FREE STUDYING COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS PDF Karin Kukkonen | 190 pages | 10 Sep 2013 | John Wiley & Sons Inc | 9781118499924 | English | New York, United States Studying Comics and Graphic Novels | Wiley Your browser does not appear to support JavaScript, or JavaScript is currently disabled. This page uses JavaScript for certain types of content, so we strongly recommend that you enable JavaScript for browsing this site. As instructors are increasingly using comics in the classroom—and especially as more college programs are devoting entire courses to comics studies—the need for a textbook introducing the medium becomes more pronounced. Over the past several years there have been a few works that have attempted to fill this textbook gap by providing broad overviews of the various facets of the nascent discipline. In their edited collection, A Comics Studies ReaderJeet Heer and Kent Worchester pull together previously published essays that would ideally serve as supplementary texts covering the history, craft, as well as cultural and aesthetic contexts of comics. In Caped CrusadersJeffery Kahan and Stanley Stewart create a more focused textbook that uses comics, specifically superhero comics, as a way of structuring a freshman composition course. Smith attempt to cover the broad spectrum of classroom potential when it comes to comics: e. While ambitious in their own ways, each of these texts is not without its problems. The Comics Studies Reader comprises almost arbitrary—and at times, perhaps too specialized—essay choices that may not serve effectively in an introductory comics classroom. Kahan and Stewart's work reads less as a composition guide and more as an excuse to discuss comics under an assumption of pedagogy. And Duncan and Smith's The Power of Comicsfor all of its breadth, is an unbalanced offering of chapters and perspectives, some more successful than others, with several that would be tangential or even superfluous in the classroom. Hers is a relatively condensed introduction to comics studies, a text of modest length that covers only a few salient aspects of the medium. Indeed, Kukkonen's work stands in direct contrast to The Power of Comicswhich takes a shotgun approach to comics studies. The text is divided into six main chapters. The first is a brief overview of the process of reading comics, understanding the mise en page and the dynamics of entering a text's storyworld. Next, Kukkonen provides a quick overview of narratological concerns, discussing the function of the narrator and highlighting such concepts as focalization, point of view, and the distinctions between story and discourse. Her third chapter is the only one specifically to focus on genre, using this sole attempt to explore autobiographical comics. She devotes her fourth chapter to comics and adaptation, limiting herself to the adaptation of classic literary texts. Her last two sections are devoted to a quick history of the medium and to various critical approaches through which readers could approach comics e. Each chapter is structured as one might expect in a textbook: a general discussion, punctuated with supplementary commentary in the form of "sidebar" boxes of information, and then followed by a reference list, texts for further reading, and Studying Comics and Graphic Novels classroom activities. Kukkonen ends her book with an appendix of comics and graphic novels for further reading and a glossary of key terms discussed in the text. The author states in the introduction that she is specifically taking a cognitive approach to her survey, "one that draws on insights from the cognitive sciences and the neurosciences into how our minds and bodies work together. It uses the cognitive approach as a point of departure for considering different aspects of comics, their connection to other media, and their place in culture" As it turns out, this both is and is not the case. While there are some parts that foreground such a cognitive approach—one of the best examples of this comes in the first chapter, where Kukkonen discusses immersion into a comic's storyworld—the majority of the text is not necessarily, or at least not overtly, framed by cognitive theory and reads in a more or less critically neutral manner. This actually works to Kukkonen's benefit, since a theoretically biased textbook may Studying Comics and Graphic Novels seen as suspect, or at least limiting, by some instructors. This being the case, it is unclear why the author makes this assertion at the outset, although perhaps it could be explained by the fact that Kukkonen also published another book, Contemporary Comics Storytellingat around the time that Studying Comics and Graphic Novels was released, which employed a discernable cognitive lens. Indeed, if readers are interested in what cognitive narrative approaches to comics may look like, they would do well to turn to Contemporary Comics Storytellingwhich uses such fascinating series as FablesTom Strongand Bullets to explore this critical method. One of the most striking aspects of Studying Comics and Graphic Novels is its brevity. Studying Comics and Graphic Novels the one hand, Studying Comics and Graphic Novels conciseness works in the textbook's favor. Instructors who want to use an introductory or supplemental book to accompany their primary texts, the comics themselves, might actually prefer a shorter textbook that does not require too much of the class's time and energy—which is arguably the case with Duncan and Smith's The Power of Comics. Kukkonen's brief overview on how to read a comics page chapter 1 and the basics of comics as narrative chapter 2 are good examples of brief and useful introductions. However, there are parts of the text Studying Comics and Graphic Novels concision works against its intended purposes. For example, the chapter on adaptation could have benefited from a broader understanding of how adaptation actually functions in comics—and here, Kukkonen would have done well to adopt Linda Hutcheon's eclectic insights in A Theory of Adaptation —instead of limiting herself to just comics that revisit classic works of literature, such as Studying Comics and Graphic Novels found in the Classics Illustrated series and the works of Martin Rowson. In fact, her use of R. Another section that could have benefited by more thorough analysis is Studying Comics and Graphic Novels 5, "Comics and Their History. Kukkonen begins this chapter with a discussion of comics' beginnings—taking issue with analyses that focus on the Bayeux tapestry or murals of ancient Egypt—and Studying Comics and Graphic Novels quickly moves onto early twentieth-century American newspapers. She does provide a succinct rendering of early newspaper strips and the rise of the comic book as comics' primary delivery system, and she devotes a brief section of this chapter to Fredric Wertham, the Senate hearings, and the ensuing Comics Code although not providing enough detail in places and Studying Comics and Graphic Novels unclear that the Comics Magazine Association of America was expressly created as a reaction to congressional inquiry. But she completely ignores historically significant moments such as the rise of Marvel in the early s, mainstream publishers' struggles in the s, the growth of alternative comics during the s, the impact of the direct market during the s and s, and the state of the industry after the turn Studying Comics and Graphic Novels the century. In fact, Kukkonen skips from censorship in the s to a digressive section on comics and popular culture, and then onto the underground comix movement. And even her discussion of underground comix is conspicuously thin. Perhaps one should not expect a more expansive coverage of comics history in such a concise textbook, but if an author intends to present a useful history of comics, she should be prepared to provide a more complete coverage of its defining events, however skeletal. Perhaps one reason for the incomplete history is due to the author's lack of familiarity with mainstream comics in general, and superhero titles in particular. This paucity of knowledge—if, in fact, this is the case—comes out in other ways in the text. Outside of a few key events in superhero comics, such as Action Comics 1 and DC's Crisis on Infinite EarthsKukkonen seems to ignore superhero comics completely. Indeed, her appendix of "More Comics and Graphic Novels to Read" includes only four—arguably five, if you include Planetary —mainstream superhero titles from DC, and surprisingly or shockingly? Where, one may ask, are Squadron Supreme —much like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmenquoted often in the text, a commentary on the superhero genre—or highly influential narrative arcs such as Secret Wars or Civil Warjust to name a few? The only superhero title that she discusses with any kind of authority is Watchmenand that, one could argue, is a postmodern critique of the superhero genre that positions itself outside of the mainstream. By continually Studying Comics and Graphic Novels back to Watchmen as the example of superhero comics, and to the exclusion of other more obvious mainstream examples, Kukkonen is perhaps inadvertently demonstrating a scant awareness of superhero comics—a genre that has gone a long way in defining comic-book history—that limits not only her history, but her entire project. The author's genre biases are perhaps most pronounced in the type of Studying Comics and Graphic Novels she chooses to use as illustrative examples to the concepts she introduces. Her chapter on autobiographical comics is the only part of the book specifically devoted to a particular genre or type of narrative. Not only is there no sustained discussion of superhero titles; there is no substantive mentioning of other genres that have, at different times, significantly defined the comics industry, past or present.