Background
Kent Worcester was born on September 13, 1959 in Omaha, Nebraska, United States to Robert and Joann (Ransdell) Worcester.
(Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, su...)
Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture. While superhero comics are a distinct and sometimes disdained branch of comics creation, they are integral to the development of the North American comic book and the history of the medium. For the past half-century they have also been the one overwhelmingly dominant market genre. The sheer volume of superhero comics that have been published over the years is staggering. Major superhero universes constitute one of the most expansive storytelling canvases ever fashioned. Moreover, characters inhabiting these fictional universes are immensely influential, having achieved iconic recognition around the globe. Their images and adventures have shaped many other media, such as film, video games, and even prose fiction. The primary aim of this reader is twofold: first, to collect in a single volume a sampling of the most sophisticated commentary on superheroes, and second, to bring into sharper focus the ways in which superheroes connect with larger social, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and historical themes that are of interest to a great many readers both in the academy and beyond.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617038067/?tag=2022091-20
(A Comics Studies Reader offers the best of the new comics...)
A Comics Studies Reader offers the best of the new comics scholarship and is ideal for classroom use. The anthology covers the pioneering work of Rodolphe Töpffer, the Disney comics of Carl Barks, and the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, as well as Peanuts, romance comics, and superheroes. It explores the stylistic achievements of manga, the international anti-comics campaign, and power and class in Mexican comic books and English illustrated stories. Hattie Kennedy, writing for the website Bookriot.com (4/26/17), says that "this edited collection of essays, articles, and extracts from longer books is a brilliant place to start if you want to read a range of approaches to the construction of comics."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1604731095/?tag=2022091-20
(When Art Spiegelman's Maus-a two-part graphic novel about...)
When Art Spiegelman's Maus-a two-part graphic novel about the Holocaust-won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, comics scholarship grew increasingly popular and notable. The rise of "serious" comics has generated growing levels of interest as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals continue to explore the history, aesthetics, and semiotics of the comics medium. Yet those who write about the comics often assume analysis of the medium didn't begin until the cultural studies movement was underway. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium brings together nearly two dozen essays by major writers and intellectuals who analyzed, embraced, and even attacked comic strips and comic books in the period between the turn of the century and the 1960s. From e. e. cummings, who championed George Herriman's Krazy Kat, to Irving Howe, who fretted about Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie, this volume shows that comics have provided a key battleground in the culture wars for over a century. With substantive essays by Umberto Eco, Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, Gilbert Seldes, Dorothy Parker, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, and others, this anthology shows how all of these writers took up comics-related topics as a point of entry into wider debates over modern art, cultural standards, daily life, and mass communication. Arguing Comics shows how prominent writers from the Jazz Age and the Depression era to the heyday of the New York Intellectuals in the 1950s thought about comics and, by extension, popular culture as a whole.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1578066875/?tag=2022091-20
(For fans of Peter Bagge (b. 1957) and his bracing satiric...)
For fans of Peter Bagge (b. 1957) and his bracing satirical writing and drawing, this collection offers a perfect means to track how he describes his career choices, work habits, preoccupations, and comedic sensibility since the 1980s. Featuring a new interview and much previously unavailable material, this book delivers insightful, occasionally gossipy, sometimes funny, and often tart conversations. His career has intersected with the modern history of comics, from underground comix and indie comics to comics journalism and graphic nonfiction. Bagge's detailed, garrulous, and often grotesquely funny (and discomfiting) work harks back to the underground generation, recalling Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, while also pointing forward to the emergence of alternative comics as a distinct genre. His signature series, the rawly humorous Hate (1990-1998) and his editorship (1983-1986) of the often outrageous Weirdo magazine, founded by Crumb, established Bagge as a leading voice in alternative comics, and his rude, wildly expressive cartooning makes him a counterpoint to the still introspection of recent literary graphic novels. In his career over three decades, Bagge has left his mark on various formats and genres, as a prolific cartoonist, an accomplished musician, and a sometime essayist, editor, and animator. While his creative output encompasses autobiographical comics, graphic nonfiction, magazine illustrations, gag cartoons, minicomics, political commentary, superhero parodies, comic strips, animated videos, and one-page humor pieces, Bagge stands out for creating continuity-based graphic stories that revolve around sharply defined, over-the-top fictional characters. Libertarians know him for his comics journalism, as his graphic biography of Margaret Sanger in 2013 reaches new audiences. While some have lazily branded Bagge as a grunge-era visual satirist, his creative restlessness and expanding body of work make it difficult to confine him within any single genre, cultural niche, or historical moment.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1496809742/?tag=2022091-20
(C. L. R. James: A Political Biography offers the first su...)
C. L. R. James: A Political Biography offers the first sustained account of the life and work of one of the twentieth-century's most important radical intellectuals. C. L. R. James (1901-1989) was born and raised in Trinidad and became one of the most prominent figures to emerge out of the West Indian diaspora. He authored numerous books and essays on Caribbean history, Marxist theory, literary criticism, Western civilization, African politics, Hegelian philosophy, and popular culture. His best known works, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, and Beyond a Boundary are classics of twentieth-century thought. James played an active part in democratic movements in the West Indies and Africa as well as in left-wing and Pan-African campaigns in Britain, the United States, and Trinidad.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0791427528/?tag=2022091-20
(Peter Kuper (b. 1958) is one of the country's leading car...)
Peter Kuper (b. 1958) is one of the country's leading cartoonists. His artwork has graced the pages and covers of numerous newspapers and magazines, including Time, the New Yorker, Mother Jones, and the New York Times. He is a longtime contributor to Mad magazine, where he has been writing and drawing Spy vs. Spy for two decades, and the cofounder and coeditor of World War 3 Illustrated, the cutting-edge magazine devoted to political graphic art. Most of the interviews collected here are either previously unpublished or long out of print. They address such varied topics as world travels, teaching at Harvard, Hollywood deal-making, climate change, Spy vs. Spy, New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, and World War 3 Illustrated. Among the works examined are his books The System, Sticks and Stones, Stop Forgetting to Remember, Diario de Oaxaca, and adaptations of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Kuper also discusses his graphic novel Ruins, which received the Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel in 2016. Along with two dozen images, this volume features ten lively, informative interviews as well as a quartet of revealing conversations, conducted in collaboration with Kuper's fellow artist Seth Tobocman, with underground comix legends Robert Crumb and Vaughn Bodé, Mad magazine publisher William Gaines, and Jack Kirby.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1496818458/?tag=2022091-20
editor educator political scientist writer
Kent Worcester was born on September 13, 1959 in Omaha, Nebraska, United States to Robert and Joann (Ransdell) Worcester.
Worcester graduated from Columbia University with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1990.
Worcester worked at Columbia University at Department of Political Science, at the position of an instructor for five years from 1986. From 1991 he served at Social Science Research Council in New York City as a program director. He was also a member of the editorial boards of New Politics and New Political Science, as well as a member of the board of directors of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.
Kent Worcester's works include Trade Union Politics: American Unions and Economic Change, 1960s-1990s and C. L. R. James: A Political Biography, an examination of the twentieth-century radical intellectual best known for his numerous writings on Caribbean history, Marxist theory, and Hegelian philosophy.
Nowadays Kent Worcester teaches political theory at Marymount Manhattan College. He is a longtime contributor to The Comics Journal.
(When Art Spiegelman's Maus-a two-part graphic novel about...)
(Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, su...)
(A Comics Studies Reader offers the best of the new comics...)
(For fans of Peter Bagge (b. 1957) and his bracing satiric...)
(Peter Kuper (b. 1958) is one of the country's leading car...)
(C. L. R. James: A Political Biography offers the first su...)
Worcester married Jennifer Scarlott on October 8, 1987. The couple has a child - Julia Corsaut Scarlott Worcester.