Comics & Media: A Special Issue of "Critical Inquiry"

With the medium of comics as a framework, Comics and Media, a special issue of Critical Inquiry, explores broader questions about media archaeology, theories of the image, popular forms, the history of aesthetics, and transmedia dynamics in nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first century contexts.

Comics and Media presents scholarly essays about comics, animation, film, digital games, and their respective (and overlapping) media ecologies in conversation with material from and inspired by the Comics: Philosophy ampersand Practice conference held in 2012 at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Structured around the question of where this vital and newly emergent (or re-emergent) field is moving, the conference featured 17 of the contemporary field’s most acclaimed cartoonists—including its two most globally famous practitioners, R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman.

Seeking to expand the depth of fields such as media studies and comics studies by seeking out the crossover between different media practices and different disciplinary or methodological locations (literary theory, art history, film studies, digital humanities), Comics and Media also examines the tensions—and connections— between “new” and “old” media throughout.