Taking the contested and contestable meaning of “comics” as its starting point, Comics is… brings together ten comics scholars from different disciplines and with different approaches to what some of us call comics, to debate and discuss the foundations of Comics Studies in a provocative and thought-provoking way.

The book is built around a three-part structure: each contributor writes a sentence or brief statement, starting from the prompt “Comics is…”; a colleague replies to the statement with a reflection, critique, or application of the statement or the position it advances; and, finally, the author of the statement responds to the reply in a brief essay.

Through its dialogical format, the book is likely to spark new conversations in the field; the statement–response–reply format will illustrate that the ways we think as comics scholars are processual, and any reader will find things they agree and disagree with in its pages - and, more importantly, will find occasion to reevaluate their own thinking.

Furthermore, when taken together, the “Comics is…” statements along with the responses and replies provide a barometer of the state of Comics Studies at present, exemplifying current approaches within the field and some of the thinking behind why some of us do our work in certain ways, while others choose sometimes radically different ones.

This article explores the construction and classification of comic book superhero characters as Jewish, proposing the term “Jewish-coded superheroes” as an alternative to “Jewish superheroes” in academic analysis. The article is based on Lund’s docent lecture and grounded in an ongoing research project that aims to analyze around 100 superhero characters characterized by their creators as Jewish. I argue that the label “Jewish superheroes” is often applied in an ascriptive and normative manner, rather than analytically. By using the term “Jewish-coded superheroes”, I contend that researchers can better focus on understanding how these characters are inscribed with attributes intended for readers to recognize as Jewish, as well as the practical interests those codings may serve. The article reviews previous research and popular science works that often essentialize Jewishness, advocating instead a historicizing and process-oriented analysis. I emphasizes the importance of viewing superheroes as products of historical and cultural processes of identification and authentication rather than as bearers of inherent, essentialized identities. By examining authentication processes and classification struggles, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of how Jewishness is constructed and represented in the comic book field and beyond. The article concludes by calling for a shift in perspective within comics studies, advocating a transition from identifying “Jewish superheroes” to analyzing how these characters are coded and authenticated as Jewish. This shift, I argue, enables a more theoretically nuanced and historically grounded understanding of Jewishness in comics.

Viking and Old Norse imaginaries aren’t rooted in any single geographical space nor any specific historical time; they are “conjured in an assemblage of alternative Earthbound pasts, fictive post-apocalyptic futures, as well as inhabiting various supernatural realms, alternative universes and outer space” (Williams, 230). The idea of Ragnarök is similarly malleable. No vision of things to come – whether utopian, dystopian, or apocalyptic – is really about the future. Speculation about the end of days is about the present in which it’s articulated, and the end of the world is always about the end of a world, some specific social formation that appears to be threatened or threatening to whoever prophecies about its downfall. Starting from these points of departure, this paper focuses on Ragnarök narratives in comics, aiming to both historicize them and to analyze them as popular cultural means serving socially formative ends.

Reference

Williams, Howard. “Towards Public Viking Research.” In Viking Heritage and History in Europe: Practices and Re-Creations, edited by Sara Ellis Nilsson and Stefan Nyzell, 229–243. Routledge, 2024.

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.

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.