Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence

by Jörn Ahrens (Editor), Arno Meteling (Editor)

Comics emerged parallel to, and in several ways intertwined with, the development of modern urban mass societies at the turn of the 20th century. On the one hand, urban topoi, self-portrayals, forms of urban cultural memories, and variant readings of the city (strolling, advertising, architecture, detective stories, mass phenomena, street life, etc.) are all incorporated into comics. On the other hand, comics have unique abilities to capture urban space and city life because of their hybrid nature, consisting of words, pictures, and sequences. These formal aspects of comics are also to be found within the cityscape itself: one can see the influence of comic book aesthetics all around us today.

With chapters on the very earliest comic strips, and on artists as diverse as Alan Moore, Carl Barks, Will Eisner and Jacques Tardi, Comics and the City is an important new collection of international scholarship that will help to define the field for many years to come.

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture, Comics, Graphic Novels, Art

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 11, 2010

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A maddeningly inconsistent collection that's very poorly copy-edited, organized entirely around American and European comics and cities, with a myopic focus on white male authors.

[Mjhancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection by Ahrens and Meteling examines different approaches to the portrayals of cities in comic books. It's a pretty wide-ranging collection, including material on early comics (Hogan's Alley), superhero comics, and a nice range of European and American comics, although there's no consideration of the city as portrayed in manga. Alan Moore is particularly well represented, as there are essays on Promethea and From Hell, but there are also examinations of writers such as Carl Barks (Scrooge McDuck), Will Eisner, Brian K. Vaughan, James Robinson, Dean Motter and Jason Lutes. I particularly liked Meteling's essay on superheroes, and Henry Jenkins' essay on Mister X. While the theory is geared more towards comic books than cities per se, there is also a lot of application of the theories of people such as Umberto Eco, Michel de Certeau, and Foucault. As someone at least mildly familiar with comic book theory, I found it an interesting read.