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Comics and the City Jorn Ahrens

Comics and the City By Jorn Ahrens

Comics and the City by Jorn Ahrens


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Summary

Deals with the most important aspect of the aesthetics and narratives of comics - urban topography and environment. This collection of essays covers a variety of international approaches from the three main comic book cultures: the US, Europe, and Japan.

Comics and the City Summary

Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence by Jorn Ahrens

Comics and the City deals with possibly the most important aspect of the aesthetics and narratives of comics - urban topography and environment. This collection of essays covers a variety of international approaches from the three main comic book cultures: the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Comics and the City deals with possibly the most important aspect of the aesthetics and narratives of comics - urban topography and environment. This collection of essays covers a variety of international approaches from the three main comic book cultures: the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Not only is the city depicted repeatedly in comic books, but it also serves as a major structural and aesthetic influence on them. Comics emerged parallel to, and in several ways intertwined with, the development of modern urban mass societies at the turn of the 20th century. On the one hand, urban topoi, self-portrayals, forms of urban cultural memories, and variant readings of the city (strolling, advertising, architecture, detective stories, mass phenomena, street life, etc.,) are all incorporated into comics. On the other hand, comics have unique abilities to capture urban space and city life because of their hybrid nature, consisting of words, pictures, and sequences. These formal aspects of comics are also to be found within the cityscape itself: one can see the influence of comic book aesthetics all around us today. With chapters on the very earliest comic strips, and on artists as diverse as Alan Moore, Carl Barks, Will Eisner and Jacques Tardi, Comics and the City is an important new collection of international scholarship that will help to define the field for many years to come.

Comics and the City Reviews

This rich collection -- as multi-faceted as the twentieth-century city itself -- proves that comics are a remarkably apposite medium to convey the rich multiplicity of the urban environment. Essays here take up the ways that comics have engaged with urban language, the spatial and temporal experience of city life, aspirational (and dystopian) visual designs, and a broad range of urban types. The range of topics is remarkable, and the scholarship is first rate. -- Scott Bukatman, author of Matters of Gravity: Special Effects & Supermen in the 20th Century
Lucidly written and critically sophisticated, these essays brilliantly chart the myriad connections between comics and the urban landscapes where they were born. With cutting-edge critical readings that range freely across historical periods, narrative genres and national boundaries, Comics and the City pulls off the remarkable feat of being at once tightly focused and intellectually expansive. This volume belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who already cares about comics and anyone interested in finding out how smart comics can be. --Joseph Rusty Witek, Stetson University; author of Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar
'There is an obvious affinity between comics and the city that this welcome collection of essays explores at length from a variety of disciplinary perspectives... The anthology is broken down thematically rather than chronologically, and works all the better for it...this is an important and necessary intervention in a burgeoning area of studies.' -- New Formations

About Jorn Ahrens

Jorn Ahrens is Senior Lecturer at the Master of Arts in Euroculture at University of Gottingen and Privatdozent at the Dept. of Cultural Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin (HUB). Arno Meteling teaches cultural studies at the University of Cologne in Germany.

Table of Contents

1. Jorn Ahrens / Arno Meteling: Introduction: The History and Structure of Comics and the City; 2. Jorn Ahrens: Vanishing Cities: Urban Cliche as Narrative in 100 Bullets; 3. Jens Balzer: Hully Gee, I'm a hieroglyphe: Mobilizing the Gaze and the Invention of Comics in New York City, 1895; 4. Thomas Becker: Enki Bilal's Nikopol Trilogy: New World Order and the Shifting Boundaries between Order and Terror in the City; 5. Michael Cuntz: Paris au pluriel. The representations of Paris in Tardi's comic book writing; 6. Stefanie Diekmann: Retro-Futurism. Francois Schuiten / Benoit Peeters: Cities of the Fantastic; 7. Anthony Enns: Media, Memory, and the Metropolis in Jason Lutes' Berlin: City of Stones; 8. Ole Frahm: Every window tells a story: Remarks on the urbanity of early comic strips; 9. Henry Jenkins: The Tomorrow That Never Was: Retrofuturism in Contemporary Comics; 10. Pascal Lefevre: The volatile and moving city: Martin tom Dieck's hundert Ansichten der Speicherstadt; 11. Arno Meteling: A Tale of Two Cities: Myth, Politics, and Superheroics in Starman and Ex Machina; 12. Nick Nguyen: Superhero Cities; 13. Andreas Platthaus: Calisota or Bust - Duckburg vs. Entenhausen in the Comics of Carl Barks; 14. Bjorn Quiring: A Fiction That We Must Inhabit: Sense Production in Urban Spaces According to Alan Moore; 15. Greg Smith: The City and Will Eisner; 16. Andre Suhr: Marc-Antoine Mathieu's Comics: Seeing the City through a Frame; 17. David G. Surman: Memorize the City: Style, Subjectivity and Urban Transformation in Otomo/Oshii/Okiura; 18. William Uricchio: Batman's Gotham City and DC's Concept of Urbanity.

Additional information

NLS9780826440198
9780826440198
0826440193
Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence by Jorn Ahrens
New
Paperback
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
2010-05-11
288
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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Customer Reviews - Comics and the City