Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-mmrw7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-07T02:24:32.156Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Why Not More Comics?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Stephanie Burt
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Why comics? “All that it is Necessary to say … upon this subject, may be effected by affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions, either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in comics, the comics will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once.” That's not exactly what William Wordsworth wrote in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, of course—he had “verse” where I have “comics” (112). Nor did Wordsworth say that the pleasure of seeing expressive, hand-drawn characters could produce

a complex feeling of delight, which is of the most important use in tempering the painful feeling always found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions … while, in lighter compositions, the ease and gracefulness with which artists manage their lines are themselves confessedly a principal source of the gratification of the Reader.

Information

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 3 , May 2019 , pp. 572 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Chute, Hillary. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.Google Scholar
Edidin, Jay. Ruby Quartz Panic Room: Cyclops, Neurodivergence, and Me. Jay Edidin Makes Stuff, gumroad.com/l/rubyquartz.Google Scholar
Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants. New York UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felski, Rita. The Uses of Literature. Blackwell, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Angela. “Queer Utopias, Queer Futurity, and Potentiality in Quotidian Practice.” Introduction. A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias, edited by Jones, , Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, Heidi. “Raina Telgemeier's ‘Ghosts’ Has a 500,000 Copy First Printing”. The Beat: The News Blog of Comics Culture, 30 June 2016, www.comicsbeat.com/raina-telgemeiers-ghosts-has-a-500000-copy-first-printing/.Google Scholar
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.Google Scholar
McDuffie, Dwayne, et al. Damage Control: The Complete Collection. Marvel, 2015.Google Scholar
Walden, Tillie. On a Sunbeam. First Second, 2018.Google Scholar
Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Da Capo Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. Preface. Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1802, by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Stafford, Fiona, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 95–116.Google Scholar
Yergeau, Melanie. Authoring Autism. Duke UP, 2017.Google Scholar