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"Comics are a strange beast," to quote Warren Ellis, who adds that they constitute "a source of continual argument".¹ Yet it is also true that comics have now left behind their status as mere products of consumer culture and successfully entered the realm of academic debate. Over the past decade, one may legitimately speak of the emergent study of an independent and complex medium.² This shift towards the perception of comics as an art form sui generis has given rise to an ongoing debate concerning the methodological issues involved in setting up an adequate theoretical framework within which the medium may be discussed. Notwithstanding their continuing importance, comics scholarship has begun to break away from its practice-based beginnings in Scott McCloud and Will Eisner, and today embraces a great variety of scholars who bring diverse interests and perspectives to the subject.³ Comics studies thus ranges across history and semiotics, (inter-)mediality and reception, production and dissemination, genre and authorship. Meanwhile, not only has the reputation of the medium changed, but so has its market value, largely through the production and reproduction of texts (in the broad sense of the term) that are either adapted from comics (most prominently superhero movies) or transformed into comics.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137414595_10

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