his book explores the historical and cultural significance of comics in languages other than English, examining the geographic and linguistic spheres which these comics inhabit and their contributions to comic studies and academia.

The volume brings together texts across a wide range of genres, styles and geographic locations including the Netherlands, Latin America, Greece, Sweden, Poland, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, the Czech Republic, among others. These works have remained out of reach for speakers of languages other than the original and do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve due to their lack of English translations. This book highlights the richness and diversity these works add to the corpus of comic art and comic studies that Anglophone comics scholars can access to broaden the collective perspective of the field and forge links across regions, genres and comic traditions.

Part of the Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series, this volume spans many continents and languages. It will be of interest to researchers and students of comics studies, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, art and design, illustration, history, film studies and sociology. 

Comics are not fruits; they are more akin to vegetables. ‘Fruit' has a clear definition in botany. It is an ‘edible product of a plant or tree, consisting of the seed and its envelope'. Among the most commonly cited definitions of comics, as far as Anglophone comics studies are concerned, is the one proposed by the comics creator and theorist Scott McCloud in the mid-1990s. Decades before the late 1890s, when many date the ‘birth' of US American comics, sequential art from all over the world influenced the cultural landscape. Rather, there are many research questions that remain unprobed when it relates to these areas and their comics traditions. Comics are neither inherently revolutionary or regressive, liberating or oppressive. There can be no doubt that Anglophone comics studies is lopsided in its overall perspective. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.

The anthology Cross-Sections: Historical Perspective from Malmö University contains contributions from researchers sharing historical perspectives, but representing different disciplines, such as arts, ethnography, history, literature studies, religion and sports science. The seventeen contributions clearly demonstrate the breadth and diversity of historical research carried out in different departments at Malmö University.

In Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, Sean Guynes and Martin Lund bring together a series of essays that contextualize the histories and stakes of whiteness studies, superhero comics, and superhero studies for academics, fans, and media-makers alike. The volume illustrates how the American comic book superhero is fundamentally a figure of white power and white supremacy and ultimately calls for diversity in superhero comics as well as a democratized media culture.Contributors not only examine superhero narratives but also delve into the production, distribution, audience, and reception of those narratives, highlighting the imbrication of forces that have helped to create, normalize, question, and sometimes even subvert American beliefs about whiteness and race. Unstable Masks considers the co-constitutive nature of identity, representation, narrative, production and consumption, and historical and cultural contexts in forging the stereotypes that decide who gets to be a superhero and who gets to be American on the four-color pages of comic books.

The topic of climate change is neither settled nor one-sided. To those who accept it, the best scientific evidence overwhelmingly attests that anthropogenic climate change is real. But there are many who reject that evidence and dismiss any claim about ongoing climate change as not only untrue, but as a great evil.  In the mounting scholarly and popular calls to understand the “religious dimensions” of climate change, it’s nearly axiomatic that religion “has a part to play” in shaping responses to climate change. But as in other areas, there’s often an apologetic suggestion that hegemonic patterns – e.g., acceptance of anthropogenic climate change and commitment to counter it – are self-evidently tied to “traditional” religious values, while opposition to such patterns or denial of climate change is “cultural,” “political,” or otherwise somehow not really religious. That is, the (explicit or implicit) focus of much of this writing is more on what the public responses from groups and leaders some of us call religious ought to be than what they are.

Whatever the science might say, the social importance of anthropogenic climate change isn’t determined by its observable effects but by political contestation. Or, as Colin Hay has noted, “crises are constituted in and through narrative.” Different climate change narratives can serve different socially formative interests. Starting from this constructivist position, this paper discusses evangelical Protestant examples from Chick Publications, RaptureReady.com, and Resisting the Green Dragon, showing how contemporary climate change discourse itself is positioned as a Satanic or anti-Christian crisis, narrated as part of a battle between good and evil, and is ultimately part of larger, long-term concerns about evangelical power and social reproduction. Having raised some problems with assuming that climate change can be understood as a universal truth and that it is, in and of itself, self-evidently a crisis, the paper concludes with a discussion about ways of framing what is primed to be a long-running scholarly engagement with “religion and climate change,” arguing that before we ask what so-called religious actors’ responses to climate change are, we should first understand how they respond to the claim that climate change is happening and is a crisis to begin with.

Comicsgaters are wrong because comics have always been political, but those politics weren’t always as great as they are sometimes made out to by comics’ defenders.

This chapter offers a critical account of some important aspects of sf comics since the late 1960s, focusing mostly on developments in US contexts. It begins by outlining some terminological and conceptual concerns that limit its treatment of the topic. It then focuses on so-called superhero comics, discussing the variety of sf tropes and framing that have characterised the genre formation since the late 1960s and highlighting the impact of historical and social developments can have on superhero sf storytelling. The chapter also discusses superhero comics in relation to political developments and to the different, often conservative or reactionary, politics they can promote, citing examples of super-Cold Warriors, but also antiracist superheroes, and more. It further highlights the impact superhero comics can have on the world outside these texts and addresses their role and impact on synergistic marketing strategies. This is followed by discussions of sf graphic novels and anthology comics in the US and elsewhere in relation to their political messaging. The chapter ends by gathering up these threads into a discussion about how utopian, dystopian and otherwise speculative comics are sometimes used to offer critiques of power, citing feminist, antiracist, Afrofuturist, Africanfuturist and otherwise radical sf stories that challenge the historically common conservative and whiteness-centring frames of earlier sf comics.

Översättning av hemsida som samlar Förintelseöverlevandes vittnesmål om livet och erfarenheter i Theresienstadt och illustrerar dem på olika sätt med hjälp av interaktiva kartor. Hemsidan är en produkt av ett forskningsprojekt som letts av Therkel Stræde vid Syddansk universitet i Odense.

Superhjältar upplever just nu en guldålder. De finns överallt. Det finns många sorters superhjältar och många sätt att se på dem. Inte minst finns det många som pratar om judiska superhjältar. Men vilka är de judiska superhjältarna? Vad gör dem judiska? Och vem är det som skapar dem?

There is today a vast literature on the topic of the Old Norse world’s reception and representation across the world and over more than a millennium. We know fairly well what meanings the Vikings, their culture, and their religion have been imbued with over this span, and we know how and why in the past they have been made into carriers of many different, and often contradictory, ideas and ideals. What seems less clear, however, is how this kind of meaning-making is still taking place; although contemporary visual culture is replete with examples of ideologically and politically charged Old Norse representations, the medium of comics and its many forms, one of the most active and vivid forums in which this contemporary representation and renegotiation occurs is often dismissed as meaningless. Indeed, the end of the Old Norse world’s meaningful reception history has been proclaimed more than once with reference to comics. In his book about the understanding of Thor throughout history, for example, Martin Arnold segues from comics into a brief epilogue, in which he proclaims that “[i]n the final analysis, whatever stance one might adopt concerning the beliefs held by societies long past, and whichever theory one chooses to advance to explain or assess the impact of mass culture, it is possible to conclude that the reception history of the Thunder god is, in any meaningful sense, at an end.” To the contrary, however, the past century of global comics production is loaded with representations of Old Norse imaginaries, in the form of Vikings and their gods. The most famous example, Marvel Comics’ Thor, alone comprises the largest single archive of stories about the Old Norse thunder god ever assembled in history. On top of this, every major global comics culture – the Scandinavian, the Franco-Belgian, the British, Japanese manga, and Korean manwa – all provide numerous noteworthy examples. Despite this fact, however, there is almost no comics scholarship on the topic, and scholarship on the long-term reception of Old Norse imaginaries has yet to take comics into account. Taking as its starting point Brian Attebery’s contention that the Old Norse myths are “legitimately part of a cultural commons, available to anyone who wishes to tap into archaic mysteries,” this paper maps Old Norse reception and representation in contemporary comics, beginning in Sweden in the 1940s and expanding, to cover global comics cultures into the present day. By using examples from each comics culture, it aims to correct the misperception about comics’ value as a source for understanding contemporary shifts and trends in the reception and representation of Old Norse imaginaries. It also aims to deepen our understanding of the Old Norse world’s enduring appeal by using comics as its primary material. Through this, the paper will illustrate how, rather than being meaningless, comics is the latest stage in Old Norse reception history, and a vibrant one that seems poised to continue its redefinition of the past for a long time still. The purpose is to begin filling an open gap in existing scholarship on Old Norse reception and representation, by mapping the many ways in which comics have attempted to define and redefine the meaning of the Old Norse world in and for their own time and place.

Superheroes are having a moment. It seems like they’re everywhere. Not just in our comics and our screens, but in the general, social and cultural, air we breathe. Social and political events and actors are often reframed with superheroic imagery, and social, cultural, economic, and political actors seem increasingly to call on images and tropes that connote superhero generic formations to stake their position on an issue or to claim how what they’re doing is right and good and just. This paper considers how the figure of the superhero can work to naturalize political positions and to make contingent values seem “natural” rather historical, and the effects this can have.

When you think of comics, you probably think of New York, too. And that’s no accident. The city has often been the setting for writers and stories in this genre, in part because it was for so many decades a central node for segments of the industry.

In this Insiders event, you’ll learn more about this history, in conversation with Martin Lund, an historian at Malmö University in Sweden, whose research explores the representation of New York City in comics and the ‘special relationship’ between NYC and comics, so often suggested in fandom, pop culture, and scholarship.

 Beyond the depictions of New York City in classic comics, Lund will discuss more recent graphic novels such as Unterzakhn by Leela Corman, which tells the story of two immigrant sisters growing up in the Lower East Side in the early 1900s, 7 Miles a Second by artist David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite Van Cooke, which depicts the artist’s childhood living on the streets of Manhattan and adulthood living with AIDS, and I Am Alfonso Jones, which deals with the theme of police brutality and justice.

In this talk:

• Sample some of the many different ways New York City has been represented in comics.
• Explore how complex the deceptively simple-looking comics medium can be in its uses of the city.
• Learn what different representations of NYC in comics can say about how the city is perceived in different contexts.

The US has historically had trouble with ethnoracial formation, tensions having often boiled over when public awareness of various immigrant groups reached critical mass. Post-9/11, Muslims became the latest such “problem.” This “Muslim problem” is hotly debated in US comics culture. This chapter looks at Dust and Ms. Marvel, two post-9/11 Marvel Muslim superheroines, to show how Marvel has attempted corrective representations of Muslims and how these characters can be said to perpetuate or complicate Muslim stereotypes. Comics’ urban representations are never merely mimetic of material space, but always symbolic, selective, and ideologically informed narrative and graphic montages: a comic’s claim to real-world space is necessarily normative, taking existing spaces, and recreating it in ways that say who belongs there. This chapter focuses on how Dust and Ms. Marvel are figured in relation to New York City and its surroundings, and what that says about Muslims’ imagined right to the city. 

That New York City is a comics staple is as undeniable as it is unsurprising. Many comics creators have lived and worked there; NYC’s cityscape provides dramatic fodder for graphic storytelling; and the city’s special place in the American and international imaginary makes it a recognizable setting for a mass readership. Because of this, fans and academics often claim that New York has a special relationship with comics. This supposed New York–comics relationship, however, appears axiomatic, a cultural myth that obscures more than it enlightens. But, as Barthes noted: in myth, “things lose the memory that they once were made,” and, through an erasure of dialectic, complexity, contradiction, and depth, come to “appear to mean something by themselves.” NYC is certainly not without complexity or contradiction, nor are comics free from dialectic or depth. Produced for general consumption, comics often address current events and articulate what is perceived as the essence of the attitudes of their time and place. Anchored in their immediate context, they often mirror or criticize contemporary society, constituting cultural artifacts in which a rich but largely neglected historical record is embedded. This presentation builds on an ongoing research project in which representations of NYC in American comics are studied through an interdisciplinary comics studies and urban cultural studies methodology. Using findings from the project, it illustrates how the image of NYC in comics is never merely mimetic of material space, but always a selective and ideologically informed symbolic montage or composite.

Presentation om processen att arbeta med översättning av hemsidan "De danska judarna i  Theresienstadt" till svenska.

Essay on politics and religion for the comic book On the Stump.

This thesis is a study of configurations of identity in American mainstream comics. It focuses on how a small number of writers of Jewish descent have expressed or disciplined their Jewishness in relation to their creations. In an attempt to revise common linear narratives, the thesis presents three case studies of famous and influential comics texts with different primary foci: a chapter on Superman asks how characterization was used to configure identity in relation to contemporary society; a chapter on Will Eisner asks how identity was configured and reconfigured in the creator’s work and self-representation; and a chapter on the X-Men asks how identity was configured and reconfigured with reference to the series’ central trope, mutantcy. The aim of these studies is to investigate how Jewishness and Americanness, as well as other subject positions that implicitly affect how people think and write, can intersect or converge in mass culture representation. In doing this, the thesis also engages in a critical dialogue with extant writing on the subject of Jews and comics. The chosen texts are analyzed using a methodology based on theories of representation and on the basis of a social constructivist paradigm of identity and identity formation. From this perspective, it is first argued that the early Superman, rather than being a Moses or golem figure as others have suggested, reverberated with a contemporary Jewish American project to construct a Jewish American heritage and to represent Jewish interests as aligned with national interests. The second chapter argues that Will Eisner’s The Spirit was configured in similar ways, but also that its use of blackface stereotypes constituted race talk, or denigration of African Americans as a means of entry into majority culture. The second half of the chapter argues that Eisner’s use of Jewish significations in his later career was not ethnography but a claim to authenticity, in support of an attempt to “whiten” the comics medium and bring it into the mainstream of American culture. The third chapter suggests that rather than having initially been racial allegory, the X-Men was a product of the Cold War, and that when civil rights discourse began to enter the series, it did so in a way that was common to liberal Jewish rights activism. It is then argued that the increased prominence of themes of prejudice and oppression in the second series was not directly intended to metaphorize Jewishness, as has been claimed, but to construct an open sign of outsiderhood for any reader to inhabit. Finally, it is argued that the reimagining of one the series’ oldest characters as a Holocaust survivor was connected with the writer’s Jewishness, but that this expression of ethnic identity was subsumed under an Americanizing representational logic. The concluding chapter argues that the popular literature on Jews and comics is best situated within a framework of present-day Jewish American identity formation, and that it constructs myths of a Jewish–comics connection to bolster contemporary Jewishness. In doing so, it is argued, the books employ common contemporary Jewish American themes and symbols to reshape the past of American comics in a way fitting current Jewish American concerns. The chapter then turns to methodological problems stemming from the use of these books in academic writing. This use, along with other issues that have become visible during the production of the thesis, is argued to be potentially detrimental to the study of Jews and comics, and to comics studies in general. Finally, after a summation of the thesis’ findings, it is suggested that the historical Jewish–comics connection, rather than being one of surreptitious symbolic or metaphorical reproduction of elements from religious or historical Jewish traditions, is perhaps instead best understood as an existential connection that emerged from the writers’ individual attempts to navigate the ways Judaism and Americanism hailed them and exerted social pressures.

The rapidly growing popularity of Christian Seders in recent years has been accompanied by the equally rapid emergence of a genre of “how-to” guides that tell celebrants, among other things, how to structure their evenings – what to do and when – and how Jesus is supposed to be understood to have fulfilled the hopes and promises embedded in the Seder and Haggadah. This paper positions the genre as a social phenomenon tied to a process of authentication, through which Christian Seders are simultaneously re-positioned as a form of authentically Christian practice and legitimized as such over and against ongoing critiques that the practice is an appropriative and supersessionist one. The paper maps and discusses recurring elements in the guides and analyzes their shared symbols, ideas, and objects to highlight the major constituent parts of supersessionist rhetorics of authenticity about Christian Seder practices. Using a critical form of social semiotics, the analysis highlights how guide-authors navigate both the modal affordances of traditionally Jewish practice and narrative and an historically Christian epistemological framework in their commitment to suturing them into a newly-fabricated and artificially-aged whole. This suturing is an appropriative process that often requires overexplicit Christian or Christianizing anchoring of core semiotic resources for Christian Seders to be legitimized. As historically conceived, neither Seders nor, for example, the conception of Jesus as the Paschal lamb or as Jewish, allow for easy cross-cultural translation; both modalities need to be actively shaped for any claim that they are related to be made. This shift, or suturing, may entail linking the New Testament last supper to the Passover meal or convincing readers how an element of the Seder should be understood to symbolize something Christian, often Easter-related. This is neither a neutral nor self-evident reframing of the Seder; how-to guides allow socially situated, often but not exclusively white US American Evangelical Protestants, to name and claim a Jewish practice as their own in a dual sense: on the one hand, they demonstrate the practice for newcomers and, on the other, justify, legitimize, and mark it as authentic.

The Holocaust is today a frequent concern of comics creators and audiences alike and will likely remain so. As such, it is important to consider what this interest means from a larger, cultural perspective. This paper looks at Magneto and the series Chutz-Pow! Superheroes of the Holocaust, published in three volumes by the Holocuast Center of Pittsburgh and focused on “The Upstanders,” “International Heroes,” and “The Young Survivors.” In both cases, the rhetorical intersections of Holocaust and superhero are momentary, fleeting: comics featuring Magneto have over the past decade increasingly used Holocaust references as a dramatic rhetorical bludgeon with little or no substance or connection to the histories they claim; Chutz-Pow! uses a language of superheroism as a thin scrim over historical stories in order to make claims about what we can learn from the Holocaust. Using these examples, this paper argues that we might be seeing a form of “hyper-Americanization” of the Holocaust in certain superhero fictions.

Brian Cremins’ Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgiais a fragmented book, jumping between seemingly unrelated aspects of a vaguely defined topic before fizzling out in a disjointed epilogue. As such, it provides a site to consider different responses to the methodological question: what is the purpose of comics studies?

Mutantcy, the central metaphor of the X-Men franchise, has been many things to many people over the years: a “stand-in” for blackness, Jewishness, homosexuality, disability, and other forms of “difference” that have suffered marginalization and violence historically and in the present. At the same time, readers have been invited to inhabit this Otherness as their own, even though their experience is different, leading to the curious situation that X-Men comics uphold oppressive discursive relations even as they claim to fight them. Taking this duality as a point of departure, this paper discusses Rogue, Cannonball, and Gambit, three Southern mutants introduced by Chris Claremont (writer of X-Men/Uncanny X-Men 1975–1991) in relation to the so-called “reddening” of America in order to illustrate three points: 1) it seeks to further our understanding of the impact of the new interest in and attention paid to the South in the 1970s and onward on superhero comics; 2) it continues my ongoing work on re-framing the academic discussion about X-Men comics by further illustrating how broad, fluid, and contradictory the concept of mutantcy is; and 3) it aims to build on the growing body of work that examines the centrality of whiteness as a guiding concept in the superhero genre. Central to the paper will be the juxtaposition of the axiomatic understanding of the X-Men as having been created as a Civil Rights allegory and that the mutant metaphor is a symbol of Otherness with the inclusion of white Southern characters with seemingly no acknowledgment of how these histories clash. Thus, my paper argues that the “reddening” of the X-Men, limited though it may have been, celebrated the white South without taking into consideration the racial history of the South, a history that would have been at the center of a discussion of Southern mutantcy if blackness or racial identity had truly been at the heart of the mutant metaphor.

Fantastical literatures have often been used as a vehicle for cultures to alleviate their anxieties, exorcise their demons, and kill their own ghosts. These fantastical means of collective therapy can take many shapes, some of which can end up being decidedly contradictory. One such example is the long-standing supervillain-turned-sometime-antihero Magneto, of Marvel Comics’ X-Men family of comics. Over the more than fifty years since his first appearance, Magneto has served as a dual threat to American empire: on the one hand, he has been an opponent of US hegemony and a thorn in its side by threatening its imperial power in myriad inventive ways; on the other, he has claimed the mantle of emperor for himself on several occasions, in ways literal and figurative. This paper looks at the many ways in which writers, artists, and editors have imagined Magneto as either a threat to empire or as himself posing the threat of imperial submission on the US. It will argue that, although these stories are very different from each other in form and content, the central figure of Magneto has remained much the same: he has served as an embodiment of various of the United States’ Others, the fears of whom his inevitable defeats have served to alleviate and the claims of whom his genocidal lunacy has served to discredit outright, allowing readers to not consider them too deeply.

The Vikings have found a place in nearly every medium invented since their passing. The comics medium is no different; it has served as a vast and protean global archive of stories rooted in and transforming received Old Norse tradition and representation for nearly a century. The extent and significance of this archive and the comics medium’s contribution to remain still largely unstudied. When discussed, comics are often either measured against supposedly more “authentic” forms of Viking or Norse representation or disparaged. This chapter attempts to bring the two fields closer together, and in so doing challenge the views that the emergence of Old Norse memory-construction in comics is, on the one hand, a sign that this memory is losing its relevance and meaning and, on the other, that we can understand what is being done in these comics without looking to the longer history of memory and reception. It does so by surveying global Old Norse-themed comics and identifying some general trends, similarities, and differences. Particular attention is given to two aspects: first, to the emphatic whiteness of many characters; and, second, on the growth in recent decades of feminist or recuperative uses of the Norse past in relation to gender representation. 

The socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness: how it was created, how it changes, and how it protects and privileges people who are perceived as white.

This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness, tracing its creation, its changing formation, and its power to privilege and protect people who are perceived as white. Whiteness, author Martin Lund explains, is not one single idea but a shifting, overarching category, a flexible cluster of historically, culturally, and geographically contingent ideals and standards that enable systems of hierarchical classification. Lund discusses words used to talk about whiteness, from white privilege to white fragility; the intersections of whiteness with race, class, and gender; whiteness in popular culture; and such ideas as “colorblindness” and “reverse racism,” which, he argues, actually uphold whiteness.

Lund shows why it is important to keep talking and thinking about whiteness. The word “whiteness,” he writes, doesn't describe; it conjures something into being. Drawing on decades of critical whiteness studies and citing a range of examples (primarily from the United States and Sweden), Lund argues that whiteness is continually manufactured and sustained through language, laws, policies, science, and representations in media and popular culture. It is often positioned as normative, even universal. And despite its innocuous-seeming manifestations in sitcoms and superheroes, whiteness is always in the service of racial domination.

Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978) marked the beginning of a second phase in the writer-artist’s career. It has been called the ‘first graphic novel’ and has been hailed as a central text in the emergence of the ‘graphic novel’ as a cultural phenomenon. This chapter presents and discusses formal aspects of Contract, elucidates its productive context, and discusses its reception. It shows how Contract was neither the first graphic novel nor the most important early one. Instead, it argues that the promotion of these ideas has contributed to a self-marginalizing discourse among a certain type of comics fans, and ends with the hope that Eisner scholarship can move beyond repeating common myths and engaging in uncritical celebration of the writer-artist, so as to better promote critical understanding of his work.