Comics as Philosophy

Through the combination of text and images, comic books offer a unique opportunity to explore deep questions about aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology in nontraditional ways. The essays in this collection focus on a wide variety of genres, from mainstream superhero comics, to graphic novels that exercise social realism, to European adventure classics.

Included among the contributions are essays on existentialism in Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World, ecocriticism in Paul Chadwick’s long-running Concrete series, and political philosophies in Herge’s perennially popular The Adventures of Tintin. Modern political concerns inform Terry Kading’s discussion of how superhero comics have responded to 9/11 and how the genre reflects the anxieties of the contemporary world.

Essayists also explore the issues surrounding the development and appreciation of comics. Amy Kiste Nyberg examines the rise of the Comics Code, using it as a springboard for discussing the