As there has yet to be any substantial scrutiny of the complex confluences a more sustained dialogue between disability studies and comics studies might suggest, Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives aims through its broad range of approaches and focus points to explore this exciting subject in productive and provocative ways.

Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award and finalist for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards: the prize-winning children's author depicts a childhood from hell in this searing yet redemptive graphic memoir. One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. In Stitches, Small, the award-winning children's illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David, a highly anxious yet supremely talented child, all too often became the unwitting object of his parents' buried frustration and rage. Believing that they were trying to do their best, David's parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son's respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David's cancer. Elizabeth, David's mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden. Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen, with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist, will resonate as the ultimate survival statement. A silent movie masquerading as a book, Stitches renders a broken world suddenly seamless and beautiful again.

​Die wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit Comics in all ihren vielfältigen Formen hat sich in den vergangenen Jahren auch in Deutschland zu einem lebhaften interdisziplinären Forschungsfeld entwickelt, dem zudem ein steigendes Interesse an der Comicanalyse in universitären Lehrveranstaltungen gefolgt ist. Die vorliegende Einführung verbindet vor diesem Hintergrund einen kompakten Überblick über einschlägige Theorien, Begriffe und Methoden mit einer Vielzahl konkreter Beispiele, um die Produktivität einer Auswahl zentraler Ansätze zur semiotischen, multimodalen, narratologischen, genretheoretischen, intersektionalen und interkulturellen Comicanalyse zu demonstrieren.

Das Phänomen ‚Behinderung‘ erfährt spätestens seit der 2006 verabschiedeten UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention verstärkt internationale Aufmerksamkeit. Weltweit wird anhand des Schlagwortes ‚Inklusion‘ über den Umgang mit stigmatisierter Normabweichung diskutiert. Inwiefern Behinderung dabei parallel zu anderen Diversitätskategorien wie ‚race‘, ‚class‘ oder ‚gender‘ konzipiert werden kann, ist eine offene Frage. Das vorliegende Handbuch beleuchtet das komplexe Forschungsgebiet der Vorstellungsbilder von Behinderung schwerpunktmäßig aus der Perspektive der Kulturwissenschaften und bietet neben systematischen Ansätzen verschiedener Disziplinen auch historische Überblicksdarstellungen. Vier Lektüreachsen gliedern das Handbuch: Vorstellungen von Behinderung in Praxis und Theorie, Geschichte der Vorstellungen von Behinderung, kulturwissenschaftliche Themenfelder sowie Darstellungs- und Ausdrucksformen in Kunst und Literatur.