"Superman's role in romanticizing commercialism; sexual violence in Japanese manga comics; Wonder Woman as Americanized immigrant; reader's reactions to the gay superhero Northstar; Dilbert as a workplace revolutionary; the Punisher's invasion of Vietnam--these are a few of the issues that Comics & Ideology addresses. Focusing on the intersection of social power and comic art, essays in this book explore how images and narratives in comic books and comic strips may portray social groups and social issues. As a scholarly examination of a form known as 'the funnies' or 'funny books, ' this book argues that the themes and characterizations in comic art are often quite serious. Essays take diverse theoretical perspectives such as cultural studies, political economy, feminist criticism, queer studies, and mythic analysis, all focusing on the relationship of comics to issues of social division."--Publisher description.

The classic, critical and humorous study of cultural imperialism and children's literature; how the Disney fantasy world reproduces the "American Dream" fantasy world, and the disastrous effect of Disney comics and other "mass" cultural merchandise on the development of the so-called "Third" World. In 1973 this work was banned and burned in Chile, and later the English edition was banned for more than a year by the US government. In comic book format with cartoon examples, introduction by David KUNZLE on the Disney world, a bibliography of left writings on cultural imperialism and the comics, and an appendix by John Shelton LAWRENCE on the book's US censorship and the legal-political issues involved in the right to criticize Disney

Offers undergraduate students with an understanding of the comics medium and its communication potential. This book deals with comic books and graphic novels. It focuses on comic books because in their longer form they have the potential for complexity of expression.

Comics have become important elements in the culture of the 20th century, not only has the genre been recognized as a medium and an art form in its own right; it has also inspired other means of communication from text books to interactive media. In 13 articles, Comics and Culture offers an introduction to the field of comics research written by scholars from Europe and the USA. The articles span a great variety of approaches including general discussions of the aesthetics and definition of comics, comparisons of comics with other media, analyses of specific comics and genres, and discussions of the cultural status of comics in society. One way to characterize this book is to focus on the contributors. Recognized and established research with important publications to their credit form one group: Donald Ault, Thierry Groensteen, M. Thomas Inge, Pascal Lefvre and Roger Sabin. Another group is from the new generation of researches represented by PhD students: Hans-Christian Christiansen

First published in 1971 in Chile, where the entire third printing was dumped into the ocean by the Chilean Navy and bonfires were held to destroy earlier editions, How to Read Donald Duck reveals the capitalist ideology at work in our most beloved cartoons. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney--curiously parentless, marginalized, always short of cash--Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart dissect the narratives of dependency and social aspiration that define the Disney corpus. Disney recognized the challenge, and when the book was translated and imported into the U.S. in 1975, managed to have all 4,000 copies impounded. Ultimately, 1,500 copies of the book were allowed into the country, the rest of the shipment was blocked, and until now no American publisher has dared re-release the book, which sold over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into seventeen languages. A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman.

This cutting-edge handbook brings together an international roster of scholars to examine many facets of comics and graphic novels. Contributor essays provide authoritative, up-to-date overviewsof the major topics and questions within comic studies, offering readers a truly global approach to understanding the field. Essays examine: the history of the temporal, geographical, and formal development of comics, including topics like art comics, manga, comix, and the comics code; issues such as authorship, ethics, adaptation, and translating comics connections between comics and other artistic media (drawing, caricature, film) as well as the linkages between comics and other academic fields like linguistics and philosophy; new perspectives on comics genres, from funny animal comics to war comics to romance comics and beyond. The Routledge Companion to Comics expertly organizes representative work from a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, literature, philosophy, and linguistics. More than an introduction to the study of comics, this book will serve as a crucial reference for anyone interested in pursuing research in the area, guiding students, scholars, and comics fans alike.

The definition of ideology continues to occupy scholars across a wide range of disciplines. In this book, Teun A van Dijk sketches a challenging new multidisciplinary framework for theorizing ideology. He defines ideology as the basis of the social representations of a group, its functions in terms of social relations between groups, and its reproduction as enacted by discourse. Contemporary racist discourse is examined to illustrate these ideological relations between cognition, society and discourse.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, both the crisis of liberal democracy, as visible in, for example, the rise of far-right actors in Europe and the United States, and environmental crises, from declining biodiversity to climate change, are increasingly in the public spotlight. Whilst both areas have been analysed extensively on their own, The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication provides much needed insights into their intersection by illuminating the environmental communication of far-right party and non-party actors in Europe and the United States. Although commonly perceived as a ‘left-wing’ issue today, concerns over the natural environment by the far right have a long, ideology-driven history. Thus, it is not surprising that some members of the far right offer distinctive ecological visions of communal life, though, for example, climate-change scepticism is voiced too. Investigating this range of stances within their discourse about the natural environment provides a window into the wider politics of the far right and points to a close connection between the politics of identity and the imagination of nature. Connecting the fields of environmental communication and study of the far right, contributions to this edited volume therefore offer timely assessments of this often-overlooked dimension of far-right politics.

Alan Moore, the idiosyncratic, controversial and often shocking writer of such works as Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta, remains a benchmark for readers of comics and graphic novels. This collection investigates the political, social, cultural, and sexual ideologies that emerge from his seminal work, Lost Girls, and demonstrates how these ideologies relate to his larger body of work. Framed by Moore's insistence upon deconstructing the myth of the superhero, each essay attends to the form and content of Moore's comics under the rubric of his pervasive metaphor of the "politics of sexuality/the sexing of politics."