Social Research and Genres in Comics: An Introduction

In recent decades, comics have become a vibrant object of academic inquiry, crossing disciplinary boundaries and gaining legitimacy within fields such as cultural studies, media theory, education, and health human- ities (Chute, 2011; Griffin, 2019). Despite this, much of the scholarly work has tended to focus on the formal features of comics—visual gram- mar, multimodal narration, and genre typologies—or on the analysis of iconic figures and mainstream productions (Groensteen, 2008; Eisner, 1996; McCloud, 1994). This edited collection instead aims to offer a dis- tinct and timely perspective by examining comics through the lens of social genres, a conceptual framework that foregrounds the entanglements between comics and the socio-political realities they narrate, reflect, and contest.