Comic Book Movies (2018)

Rutgers University Press
Cloth, Paperback, eBook, 256pp.

Comic Book Movies explores how this genre serves as a source for modern-day myths, sometimes even incorporating ancient mythic figures like Thor and Wonder Woman’s Amazons, while engaging with the questions that haunt a post-9/11 world: How do we define heroism and morality today? How far are we willing to go when fighting terror? How can we resist a dystopian state?

Film scholar Blair Davis also considers how the genre’s visual style is equally important as its weighty themes, and he details how advances in digital effects have allowed filmmakers to incorporate elements of comic book art in innovative ways. As he reveals, comic book movies have inspired just as many innovations to Hollywood’s business model, with film franchises and transmedia storytelling helping to ensure that the genre will continue its reign over popular culture for years to come.

Blair Davis is an associate professor of Media and Cinema Studies in the College of Communication at DePaul. His other books include Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page; The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art; and The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema. He edited an "In Focus" section for a 2017 issue of Cinema Journal on the graphic novel Watchmen and a roundtable on comics and methodology for the inaugural issue of the journal Inks that same year. He has co-chaired the Comics Studies SIG with SCMS since 2012 and is currently on the executive board of the Comics Studies Society.