Comic Studies: Within and Beyond Borders

“Comic Studies: Within and Beyond Borders,” was an invited presentation given as one of the Informal Conversations on Research in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, on September 19, 2018. Comics books and graphic novels, much as their genre cousins, science fiction, fantasy, and horror, have until only relatively recently been overlooked by academics and other cultural critics. For the most part the growing attention given to these media tends to define elite or exceptional works as "literature" while dismissing the greater corpora. This paper argues that the challenges presented by the sheer volume and decades-long history of so many characters perpetuate this critical focus on "exceptional" titles in part because they are more manageable. However, a variety of digital humanities tools and methods may enable and sustain critical analysis of the greater corpora.