Comics Studies

Frederick Luis Aldama holds the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin and is also founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab and the annual BIPOC PoP: Comics, Gaming & Animation Arts Expo & Symposium. He is an award-winning author, co-author, and editor of over 50 books, including The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture (2016), Comics Studies Here and Now (2018), and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comics Studies (2020). He is also an author of fiction, including children’s books and comics. Aldama is also Editor-in-Chief of Latinx Pop Magazine and FlowerSong Press and edits ten academic and creative book series while curating the Latinographix and Brown Ink graphic novel series.

• IntroductionTHE KEY CONCEPTSGlossaryIndex

"Aldama charts the impossible. He forges the compass that navigates Comics Studies across our vast planetary system of comics—from theories of comics grammatexts built from the Bayeux tapestry and Mesoamerican codices, to insights into Herriman's boundary-shattering Krazy Kat and mind-blowing race-speculative word-drawn narratives that demolish and rebuild the rules of representation. His 22 key concepts do more than mark destinations—they blast open portals to unexplored territories, revealing new comics galaxies!"John Jennings, Multi-Eisner Award-winning comics creator and Professor at the University of California, RiversideAldama's Comics Studies: The Key Concepts arrives at precisely the moment when the field most urgently requires both consolidation and expansion. It is no overstatement to say that Aldama achieves a masterful synthesis that is at once comprehensive and provocative, erudite and accessible, attending equally to the formal and the political, the canonical and the emergent, the local and the planetary. The tensions Aldama navigates with characteristic verve—between medium specificity and transmedia flow, between close reading and cultural critique, between established scholarship and insurgent new voices—reflect the productive contradictions that have come to define comics studies as a vibrant, contested discipline. This is an indispensable resource for all those seeking not merely to survey the field but to grasp its highest stakes!Jan Baetens, co-author of The Graphic Novel: An Introduction and Professor of Cultural Studies at KU Leuven