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List of contents
Preface
1. Introduction
2. What are Comics?
3. Comics as Artifacts – Ontology and Authenticity
4. Does Superman Exist?
5. Truth in Comics
6. Genre in Comics
7. Representing Social Categories in Comics
8. Are Comics Literature?
9. Comics, Obscenity, and Pornography
10. Page, Panel, Screen – Comics and Adaptation
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Sam Cowling is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Denison University, USA.Wesley D. Cray is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas Christian University, USA.
Summary
What exactly are comics? Can they be art, literature, or even pornography? How should we understand the characters, stories, and genres that shape them?
Thinking about comics raises a bewildering range of questions about representation, narrative, and value. Philosophy of Comics is an introduction to these philosophical questions. In exploring the history and variety of the comics medium, Sam Cowling and Wesley D. Cray chart a path through the emerging field of the philosophy of comics.
Drawing from a diverse range of forms and genres and informed by case studies of classic comics such as Watchmen, Tales from the Crypt, and Fun Home, Cowling and Cray explore ethical, aesthetic, and ontological puzzles, including:
- What does it take to create—or destroy—a fictional character like Superman?
- Can all comics be adapted into films, or are some comics impossible to adapt?
- Is there really a genre of “superhero comics”?
- When are comics obscene, pornographic, and why does it matter?
At a time of rapidly growing interest in graphic storytelling, this is an ideal introduction to the philosophy of comics and some of its most central and puzzling questions.
Foreword
The first introductory guide to the philosophical, conceptual and artistic puzzles raised by comics.
Additional text
Philosophy of Comics offers a rich diversity of topics, ranging from definitional, conceptual, and ontological issues over metaphysical and epistemological aspects, to the concentration on genres, topics of diversity and representation as well as media-specific questions … [it] offers one of the first extensive examinations and expositions of the philosophy of comics as an attractive field of study.
