Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity

The work of Frank Quitely and the role of comics art in contemporary Scottish culture, politics and society.

Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity explores the life and career of Glasgow-born, Eisner Award-winning, and internationally acclaimed Marvel, DC, and Image Comics artist Frank Quitely. With a prolific career spanning more than three decades, Quitely played a pivotal role in the British superhero renaissance of the 1990s and 2000s and in the explosive emergence of the Scottish new wave of comics, a movement that included peers like Alan Grant, Mark Millar, and Grant Morrison, but has been underrepresented in both comics studies and Scottish studies. This work investigates questions of historical and contemporary expressions of Scottishness in transcultural comics genres such as superhero, science fiction, and fantasy. Framed through the lens of comics and literary genres, as well as their British and American editors, Quitely’s approach to Scottishness is oblique and self-reflexive; his expressions of Scottishness are tensely bound to current nuanced examinations of Scottish national, literary and historical subjectivity. His work oscillates between two axiomatic antipodes: the regional, provincial, and local versus the transnational, cosmopolitan, and global.

This comprehensive study also features an in-depth interview with Quitely, as well as unearthed archives, sketchbooks, notes, and donated or personal artworks not available elsewhere.

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/

"Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity" was written by David John Boyd and Julie Briand-Boyd.

David John Boyd is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Stirling Maxwell Centre of the University of Glasgow.

Julie Briand-Boyd is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Stirling Maxwell Centre of the University of Glasgow.

Yes, "Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity" is part of the "Studies in European Comics and Graphic Novels" series.

All volumes will be published in English, but the comics and graphic novels under investigation will be of any European language and from any European culture. Like graphic novels and comics, Europe itself is hard to define, and the approach for the series will be open and not overly prescriptive.

Series editors

Jan Baetens, KU Leuven
Hugo Frey, University of Chichester
Maaheen Ahmed, Ghent University

Editorial Board

The editorial board is composed of leading scholars from literature, visual arts, and historical studies:
Bart Beaty (University of Calgary)
Christopher Pizzino (University of Georgia)
Ann Miller (University of Leicester).

Proposals

Proposals and enquiries can be sent to the series editors.
Please make use of the submission form to present your manuscript or proposal to our board.
Authors interested in Open Access can consult the available funding options.

Links & Resources

Acknowledgements

Part 1—Sketching Scotland
Introduction. The Scottish Connection
Chapter 1. Frank Quitely’s Portraits of Scottishness
Chapter 2. Frank Quitely’s Landscapes of Scottishness

Part 2—The Garden of Two Glasgows
Chapter 3. Frank Quitely’s Angelic Doubles
Chapter 4. Frank Quitely’s Devilish Derivations

Part 3—The Bottled City of Glasgow
Chapter 5. Frank Quitely as Global Artist
Chapter 6. Frank Quitely as Local Artist
Conclusion. From Glasgow to Gotham
The Glasgow Interviews. A Conversation with Frank Quitely

Bibliography
Index