Content area
Full Text
Annessa Ann Babic, ed., Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014). 272 pp. ISBN: 978-1- 61147-556-2 (hardback, $85.00, £51.95)
This anthology is an intriguing and ambitious - perhaps overambitious - contribution to the ongoing disciplinary formation of comics studies in the academy with a series of essays on the role of comics in reconstructing history and in debates on literary value. While the publication of any serious comics criticism is worth celebrating, there are several weaknesses with this collection that cannot be overlooked.
Let us start with the positives. Annessa Ann Babic has pulled together an impressive series of readings, which, individually and collectively, generally work in dialogue with extant scholarship. The focus is overwhelmingly on issues of representation - whether historical, national or political. In this regard, Lynda Goldstein's contribution, 'Graphic/Narrative/History: Defining the Essential Experience(s) of 9/11' (123-140), stands out: Goldstein asks how we can meet the challenge of processing major contemporary events that are already visually overdetermined by mass media.
Melanie Huska's 'Image and Text in Service of the Nation: Historically Themed Comic Books as Civic Education in 1980s Mexico' (65-78) provides a welcome example of non-Anglophone/Francophone comics. Huska carefully and diligently contextualises the use of historical comics that mixed fact and fiction (much as a lot of literary historical fiction does) in their narration of significant national events and were used to promote literacy and articulate a (state-approved) sense of nationhood.
James C. Lethbridge's 'Comics as Containment: No Laughing Matter'...