Rich Interdisciplinary Possibilities

Berninger, M., Ecke, J., & Haberkorn, G. (2010). Comics as a nexus of cultures: Essays on the interplay of media, disciplines and international perspectives. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co.

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Di, P. M. (2011). War, politics and superheroes: Ethics and propaganda in comics and film. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Ahrens, J., & Meteling, A. (2010). Comics and the city: Urban space in print, picture, and sequence. New York: Continuum.

Kovacs, G., & Marshall, C. W. (2011). Classics and comics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2 Mawsūʻat manshūrāt al-sharīṭ al-muṣawwar (kūmiks) al-Lubnānīyah. Bayrūt, Lubnān Hanrī Mātyūs..jpg

Mātyūs, H. (2010). Mawsūʻat manshūrāt al-sharīṭ al-muṣawwar (kūmiks) al-Lubnānīyah. Bayrūt, Lubnān: Hanrī Mātyūs.

McAllister, M. P., Sewell, E. H., & Gordon, I. (2001). Comics & ideology. New York: P. Lang.

In Babic, A. A. (2014). Comics as history, comics as literature: Roles of the comic book in scholarship, society, and entertainment.

Douglas, A., & Malti-Douglas, F. (1994). Arab comic strips: Politics of an emerging mass culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

A lot has been written about comics in general, highlighting their great potential to crystallize and predict moments of change, to distill significant ideas, key moments in history, cultural trends, prevalent attitudes, stereotypes, etc., whether to mock, affirm or question them. By making use of subjective perspectives, visual images and short, expressive text, graphics, colors, typography, metaphors, fiction, and artistic distortions of reality, comics have been championed as the Ninth Art, as the 21^st century's new art form (similar to film in the 20th c., and literature in the 19th). An art form that is capable of digging into, shaping and expressing the time's spirit, and most notably, a post-modern "truth", a reality that cannot always be successfully transmitted by traditional discourses and modes of expression, and that nurtures at its very core, a reader's response, a necessary reconceptualization of our hectic, multi-layered, visual, disconnected and fast-paced modern reality. Arab comics do afford us a truthful, genuine glimpse onto the current turbulent, changing modern Arab socio-political and cultural realities.