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As the Tahrir Square uprisings of 2011 grew, the US narrative about the Arab world changed quickly, moving from old fashioned Orientalism to embrace a young revolution (Arab Spring) and a focus on new media and social networking software. This chapter takes an extended look at how cultural forms associated with the US—cyberpunk fiction, superhero comics, social networking software, and text messaging language—make their way into the Egyptian cultural scene, and are imbibed with rich new sets of meanings.

The conclusion looks forward from the Victorian illustrated book to the “graphic classics,” a form of modern popular culture that is arguably the heir of the Victorian illustrated book. Canonical texts adapted into graphic novel format are inheritors of the aesthetic conventions of caricature and realism, reshaped in a hyper-modern form to appeal to twenty-first-century readers. The chapter explores parallels between the serial and the comic book. It surveys graphic novel adaptations of nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels (e.g. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and original Victorian-themed graphic novels (e.g. Batman Noël). The conclusion focuses on two important Victorian illustrated books—Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865)—to demonstrate how graphic novel adaptation is reviving a genre that a century before recognized pictures play a central role in plot and character development. This chapter foregrounds author-illustrator Will Eisner, the father of the graphic novel and author-illustrator of Fagin the Jew (2003), for his direct challenge to a religious and ethnic stereotype that Dickens and Cruikshank develop in Oliver Twist and Du Maurier carries into Trilby.

This chapter addresses the relative paucity of comics work done, until recently, on and by First Peoples. It focuses especially on conics work by First Peoples artists, arguing that a key reason First Peoples authors might be attracted to the comics form is that it can be seen to complement traditional oral literature. The chapter argues that we can understand these First Peoples graphic novels as writing back to misrepresentations of themselves throughout the long tradition of the comic and cartoon. In their own graphic novels, First Peoples are disrupting, rejecting, or even reclaiming and revisioning these previous images and tropes.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the varied landscape of contemporary children's and young adult literature. The closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the new millennium witnessed profound literary, artistic, and commercial changes in children's and young adult literature. Arguably one of the most significant transformations that took place during this period was the resurgence of comics geared toward a youth readership. The chapter then considers scholarship on children's and young adult comics, suggesting that despite the popularity and influence enjoyed by children's and young adult graphic novels, contemporary developments in the genre have received surprisingly scant critical attention. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This introductory chapter discusses how graphic novels can make the serious amusing, while philosophy can make the amusing serious. Individuals, be they philosophers or poets, can assign words that may come within a mile or so of what it is truly like to be someone, but humans are really completely at a loss when it comes to knowing the immediate experiences of others. It is even a greater distance if they are dealing with a translation where one language has words for things that another does not. Graphic art allows people one more opportunity to try and meet this challenge. Art provides humans with another means of being both in and cognizant of the world.

This chapter explains how Will Eisner's A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978) reshaped its medium as suitable for mature reflection upon life, so much that the received term “comic book”—not to mention “funnies”—did not seem anymore an appropriate designation. “Graphic novel” was popularized as a relatively new category of artistic composition. The chapter shows how, in discussing mortality, sexuality, and spirituality in Contract, Eisner drew from the fact that humans make philosophical statements based on their experiences. Yet relying excessively on the author's self-interpretations, one loses sight of possibilities not recommended or even considered by him.

This chapter examines how Asian American young girls are represented in male-authored and female-authored graphic texts. Although the two Asian American male-authored texts discussed in this chapter, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and Derek Kirk Kim’s Good as Lily, counter the white male dominance of the graphic fiction genre, these two texts rely on a romance sub-plot that objectifies young Asian American girls and offer them conflicting messages about their gender roles. However, two Asian American female graphic fiction creators, anthologized in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, Kripa Joshi in “Girl Power” and Lynn Chen in “You Are What You Eat” move beyond the restrictive romance plot to draw attention to issues that young Asian American girls encounter in society, such as female hyper-sexualization and low self-esteem due to poor body image.

This chapter argues that there is no “clash of civilizations,” noting that the West is now a place where Muslims are at home, and Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and secularists are at home with Muslims. It shows that every day, in defiance of the clash of civilizations, ordinary people find ordinary ways to make a life together. Paul Gilroy has used the word “conviviality” to describe the most important proof that we are making a life in common. The chapter considers Michael Muhammad Knight's novel The Taqwacores, in which he pointed out numerous ways to be Muslim in the West, and cites evidence of conviviality. For example, the idea of a clash of civilizations is resisted in novels, especially graphic novels; Islam is present in the American heartland; and Muslims are present in politics.

This chapter applies Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field of literary production, as well as critical evaluations of contemporary graphic novels and comic books (McCloud, Hatfield), in order to consider the trajectory of Ray Fawkes, a Canadian comics artist and writer. Through analyzing the aesthetic presentation and material qualities of Fawkes’ works One Soul (2011),The Spectral Engine (2013), The People Inside (2014), and Intersect (2015), as well as industry standards and practices and their subsequent impact on the reader, this chapter contends that the creator’s adoption of a particular visual style in any given comic book or graphic novel can serve as a signal to readers as to the genre and subfield of literature to which their publication belongs. Through marked shifts in visual style and formal experimentation, Ray Fawkes subtly innovates from within both the mainstream and alternative subfields of the field of comics publishing.

For Kafka, there is always something out of this world, meaning radically weird and inexhaustible, about Kafka that arrives in broad strokes and tiny splashes. Kafka was uncannily attuned to the systematic restructuring ensuing from nineteenth-century colonialism and military science, from twentieth-century corporate organization and bureaucracy, and from the enlarged scale, acceleration, and range of mass communications facilitated by such technologies as the telephone, radio transmission, and photo journalism. Kafka's imagination of systems and of urban and bureaucratic space under advanced capitalism succumbs to contemporary graphic fiction as the taking-off point and basic assertion of this chapter.

This chapter examines the influence of the graphic novel on American comics. It looks at two factors that indirectly led to the creation of the graphic novel in the 1970s and 1980s: the introduction of the “direct market” in which publishers sold comic books directly to specialty comics stores; and challenges to the Comics Code Authority that regulated the newsstand comic book industry. The chapter also shows how, after a series of unstable economic and material conditions, graphic novels have emerged as common fixtures in libraries and bookshops independent of the comics shops and newsstands. It provides a background on the Comics Code Authority and how it worked in tandem with the production, distribution, and reception of American comics. Moreover, the chapter considers the Comics Magazine Association of America, founded in 1954 by several major comics publishers to govern the content of comic books. It describes the rise of black and white “alternative” comics published by cartoonists, along with self-publishing and small press publications. Finally, the chapter focuses on three comics publishers: DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Dark Horse Comics.

This chapter theorizes the form of autobiographical graphic novels as well as their formal unconscious by analyzing the significance of mirror scenes of subject formation and fragmentation in Marjane Satrapi's two-volume autobiography Persepolis (2003), James Kochalka's American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries (1998–2004), David B.'s Epileptic (1996–2003; 2005), and Laurie Sandell's The Imposter's Daughter (2009). The chapter begins with the argument that the gutter separating the first two panels of Persepolis is a mirror and a mise en abyme (“to place into the abyss”), the classic trope of a reflection within a reflection. It then considers authorial self-portraiture (the I-con) in American Elf and how it acquires the symbolic potential to express an impossible relation to itself. It also discusses the significance of mirrors to autographic subjects in Imposter's Daughter and Epileptic and concludes that mirrors in the comics imply “failed encounters with the real”.

This chapter analyzes Sita's Ramayana, a graphic novel published in 2011 by the Indian publisher Tara Books in partnership with Groundwood Books in the United States and Canada. Illustrated by Moyna Chitrakar, a female folk artist from West Bengal, and written by Samhita Arni, a young, cosmopolitan female Indian author, Sita's Ramayana has been marketed as a feminist retelling of the epic. It has been primarily targeted at a young adult readership and has been critically acclaimed as well as commercially successful both in India and abroad. The chapter shows how the graphic novel version of the popular Indian epic Ramayana is strikingly different visually from the other myriad picture books and comic book adaptations of the tale, because of its use of the centuries-old patua folk art form.

This chapter explores puzzles and other ludic devices in Epileptic, Cancer Vixen, and Fun Home, asking what is produced when autobiographical graphic novels stop showing and telling and start playing. The goal is to understand the tendency in some autography for picture puzzles, labyrinths, and matching exercises. The chapter examines the implications of graphic memoir's penchant for ludic interactivity (“ludic” refers to acts of play solicited by the text as well as the textual spaces that these solicitations inscribe). More specifically, it considers what happens to reading and readers when this shift to play occurs. It also investigates how shifts to the ludic give rise to tactile “reading” experiences that reveal graphic memoir's investments in embodiment and materiality. The chapter shows that the play spaces of autobiographical graphic novels beckon transformative agency in the field of the reader, whose actions therein are both emancipatory and puzzling.

Shoshana Magnet and Amanda Watson focus on two graphic memoirs, Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh, and Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, by Miriam Engelberg. These comics, using text, images, and the specific affordances of the graphic novel genre, allow for unusual representations of the “temporalities of disability” with respect to cancer and depression. These conditions produce experiences of time which are at odds with normative expectations of time and productivity. Such alternate temporalities, when made evident, can become the basis for broader understanding of and greater empathy toward disability experiences.

This chapter demonstrates how the social contract theory is one of the most dominant ways in which political philosophy is done. At least one important objective of the contract is to use the power and force of the collective to achieve a level of security for individuals and their property. The trade-off for this security is the loss of some degree of individual freedom. The graphic novel V for Vendetta puts this trade-off into stark relief. But it is not simply about a cost/benefit analysis of a particular social contract. It is about the love that V has for liberty and his fellow citizens and the love that the leader of the regime (Adam Susan) has for his country. The chapter shows how the graphic novel raises important questions about the role of emotions in the political order.

Berndt, in her “Skim as Girl: Reading a Japanese North American Graphic Novel through Manga Lenses,” interprets the reception of Tamaki and Tamaki’s Skim within a Japanese manga audience once it was translated into Japanese. But the translated version suffers from aesthetic losses and misunderstandings, argues Berndt. She carefully investigates how manga conventions and Japanese readers’ expectations, including standard responses to a subject who is deemed “other,” stymied the book’s success abroad as the audience struggled to decipher Tamaki and Tamaki’s graphic reading cues uniting and separating Skim from her peers, that heavily influence interpretation.