Sabin - Adult Comics

In a society where a comic equates with knockabout amusement for children, the sudden pre-eminence of adult comics, on everything from political satire to erotic fantasy, has predictably attracted an enormous amount of attention.

Adult comics are part of the cultural landscape in a way that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. In this first survey of its kind, Roger Sabin traces the history of comics for older readers from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. He takes in the pioneering titles pre-First World War, the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s, fandom in the 1970s and 1980s, and the boom of the 1980s and 1990s (including graphic novels and Viz.). Covering comics from the United States, Europe and Japan, Adult Comics addresses such issues as the graphic novel in context, cultural overspill and the role of women.

By taking a broad sweep, Sabin demonstrates that the widely-held notion that comics grew up in the late 1980s is a mistaken one, largely invented by the media. Adult Comics: An Introduction is intended primarily for student use, but is written with the comic enthusiast very much in mind.

Roger Sabin is a freelance arts journalist, living and working in London. He has written about comics for several national newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman and Society.

Alternative Shakespeares 1, ed. John Drakakis

Alternative Shakespeares 2, ed. Terence Hawkes

Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin

Re-Reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson

Rewriting English, Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, R. ORourke, Chris Weedon

English and Englishness, B. Doyle

Linguistics and the Novel, Roger Fowler

Language and Style, E. L. Epstein

The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Keir Elam

Structuralism and Semiotics, Terence Hawkes

Superstructuralism, Richard Harland

Deconstruction ed. 2, Christopher Norris

Formalism and Marxism, Tony Bennett

Critical Practice, Catherine Belsey

Dialogism, Michael Holquist

Dialogue and Difference: English for the Nineties, ed. Peter Brooker/Peter Humm

Literature, Politics and Theory, ed. F. Barker, P. Hulme, M. Iversen, D. Loxley

Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History, ed. Peter Humm, Paul Stigant, Peter Widdowson

Criticism in Society, ed. Imre Salusinszky

Fantasy, Rosemary Jackson

Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching, Patrick Parrinder

Sexual Fiction, Maurice Charney

Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Patricia Waugh

Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction, Steven Cohan and Linda Shires

Poetry as Discourse, Anthony Easthope

The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon

Subculture, ed. 2, Dick Hebdige

Reading Television, John Fiske and John Hartley

Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong

Adult Comics, An Introduction, Roger Sabin

The Unusable Past, Russell J. Reising

The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

Translation Studies ed. 2, Susan Bassnett

Studying British Cultures, Susan Bassnett

Literature and Propaganda, A. P. Foulkes

Reception Theory, Robert C. Holub

Psychoanalytic Criticism, Elizabeth Wright

The Return of the Reader, Elizabeth Freund

Sexual/Textual Politics, Toril Moi

Making a Difference, ed. Gayle Green and Copplia Kahn

AVAILABLE AS A COMPLETE SET: ISBN 041529116X

First published 1993
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

This edition first published 2003

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

First issued in paperback 2010

1973, 2003 Roger Sabin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 978-0-415-29139-2 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-415-60689-9 (pbk)
ISBN 978-0-415-30026-1 (set)
eISBN 978-1-134-55806-3

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

How can we recognise or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to the task will have been designed to engage with the old: it will look for and identify extensions and developments of what we already know. To some degree the unprecedented will always be unthinkable.

The New Accents series has made its own wary negotiation around that paradox, turning it, over the years, into the central concern of a continuing project. We are obliged, of course, to be bold. Change is our proclaimed business, innovation our announced quarry, the accents of the future the language in which we deal. So we have sought, and still seek, to confront and respond to those developments in literary studies that seem crucial aspects of the tidal waves of transformation that continue to sweep across our culture. Areas such as structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, marxism, semiotics, subculture, deconstruction, dialogism, postmodernism, and the new attention to the nature and modes of language, politics and way of life that these bring, have already been the primary concern of a large number of our volumes. Their nuts and bolts exposition of the issues at stake in new ways of writing texts and new ways of reading them has proved an effective stratagem against perplexity.

But the question of what texts are or may be has also become more and more complex. It is not just the impact of electronic modes of communication, such as computer networks and data banks, that has forced us to revise our sense of the sort of material to which the process called reading may apply. Satellite television and supersonic travel have eroded the traditional capacities of time and space to confirm prejudice, reinforce ignorance, and conceal significant difference. Ways of life and cultural practices of which we had barely heard can now be set compellingly beside can even confront our own. The effect is to make us ponder the culture we have inherited; to see it, perhaps for the first time, as an intricate, continuing construction. And that means that we can also begin to see, and to question, those arrangements of foregrounding and backgrounding, of stressing and repressing, of placing at the centre and of restricting to the periphery, that give our own way of life its distinctive character.