The University of Illinois library has nearly 10,000 comics and graphic novels in its collection. About 4,000 of those are from countries other than the U.S., with about 1400 English titles. The word cloud to the right highlights some of the most common subject terms for international comics in the catalog. Illinois has a particularly rich collection of South Asian comics, with over 1600 titles. Visit the South Asian Comic Collection LibGuide to learn more.
Use the map below to explore the international comics collection. To browse comics in the catalog, do an advanced subject search for “comic books, strips, etc.” OR “graphic novels,” then use the links at the right of the page to filter by country, language, genre, and subject.
Doing research? In addition to the resources listed below, the Library has several international bibliographies of comics and comics scholarship. The comics tabs in the area studies sections above highlight resources and comics from those areas.
Use these terms in subject searches in the library catalog or databases, plus the country, language, or region you're interested in:
Comics As a Nexus of Cultures
Essays examine how comic books and graphic narratives affect various media, merging youth and adult cultures and popular and high art. Articles feature perspectives on comics and graphic novels published in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Portugal, Germany, Turkey, India, and Japan. Topics range from film adaptation, to journalism in comics, to the current manga boom.
The Essential Guide to World Comics by
Arranged geographically, this book assesses the medium in every major area of the world, discussing the history of the genre, the comics and characters, the publishers, creators and artists. Regions covered include the UK and United States, central Europe (France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy), Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Japan and Asia, Africa, India, Central and South America, and Australasia. Including key feature spreads and a wealth of colour images - many of them unseen - this book is the first of its kind to provide a global picture of an often-underrated art form.
Comics by
Comics, manga, bandes dessinées, fumetti, tebeo, historietas... no matter the name, they have been a powerful medium across four continents for decades. This is the history of comics around the world from the late 1960s to the dawn of the 21st century. An unprecedented collection includes around 260 expertly chosen illustrations, many reproduced in full-page format for more sophisticated analysis.
Visions of the Future in Comics by
This collection of new essays explores the creative processes in comics production that bring plausible futures to the page. The contributors investigate portrayals in different stylistic traditions--manga, bande desinees--from a variety of theoretical perspectives.
Map created by Sarah Sahn for IS590DH, Digital Humanities, in Spring 2018, using data from the University of Illinois Library catalog and open source software. The data was cleaned and visualized using OpenRefine. The data visualizations were created in Tableau Public. The word cloud was created using Voyant.
