Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity: the Comics Art of Frank Quitely (book launch)
Book launch of 'Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity: The Comics Art of Frank Quitely' (Leuven: LUP, 2025), the first full-length study of the internationally acclaimed, Glasgow-born comics artist Frank Quitely. Meet the authors and the artist. Discount on the cover price on the day.
College of Arts School of Modern Languages and Cultures Stirling Maxwell Centre
Date: Thursday 12 March 2026
Time: 17:00 - 18:00
Venue: Campus Bookshop, Fraser Building (Level 01)
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: David John Boyd
Document: Superhero Event poster
Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity: The Comics Art of Frank Quitely is the first full-length study of the internationally acclaimed, Glasgow-born comics artist Frank Quitely. Best known for his work with DC, Marvel, and Image Comics, Quitely has played a central role in reshaping contemporary superhero aesthetics while remaining deeply engaged with questions of place, history, and cultural identity. Drawing on close visual analysis, archival research, and an original in-depth interview with Quitely, this book explores how Scottish identity is articulated within globally circulating comics genres such as superhero fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. Boyd and Briand Boyd situate Quitely within the Scottish “new wave” of comics while also tracing his transnational career, showing how his work negotiates tensions between the local and the global, the provincial and the cosmopolitan. The study examines recurring themes in Quitely’s art—including masking, landscapes, doubling, and fractured subjectivity—to demonstrate how comics function as a vital site for contemporary cultural and national reflection.
David John Boyd and Julie Briand Boyd are research fellows at the Stirling Maxwell Centre, University of Glasgow, working in global visual studies and Scottish studies.