Comics Memory: Archives and Styles [Hardcover]

Despite the boom in scholarship in both Comics Studies and Memory Studies, the two fields rarely interactespecially with issues beyond the representation of traumatic and autobiographical memories in comics. With a focus on the roles played by styles and archivesin their physical and metaphorical manifestationsthis edited volume offers an original intervention, highlighting several novel ways of thinking about comics and memory as comics memory. Bringing together scholars as well as cultural actors, the contributions combine studies on European and North American comics and offer a representative overview of the main comics genres and forms, including superheroes, Westerns, newspaper comics, diary comics, comics reportage and alternative comics. In considering the many manifestations of memory in comics as well as the functioning and influence of institutions, public and private practices, the book exemplifies new possibilities for understanding the complex entanglements of memory and comics.

1. Introduction: Untaming Comics Memory (Maaheen Ahmed & Beno?t Crucifix)

Part One: Remembering

2. Portrait of the Artist as a Nostalgic: Seth's It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken (Giorgio Busi Rizzi)

3. Its All Come Flooding Back: Memories of Childhood Comics (Mel Gibson)

Part Two: Memory Styles

5. The Ever-Shifting Wall: Edmond Baudoin and the Continuous Poem of Autobiography (Pedro Moura)

Part Three: Comics Embodiment

6. Keep Out, Or Else: Diary as Body in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Cruddy (Rachel R. Miller)

7. The Un-erotic Dancer: Sylvie Rancourts Melody (Eleanor Ty)

Part Foulӟ