Mel Gibson

Sequential art for science and CHI

This paper illustrates our preliminary studies of new interactive tools that support the generation of sequential art for entertainment, learning and scientific discourse. In the first of two examples, primary school students document a practical science session through the creation of a photostory. In the second, participants in a study on the biological nature of thrill create a souvenir photostory by selecting images from a DVD. The paper is written in a comic-book format to further explore and highlight the communicative capabilities of the medium, one that can be visually attractive and facilitate rapid dissemination to a wide audience.

Superheroes and Identities

This collection analyses stories from popular comics franchises such as Batman, Captain America, Ms Marvel and X-Men, alongside less well known comics such as Kabuki and Flex Mentallo.

“It’s All Come Flooding Back”: Memories of Childhood Comics

This chapter explores how memories of childhood comics in Britain are interwoven with ones about places, families and friendships and constructions of both comics and childhood. It draws on over 200 interviews with male and female readers who were children from the early 1950s to the late 1990s. The chapter consequently looks at cultural practices around comics such as collecting, buying and exchanging titles; the comic as object; and how relationships related to reading. It also offers some initial thoughts on gender and nostalgia and on the way some dominant discourses around childhood are disrupted by accounts of comic reading, making forgotten aspects of childhood experience visible.

‘There Is No Race So Wretched That There Is Not Something Out There That Cares for Them’: Multiculturalism, Understanding, Empathy and Prejudice in Discworld

Multiculturalism is at the heart of Mel Gibson’s chapter. Arguing that stories situated in Ankh-Morpork, Discworld’s major capital and the focal point of many Discworld stories, in particular deal with the opportunities, problems and, sometimes, sheer craziness associated with multi- and cross-cultural debates and realities, Gibson draws on European models of multiculturalism. She analyses how, alongside debating the nature of prejudice and oppression, the City Watch stories in particular explore ways in which a multicultural space may work.

Watch this space: childhood, picturebooks and comics

This is a special issue of Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics exploring the relationships of picturebooks and comics with notions of childhood. There have been productive readings in relation to the mechanics of both these media such as Maria Nikoljeva and Carole Scott’s How Picturebooks Work (2001) and Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007), as well as extensive research on the history and specific creators of children’s picturebooks. However, much less attention has been paid to the intersection between these comics, picturebooks and constructions of childhood. This is an area that is potentially significant, as the understandings and definitions of childhood held by creators, publishers, teachers and others shape both what is offered to actual child readers and how children are depicted in texts. We believe, then, that focusing on constructions of childhood, rather than education, or reading for pleasure, is an important area of enquiry that opens the fields of childhood studies and visual culture to new debates. Focusing on the links across illustration, graphic narratives and visual culture, this special issue offers interventions in the fields of comics and picturebooks. It is perhaps worth noting that comics and picturebooks are not typically considered together, with some rare exceptions such as Mel Gibson’s (2010) work in ‘Graphic Novels, Comics and Picturebooks’ and David Lewis’s (1998) work on ‘knowingness’ in relation to Colin McNaughton’s work. Perhaps one material difference between comics and picturebooks is the traditionally serial nature of the former compared with the relatively infrequent production process for the latter. While comics such as Little Nemo in Slumberland (1902–1914), Calvin and Hobbes (1985–1995) and the long-running The Katzenjammer Kids (1912–1949) were produced in weekly, if not daily, newspapers, picturebooks and graphic novels such as Raymond Briggs’s (1978) The Snowman, Maurice Sendak’s (1963) Where the Wild Things Are, or even the Dr Seuss corpus might be regarded as more ‘singular’ publication events. This is not to suggest that picturebooks are somehow more valuable, but only to draw attention to some of the material specificities surrounding each genre. While both genres have spawned their own kinds of adaptations, spin-offs and readerships, there are several links between them that might fruitfully be considered. For example, in relation to audience (a focus in Lewis), comics and picturebooks have frequently been associated with younger readers, despite the two being very flexible media that can be used to address readers of all ages on any topic. When such assumptions are dominant, this is usually related to perceptions of what might be ‘appropriate’ content. As the artist and illustrator Shaun Tan commented in an interview, ‘I’m not sure if there is a conflict across different audiences, but like to think that

Graphic novels and comics in libraries and archives. Essays on readers, research, history and cataloging, edited by Robert G. Weiner

Robert G. Weiner’s collection is predominantly focused on the ways that North American librarians and archivists, with examples predominantly from the US, engage with sequential art as practitioners, sharing examples of successful practice. It also offers a small number of pieces that do not share that focus and a wealth of ‘leads’ into other print material and websites on collection development. The essays are grouped in sections which reveal the diversity of responses to the medium in North America and the collection does a good job of gathering together a series of themed ‘snapshots’ of a range of settings and issues. It may best be thought of as more like a series of conference panels, where speakers come from very different disciplines and ranges of experience, than a more traditional collection of essays. The 29 essays included are divided into 10 sections: history, school libraries, public libraries, academic libraries, state libraries/archives, audiences, nomenclature and aesthetics, meta-comics/webcomics, cataloguing and evaluation of collections. The diversity of the collection means that it is uneven in terms of address, although most of the authors offer their practice as case studies, effectively linking the pieces. The exceptions to this are the pieces in the history and nomenclature and aesthetics sections. To return to the notion of address, some of the essays are written with a professional audience in mind who may not be familiar with graphic novel collections. Essays taking this approach tend to offer a ‘how to’, or a campaigning ‘take’, in encouraging other professionals to engage with the medium, sometimes on behalf of a specific client group or audience, such as young adults, for instance. In contrast, others address an implied reader who is familiar with the medium and the issues for library staff. Here the exploration of a specific issue is often the focus, as is the case, for example, in comparative accounts of university library holdings. These essays often share quantitative and qualitative research material that could usefully support attempts to develop collections. Still other essays address a specific professional sub-group. The pieces on cataloguing, for instance, show a rigorousness and level of engagement that not all British library services may be able to use as a model, due to so much of that area having become part of the work of library suppliers, but do show a range of solutions to the problems that such material may offer that are appropriate, depending on the kind of service being offered. A final group of essays offer a more academic, research or philosophical ‘take’, something particularly in evidence in Amy Kiste Nyberg’s analysis of librarians’ writings about graphic novels and the changing perspectives they reveal. This diversity could be seen as a strength, or a weakness, but certainly suggests the potential of the text. This is a very useful collection, which, it is suggested by the editor, should be dipped into rather than read through. In reviewing the book, of course, I have followed the latter