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 non-traditional 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 the existentialist ethos present in Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World, ecocriticism in Paul Chadwick’s long-running Concrete series, and the inherent political philosophies espoused in Hergé’s perennially popular The Adventures of Tintin. Modern political concerns inform Terry Kading’s "Drawn into 9/11: But Where Have All the Superheroes Gone?," which discusses how superhero comics have responded to 9/11, and how the concerns of the genre reflect the anxieties of the contemporary world.

Along with comics themselves, essayists explore the issues surrounding the development and appreciation of the medium. Amy Kiste Nyberg examines the rise of the Comics Code, using it as a springboard for discussing the ethics of censorship and child protection in America. Stanford W. Carpenter’s "Truth Be Told: Authorship and the Creation of the Black Captain America" uses interviews, memos, and other documents to analyze how a team of Marvel artists and writers re-imagined the origin of one of Marvel’s most iconic superheroes. Throughout, essayists in Comics as Philosophy show how well the form can be used by its artists and its interpreters as a means of philosophical inquiry.