Considers how comics display our everyday stuff--junk drawers,
bookshelves, attics--as a way into understanding how we represent
ourselves now
For most of their history, comics were widely understood as
disposable--you read them and discarded them, and the pulp paper they
were printed on decomposed over time. Today, comic books have been
rebranded as graphic novels--clothbound high-gloss volumes that can be
purchased in bookstores, checked out of libraries, and displayed proudly
on bookshelves. They are reviewed by serious critics and studied in
university classrooms. A medium once considered trash has been
transformed into a respectable, if not elite, genre.
While the American comics of the past were about hyperbolic battles
between good and evil, most of today's graphic novels focus on everyday
personal experiences. Contemporary culture is awash with stuff. They
give vivid expression to a culture preoccupied with the processes of
circulation and appraisal, accumulation and possession. By design,
comics encourage the reader to scan the landscape, to pay attention to
the physical objects that fill our lives and constitute our familiar
surroundings. Because comics take place in a completely fabricated
world, everything is there intentionally. Comics are stuff; comics tell
stories about stuff; and they display stuff.
When we use the phrase "and stuff" in everyday speech, we often mean
something vague, something like "etcetera." In this book, stuff refers
not only to physical objects, but also to the emotions, sentimental
attachments, and nostalgic longings that we express--or hold at
bay--through our relationships with stuff.
In Comics and Stuff, his first solo authored book in over a decade,
pioneering media scholar Henry Jenkins moves through anthropology,
material culture, literary criticism, and art history to resituate
comics in the cultural landscape. Through over one hundred full-color
illustrations, using close readings of contemporary graphic novels,
Jenkins explores how comics depict stuff and exposes the central role
that stuff plays in how we curate our identities, sustain memory, and
make meaning. Comics and Stuff presents an innovative new way of
thinking about comics and graphic novels that will change how we think
about our stuff and ourselves.
