What makes a successful comics creator? How can storytelling stay exciting and innovative? How can genres be kept vital?  Writers and artists in the highly competitive U.S. comics mainstream have always had to explore these questions but they were especially pressing in the 1980s. As comics readers grew older they started calling for more sophisticated stories. They were also no longer just following the adventures of popular characters--writers and artists with distinctive styles were in demand. DC Comics and Marvel went looking for such mavericks and found them in the United Kingdom. Creators like Alan Moore (Watchmen, Saga of the Swamp Thing), Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo) and Garth Ennis (Preacher) migrated from the anarchical British comics industry to the U.S. mainstream and shook up the status quo yet came to rely on the genius of the American system.

Global Genre. Lincoln, NE ; University of Nebraska Press; 2022.

pp. 88-100 IN: Murphy, Bernice M.(ed. and introd.); Matterson, Stephen(ed. and introd.); Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction. Edinburgh, Scotland ; Edinburgh University Press; 2018.

Content Notes: The orphan in the Victorian novel / Marion Gymnich -- The gap, or the dying orphan / Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz -- "Some things remain broken forever": orphans and orphanhood in recent narrative representations / Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz -- Orphans, myth, and contemporary fantasy literature: Harry Potter, His dark materials, A song of ice and fire / Gerold Sedlmayr -- The orphan in comics and graphic novels / Dirk Vanderbeke.

A special issue of the academic journal, ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, dedicated entirely to Scottish Comics creator, Grant Morrison.