibilities of the adapting medium. More and more recent examples from the graphic novel field, which aims at becoming a literary practice itself, do not only show that literary adaptations can be very valuable, they also demonstrate that it is possible to use the notion of fidelity itself in highly creative ways. Taking its departure from specific case studies, Olivier Deprez’s adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle (2003), Paul Karasik (script) and David Mazzuchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (2005), Simon Grennan’s adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (2015), and Sébastien Conard’s adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Watt (2019), this chapter examines the most important techniques that can be used to transfer a novel into a visual narrative in print. It pays particular attention to the visuality of the text as it is transferred from one medium to another (typography, page layout, text as drawing).

Different literary strategies tied to the peculiarities of the city itself have been used to write Mexico City. This is a roughly chronological attempt to understand the dialog between the materiality of the city and the mirrors literature has held to it. We first focus on distance as obstacle to reach Mexico City––both for Aztecs and later for the conquistadors–– but also allowing authors to encompass the whole city. Distance is embodied in the gaze of the traveler who discovers the city anew as does, for instance, Frances Calderón de la Barca. As the texts of these visitors prove, the city is not only extensional, it is always conditioned by the past, modeling, and shaping the present. Offering a total view of the city became more challenging as the 20th Century progressed. This however is achieved in the novel, from Federico Gamboa to Carlos Fuentes. After the 60’s, fiction tends more and more to partial accounts of the metropolis and non-fiction privileges moments when the city beats in unison, as exemplified by Elena Poniatowska´s work. Mexico City has been portrayed as an urban tsunami. Extensive areas remain largely absent from the citys literature and cultural production.

This chapter follows microcosmic worlds figured in the skyscraper across three “Chicago Schools”: in architecture, in urban sociology, and in political economy. Three novels map three historical phases: Frank Norris’s The Pit (1902), the financialization of wheat in Chicago’s early skyscrapers; Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the “color line” and the public sphere on Chicago’s South Side; and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), the landscapes of oil and steel in Dubai. In each the skyscraper appears fleetingly on the horizon, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as it shifts scales from stage to prop. The three corresponding “Chicago Schools” are: the architects of early skyscrapers assembled around the slogan “form follows function”; the group of urban sociologists that included St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis (1945); and the economists who supplied the neoliberal precepts by which oil wealth was converted into speculative real estate in Dubai and elsewhere. The article concludes with a coda that records, with reference to the work of urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod and the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, the stark divisions of labor that haunt these three “Chicagos” and their skyscrapers, from Lake Michigan to the Persian Gulf.