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The scholarship on comic books as an object of study has exploded in recent years with volumes such as Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic in the 1990s (2007), Bradford Wright's Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (2001), and Joseph Witek's Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (1989). In Germany, the drive to legitimize comics, demanding they be taken seriously as a medium, was rendered most visible by the Comic-Manifesto issued by comic creators and publishers at the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin in 2013. And while the study of German-language comics languishes in their own countries, editor Lynn Marie Kutch's volume Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies: History, Pedagogy, Theory attempts to fill a void in the English-language study of these comics. As Brett Sterling rightly asserts in his own chapter, this dearth of academic literature stems from lingering perceptions of comics being solely for children or the unsophisticated (241). Kutch concurs, suggesting in her introduction that this notion emerged as popular American comic genres appeared to Germans little more than "fast food for readers" (3). Kutch goes on to argue that, since that early postwar experience, not only has the medium grown up, but also that German comics are themselves art alongside the canonical works of literature, painting, and film (5).
Though chapters in this volume...