A review of Marc Singer’s Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies (University of Texas Press, 2018), by Associate Director for Digital Learning and Research Nhora Lucía Serrano, was published in the spring issue of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society.
Serrano said that in his book, Singer “points out that as a disciplinary field of study, often housed in either cultural studies or literary studies programs, comics studies has reached a peak fervor of teaching and research acceptance on most college campuses… yet comics studies is at a crucial crossroads.”
For Serrano, Breaking the Frames calls upon comics scholars to “assemble” so as to create “a genuinely multidisciplinary field [that] can draw on the methods and insights of all its constituent disciplines without rejecting disciplinarity itself …” (247).
Serrano concludes that Breaking the Frames is a necessary read for comics scholars, teachers, students, and readers alike.
An Eisner-nominated journal, Inks features scholarly research on sequential art, graphic narrative, and cartooning, and seeks to bring together scholarly essays, archival materials, and insights and discoveries from leading comics professionals.
