Context is Everything: A Review of Comics Studies: A Guidebook

Abstract

According to Peter Webster, author of The Edited Collection: Pasts, Present and Future (2020), edited collections “have been suspected of incoherence as volumes – of being no more than the sum of their parts”. (‘Writing’ 2020) While Webster makes a case for the academic vitality of edited collections, it is clear that editors do not have an enviable task, even when they have set clear parameters from the outset for the sake of the volume, the contributors, and the readers. Reviewers for that matter are not to be envied: are we to take the volume as a unified whole or to treat those ‘parts’Writing as if they are independent critical essays?