Ally Sloper, Victorian comic book hero: interpreting a comedy type

The 19th century UK comics character Ally Sloper was the fictional superstar of his day. By developing a life outside the comics, in music hall theatre and via merchandising, Sloper revolutionised the rapport between consumer and product and set a template for capitalistic enterprise in the entertainment industry for the 20th and 21st centuries. Whether this made him the 'first' comics superstar per se is a subsidiary theme.

The primary goal of the volume on "Visual Communication" is to provide a collection of high quality, accessible papers that offer an overview of the different academic approaches to Visual Communication, the different theoretical perspectives on which they are based, the methods of analysis used and the different media and genre that have come under analysis. There is no such existing volume that draws together this range of closely related material generally found in much less related areas of research, including semiotics, art history, design, and new media theory. The volume has a total of 34 individual chapters that are organized into two sections: theories and methods, and areas of visual analysis.The chapters are all written by quality theorists and researchers, with a view that the research should be accessible to non-specialists in their own field while at the same time maintaining a high quality of work. The volume contains an introduction, which plots and locates the different approaches contained in it within broader developments and history of approaches to visual communication across different disciplines as each has attempted to define its terrain sometimes through unique concepts and methods sometimes through those borrowed and modified from others.

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