{"title":"Encapsulations: Critical Comics Studies","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"aquaman-and-the-war-against-oceans-book-ryan-poll-9781496225856","title":"Aquaman and the War Against Oceans","description":"Ryan Poll argues that the New 52 Aquaman develops the superhero into a figure of ecological justice who charts the environmental apocalypse caused by global capitalism and helps readers connect the violences occurring in the ocean to those occurring on the surface, including sexism and racism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49741587185937,"sku":"NGR9781496225856","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50256411885841,"sku":"CIN1496225856VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50378256154897,"sku":"CIN1496225856G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51030364356881,"sku":"NIN9781496225856","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1496225856.jpg?v=1761388741"},{"product_id":"storytelling-in-kabuki-book-steen-ledet-christiansen-9781496226686","title":"Storytelling in Kabuki","description":"Steen Ledet Christiansen’s Storytelling in “Kabuki” explores the series created by David Mack-a slow, recursive narrative that focuses on the death of Kabuki and her past. The series ran from 1994 to 2004 in a variety of miniseries, one-shots, and spin-offs, rather than following a conventional American monthly release schedule. Most of the series explores different perspectives on the same event and adds background to Kabuki’s past, usually through surreal sequences, dreams, and near-death experiences. The flexibility of comics’ approach to chronology, space, focalization, narrative, and fictionality enabled Mack to produce an unusual experience. Kabuki tells a story that can only exist via comics.   Christiansen analyzes the visual design of the series, a heterogeneous collection of styles depending on the story. To understand Kabuki, it is crucial to explore the visual styles, as well as the use of visual and spatial rhymes and mixed media forms. Because Kabuki employs a complex layering of focalizations, diegetic levels, and metafictional self-reflectivity that is rare in mainstream American comics, it utilizes a narrative poetics that focuses on constant repeating, restating, and returning to the same events.  Kabuki’s unique compositional layering allows Christiansen to provide a clear example of how comics work while also expanding on critical vocabulary, especially in terms of spatial poetics. By exploring spatial form, Christiansen illuminates and gives a critical framework to a different and underexamined aspect of comics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50464246530321,"sku":"NGR9781496226686","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51030264152337,"sku":"NIN9781496226686","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1496226682.jpg?v=1761389997"},{"product_id":"silence-in-the-quagmire-book-harriet-e-h-earle-9781496240545","title":"Silence in the Quagmire","description":"In Silence in the Quagmire Harriet E. H. Earle uses silence to construct a narrative of the Vietnam War via U.S. comics. Unlike the vast majority of cultural artifacts and scholarly works about the war, which typically focus on white, working-class American servicemen and their experiences of combat, Earle’s work centers less-visible players: the Vietnamese on both sides of the conflict, women and girls, and returning veterans.   Earle interrogates the ways this conflict is represented in American comic books, with special focus on these missing groups. She discusses how-and more critically why-these groups are represented as they are, if they’re represented at all, and the ways these representations have affected views of the war, during and since. Using Michel Foucault’s understanding of silence as discourse, Earle considers how both silence and silencing are mobilized in the creation of the U.S.-centric war narrative. Innovative in its structure and theoretical scaffolding, Silence in the Quagmire deepens our understanding of how comic books have represented the violence and trauma of conflict.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51673667764497,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51673668059409,"sku":"NIN9781496240545","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1496240545.jpg?v=1761387217"},{"product_id":"new-old-style-book-matthew-levay-9781496237620","title":"The New Old Style","description":"The New Old Style explores how the deliberate use of cartooning styles that mimic those of the early twentieth century has paradoxically become one of the most significant vehicles for formal experimentation in contemporary comics. Dubbing this phenomenon \"the anachronistic aesthetic,\" Matthew Levay argues that what can initially appear to be a nostalgic affinity for outmoded drawing styles is in fact a complex and holistic movement in contemporary comics with profound consequences for how artists and audiences might understand the critical possibilities and historical legacies of the medium itself.  The phenomenon of anachronism as an aesthetic mode is visible in North American comics as early as the 1970s, but it rose to prominence in the 1990s. Since then, multiple artists have drawn in ways that reference cartooning styles of the distant past—those of early twentieth-century newspaper comics, early American animation, and midcentury comic books for young children, to name a few. The New Old Style characterizes these cartoonists' use of anachronism as a mode of critical engagement that reveals how comics, as a medium, can simultaneously interrogate its history—and the violence, misogyny, and racial stereotypes that pervade it—while opening up new ways of addressing its aesthetic conditions. A work of comics history as well as theory, The New Old Style traces the uses of anachronism in comics published from the 1970s to the present and, via a focused set of case studies, argues that those uses represent a wide-ranging critique of the politics of the past, the material culture of the present, and the aesthetic possibilities of the future.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53383142441233,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53383142637841,"sku":"NGR9781496237620","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781496237620.jpg?v=1781704719"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/encapsulations-critical-comics-studies-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}