Urban Comics recognised with Honourable Mention
Urban Comics has been by the Comics Studies Society with an Honourable Mention. The full announcement is available here.
It won this recognition as a runner up for The Charles Hatfield Book Prize, named for CSS cofounder and first President Charles Hatfield, which recognises scholarly books from the previous year that significantly advance the field of Comics Studies – that is, books that greatly add to our understanding of comic art and/or its historical, cultural, critical, or theoretical contexts.
It received this honourable mention alongside Monalesia Earle’s Writing Queer Women of Color, and the prize was won by Jorge Santos for his book Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics. It is a privilege to be in such company!
Here is a description of Urban Comics and you can also learn more here.
Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives makes an important and timely contribution both to comics studies and urban studies, offering a decolonisation and reconfiguration of both of these already interdisciplinary fields. With chapter-length discussions of comics from cities such as Cairo, Cape Town, New Orleans, Delhi and Beirut, this book shows how artistic collectives and urban social movements working across the global South are producing some of the most exciting and formally innovative graphic narratives of the contemporary moment.
Throughout, the author reads an expansive range of graphic narratives through the vocabulary of urban studies to argue that these formal innovations should be thought of as a kind of infrastructure. This ‘infrastructural form’ allows urban comics to reveal that the built environments of our cities are not static, banal, or depoliticised, but rather highly charged material spaces that allow some forms of social life to exist while also prohibiting others. Built from a formal infrastructure of grids, gutters and panels, and capable of volumetric, multi-scalar perspectives, this book shows how urban comics are able to represent, repair and even rebuild contemporary global cities toward more socially just and sustainable ends.
Operating at the intersection of comics studies and urban studies, and offering large global surveys alongside close textual and visual analyses, this book explores and opens up the fascinating relationship between comics and graphic narratives, on the one hand, and cities and urban spaces, on the other.
