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.

This chapter begins by discussing a lost Toni Morrison manuscript about two different parts of this neighborhood that surrounds Basin Street, Storyville, and Congo Square, and from there it sketches the early history of both of these as well as of nearby Tremé. In each of these sections, after outlining their histories, there then follows a literature-based delineation of the major themes associated with the areas. Given that African-American music is understood to have begun in Congo Square, and that Jazz itself came to widespread attention through Storyville, the function of music is a key theme through all of this literature, and, more to the point, the particular function of music to encode and preserve memory. Congo Square itself will be discussed through the travel-writing by which visitors reported on what they saw there. Next, the chapter takes up the lore around the idea of the mixed-race “seductress,” as propagated in popular fiction, that drove the rise of the red-light district in what became Storyville. This latter territory forms the basis of Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter and Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia. From there, it discusses the major writing of Tremé through Tom Dent, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Albert Woodfox.