The Ambiguities of European Comic-book Bikers
eBook - ePub

The Ambiguities of European Comic-book Bikers

Navigating the Twists and Turns

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Ambiguities of European Comic-book Bikers

Navigating the Twists and Turns

About this book

In this book, David Walton explores European comic-book biker publications as a subgenre of popular culture. Using a multidisciplinary approach, he reveals an intricate amalgam of ingenuity, irony, and highly ambiguous humor. The creative resourcefulness of the comic-book biker authors is seen to dramatize and celebrate the material existence of motorcycles and lifestyles while laughing at the foibles, inconsistencies, manias, fantasies, and practices of those characterised as motorized flâneurs. At the core of Walton's analysis is the exploration of identity formation, marked by tensions between individualism and collective affinities, undermined by egoism and competitiveness.
At the same time, Walton argues that the storylines (despite much comic invention, caricature, and exaggeration) create resonances which hold up a distorted but highly revealing mirror to the multiple subgroups of people who ride motorcycles for pleasure. The author also demonstrates how the implied biker-readers of this subgenre confront comic representations of themselves which repeatedly undermine any positive self-image they may possess. Yet the comics are also seen to offer valuable insights into much broader cultural concerns ranging from subculture, consumption habits, (in)authenticity, taste, freedom, risk, and delinquency – without forgetting other key aspects of cultural studies like class, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ecocriticism.

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Yes, you can access The Ambiguities of European Comic-book Bikers by David Walton in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-Title
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. List of Figures
  7. Acknowledgements
  8. 1 Comic Rides and Cultural Turns: Motorcycle Culture in Comic Panels
  9. 2 Mobile Identities: Performing the (Comic-book) Biker Self
  10. 3 Riding the Edge: Speed, Risk, and Governance
  11. 4 Comic-Book Class, Identity, Masculinity and Taste
  12. 5 Race, Ethnicity and Gender: The Ubiquity of Caricature
  13. 6 Comic-book Biker Paradise or Conservationist Hell?: An Ecocritical View
  14. 7 Conclusions: Unravelling Motorcycle Culture Through Comic-book Bikers
  15. References
  16. Index
  17. About the Author