A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY9 start with T start with T
In the Latinx comics community, there is much to celebrate today, with more Latinx comic book artists than ever before. The resplendent visual-verbal storyworlds of these artists reach into and radically transform so many visual and storytelling genres. Tales from la Vida celebrates this space by bringing together more than eighty contributions by extraordinary Latinx creators. Their short visual-verbal narratives spring from autobiographical experience as situated within the language, culture, and history that inform Latinx identity and life. Tales from la Vida showcases the huge variety of styles and worldviews of today’s Latinx comic book and visual creators.
Whether it’s detailing the complexities of growing up—mono- or multilingual, bicultural, straight, queer, or feminist Latinx—or focusing on aspects of pop culture, these graphic vignettes demonstrate the expansive complexity of Latinx identities. Taken individually and together, these creators—including such legendary artists as Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Roberta Gregory, and Kat Fajardo, to name a few—and their works show the world that when it comes to Latinx comics, there are no limits to matters of content and form. As we travel from one story to the next and experience the unique ways that each creator chooses to craft his or her story, our hearts and minds wake to the complex ways that Latinxs live within and actively transform the world.
How manga and comics reshape storytelling across cultures
Text and Image is a groundbreaking exploration of how Japanese manga and comics from the United States and United Kingdom craft meaning through the combination of words and pictures. Current scholarship often isolates manga in niche genre studies or prioritizes anime instead; in response, Deborah Shamoon proposes a unified framework for understanding paneled visual storytelling across cultures. She reframes comics not as kids’ stuff but as a sophisticated narrative art with its own grammar, rhythm, and visual poetics.
Drawing on narratology, art history, film studies, and media theory, Text and Image examines a vast array of material, from four-panel comic strips to different manga genres, including shōjo (girls’ romance comics), shōnen (teen action), seinen (adult drama), and gekiga (mature realism). Through close visual analysis, Shamoon demonstrates how creators use panel layout, pacing, and the choreography of text and image to shape emotional impact and narrative momentum. She reveals the shared techniques that link works as disparate as Fun Home and Spider-Man while also showing where cultural conventions diverge. Beyond the traditional print realm, Shamoon discusses digital platforms, such as webtoons and vertically scrolling comics, to show how new technologies merge manga’s cinematic sensibility with global innovation.
Making a bold case for a more expansive, inclusive theory of visual narrative that bridges long-standing divides between manga studies and Anglophone comics scholarship, Text and Image is an indispensable guide to understanding how contemporary stories work and why they resonate across borders.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
These lyric, unsparing poems stitch together a story of identity, belonging, and dissolution.
A Theory of Knots explores the loops of how identity and belonging are constructed, broken, resurrected, and dissolved. In sections, knots weave DNA and cords, memory and mythology, home and tongue; they draw on desire, Zoroastrian rituals, tradition and transgression, and the legacies of womanhood, asking what connects us, and at what cost.
As layers of identity are examined, Pervin Saket's poems return to language: heirloom, hazard, half-truth. Soon enough, language is both subject and suspect; having exposed the artificial nature of our truths, the poems confront the artificial nature of language itself. At the end, poetry reaches the wilderness of earth, collapses upon itself, dissolving on the page—untangling the final knot.
Honor-winner, 2025 Texas Institute of Letters Jean Flynn Award for Best Young Adult Book
Longlisted, REFORMA National Book Award 2024
Through Fences follows the ups and downs of Latino kids and young adults in the US–Mexico borderlands: San Ysidro, Calexico, McAllen, and back and forth across the border. A young girl's journey north goes wrong, and now she is in a forbidding new place, away from her parents and brother, where she doesn't understand what the adults in green are saying even as she tries to obey their rules. Rocky, one of the few white kids in town, stands by and watches as Miguel is jumped by two of his friends. Maggie and her parents are separated at the border in a tragic accident. Alberto's son doesn't understand his Mexican father's hatred for illegals or his work as a border patrol agent. Alicia is a TikTok influencer who doesn't want to grow up to be a hospital cleaning lady like her mother, but COVID complicates things. Whatever their challenges, the kids, teens, tweens, and adults in these pages are just trying to survive their everyday lives. Vibrantly illustrated by Oscar Garza, each of these short stories brings a different perspective on the perils of living on the border while brown.
As a young boy in nineteenth-century America, Captain John Brown swore to dedicate his life to the struggle against slavery. Years later, he and his sons have joined the fight in Kansas, the epicenter of the national debate over slavery. As the territory nears statehood, abolitionists and proslavery border ruffians clash in increasingly violent conflict across the territory. But John Brown has more in mind than border skirmishes. He aims to eliminate slavery from US soil once and for all—even if that means raiding a government armory in order to arm a national slave revolt. From the Pottawatomie Massacre to the Battle of Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie, this first installment in the story of the legendary John Brown traces the rise of the insurrection in stunning detail.
Gritty, gripping, and masterfully illustrated, Wilfred Santiago’s telling of John Brown’s tale pulls no punches as it unflinchingly recounts the epic struggle across pre–Civil War America. And while John Brown’s methods may be questionable, his story is unforgettable. After all, dying is part of the plan.
Twelve-Cent Archie is not only the first scholarly study of the Archie comic, it is an innovative creative work in its own right. Inspired by Archie’s own concise storytelling format, renowned comics scholar Bart Beaty divides the book into a hundred short chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of the Archie comics. Fans of the comics will be thrilled to read in-depth examinations of their favorite characters and motifs, including individual chapters devoted to Jughead’s hat and Archie’s sweater-vest. But the book also has plenty to interest newcomers to Riverdale, as it recounts the behind-the-scenes history of the comics and analyzes how Archie helped shape our images of the American teenager.
As he employs a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, Beaty reveals that the Archie comics themselves were far more eclectic, creative, and self-aware than most critics recognize. Equally comfortable considering everything from the representation of racial diversity to the semiotics of Veronica’s haircut, Twelve-Cent Archie gives a fresh appreciation for America’s most endearing group of teenagers.
In the years following 1975, a group of female-created comic strips came to national attention in a traditionally male-dominated medium. Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women’s experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women’s rights in popular comic strips.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2026
The University of Chicago Press