Exploring an overlooked era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s shines a new light on what was a dark decade, but an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults.Blurring the lines between high art and popular consumption, artists of the Italian comics scene went beyond passively documenting history and began acti...

Exploring an overlooked era of Italian history roiled by domestic terrorism, political assassination, and student protests, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s shines a new light on what was a dark decade, but an unexpectedly prolific and innovative period among artists of comics intended for adults.Blurring the lines between high art and popular consumption, artists of the Italian comics scene went beyond passively documenting history and began act...

Mushroom Heads begins and ends in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where the antiquarian Levi Colombia finances an expedition to the equatorial Amazon led by Corto Maltese and Professor Steiner, on the trail of the legendary Eldorado. Banana Conga is based on a story by American writer Art Buchwald, taken by Pratt and reworked to explore the idea of a foreign presence forced to leave Mosquito, a small town on the east coast of Honduras. The dangerous and lethal enemy...

The secret of Tristan Bantam: Tristan, who has inherited precious papers that tell of the lost kingdom of Mû, has a dream that portends an apparently incomprehensible fate. At Paramaribo, in the sultry heat of Dutch Guyana, Corto finds himself entangled in a sordid tale about a stolen inheritance, while surrounded by such strange characters as Kerster, an unscrupulous lawyer; Jeremiah Steiner, a former university professor, and Madame Java, “hotel” manager and expert knife...

With this book Pratt leaves behind the short story form he'd used for twenty-one interrelated tales and presents a truly epic graphic novel. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Corto Maltese is engaged by the Red Lanterns--a Chinese secret society made up entirely of women--to find an armored train laden with gold that belonged to the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II. They aren't the only ones lusting after the treasure. The adventure, which shifts from the hi...

The protagonist of this tale, actually, is not the 18-year-old Corto, but Rasputin, a deserter from a Siberian rifle regiment, and the writer Jack London, who was a war correspondent in the region at that time. London is already friends with Corto and introduces the sailor to the unpredictable Russian, who even as a young man kills with disconcerting ease and is ready to lie and betray without hesitation. It is, however, "the beginning of a beautiful friendship" that continues throughout t...

The autobiography opens with Cellini's early life in Florence, where he was born in 1500. He describes his artistic training and his natural talent for working with metals, which led to his early career as a goldsmith. His skill soon gained him recognition, and he moved in influential circles, serving popes, kings, and nobles. Throughout the narrative, Cellini portrays himself as a passionate, proud, and sometimes hot-headed individual, often embroiled in feuds with rivals and authorities....

Religion and liberty are often thought to be mutual enemies: if religion has a natural ally, it is authoritarianism--not republicanism or democracy. But in this book, Maurizio Viroli, a leading historian of republican political thought, challenges this conventional wisdom. He argues that political emancipation and the defense of political liberty have always required the self-sacrifice of people with religious sentiments and a religious devotion to liberty. This is particularly the case wh...

Despite the growing importance of heroines across literary culture—and sales figures that demonstrate both young adult and adult females are reading about heroines in droves, particularly in graphic novels, comic books, and YA literature—few scholarly collections have examined the complex relationships between the representations of heroines and the changing societal roles for both women and men.In Heroines of Comic Books and Literature: Portrayals in Popular Culture, editors Maja ...

This book explores the secrets of the extraordinary editorial success of Jacobus Acontius' Satan's Stratagems, an important book that intrigued readers and outraged religious authorities across Europe. Despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, the work, first published in Basel in 1565, was a resounding success. For the next century it was republished dozens of times in different historical context, from France to Holland to England. The work sowed the idea that religious perse...

This is a complete reference work to the history of Batman big screen works, from the 1940s serials through the campy 1960s TV show and film, and up through the series of Warner Bros. summer blockbusters that climaxed with Christopher Nolan's 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises. Chapters on each Batman feature include extensive film and production credits, a production history, and a critical analysis of the movie relative to the storied history of the Batman character. The book also ...

The 1959 purge of the Latvian national communists has long been cast in black-and-white terms: Russification and resistance; victimizers and victims. Conventional wisdom holds that Nikita Khrushchev was behind the purge. After all, he was the Soviet premier; he stopped in Riga just a few weeks before; even the leading victim of the purge, Eduards Berklavs, labeled Khrushchev the culprit. For the first time, William D. Prigge’s penetrating analysis challenges this view and untangles the int...