Trina Robbins (
Lily Renée, Escape Artist) details the art and amazing life of Holocaust survivor Lily Renée Wilheim, one of the most successful women cartoonists during World War II and Fiction House's only woman cartoonist to draw covers as well as interior stories.
Eyal Amiran (University of California, Irvine) examines Winsor McCay's public side, in which he quit comics in 1914 to draw xenophobic and anti-immigrant editorial cartoons for Hearst newspapers, arguing that McCay's reactionary sense of the collapse and contamination of culture and civilization mirrors his exploration of infantile fantasies in
Little Nemo in Slumberland, Little Sammy Sneeze, and
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.
Matt Yockey (University of Toledo) examines the ways in which Richard E Hughes' and Ogden Whitney's
Herbie ironically deconstructs the transcendent promises of mass consumerism in postwar America. In the comic's subversive take on popular culture, and its (sometimes literal) dismantling at the hands of its protagonist,
Herbie allows readers a symbolic mastery and control over their own subjectivity, itself a textual construct of both civic identity and mass culture.
Cori Knight (University of California, Riverside) and
Sean Sagan (University of California, Riverside) present joint research on aspects of the gospel tracts of Jack T. Chick, an author whose comic-book-style evangelical tracts have circled the globe and have been translated into over 40 languages, and consider the tracts' status as sacred objects and as warnings to the world at large.
http://www.comic-con.org/cci/cci_search_results.php?strShow=33&strRec=4245
