The Art of Comics – A Philosophical Approach

Aaron Meskin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on aesthetics and other philosophical subjects. His work on comics has been published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , the British Journal of Aesthetics , Philosophy Compass and the third edition of the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics . He is a former Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and a former Officer of the British Society of Aesthetics. Roy T. Cook is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, a Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, and an Associate Fellow of the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on philosophical logic, mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics, and more recently on the aesthetics of comics. He previously edited The Arche Papers on the Mathematics of Abstraction (2007), and is the author of A Dictionary of Philosophical Logic (2009).

Editors' Acknowledgments vii List of Figures viii Notes on Contributors ix Foreword xii Warren Ellis The Art and Philosophy of Comics: An Introduction xiv Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook Part One: The Nature and Kinds of Comics 1 1 Redefining Comics 3 John Holbo 2 The Ontology of Comics 31 Aaron Meskin 3 Comics and Collective Authorship 47 Christy Mag Uidhir 4 Comics and Genre 68 Catharine Abell Part Two: Comics and Representation 85 5 Wordy Pictures: Theorizing the Relationship between Image and Text in Comics 87 Thomas E. Wartenberg 6 What's So Funny? Comic Content in Depiction 105 Patrick Maynard 7 The Language of Comics 125 Darren Hudson Hick Part Three: Comics and the Other Arts 145 8 Making Comics into Film 147 Henry John Pratt 9 Why Comics Are Not Films: Metacomics and Medium Specific Conventions 165 Roy T. Cook 10 Proust's In Search of Lost Time : The Comics Version 188 David Carrier Index 203