Comics and Agency

This volume aims to intensify the interdisciplinary dialogue on comics and related popular multimodal forms (including manga, graphic novels, and cartoons) by focusing on the concept of medial, mediated, and mediating agency. To this end, a theoretically and methodologically diverse set of contributions explores the interrelations between individual, collective, and institutional actors within historical and contemporary comics cultures. Agency is at stake when recipients resist hegemonic readings of multimodal texts. In the same manner, “authorship” can be understood as the attribution of agency of and between various medial instances and roles such as writers, artists, colorists, letterers, or editors, as well as with regard to commercial rights holders such as publishing houses or conglomerates and reviewers or fans. From this perspective, aspects of comics production (authorship and institutionalization) can be related to aspects of comics reception (appropriation and discursivation), and circulation (participation and canonization), including their potential for transmedialization and making contributions to the formation of the public sphere.

Frontmatter --; Contents --; Comics and Agency --; What We Do with Comics: The Agency of Collectors in Dylan Horrock’s Hicksville --; Tintin’s Global Journey: Editors as Invisible Actors behind the Comics Industry of the 1960s --; How a German Publisher Appropriates Comics It Did Not Originally Publish --; The Agents of Doom: An Empirical Approach to Transmedia Actors --; Agency in the Making: Distribution and Publication as Topics in Nikolas Mahler’s Die Goldgruber Chroniken and the Anthology Drawn & Quarterly --; Comics Artist versus Artistic Genius: Kverneland and Fiske’s Approach to Artists, Metafiction, and Allusion to Contemporary Sources in Kanon --; Death of the Endless and Fan Projections --; “I Always Win”: Corporate Comics, Delinquent Fans, and the Body of Richard C. Meyer --; Pilgrimage to Hall H: Fan Agency at Comic-Con --; Librarians, Agency, Young People, and Comics: Graphic Account and the Development of Graphic Novel Collections in Libraries in Britain in the 1990s --; Learning from Pupils about Conviviality --; Ada in the Jungle and Aya of Yop City: Negotiating “Africa” in Comics --; Telling Stories with Photo Archives: Intermedial Agency in Documentary Comics --; Who Controls the Speech Bubbles? Reflecting on Agency in Comic-Games --; Notes on Contributors --; Index