Comics and Stuff / / Henry Jenkins.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2020 English
• VerfasserIn: Jenkins, Henry,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 104 color illustrations

Considers how comics display our everyday stuff—junk drawers, bookshelves, attics—as a way into understanding how we represent ourselves nowFor most of their history, comics were widely understood as disposable—you read them and discarded them, and the pulp paper they were printed on decomposed over time. Today, comic books have been rebranded as graphic novels—clothbound high-gloss volumes that can be purchased in bookstores, checked out of libraries, and displayed proudly on bookshelves. They are reviewed by serious critics and studied in university classrooms. A medium once considered trash has been transformed into a respectable, if not elite, genre.While the American comics of the past were about hyperbolic battles between good and evil, most of today’s graphic novels focus on everyday personal experiences. Contemporary culture is awash with stuff. They give vivid expression to a culture preoccupied with the processes of circulation and appraisal, accumulation and possession. By design, comics encourage the reader to scan the landscape, to pay attention to the physical objects that fill our lives and constitute our familiar surroundings. Because comics take place in a completely fabricated world, everything is there intentionally. Comics are stuff; comics tell stories about stuff; and they display stuff.When we use the phrase “and stuff” in everyday speech, we often mean something vague, something like “etcetera.” In this book, stuff refers not only to physical objects, but also to the emotions, sentimental attachments, and nostalgic longings that we express—or hold at bay—through our relationships with stuff.In Comics and Stuff, his first solo authored book in over a decade, pioneering media scholar Henry Jenkins moves through anthropology, material culture, literary criticism, and art history to resituate comics in the cultural landscape. Through over one hundred full-color illustrations, using close readings of contemporary graphic novels, Jenkins explores how comics depict stuff and exposes the central role that stuff plays in how we curate our identities, sustain memory, and make meaning. Comics and Stuff presents an innovative new way of thinking about comics and graphic novels that will change how we think about our stuff and ourselves.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction Comics and Stuff— Core Concepts -- 1 How to Look at Stuff From Still Life to Graphic Novel -- Collecting Stories -- 2 “What Are You Collecting Now?” Seth and His Finds -- 3 “The Stuff of Dreams” Kim Deitch’s Remarkable Displays -- 4 Wonders, Curiosities, and Diversions Accumulation in Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland -- 5 “Monsters” and Other “Things” Emil Ferris’s Transformative Vision -- Object Lessons -- 6 Scrapbooks and Army Surplus C. Tyler’s You’ll Never Know -- 7 Sorting, Culling, Hoarding, and Cleaning Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? -- 8 “Contemptible Collectibles”: Confronting the Residual in Jeremy Love’s Bayou -- Epilogue Unpacking My Comics -- Acknowledgments -- List of Figures -- References -- Index -- About the Author