The New Old Style: Anachronism in Contemporary Comics Matthew Levay 9781496237620

The New Old Style explores how the deliberate use of cartooning styles that mimic those of the early twentieth century has paradoxically become one of the most significant vehicles for formal experimentation in contemporary comics. Dubbing this phenomenon "the anachronistic aesthetic," Matthew Levay argues that what can initially appear to be a nostalgic affinity for outmoded drawing styles is in fact a complex and holistic movement in contemporary comics with profound consequences for how artists and audiences might understand the critical possibilities and historical legacies of the medium itself.

The phenomenon of anachronism as an aesthetic mode is visible in North American comics as early as the 1970s, but it rose to prominence in the 1990s. Since then, multiple artists have drawn in ways that reference cartooning styles of the distant past-those of early twentieth-century newspaper comics, early American animation, and midcentury comic books for young children, to name a few. The New Old Style characterizes these cartoonists' use of anachronism as a mode of critical engagement that reveals how comics, as a medium, can simultaneously interrogate its history-and the violence, misogyny, and racial stereotype that pervade it-while opening up new ways of addressing its aesthetic conditions. A work of comics history as well as theory, The New Old Style traces the uses of anachronism in comics published from the 1970s to the present and, via a focused set of case studies, argues that those uses represent a wide-ranging critique of the politics of the past, the material culture of the present, and the aesthetic possibilities of the future.

Matthew Levay is a professor of English at Idaho State University. He is the author of Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal.

"In isolating the anachronistic aesthetic, The New Old Style makes an important contribution to the field of comics studies, providing a critical term for a distinctive style or even a kind of genre, and offering a vocabulary and a set of parameters for other scholars to think about similar works. The distinctions being made between the anachronistic aesthetic, retro style, and nostalgia more broadly provide useful contextualization."-Barbara Postema, author of Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments

"Through the notion of the 'anachronistic aesthetic,' The New Old Style helps contextualize an important strand of comics and cartooning that is increasingly prevalent in both independent comics and those owned by major media corporations. By introducing this term, The New Old Style situates itself at the forefront of a conversation that is only beginning to emerge, and I suspect that the introduction, in particular, will be frequently cited by scholars working on independent and alternative comics, especially those interested in the cartoonists represented in this volume."-Zack Kruse, author of Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity