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

by Jörn Ahrens (Editor), Arno Meteling (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826440198
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/11/2010
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jorn Ahrens teaches cultural sociology at Giessen University, Germany. Arno Meteling teaches literature at the Westfalian Wilhelms-University Muenster in Germany.

Table of Contents

Notes on the Contributors vii

Introduction Jörn Ahrens Arno Meteling 1

I History, Comics, and the City

1 “Hully Gee, I'm a Hieroglyphe” — Mobilizing the Gaze and the Invention of Comics in New York City, 1895 Jens Balzer 19

2 Every Window Tells a Story: Remarks on the Urbanity of Early Comic Strips Ole Frahm 32

3 The City as Archive in Jason Lutes's Berlin Anthony Enns 45

II Refrofuturistic and Nostalgic Cities

4 “The Tomorrow That Never Was”—Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter Henry Jenkins 63

5 Remembrance of Things to Come: François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters's Cities of the Fantastic Stefanie Diekmann 84

6 Paris au pluriel: Depictions of the French Capital in Jacques Tardi's Comic Book Writing Michael Cuntz 101

III Superhero Cities

7 The Batman's Gotham City&Trade;: Story, Ideology, Performance William Uricchio 119

8 A Tale of Two Cities: Politics and Superheroics in Starman and Ex Machina Arno Meteling 133

9 The Radiant City: New York as Ecotopia in Promethea, Book V Anthony Lioi 150

10 “I Am New York”—Spider-Man, New York City and the Marvel Universe Jason Bainbridge 163

IV Locations of Crime

11 Will Eisner, Vaudevillian of the Cityscape Greg M. Smith 183

12 “A Fiction That We Must Inhabit”—Sense Production in Urban Spaces according to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell Björn Quiring 199

13 The Ordinary Urban: 100 Bullets and the Clichés of Mass Culture Jörn Ahrens 214

V The City-Comic as a Mode of Reflection

14 Seeing the City through a Frame: Marc-Antoine Mathieu's Acquefacques Comics André Suhr 231

15 Calisota or Bust: Duckburg vs. Entenhausen in the Comics of Carl Barks Andreas Platthaus 247

16 Enki Bilal's Woman Trap: Reflections on Authorship under the Shifting Boundaries between Order and Terror in the City Thomas Becker 265

Editorial Reviews

'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.'

"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

From the Publisher