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Book Cover for: Webcomics, Sean Kleefeld

Webcomics

Sean Kleefeld

**Nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work**

The first critical guide to cover the history, form and key critical issues of the medium, Webcomicshelps readers explore the diverse and increasingly popular worlds of online comics.

In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as:

-The history of webcomics and how developments in technology from the 1980s onwards presented new opportunities for comics creators and audiences
-Cultural contexts - from the new financial and business models allowed by digital media to social justice causes in contemporary webcomics
-Key texts - from early examples of the form such as Girl Genius and Penny Arcadeto popular current titles such as Questionable Contentand Dumbing of Age
-Important theoretical and critical approaches to studying webcomics

Webcomics
includes a glossary of crucial critical terms, annotated guides to further reading, and online resources and discussion questions to help students and readers develop their understanding of the genre and pursue independent study.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publish Date: Jun 25th, 2020
  • Pages: 272
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.70in - 0.79lb
  • EAN: 9781350028173
  • Categories: Comics & Graphic NovelsPopular CultureMedia Studies

About the Author

Kleefeld, Sean: - Sean Kleefeld is an independent scholar based in the USA. He is the author of Comic Book Fanthropology (2009) and is a regular columnist and blogger.
Gavaler, Chris: - Chris Gavaler is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, USA. He is also the author of On the Origin of Superheroes: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1 (2015) and Superhero Comics (2017) and Creating Comics (2021), both published by Bloomsbury. Since 2021, he has been series editor of Bloomsbury Comics Studies.

Praise for this book

Sean Kleefeld's Webcomics, an entry in the Bloomsbury Comics Studies series, is essential because it remedies the lack of a high-level account of webcomics. It allows the reader to survey the entire field and to see the common threads that link seemingly disparate genres together ... I hope that other future scholarly works, by Kleefeld or others, will complement Kleefeld's perspective by offering more critical and theoretically informed analyses of webcomics. For such works, however, Kleefeld's Webcomics represents an essential starting point.
Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society
I've always been a great fan of Sean Kleefeld's writing: its clarity, its circumspection, and the measured quality of his tone. Kleefeld is an ideal writer to chronicle the rise of modern webcomics. He patiently explores not just the nascent realities of an industry in flux but all of the roads not taken, all of the false starts and dead ends, with the perspicacity an unformed future demands. In Kleefeld's hands, defining what comics looks like today is less a sorting out process for the ages than a mad crash down a steep hill hoping to scoop up some village's bouncing wheel of cheese set loose on the valley below. By the time you're through, you'll know just what set of circumstances won the day, and what set didn't and what might be yet to come. The longer you take to find and read your own copy is the amount of time I get to be smarter than you.
Tom Spurgeon, Publisher and Managing Editor, The Comics Reporter