The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions

by Alison Halsall (Editor), Jonathan Warren (Editor)

Overview

An essential volume that acknowledges and celebrates the power of LGBTQ+ comics

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496841346
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	09/20/2022
Pages:	364
Product dimensions:	6.13(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Alison Halsall is associate professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto, Canada. She is editor of White Rose and the Red, and her work has been published in such edited volumes and journals as Cultural and Creative Industries of Childhood and Youth; Graphic Perspectives on Health and Embodiment; and INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. She specializes in Victorian and modernist literatures, with a particular emphasis on visual cultures, which includes the study of paintings and illustrations, contemporary film, comics, and graphic narratives. Jonathan Warren is associate professor and former chair in the English Department at York University. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and his work has been published in such journals as the Henry James Review, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, and the American Century. A specialist in literary modernism and its precursors, including especially American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he has taught York's massively popular undergraduate and graduate courses in comics since inventing them two decades ago.

Editorial Reviews

08/29/2022

Halsall and Warren, both professors at York University, bring together a rigorous collection of essays that examine the rich history of LGBTQ comics, from the mid-1960s to the present. The essays “represent and manifest the collective urgency of queer togetherness,” as the editors write in their introduction. Michelle Ann Abate’s “Rude Girls and Dangerous Women” traces the history of lesbian comics in the 1980s and 1990s and the “queer female anger” and defiance that resonated in publications from such pioneers as Alison Bechdel and Jennifer Camper. Sheena C. Howard’s “BLK Cartoons” is a deep dive into the ahead-of-its-time comics produced by American monthly BLK Magazine in the late 1980s and early 1990s that explored Black lesbian identity, and “Comics, Community, and Kickass Women” documents a conversation between Halsall, Warren, and Jennifer Camper—“Creating evil or flawed queer characters is a privilege that comes only with having many opportunities for stories about multitudes of LGBTQ+ experiences,” according to Camper. Halsall and Warren feature an impressive diversity of perspectives, examining a wealth of groundbreaking comics that have, over the years, combined politics and personal experience. Smart and wide-ranging, this is a worthy contribution to the history of comics. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Halsall and Warren's comprehensive Reader invites scholars of comics, queerness, and childhoods to imagine diversity anew and to visualize, whether in cartoons or in the imagination, the future of LGBTQ+ comics.--James Joshua Coleman "The Lion and the Unicorn"

This collection is well-worth a cover to cover read. Each author explores a different aspect of queer comics both in terms of queer history, as well as in terms of queer theory. It is exciting to see this anthology in the world and its influence on queer comics scholars will be profound.--Christopher M. Roman "International Journal of Comic Art blog"

[Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren] feature an impressive diversity of perspectives. . . . Smart and wide-ranging, this is a worthy contribution to the history of comics.-- "Publishers Weekly"

The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader is a major intervention in comics studies. The essays extend the context of LGBTQ+ comics beyond 'comix, ' beyond the underground or alternative, where they have historically been understood. They show how comics are integral to LGBTQ+ cultures, how they work to create those cultures in addition to representing them, and how comics themselves as a form instantiate queerness. This is a forward-looking volume that maps the state of the field while also pointing towards exciting new directions.--Janine Utell, author of The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In

From the Publisher