Bodies and Boundaries in Graphic Fiction

<p>This book examines the fictional female bodies of four stylistically distinct comics artists in the United States—Chris Ware Emil Ferris Ebony Flowers and Tillie Walden—whose work has attracted significant attention. These bodies showcase how comics and its unique visual language can both critique and re-envision some of the most challenging social issues of our time.</p><p>The characters analyzed in this book illustrate diverse techniques for projecting the complex humanity and truth of U.S. women’s unruly bodies onto a two-dimensional page. All of the protagonists qualify as outsider in some way whether by gender identity sexuality ability religion race class ethnicity age or a combination of these and other categories. These bodily expressions of outsider identity both resist traditional categorization and stereotypes and sometimes harness and employ those stereotypes for the purposes of parody or social critique. The language of comics affords a unique opportunity for complex representation of these disparate women’s bodies especially when comics artists use the full range of tools at their disposal such as style materials narrative direction the space of the gutter and the friction between word and image. </p><p>This is an a timely and important intervention suitable for researchers and students in comics studies gender studies literature and queer studies.</p>