Reprint. Originally published: 2018.

PART I: Words, Pictures, and Borders -- 1. A Touch of Irony and Pity: Krazy Kat in the Breaks -- 2. In Love with Magic and Monsters: The Groundbreaking Life and Work of Rose O'Neill -- 3. Cranky Bosses, Rebellious Characters, and Suicidal Artists: Scribbly, Inkie, and Pre-Underground Autobiographical Comics -- 4. How Lust Was Lost: Genre, Identity, and the Neglect of a Pioneering Comics Publication -- PART II: Transmedial Forms -- 5. Comics, Race, and the Political Project of Intermediality in Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel -- 6. Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window as "Cineromanzo" -- 7. Articulate This!: Critical Action Figure Studies and Material Culture -- PART III: Institutions and Movements -- 8. Singapore Cartoons in the Anti-Comics Movement of the 1950s and 1960s -- 9. The Institutional Support for Hong Kong Independent Comics -- 10. Jirō Taniguchi: France's Mangaka -- PART IV: Resistant Word-Drawn Acts & Transformative Reading Communities -- 11. The Latina Superheroine: Protecting the Reader from the Comic Book Industry's Racial, Gender, Ethnic, and Nationalist Biases -- 12. The Page Is Local: Planetarity and Embodied Metaphor in Anglophone Graphic Narratives from South Asia -- 13. Hands across the Ocean: A 1970s Network of French and American Women Cartoonists -- 14. Comics as Orientation Devices -- 15. Service Dogs, Code-Switching, and Interracial Polyamory: Exploring the Reclamation Narratives of Comic Fandom -- PART V: Margins transforming Centers -- 16. Once and Again, Ack!: Epimone, Recursion, and Variation in Guisewite's Cathy -- 17. Mapping Transamerican Mestizaje in Love and Rockets -- 18. Only a Chilling Elegy: An Examination of White Bodies, Colonialism, Fascism, Genocide, and Racism in Dragon Ball -- 19. From the Inner City to the Interstellar: Brian K. Vaughan's Comix after 9/11 -- 20. "Am I Doing the Right Thing?": Milestone Comics, Black Nationalism, and the Cosmopolitics of Static -- 21. Juvenile, Cruel, and MAD: In Defense of Immature Comics -- Index.

"Comics Studies Here and Now marks the arrival of comics studies scholarship that no longer feels the need to justify itself within or against other fields of study. The essays herein move us forward, some in their re-diggings into comics history and others by analyzing comics and all its transmedial and fan-fictional offshoots on its own terms. Comics Studies stakes the flag of the arrival as a full-fledged discipline that today and tomorrow excavates, examines, discusses, and analyzes all aspects that make up the resplendent planetary republic of comics. This collection of scholarly essays is a testament to the fact that comic book studies have come into their own as an academic discipline; simply and powerfully moving comic studies forward with their critical excavations and theoretical formulas based on the common sense understanding that comics add to the world as unique, transformative cultural phenomena."