Comics Memory: Archives and Styles

by Maaheen Ahmed (Editor), Benoït Crucifix (Editor)

Overview

Despite the boom in scholarship in both Comics Studies and Memory Studies, the two fields rarely interact—especially with issues beyond the representation of traumatic and autobiographical memories in comics. With a focus on the roles played by styles and archives—in their physical and metaphorical manifestations—this edited volume offers an original intervention, highlighting several novel ways of thinking about comics and memory as comics memory. Bringing together scholars as well as cultural actors, the contributions combine studies on European and North American comics and offer a representative overview of the main comics genres and forms, including superheroes, Westerns, newspaper comics, diary comics, comics reportage and alternative comics. In considering the many manifestations of memory in comics as well as the functioning and influence of institutions, public and private practices, the book exemplifies new possibilities for understanding the complex entanglements of memory and comics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319917450
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/02/2018
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
Edition description:	1st ed. 2018
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Maaheen Ahmed is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University, Belgium. She is currently working on possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between comics and different kinds of memories, ranging from personal memories to collective and medium-based ones. Her books include Openness of Comics (2016) and Le Statut culturel de la bande dessinée/The Cultural Standing of Comics (2017), co-edited with Stéphanie Delneste and Jean-Louis Tilleuil. She recently received an ERC Starting Grant for her project on children in European comics.

Benoît Crucifix is a FRS-FNRS doctoral fellow at the University of Liège and UCLouvain, Belgium. His thesis focuses on the cultural memory of comics in the contemporary graphic novel. His research on comics memory has been published in European Comic Art, The Comics Grid, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and Inks. He is a member of the ACME Comics Research Group and of the editorial board of Comicalités.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Untaming Comics Memory (Maaheen Ahmed & Benoît Crucifix)

Part One: Remembering

2. Portrait of the Artist as a Nostalgic: Seth's It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken (Giorgio Busi Rizzi)

3. ‘It’s All Come Flooding Back’: Memories of Childhood Comics (Mel Gibson)

Part Two: Memory Styles

4. Archives and Oral History in Emmanuel Guibert’s Le Photographe (Bettina Egger)

5. The Ever-Shifting Wall: Edmond Baudoin and the ‘Continuous Poem’ of Autobiography (Pedro Moura)

Part Three: Comics Embodiment

6. Keep Out, Or Else: Diary as Body in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Cruddy (Rachel R. Miller)

7. The Un-erotic Dancer: Sylvie Rancourt’s Melody (Eleanor Ty)

Part Four: Reading Comics History

8. Panique en Atlantique: Bridging Personal and Collective Memories of L’Association and Comics History (Christian Reyns-Chikuma)

9. Comics History and the Question of Delinquency: The Case of Criminal (Christopher Pizzino)

Part Five: Archival Memory

10. Sons and Grandsons of Origins: Narrative Memory in Marvel Superhero Comics (Jean-Matthieu Méon)

11. A Trip Down Memory Lane: Reprints and Canonization of Morris’ Lucky Luke Series (Nicolas Martinez)

12. Selective Memory: Art History and the Comic Strip Work of Jack B. Yeats (Michael Connerty)

Part Six: Archiving by Other Means

13. The Marie Duval Archive: Memory and the Development of the Comic Strip Canon (Simon Grennan)

14. The Tremendous Treasure: The Curious Problem of Preserving Belgian Comics Heritage (Roel Daenen)

15. Fanzines and Swedish Comics Memory (Gunnar Krantz)

16. Store Memory (Philippe Capart)

17. Coda: A User Guide to Comics Memory (Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix)

Editorial Reviews

Comics Memory succeeds at addressing the role of memory in comics and the role of comics in memory from new vantage points, opening up new avenues for research on the subject. … it also proposes new methodologies to examine memory and memory culture more generally.” (Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam, Image & Narrative, Vol. 20 (1), 2019)

From the Publisher