Read more
In this book, David Walton explores European comic-book biker publications as a subgenre of popular culture. Using a multidisciplinary approach, he reveals an intricate amalgam of ingenuity, irony, and highly ambiguous humor. The creative resourcefulness of the comic-book biker authors is seen to dramatize and celebrate the material existence of motorcycles and lifestyles while laughing at the foibles, inconsistencies, manias, fantasies, and practices of those characterised as motorized flâneurs. At the core of Walton’s analysis is the exploration of identity formation, marked by tensions between individualism and collective affinities, undermined by egoism and competitiveness.
At the same time, Walton argues that the storylines (despite much comic invention, caricature, and exaggeration) create resonances which hold up a distorted but highly revealing mirror to the multiple subgroups of people who ride motorcycles for pleasure. The author also demonstrates how the implied biker-readers of this subgenre confront comic representations of themselves which repeatedly undermine any positive self-image they may possess. Yet the comics are also seen to offer valuable insights into much broader cultural concerns ranging from subculture, consumption habits, (in)authenticity, taste, freedom, risk, and delinquency – without forgetting other key aspects of cultural studies like class, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ecocriticism.
List of contents
Chapter 1
Comic Rides and Cultural Turns: Motorcycle Culture in Comic Panels
Chapter 2
Mobile Identities: Performing the (Comic-book) Biker Self
Chapter 3
Riding the Edge: Speed, Risk, and Governance
Chapter 4
Comic-Book Class, Identity, Masculinity and Taste
Chapter 5
Race, Ethnicity and Gender: The Ubiquity of Caricature
Chapter 6
Comic-Book Biker Paradise, or Conservationist Hell? An Ecocritical View
Chapter 7
Conclusions: Unravelling Motorcycle Culture Through Comic-Book Bikers
About the author
David Walton is senior lecturer and coordinator of cultural studies at the University of Murcia.
