RIT Press publishes new titles in comics studies and in the Arts and Crafts Movement

RIT Press has added new titles to its two signature monograph series on comics studies and the Arts and Crafts movement.

Romanticism in Comics: Faith, Myth, and Mood, by Nick Katsiadas, examines genre-bending works from the modern age of comics, focusing on Neil Gaimen’s Sandman, Mike Carey and Peter Gross’ The Unwritten, and Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III’s Promethea. These comics from the 1980s and 1990s fuse dark-fantasy fiction, historically based characters, and the authors’ presence within the storytelling. He looks to 18th century Romanticism to explore imaginary realms, mythology, and paranoia.

Katsiadas supports an inclusive approach to comics studies and comprehensive scholarship that refrains from elevating one genre over another.

“It is important to the field of comics studies that we reveal intersections between nonfiction and mainstream fiction so that we may better understand genre, creative impetus, and comics’ greater literary history,” Katsiadas said.

Romanticism in Comics is the sixth title in the Comics Studies Monograph Series edited by Terrence R. Wandtke.

The Splendid Disarray of Beauty: The Boys, the Tiles, the Joy of Cathedral Oaks—A study in the Arts and Crafts Community, by Richard D. Mohr, focuses on the place of California artists Frank Ingerson (1879–1968) and George Dennison (1873–1966) in the American Arts and Crafts movement.

The couple ran the Cathedral Oaks School of Art in the Santa Cruz Mountains in northern California from 1911 to 1914. It was the first summer-only arts school of its kind in the area and inspired the creation of three other summer art programs. Cathedral Oaks followed the aesthetic principles of Arthur Wesley Dow, the founder of American Arts and Crafts design. When a fire destroyed the school in 1915, the artists pursued successful careers as interior designers in the United States and in Europe. A collection of art tiles represents the work produced at the Cathedral Oaks School of Art and is featured in the book’s 105 illustrations.

The Splendid Disarray of Beauty examines the lives of the people at Cathedral Oaks, the art made there, and the style of living and the aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

“The book is in part a redemptive project—to bring the school and its people back into art history,” Mohr writes. “After it closes, though its effects across the state persist, the school itself drops into total obscurity, so eclipsed was it by the later bedazzling ways of the men who founded it.”

The Splendid Disarray of Beauty is the second title in the Arts and Crafts Series and is edited by Bruce Austin, RIT Press director.

To purchase copies of Romanticism in Comics and The Splendid Disarray of Beauty, email RIT Press or call 585-475-5819.