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Queer about Comics
Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2018
This special issue explores the intersection of queer theory and comics studies. The contributors provide new theories of how comics represent and reconceptualize queer sexuality, desire, intimacy, and eroticism, while also investigating how the comic strip, as a hand-drawn form, queers literary production and demands innovative methods of analysis from the fields of literary, visual, and cultural studies. 

Contributors examine the relationships among reader, creator, and community across a range of comics production, including mainstream superhero comics, independent LGBTQ comics, and avant-garde and experimental feminist narratives. They also address queer forms of identification elicited by the classic X-Men character Rogue, the lesbian grassroots publishing networks that helped shape Alison Bechdel’s oeuvre, and the production of black queer fantasy in the Black Panther comic book series, among other topics. 

Contributors andré carrington, Anthony Michael D’Agostino, Ramzi Fawaz, Margaret Galvan, Yetta Howard, Joshua Abraham Kopin, Kate McCullough, Darieck Scott, Jessica Q. Stark, Shelley Streeby, Rebecca Wanzo
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front cover of Queer Compassion in 15 Comics
Queer Compassion in 15 Comics
Edited by Phillip Joy, Andrew Thomas, and Megan Aston
Lever Press, 2024
This unique comic anthology takes its readers on a journey through different art styles and queer perspectives, from first Prides to multi-generational friendships to finding community among chosen families. The comics in Queer Compassion offer kaleidoscopic insight into the colorful, heartbreaking, empowering, funny, and diverse lives of queer people around the world by centering compassion as a way to inhabit and build community. 

These comics are created by queer artists for queer audiences and with the intent for queer self-expression and representation. Social science researchers spoke to  diverse members of LGBTQ+ communities to explore their beliefs about and experiences of compassion. Fifteen queer comics were commissioned to illustrate those stories, making the process of creating each comic a unique collaboration between researchers and artists, blending data exploring the meanings of compassion for queer folks with the creativity, passion, and understanding of a queer comic artist. 

These stories reflect not only the harsh realities that many queer people face but they also uplift queer voices, illustrate strength, and capture queer resolve to make life more compassionate. Queer people, living in a cis-heteronormative world, often face experiences of marginalization, discrimination, stigma, trauma, and invisibility in everyday life. Queer Compassion shows that its titular emotion can be the bridge that brings understanding and creates community connections — a bridge that is particularly needed at this time. 
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front cover of The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel
The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel
Stephen E. Tabachnick
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Many Jewish artists and writers contributed to the creation of popular comics and graphic novels, and in The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel, Stephen E. Tabachnick takes readers on an engaging tour of graphic novels that explore themes of Jewish identity and belief.

The creators of Superman (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), Batman (Bob Kane and Bill Finger), and the Marvel superheroes (Stan Lee and Jack Kirby), were Jewish, as was the founding editor of Mad magazine (Harvey Kurtzman). They often adapted Jewish folktales (like the Golem) or religious stories (such as the origin of Moses) for their comics, depicting characters wrestling with supernatural people and events. Likewise, some of the most significant graphic novels by Jews or about Jewish subject matter deal with questions of religious belief and Jewish identity. Their characters wrestle with belief—or nonbelief—in God, as well as with their own relationship to the Jews, the historical role of the Jewish people, the politics of Israel, and other issues related to Jewish identity.

In The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel, Stephen E. Tabachnick delves into the vivid kaleidoscope of Jewish beliefs and identities, ranging from Orthodox belief to complete atheism, and a spectrum of feelings about identification with other Jews. He explores graphic novels at the highest echelon of the genre by more than thirty artists and writers, among them Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), Will Eisner (A Contract with God), Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat), Miriam Katin (We Are On Our Own), Art Spiegelman (Maus), J. T. Waldman (Megillat Esther), Aline Kominsky Crumb (Need More Love), James Sturm (The Golem’s Mighty Swing), Leela Corman (Unterzakhn), Ari Folman and David Polonsky (Waltz with Bashir), David Mairowitz and Robert Crumb’s biography of Kafka, and many more. He also examines the work of a select few non-Jewish artists, such as Robert Crumb and Basil Wolverton, both of whom have created graphic adaptations of parts of the Hebrew Bible.

Among the topics he discusses are graphic novel adaptations of the Bible; the Holocaust graphic novel; graphic novels about the Jews in Eastern and Western Europe and Africa, and the American Jewish immigrant experience; graphic novels about the lives of Jewish women; the Israel-centered graphic novel; and the Orthodox graphic novel. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography.

No study of Jewish literature and art today can be complete without a survey of the graphic novel, and scholars, students, and graphic novel fans alike will delight in Tabachnick’s guide to this world of thought, sensibility, and artfulness.
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