Comics and authorship : an introduction

If media authorship can be understood "as a site of cultural tension" (Johnson and Gray 2013, 10), then a deeper understanding of comics authorship will also provide clues regarding the sustaining—and constraining— of creative practices in other media ecologies and intermedial interactions (such as, for instance, adaptations). For comics, this implies combining insights from comics scholars, practitioners as well as agents involved in the publication and dissemination of comics. This issue, building on the findings of extant scholarship on authorship in comics and other media, hopes to provide incentive for further adventures into the (almost) unknown of comics authorship

Children in comics : between education and entertainment, conformity and agency

This chapter begins by examining the tension between education and entertainment in comics from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yellow Kid exemplifies the agentic, carnivalesque comics child who gets away with everything he does, and Buster Brown narrates the antics and slips of a naughty child who is duly punished. This also holds for Katzenjammer Kids and the children in the British magazine Beano. Children in comics are first situated in the broader media context of the nineteenth century. Changing conceptions of children and childhood and the relationship between children and laughter are also elaborated. The chapter then focuses on naughty children in comics and the degree of impunity offered to them in order to map the negotiation between education and entertainment as well as social commentary. It highlights the queer inclinations and affective power of comics children while also tracing the continuation of racist stereotypes

Loving comics in Neil the Horse Comics and Stories

This article examines the love of comics or bedephilia discernible in Katherine Collins’s Neil the Horse Comics and Stories, a short-lived comic from the 1980s. It interrogates and contextualizes the “childish” elements of the comic, its bridging of children’s culture and adult culture through focusing girls’ comics and funny animal comics. It also discusses the comic’s interactions with musicals. Situating the comic in the “maturing” scene of 1980s North America, this article shows how Neil the Horse expresses a love for comics that were often left out of the mainstream and its alternatives; it reached out to a relatively mixed audience and an all but forgotten group of comics readers that often steered clear of the abundance of superhero comics