How Comics Travel

<b>Winner, 2023 Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work<br> Honorable Mention, 2023 CSS Charles Hatfield Book Prize</b><br> <br> In <i>How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies</i>, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a “universal” language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of <i>reading for difference</i>. Kelp-Stebbins’s anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist analytical framework engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation in a diverse world. Through comparative case studies of <i>Metro</i>, <i>Tintin</i>, <i>Persepolis</i>, and more, she explores the ways in which graphic narratives locate and dislocate readers in every phase of a transnational comic’s life cycle according to distinct visual, linguistic, and print cultures. <i>How Comics Travel</i> disengages from the constrictive pressures of nationalism and imperialism, both in comics studies and world literature studies more broadly, to offer a new vision of how comics depict and enact the world as a transcultural space.