Comics / Graphic Novel Collections

The Art of the News is the first museum exhibition and catalogue devoted to the remarkable international emergence of comics journalism. Hailing from eight countries, their work demonstrates the truly global nature of this literary and artistic medium.

Some comics fans view the Golden Age (1930s-1950s) as a challenging time when it comes to representations of race, an era when the few Black characters appeared as brutal savages, devious witch doctors, or unintelligible minstrels. Yet the true portrait is more complex and reveals that even as caricatures predominated, some Golden Age comics creators offered more progressive and nuanced depictions of Black people. Desegregating Comics features leading scholars exploring how debates about the representation of Blackness shaped both the production and reception of Golden Age comics.

Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics collects several theoretically informed close reading of comics and graphic literature that apply an intersectional feminist lens to the interpretation of several contemporary North American graphic narratives. The essays examine use a range of interpretive lenses drawn from theoretical models used in contemporary aesthetics, media studies, and literary criticism to analyze mainstream figures like DC's Catwoman to contextualize historical and speculative comics by Indigenous American illustrators, and to explicate autography by critically lauded Jewish, queer and female cartoonists.

The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies looks at the field of comics studies systematically, examining the history and evolution of the genre from a global perspective. This includes a discussion of how comic books are built out of shared aesthetic systems such as literature, painting, drawing, photography, and film. The Handbook brings together readable, jargon-free essays written by established and emerging scholars from diverse geographic, institutional, gender, and national backgrounds.

Surveying the work of 40 contemporary Canadian artists, THIS IS SERIOUS showcases the energy of underground artistic production and indie publishing as expressed through a diverse range of artists such as: David Collier, Jesse Jacobs, Sylvia Nickerson, Doug Wright, James Simpkins and Joe Ollmann.