Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century
Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century
Transgressing the Frame
How twenty-first-century Latin American comics transgress social, political, and cultural frontiers.
Given comics’ ability to cross borders, Latin American creators have used the form to transgress the political, social, spatial, and cultural borders that shape the region. A groundbreaking and comprehensive study of twenty-first-century Latin American comics, Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century documents how these works move beyond national boundaries and explores new aspects of the form, its subjects, and its creators.
Latin American comics production is arguably more interconnected and more networked across national borders than ever before. Analyzing works from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, James Scorer organizes his study around forms of “transgression,” such as transnationalism, border crossings, transfeminisms, punk bodies, and encounters in the neoliberal city. Scorer examines the feminist comics collective Chicks on Comics; the DIY comics zine world; nonfiction and journalistic comics; contagion and zombie narratives; and more. Drawing from archives across the United States, Europe, and Latin America, Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century posits that these comics produce micronarratives of everyday life that speak to sites of social struggle shared across nation states.
Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century offers a thought-provoking alternative approach to an important art form that does not gain the profile it clearly deserves in the study of visual culture...an original perspective on regional trends and patterns that, if we care to look, may be precursors to cultural production closer to home.
This groundbreaking scholarly work provides a detailed account of Latin American comics in the 21st century, offering rich details, data, and solid information.
A book as provocative and captivating as the comics analyzed within it. Scorer’s prose is propulsive, his insights transgressive and his framework transnational. This is a long-awaited and significant contribution to the study of Latin American comics.
Underscoring the diversity of forms, styles, and materialities that mark the corpus produced by a new generation of comics creators, Scorer ultimately signals the shared transgressions that mark a definitive turn in Latin American comics production in the twenty-first century. Building on the work that came before it, this book also offers a clear and provocative departure; a truly trans modality of Latin American comics studies that will make tremendous contributions to comics studies, Latin American studies, and beyond.
James Scorer is a senior lecturer in Latin American cultural studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of City in Common: Culture and Community in Buenos Aires, the editor of Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America, and the coeditor of Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean and Comics and Memory in Latin America.
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Before the Volcano: Print Magazines and Latin American Comics
- Chapter 2. Traversing Bodies and Borders: Transnational and Transgender Comic Feminisms
- Chapter 3. Punks and Punctured Bodies: Zines and DIY Comics
- Chapter 4. Comic-Stripping the Land: Graphic Neoextractivisms
- Chapter 5. Mobilizing the Comics Archive
- Chapter 6. Comics, Contagion, and the Undead
- Chapter 7. Comics, Encounter, and Enchantment in the Neoliberal City
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- References
- Index
