Since the publication of The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo by Tom Feelings, more African American creators have used graphic narratives to explore key moments in colonial and US history. These graphic stories address the painful legacies of anti-Black violence and the long history of racial injustice, using the power of comics to both confront the past and offer visions for the future.From the Middle Passage and slavery to the civil rights movement and today’s fi...

Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and ...

Authorizing Superhero Comics examines the comic book superhero as a lasting phenomenon of US popular serial storytelling. Moving beyond linear- or creator-centered models of genre development, Daniel Stein identifies authorization conflicts that have driven the genre’s evolution from the late 1930s to the present. These conflicts include paratextually mediated exchanges between officially authorized comic book producers and, alternatively, authorized fans that trouble the distinct...

This volume examines the emergence of modern popular culture between the 1830s and the 1860s, when popular storytelling meant serial storytelling and when new printing techniques and an expanding infrastructure brought serial entertainment to the masses. Analyzing fiction and non-fiction narratives from the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Brazil, Popular Culture—Serial Culture offers a transnational perspective on border-crossing serial genres f...

This book uniquely combines cutting-edge medical, psychological, and sociocultural topics pertinent to eating disorders. In the medical realm, the book focuses on Eating Disorders’ newly investigated associations with ADHD and sleep disorders, and on innovative treatments of osteoporosis in anorexia nervosa. Novel contributions in the psychological realm address families’ trans-generational transmission of Eating Disorders-related difficulties and novel internet-based treatments for such f...

Music Is My Life is the first comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong's autobiographical writings (including his books, essays, and letters) and their relation to his musical and visual performances. Combining approaches from autobiography theory, literary criticism, intermedia studies, cultural history, and musicology, Daniel Stein reconstructs Armstrong's performances of his life story across various media and for different audiences, complicating the monolithic and hagiograph...

This book offers the first comprehensive study of the many interfaces shaping the relationship between comics and videogames. It combines in-depth conceptual reflection with a rich selection of paradigmatic case studies from contemporary media culture.The editors have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars working at the interstices of comics studies and game studies to explore two interrelated areas of inquiry: The first part of the book focuses on hybrid mediali...

How digital visual effects in film can be used to support storytelling: a guide for scriptwriters and students.Computer-generated effects are often blamed for bad Hollywood movies. Yet when a critic complains that "technology swamps storytelling" (in a review of Van Helsing, calling it "an example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood computer-generated effects movies"), it says more about the weakness of the story than the strength of the technology. In D...

In 2001, yet another adaptation of the Superman comic book came to television. Lasting 10 seasons, Smallville took the traditional Superman story and turned it into an American teen action drama about Clark Kent's life at high school-before he donned the famous blue tights and red cape. Instead of depicting Superman's clashes with criminals in Metropolis, the show focused on how Clark first developed his powers and learned to cope with girls, school, and teenage angst. Although la...

Designed to trick the eye and stimulate the imagination, special effects have changed the way we look at films and the worlds created in them. Computer-generated imagery (CGI), as seen in Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Men in Black, and The Matrix, is just the latest advance in the evolution of special effects. Even as special effects have been marveled at by millions, this is the first investigation of their broader cultural reception...

Over the past forty years, American film has entered into a formal interaction with the comic book. Such comic book adaptations as Sin City, 300, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World have adopted components of their source materials' visual style. The screen has been fractured into panels, the photographic has given way to the graphic, and the steady rhythm of cinematic time has evolved into a far more malleable element. In other words, films have begun to look like c...

The third edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text provides an up-to-date introduction to the most important issues in documentary history and criticism. A new chapter, "I Want to Make a Documentary: Where Do I Start?" guides readers through the steps of planning and preproduction and includes an example of a project proposal for a film that went on to win awards at major festivals. Designed for students in any field that makes use of visual evidence and persuasive strategies, Introduct...