Table of Contents

Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling: Introduction I. History, Comics, and the City 1. Jens Balzer: "Hully Gee, I'm a Hieroglyphe" - Mobilizing the Gaze and the Invention of Comics in New York City, 1895 2. Ole Frahm: Every Window Tells a Story: Remarks on the Urbanity of Early Comic Strips 3. Anthony Enns: The City as Archive in Jason Lutes' Berlin II. Retrofuturistic and Nostalgic Cities 4. Henry Jenkins: "The Tomorrow that Never Was" - Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter 5. Stefanie Diekmann: Remembrance of Things to Come: François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters' Cities of the Fantastic 6. Michael Cuntz: Paris au pluriel: Depictions of the French Capital in Jacques Tardi's Comic Book Writing III. Superhero Cities 7. William Uricchio: The Batman's Gotham City™: Story, Ideology, Performance 8. Arno Meteling: A Tale of Two Cities: Politics, and Superheroics in Starman and Ex Machina 9. Anthony Lioi: The Radiant City: New York as Ecotopia in Promethea, Book V 10. Jason Bainbridge: "I am New York" - Spider-Man, New York City, and the Marvel Universe IV. Locations of Crime 11. Greg M. Smith: Will Eisner, Vaudevillian of the Cityscape 12. Björn Quiring: "A Fiction That We Must Inhabit" - Sense Production in Urban Spaces According to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell 13. Jörn Ahrens: The Ordinary Urban: 100 Bullets and the Clichés of Mass Culture V. The City-Comic as a Mode of Reflection 14. André Suhr: Seeing the City through a Frame: Marc-Antoine Mathieu's Acquefacques-Comics 15. Andreas Platthaus: Calisota or Bust: Duckburg vs. Entenhausen in the Comics of Carl Barks 16. Thomas Becker: Enki Bilal's Woman Trap: Reflections on Authorship under the Shifting Boundaries between Order and Terror in the Cities

Promotional Information

Includes international essays on possibly the most important aspect of the aesthetics and narratives of comics - urban topography and environment.

About the Author

Jörn Ahrens teaches cultural sociology at Giessen University, Germany.

Arno Meteling teaches literature at the Westfalian Wilhelms-University Muenster in Germany.

Reviews

"This rich collection -- as multi-faceted as the twentieth-century city itself -- proves that comics are a remarkably apposite medium to convey the rich multiplicity of the urban environment. Essays here take up the ways that comics have engaged with urban language, the spatial and temporal experience of city life, aspirational (and dystopian) visual designs, and a broad range of urban types. The range of topics is remarkable, and the scholarship is first rate." -- Scott Bukatman, author of Matters of Gravity: Special Effects & Supermen in the 20th Century

Lucidly written and critically sophisticated, these essays brilliantly chart the myriad connections between comics and the urban landscapes where they were born. With cutting-edge critical readings that range freely across historical periods, narrative genres and national boundaries, Comics and the City pulls off the remarkable feat of being at once tightly focused and intellectually expansive.  This volume belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who already cares about comics and anyone interested in finding out how smart comics can be. --Joseph "Rusty" Witek, Stetson University; author of Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar

‘There is an obvious affinity between comics and the city that this welcome collection of essays explores at length from a variety of disciplinary perspectives... The anthology is broken down thematically rather than chronologically, and works all the better for it...this is an important and necessary intervention in a burgeoning area of studies.'
*New Formations*