From the mind of New York Times Best-selling author and Eisner Award-winning author Neil Gaiman, comes Mr. Hero! Created by the villainous Henry Phage (aka Teknophage) as a sleeper agent, steampunk robot Mr. Hero is the toast of the late 19th century carnival scene. But when an accident during a boxing match causes him to seriously harm a patron, he's boxed up and forgotten. Rediscovered 100 years later by a young street magician, Mr. Hero struggles to overcome his original programming and become the hero his new friend (and the world) needs. This new volume (the first of a two-volume set) will collect all of the classic Mr. Hero comics for the first time anywhere. Volume 2 of the series is planned for Winter 2017.

When Karen leaves New Jersey to spend time with her enigmatic father on Mount Olympus, she is shocked to learn that her junior high classmates are gods and goddesses, and that one of them is turning people to stone.

"Across more than fifty essays, Keywords for Comics Studies provides a rich, interdisciplinary vocabulary for comics and sequential art, and identifies new avenues of research into one of the most popular and diverse visual media of the twentieth and twenty-first century. In an original twist on the NYU Keywords mission, the terms in this volume combine attention to the unique aesthetic practices of a distinct medium, comics, with some of the most fundamental concepts of the humanities broadly. Readers will see how scholars, cultural critics, and comics artists from a range of fields-including media and film studies, queer and feminist theory, and critical race and transgender studies among others-take up sequential art as both an object of analysis and a medium for developing new theories about embodiment, identity, literacy, audience reception, genre, cultural politics and more. To do so, Keywords for Comics Studies presents an array of original and inventive analyses of terms central to the study of comics and sequential art, but traditionally siloed in distinct lexicons: these include creative or aesthetic terms like Ink, Creator, Border, and Panel; conceptual terms like trans*, disability, universe, and fantasy; genre terms, like Zine, Pornography, Superhero, and Manga; and canonical terms like X-Men, Archie, Watchmen and Love and Rockets. Written as much for students and lay readers as professors and experts in the field, Keywords for Comics Studies revivifies the fantasy and magic of reading comics in its kaleidoscopic view of the field's most compelling and imaginative ideas."--

In this comprehensive textbook, editors Matthew J. Brown, Randy Duncan, and Matthew J. Smith offer students a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing key theories and critical methods for analyzing comics. Each chapter explains and then demonstrates a critical method or approach, which students can then apply to interrogate and critique the meanings and forms of comic books, graphic novels, and other sequential art. Contributors introduce a wide range of critical perspectives on comics, including disability studies, parasocial relationships, scientific humanities, queer theory, linguistics, critical geography, philosophical aesthetics, historiography, and much more. As a companion to the acclaimed Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, this second volume features 19 fresh perspectives and serves as a stand-alone textbook in its own right. More Critical Approaches to Comics is a compelling classroom or research text for students and scholars interested in Comics Studies, Critical Theory, the Humanities, and beyond.

Kazu Jones, scrappy fifth grade detective, is back on the case and ready to track down a local store vandal in this fun and exciting book filled with mystery. Fresh off their first successful investigation, Kazu and her friends—March, CindeeRae, and Madeline—are hungry for their next case, which comes when a vandal begins targeting local comic book stores with anti-comic graffiti. March is especially desperate to unmask the villain before his beloved shop, The Super Pickle, gets hit. But when March takes over, the gang starts butting heads. It doesn't help that Kazu is distracted by another mystery at home: her mom is bedridden and her grandmother has come from Japan to help out, but no one will tell Kazu what's going on. Juggling two investigations is not easy. When Kazu and the gang trace the vandal's secret identity to one of the most popular superhero characters in the nation, they realize the vandal's revenge plot is much more explosive than they thought. But can they put aside their differences in time to catch this criminal—or will both of Kazu's cases fall apart?

Contributions by Ofra Amihay, Madeline Backus, Samantha Baskind, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Scott S. Elliott, Assaf Gamzou, Susan Handelman, Leah Hochman, Leonard V. Kaplan, Ken Koltun-Fromm, Shiamin Kwa, Samantha Langsdale, A. David Lewis, Karline McLain, Ranen Omer-Sherman, Joshua Plencner, and Jeffrey L. Richey Comics and Sacred Texts explores how comics and notions of the sacred interweave new modes of seeing and understanding the sacral. Comics and graphic narratives help readers see religion in the everyday and in depictions of God, in transfigured, heroic selves as much as in the lives of saints and the meters of holy languages. Coeditors Assaf Gamzou and Ken Koltun-Fromm reveal the graphic character of sacred narratives, imagining new vistas for both comics and religious texts. In both visual and linguistic forms, graphic narratives reveal representational strategies to encounter the sacred in all its ambivalence. Through close readings and critical inquiry, these essays contemplate the intersections between religion and comics in ways that critically expand our ability to think about religious landscapes, rhetorical practices, pictorial representation, and the everyday experiences of the uncanny. Organized into four sections—Seeing the Sacred in Comics; Reimagining Sacred Texts through Comics; Transfigured Comic Selves, Monsters, and the Body; and The Everyday Sacred in Comics—the essays explore comics and graphic novels ranging from Craig Thompson’s Habibi and Marvel’s X-Men and Captain America to graphic adaptions of religious texts such as 1 Samuel and the Gospel of Mark. Comics and Sacred Texts shows how claims to the sacred are nourished and concealed in comic narratives. Covering many religions, not only Christianity and Judaism, this rare volume contests the profane/sacred divide and establishes the import of comics and graphic narratives in disclosing the presence of the sacred in everyday human experience.