Publisher:
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge
"Fans and scholars have long regarded the 1980s as a significant turning point in the history of comics in the U.S. The decade saw titles such as Art Spiegelman's "Maus", Frank Miller's "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns", and Alan Moore and Dave...
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"Fans and scholars have long regarded the 1980s as a significant turning point in the history of comics in the U.S. The decade saw titles such as Art Spiegelman's "Maus", Frank Miller's "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns", and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's "Watchmen" celebrated by both readers and critics alike, even attracting the attention of prominent publications including the "New York Times," the "Atlantic," and "Rolling Stone." Three decades later, most of the critical discussion of the period still focuses on these three books and their creators, eclipsing the work of others who also played a key role in shaping comics as we know them today. With twenty essays covering a diverse array of material, "The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics' Crucial Decade" offers a more complicated and multivalent picture of this remarkably robust era of ambitious comics publishing. Many of the works considered in this volume were hailed as innovative and groundbreaking in their day, but they have fallen to the wayside, in some cases because they do not easily square with the dominant tendencies in comics studies. Instead, "The Other 1980s" illuminates works that prove far more unwieldy, though no less interesting: open-ended serials that do not translate neatly to the graphic novel format beloved by literature departments; sprawling superhero narratives with no connection to corporate superhero universes; offbeat and abandoned experiments by major publishers, including Marvel and DC, to reach new audiences; idiosyncratic and experimental independent comics; unusual genre exercises filtered through deeply personal sensibilities; and oft-neglected offshoots of the classic "underground" comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The contributors also offer original and enlightening examinations of the ways in which the fans and critics of the day engaged with creators and publishers and laid the groundwork for much of the contemporary critical and academic discourse on comics. By uncovering comics and creators long ignored by comics studies, "The Other 1980s" offers a more nuanced understanding of the context from which the iconic works of the 1980s emerged and revises conventional histories of this major period in comics"--
