Drawing the past

"Contributions by Dorian L. Alexander, Lawrence Abrams, Max Bledstein, Peter Cullen Bryan, Stephen Connor, Matthew J. Costello, Martin Flanagan, Michael Fuchs, Michael Goodrum, Bridget Keown, Kaleb Knoblach, Christina M. Knopf, Martin Lund, Jordan Newton, Stefan Rabitsch, Maryanne Rhett, and Philip Smith "This enjoyable collection of essays illustrates America as a fluid construction politically, historically, and culturally. The essays perform a tricky tightrope walk between knowledge of comics and their production, comics form, and history." -Joan Ormrod, author of Wonder Woman: The Female Body and Popular Culture and editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics Drawing the Past, Volume 1: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the United States, the first book in a two-volume series, provides a map of current approaches to comics and their engagement with historical representation. The first section of the book on history and form explores the existence, shape, and influence of comics as a medium. The second section concerns the question of trauma, understood both as individual traumas that can shape the relationship between the narrator and object, and historical traumas that invite a reassessment of existing social, economic, and cultural assumptions. The final section on mythic histories delves into ways in which comics add to the mythology of the US"--