Snoopy and Charlie Brown, Calvin and Hobbes, Tintin and Snowy? comics are home to many memorable child and animal figures. Many cultural productions, especially children?s literature and cartoons, stress the similarities between children and animals, similarities that have their limits and often place the child, as human, above the animal. Still, these fictional situations offer opportunities for thinking of child-animal relationships in diverse ways through, for instance, considering the possibilities of privileged contact between children and animals or of animals that are more knowledgeable and powerful than children and even adults.0Despite the prevalence and success of child-animal tandems in comics and culture, we know very little about these relationships. What makes them so popular? How do they work? How much do they vary across time and cultures? What do they tell us about the place of animals and children in comics and in the real world?0'Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics' takes a first, important step in this direction. Bringing together scholars with a diverse range of comics expertise, the volume?s chapters combine contextualized readings of comics with relevant theories for interrogating childhood and animalhood, their overlaps and divergences. The strong bonds between children and animals mapped out here point towards alternative modes of conceptualizing family and identity and, ultimately, alternative means of reading, interpreting and imagining.0With chapters on early comics (the Italian children?s magazine 'Corriere dei Piccoli' during WWI, Harold Gray?s 'Little Orphan Annie') international and regional classics ('Tintin', the Flemish 'Jommeke') and contemporary graphic novels (Bryan Talbot?s 'A Tale of One Bad Rat', Brecht Even?s 'Panther'), this critical anthology sheds light on a vast array of child-animal relationships in comics from Europe and North America.000.

Key Terms in Comics Studies is a glossary of over 300 terms and critical concepts currently used in the Anglophone academic study of comics, including those from other languages that are currently adopted and used in English. Written by nearly 100 international and contemporary experts from the field, the entries are succinctly defined, exemplified, and referenced. The entries are 250 words or fewer, placed in alphabetical order, and explicitly cross-referenced to others in the book. Key Terms in Comics Studies is an invaluable tool for both students and established researchers alike.

Historical and theoretical analysis of the “clear line” style in comics and cinema The “clear line”, a term coined in 1977 by Dutch essayist and artist Joost Swarte, has become shorthand in the field of comics studies for the style originally developed by Hergé and the École de Bruxelles. It refers to certain storytelling strategies that generate a deceptively simple, lucid, and hygienic narration: in Philippe Marion’s words, it is a style “made out of light, fluidity and limpid clarity”. By cataloguing and critically analysing clear line comics from historical and theoretical perspectives, this book offers a new outlook on the development of the style in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially focused on the context of the European bande dessinée. In addition, it pioneeringly expands the concept of “clear line” to other artistic domains by introducing and defending its transmedial use, which is particularly relevant for the understanding of the oeuvres of certain filmmakers of the 20th century working in the postwar period, such as Yasujirô Ozu in Japan, Jacques Tati in France and Frank Tashlin in the United States. The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema is therefore a key theoretical work for both bande dessinée enthusiasts and comics scholars, as well as a fundamental contribution to present-day film studies and transmedial narratology.

Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of “reproduction” in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers.

This interdisciplinary book explores posthuman and psychological approaches to childhood education and well-being by examining ‘animal-assisted’ education, using qualitative approaches to understand the nuanced mechanisms which unfold in child-dog interactions. Mapping the lives of children in a primary school setting and the relationships they share with their school and classroom dog, Ted, the book provides insight into everyday child-dog encounters, the importance of touch in middle childhood and how ‘bodiment’ offers a corporeal and compassionate means to understand the rhythm and musicality in interspecies communication. In doing so, the book uses the unique orientation of ‘rhythmanalysis’, a posthuman critical theory, and new materialist orientation in multispecies empathic childhood flourishing in the future. Reflecting contemporary interest in child-dog companionship, picture books, children’s flourishing, and children’s well-being, the book provides a nuanced multi-disciplinary overview of the field. Using creative methods as well as spatial, sensory, and movement theory, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and academics in the fields of cognitive psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, and primary and elementary education. Those interested in the early years will also benefit from this volume.

Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics investigates girl superheroes published by DC and Marvel Comics in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, asking who the new-and-improved super-girls are and what potentials they hold for imagining girls as agents of change, in the genre as well as its socio-cultural context. As super-girls have grown increasingly numerous and diverse since the turn of the millennium, they provide an opportunity for reconsidering representations of gender and power in the superhero genre. This book offers the term agentic embodiment as an analytical tool for critiquing the body politics of superhero comics, particularly concerning youth, femininity, whiteness, and violence. Grounded in comics studies and informed by feminist cultural studies, the book contributes a critical and hopeful perspective on the diversification of a genre often written off as irredeemably conservative and patriarchal. Super-Girls of the Future is a key title for students and scholars of comics studies, visual culture, US popular culture, and feminist criticism.

Sugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice offers an innovative, wide-ranging and geographically diverse book-length treatment of girlhood in comics. The various contributing authors and artists provide novel insights into established themes within comics studies, children’s comics, graphic medicine and comics by and about refugees and marginalised ethnic or cultural groups. The book enriches traditional historical, narratological and aesthetic approaches to studying girlhood in comics with practice-based research, discussion and conversation. This re-examination of girls, gender and identity in comics connects with contemporary discourse on gender identity politics. Through examples from both within Europe, the anglophone world and beyond, and including visual essays alongside critical theory, the volume furthermore engages with new developments in contemporary comics scholarship. It will therefore appeal to students and scholars of childhood studies, comics scholars and creators, and those interested in addressing gender identity through the prism of comics.