A collaboration between Belgian artist François Schuiten and French writer Benoît Peeters, The Obscure Cities is one of the few comics series to achieve massive popularity while remaining highly experimental in form and content. Set in a parallel world, full of architecturally distinctive city-states, The Obscure Cities also represents one of the most impressive pieces of world-building in any form of literature. Rebuilding Story Worlds offers the first full-length study of this seminal series, exploring both the artistic traditions from which it emerges and the innovative ways it plays with genre, gender, and urban space. Comics scholar Jan Baetens examines how Schuiten’s work as an architectural designer informs the series’ concerns with the preservation of historic buildings. He also includes an original interview with Peeters, which reveals how poststructuralist critical theory influenced their construction of a rhizomatic fictional world, one which has made space for fan contributions through the Alta Plana website. Synthesizing cutting-edge approaches from both literary and visual studies, Rebuilding Story Worlds will give readers a new appreciation for both the aesthetic ingenuity of The Obscure Cities and its nuanced conception of politics.

Visit a land full of mystery, ancient alchemy, and modern technologies in this award-winning graphic novel series, now in a new edition with all-new colors and an updated translation! The second book in the original The Obscure Cities series, The Fever in Urbicande was first published in English by NBM in 1990 in black-and-white. This updated edition features an all-new translation and beautiful new coloring supervised by Francois Schuiten and Benoit Peeters. Eugen Robick, Urbatect of Urbicande has been designing a new bridge to connect the southern portion of the city to the north, but his bid to commence construction has been denied by the Commission. Unconcerned with the politics of the situation, Eugen only cares about the balance it will bring to the city. While contemplating how he can convince the Commission to see things his way, Eugen is brought a cube made of beams discovered during construction of another project. Initially small enough to fit on his desk, it begins to grow, adding beam after beam, until it soon takes over his entire office. Growing exponentially, it eventually takes over the entire city, disrupting the social order as citizens begin using the beams to travel back and forth between the southern and northern parts of the city, previously only accessible via the guarded bridges. While the Commission wishes to put a stop to any such social change, the cube’s impact is overpowering and irreversible.

This book provides both students and scholars with a critical and historical introduction to the graphic novel. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey explore this exciting form of visual and literary communication, showing readers how to situate and analyse graphic novels since their rise to prominence half a century ago. Several key questions are addressed: what is the graphic novel? How do we read graphic novels as narrative forms? Why is page design and publishing format so significant? What theories are developing to explain the genre? How is this form blurring the categories of high and popular literature? Why are graphic novelists nostalgic for the old comics? The authors address these and many other questions raised by the genre. Through their analysis of the works of many well-known graphic novelists - including Bechdel, Clowes, Spiegelman and Ware - Baetens and Frey offer significant insights for future teaching and research on the graphic novel.

Includes international essays on possibly the most important aspect of the aesthetics and narratives of comics - urban topography and environment.

Offers one hundred innovative initiatives from scientific researchers, architects, artists, and entrepreneurs from around the world that offer solutions to the environmental problems facing planet Earth.

This penultimate work in John Lent's series of bibliographies on comic art gathers together an astounding array of citations on American cartoonists and their work. Author John Lent has used all manner of methods to gather the citations, searching library and online databases, contacting scholars and other professionals, attending conferences and festivals, and scanning hundreds of periodicals. He has gone to great length to categorize the citations in an easy-to-use, scholarly fashion, and in the process, has helped to establish the field of comic art as an important part of social science and humanities research. The ten volumes in this series, covering all regions of the world, constitute the largest printed bibliography of comic art in the world, and serve as the beacon guiding the burgeoning fields of animation, comics, and cartooning. They are the definitive works on comic art research, and are exhaustive in their inclusiveness, covering all types of publications (academic, trade, popular, fan, etc.) from all over the world. Also included in these books are citations to systematically-researched academic exercises, as well as more ephemeral sources such as fanzines, press articles, and fugitive materials (conference papers, unpublished documents, etc.), attesting to Lent's belief that all pieces of information are vital in a new field of study such as comic art.

The first science fiction course in the American academy was held in the early 1950s. In the sixty years since, science fiction has become a recognized and established literary genre with a significant and growing body of scholarship. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction is a landmark volume as the first authoritative history of the genre. Over forty contributors with diverse and complementary specialties present a history of science fiction across national and genre boundaries, and trace its intellectual and creative roots in the philosophical and fantastic narratives of the ancient past. Science fiction as a literary genre is the central focus of the volume, but fundamental to its story is its non-literary cultural manifestations and influence. Coverage thus includes transmedia manifestations as an integral part of the genre's history, including not only short stories and novels, but also film, art, architecture, music, comics, and interactive media.

Eugen Robick thought he had designed the perfect city, efficiently divided between the consummately aesthetic and the irrational. But then a small but mysterious grid of beams invades and exponentially expands into an indestructible city-engulfing lattice, allowing a bridge between the city's two halves. As well-laid plans are thrown into disarray, readers will join in Robick's search to learn the cube's secret and the errors of his own ways. Illustrated in b/w throughout. 'Marvel at one of Europe's master draughtsmen' - Amazon.com

ESSENTIAL COMICS VALUES ALL IN COLOR! COMICS SHOP is the reliable reference for collectors, dealers, and everyone passionate about comic books! THIS FULL-COLOR, INDISPENSABLE GUIDE FEATURES: • Alphabetical organization by comic book title • More than 3,000 color photos • Hundreds of introductory essays • Analysis of multi-million dollar comics' sales • How covers and splash pages have evolved • An exclusive photo to grading guide to help you determine your comics' conditions accurately • Current values for more than 150,000 comics From the authoritative staff at Comics Buyer's Guide, the world's longest running magazine about comics, Comics Shop is the only guide on the market to give you extensive coverage of more than 150,000 comics from the Golden Age of the 1930s to current releases and all in color! In addition to the thousands of comic books from such publishers as Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, and Image, this collector-friendly reference includes listings for comic books from independent publishers, underground publishers, and more!