Changes

The second and third monograph in the series follow more established analytical discourses, though they also look to new archives and seek to complicate the power of branding. In the series’ second book, Ian Gordon tracks the history of the Superman brand. Gordon, a professor of history at the National University of Singapore, writes in <i>Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon</i>, “At any given time, or place, in his history, Superman is, and has long been, an amalgam of factors including myth, memory, nostalgia, intellectual property regimes like copyright and trademark, authors, readers, fans, collectors, comic books, comic strips, radio series, movie serials, television shows, animation, toys and collectibles, and feature films.”<ref> Ian Gordon, Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 3. < /ref>

Andrew Hoberek’s <i>Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics</i>, the series’ third monograph, primarily responds to Sara J. Van Ness’s “Watchmen” as Literature: A Critical Study of the Graphic Novel, which he argues did not sufficiently address the nature of literature and took for granted that the forms of comics should be grouped among primarily prose works, using the example of omitting film from lists of the best recent works of literature. Hoberek, a professor of English at the University of Missouri, further wishes to demonstrate that works like Alan Moore’s Watchmen find an easier place among this list due to the ability of readers to portray them as having a single author – or as a collaboration between one author and one illustrator, in the case of Watchmen – which reinforces a preference toward auteurs.  Referencing the nature of the business, Hoberek argues that the rise in auteurs was only possible through the shift to a direct market for comics sales as opposed to the older, newsstand based model. He arguesexplains, “Moore and [Dave] Gibbon’s story has been – both covertly and overtly – enormously influential on what has very recently become the newly genre-positive mainstream of contemporary literary fiction.” <ref> Andrew Hoberek, Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 30. </ref> Hoberek’s work serves not only as a valued contribution to comics studies, but a primer in the theory that underlies that work. He interweaves elements of literary criticism with interviews of Alan Moore and others in the comics industry to paint a complex picture that demonstrates how comics can be both literature and a distinct medium.