“…Comic studies as a valid field of scholarly research started picking up in the 1990s (Lent, 2010), and today it is an established area in many parts of the world (e.g., Beaty, 2004;Cohn, 2014;Groensteen, 2007; C. Hatfield, 2006;Meskin, 2007;Platz Cortsen, 2012;Postema, 2013;Sousanis, 2015;Strömberg, 2007) 3 . Bart Beaty compares the academic study of comics to a toddler "taking its first steps towards maturity" (Beaty, 2004, p. 403).…”