Blair Davis is an award-winning scholar whose teaching and research interests include comics studies, B-movies, comic book movies, and Classical Hollywood cinema. In 2017, he was awarded DePaul University's Spirit of Inquiry award for excellence in research, and his 2023 book Comic Book Women won multiple awards from the Popular Culture Association and Southwest Popular/American Culture Association. He teaches classes on film history/studies, comic books, comic book cinema, B-films, and media studies/methods (plus an annual December class, “Bah Humbug! Christmas Movies/TV and Media Methods”).
His books include The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Rashomon Effects (Routledge, 2015), Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Comic Book Movies (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Comic Book Women: Characters, Creators and Culture in the Golden Age (University of Texas Press, 2022), and Christianity and Comics: Stories We Tell About Heaven and Hell (Rutgers University Press, 2024).
Davis has written numerous articles for such journals as: Cinema Journal, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture, and Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. His work also appears in such anthologies as Desegregating Comics (Rutgers University Press, 2023), Recollecting Collecting (Wayne State University Press, 2023), The Cambridge Companion to Comics (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Critical Approaches to Horror Comics (Routledge, 2022), Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited (Wayne State University Press, 2021), Keywords for Comics Studies (New York University Press, 2021), The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics' Crucial Decade (Louisiana State University Press, 2021), Comics and Pop Culture (University of Texas Press, 2020), Working Class Comic Book Heroes (University Press of Mississippi, 2018), The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema (Lexington, 2014), American Horror Film (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Caligari's Heirs (Scarecrow, 2007), Reel Food (Routledge, 2004), and Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear (University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
He has written articles for Annenberg Media, USA Today, Ms. Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post, and appeared on two episodes of James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction (AMC, 2018). Davis has been interviewed by such media outlets as Annenberg Media, The Chicago Tribune, ABC-7, CBC Radio, PRI, Reel Chicago, USA Today, Voice of America, WBEZ , and The Wall Street Journal.
Selected Publications
Books
Book Chapters
- “Silver Tiaras, Removable Afros and the Visual Design of Black Comic Book Superheroes,”
The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Blackness in Comics and Sequential Art. Eds. John Jennings & Francis Gateward, (Rutgers University Press, 2015.)
- “Of Apes and Men (And Monsters and Girls): The Ape Film and 1940s Horror Cinema,”
Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade, Eds. Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Charlie EllBé and Kristopher Woofter, (Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 275-294.)
Journal Articles
Media