How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies - Paperback

by Katherine Kelp-Stebbins (Author)

Winner, 2023 Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work
Honorable Mention, 2023 CSS Charles Hatfield Book Prize

In How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a "universal" language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of reading for difference. Kelp-Stebbins's anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist analytical framework engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation in a diverse world. Through comparative case studies of Metro, Tintin, Persepolis, and more, she explores the ways in which graphic narratives locate and dislocate readers in every phase of a transnational comic's life cycle according to distinct visual, linguistic, and print cultures. How Comics Travel disengages from the constrictive pressures of nationalism and imperialism, both in comics studies and world literature studies more broadly, to offer a new vision of how comics depict and enact the world as a transcultural space.

Author Biography

Katherine Kelp-Stebbins is Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Comics Studies Program in the Department of English at the University of Oregon.