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Subversive Comics
This issue takes a wandering journey through the increasingly broad and complex world of comics. At best, this journal issue can only reveal a corner of this world, because the world is wide-ranging and constantly expanding. But our contributors to this issue, who include comics script writers and artists and teachers of various types, not to mention a famed feminist art critic and an investigator into conjunctures between African American traditions, literature, and comics, come mainly from the younger generation of comics scholars. The contributions to this issue don’t attempt grand, comprehensive generalizations, instead focusing on forays into the niches and localized spaces of comics production.
Introductions Paul Buhle and Raymond Tyler suggest contexts for the issue, offering overviews and insights into the expanding variety of recent comics.
Features Nadeen Abdalla and Ahmed El Antably demonstrate the internationality of subversive comics by describing the politics of comics resistance to the Egyptian built environment. Nicholas Sammon shifts our focus by probing the intersection of comics with LBGTQ+ lives. Margaret Galvan offers us representations of gay life in Gay Comics (or Comix) and examines them.
Perspectives Sean Casey investigates the significance of shared universes and missions among recent subversive comics superheroes. Andrea Hormaechea Ocaña tracks the relationship of comics superheroes to 1970s social movements. Emily Coombs explores the potential of comics for sex worker workers’ rights movements. Anna Duensing discusses, “A Revelation: Reflections on Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts,” and raises important questions of contemporary comics and the African American tradition. Lucy R. Lippard, a veteran of the recent “new comics” explosion, offers her perspectives, especially on the seminal WorldWar 3 Illustrated Comix, along with perspectives of Sabrina Jones. Emma Oki and Maite Urcaregui, in separate pieces, deal with comics subversion in the Japanese and Japanese-American traditions. Martha Kuhlman, another veteran of the contemporary comics movement, reviews Dolores Huerta and the Plight of Farm Workers and Union Organizers as a way to offer her reflections on the direction of comics, especially subversive ones.
Caption: Joshua Brown, et al., “A Cavalcade of Subversive Comics.”
