Books by Scott Bukatman

Hellboy, Mike Mignola's famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboys Worldshowshow our engagement with Hellboys worldisa highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality. Scott Bukatman's dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened ';adventure of reading' in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader's imagination to inhabit. Drawing upon other mediaincluding children's books, sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and illuminated manuscriptsBukatman reveals the mechanics of creating a world on the page. He also demonstrates the pleasurable and multiple complexities of the reader's experience, invoking the riotous colors of comics that elude rationality and control and delving into shared fictional universes and occult detection, the horror genre and the evocation of the sublime, and the place of abstraction in Mignola's art. Monsters populate the world of Hellboy comics, but Bukatman argues that comics are themselves little monsters, unruly sites of sensory and cognitive pleasures that exist, happily, on the margins. The book is not only a treat for Hellboy fans, but it will entice anyone interested in the medium of comics and the art of reading.

Demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge, both of the history of science fiction narrative from its earliest origins, and of cultural theory and philosophy, this book redefines the nature of human identity in the Information Age.

Features essays on cinema, the body, and the experience of modernity. Focusing on the experience of technological spectacle in American popular culture, this book reveals how popular culture tames the threats posed by technology and urban modernity, by immersing people in kinetic environments like those traversed by Plastic Man and Superman.