Justice Framed: Law Text Culture special issue (2012)

Posted on by Thomas Giddens
Many of you may already be aware of this publication, but it remains a highly useful resource for those of us interested in exploring the intersections of comics and law: the 2012 special issue of Law Text Culture ‘Justice Framed: Law in Comics and Graphic Novels’. This open-access volume contains a wide variety of legal and comics analysis, from the development of a metaphor of ‘eating’ for understanding jurisprudence via Chew, through the significance of comics villains’ aesthetic appearance, to the politics of retribution in the Punisher. Here’s a handy list of contents:.

  • Introduction – Justice framed: law in comics and graphic novels
    Luis Gomez Romero and Ian Dahlman

  • Krazy Kat (review)
    K N Llewellyn

  • The legal surrealism of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat
    Ian Dahlman

  • ‘What had been many became one’: continuity, the common law, and Crisis on Infinite Earths
    Benjamin Authers

  • Justice in the gutter: representing everyday trauma in the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman
    Karen Crawley and Honni van Rijswijk
  • ‘Sakaarson the World Breaker’: violence and différance in the political and legal theory of Marvel’s sovereign
    Chris Lloyd
  • Chewing in the name of justice: the taste of law in action
    Anita Lam

  • Magic and modernity in Tintin au Congo (1930) and the Sierra Leone Special Court
    René Provost

  • Spider-Man, the question and the meta-zone: exception, objectivism and the comics of Steve Ditko
    Jason Bainbridge

  • Comic book mythology: Shyamalan’s Unbreakable and the grounding of good in evil
    Timothy D Peters

  • ‘Come a Day there Won’t be Room for Naughty Men Like Us to Slip About at All’: the multi-media outlaws of Serenity and the possibilities of post-literate justice
    Kieran Tranter

  • The aesthetics of supervillainy
    Jack Fennell

  • The punisher and the politics of retributive justice
    Kent Worcester

  • ‘Riddle me this…?’ Would the world need superheroes if the law could actually deliver ‘justice’?
    Cassandra Sharp

  • Noir justice: Law, crime and morality in Díaz Canales and Guarnido’s Blacksad: Somewhere within the shadows and Arctic-nation
    Jane Hanley

  • The story of Bohemia or, why there is nothing to rebel against anymore
    John Hanamy

Justice Framed: Law in Comics and Graphic Novels (2012 ) Law Text Culture 16(1)

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Published by Thomas Giddens

Thomas Giddens is senior lecturer in law at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. He researches critical, comics, and cultural legal studies. His most recent work is 'On Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing' (Routledge 2018). He founded the Graphic Justice Research Alliance in 2013 and edited the collection 'Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law' (Routledge 2015). He also edits the on-going 'Graphic Justice' special collection at The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship (www.comicsgrid.com) and is a founding Co-Director of St Mary's Centre for Law and Culture.