Comics and the U.S. South

A wide-ranging survey of how comics have portrayed southern ways of life Contributions from Tim Caron, Brannon Costello, Brian Cremins, Conseula Francis, Anthony Dyer Hoefer, M. Thomas Inge, Nicolas Labarre, Alison Mandaville, Gary Richards, Joseph Michael Sommers, Christopher Whitby, and Qiana J. Whitted Comics and the U.S. South offers a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman's Metropolis or Chris Ware's Chicago to the swamps, back roads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Some essays seek to discover what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly (Pogo), Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld (A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Comics and the U.S. South contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies. Brannon Costello, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University and is the editor of Howard Chaykin: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi). Qiana J. Whitted, Columbia, South Carolina, is associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of "A God of Justice?": The Problem of Evil in Twentieth-Century Black Literature.