[Commlist] new book: Comics and Stuff by Henry Jenkins

We would like to announce a new publication from New York University 
Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*Comics and Stuff***

*Henry Jenkins***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781479800933/comics-and-stuff/_**__*

*Receive a 20% discount online:*

*CSLS2020*

“For nearly a century, comic books have been an integral part of ‘the 
stuff’ of our collective fantasies, both a wildly successful form of 
entertainment and a visual archive of our developing identities. In 
Henry Jenkins’s /Comics and Stuff/, one of our greatest cultural critics 
offers an expansive and exuberant study of the ways that contemporary 
comics and graphic novels document the material life of American 
culture, from collecting to artistic curation and hoarding to archiving. 
Jenkins introduces readers to aesthetically innovative, yet largely 
understudied, comics and graphic novels to show us how this enduring 
medium provides a visual map of our most cherished object 
worlds.”*—Ramzi Fawaz, author of **/The New Mutants: Superheroes and the 
Radical Imagination of American Comics/*

“A major book from a major contemporary thinker. /Comics and 
Stuff/ models a rigorous but supple interdisciplinarity that the hybrid 
form of comics itself inspires; its range is wide and enlivening. A 
lucid, brilliant, and important book.”*—Hillary Chute, author of **/Why 
Comics? From Underground to Everywhere/*//

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.

*Henry Jenkins*is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, 
Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. 
He is the author or editor of 20 books including /Textual Poachers: 
Television Fans and Participatory Culture/, /Convergence Culture: Where 
Old and New Media Collide/, /Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and 
Value in a Networked Society/, and /By Any Media Necessary: The New 
Youth Activists/. He blogs at henryjenkins.org and co-hosts the podcast 
/How Do You Like It So Far?/

*New York University Press**| April 2020 | 352pp | 9781479800933 | PB | 
£24.99**

*Price subject to change.

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