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- Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017
Studies in Comics - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017
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‘An altered view regarding the relationship between dreams and reality’: Magic, politics and the comics medium in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrow’s Providence
More LessAbstractAlan Moore reports that, through researching Providence, he ‘became more fully acquainted with academic literary criticism’ (Moore and Green 2016) and the extensive evidence of research throughout the series supports this claim. In this article, I argue that Providence uses the comics form to assert the value of humanities research and of the arts more broadly, and to educate its audience in reading and research practices (some of which are more providential than others). My focus is on the relationships between imagination and the historical realities of readers; while the latter are not detailed at length, the discussion does map onto the real world of Brexit, the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election and austerity politics because Moore’s underlying premise is that it is possible to trace the origins of our contemporary moment through the societal anxieties encoded in Lovecraft’s fiction. The analysis combines key concepts from adaptation studies with the theoretical model of the comics system proposed by Thierry Groensteen; moreover, it both draws upon and extends Brian McHale’s work on metafiction to suggest ways of extending Groensteen’s model in order to better understand the way in which Providence uses the comics medium to put into practice his hopes concerning the world-altering potential of art and scholarship.
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Western nightmares: Manifest Destiny and the representation of genocide in weird fiction
By Dragoş ManeaAbstractThis article focuses on the representation of genocide in Manifest Destiny (Dingess 2013–present), a comic book series loosely based on the 1804–06 Lewis and Clark expedition, replete with fantastical creatures, strange habitats and superhuman acts of heroism. The graphic narrative, published by Skybound/Image Comics, with art by Matthew Roberts and Owen Gieni, tells the story of the Corps of Discovery as they explore a quasi-mythical uncharted land, on the orders of President Jefferson. Their mission is to map and tame the newly purchased Louisiana Territory and prepare it for American settlers by killing the myriad monsters that still populate the strange land (including buffalotaurs, gigantic frogs, sentient anthropomorphic birds and a plant that infects humans and animals, turning their insides to plant-like material and robbing them of their will). By analysing it as a work of weird fiction, I explore how the presence of monstrous creatures creates a number of effects, from the horrific to the unsettling, outlines the killers’ awareness of the moral ambiguity of their actions and encourages readers’ identification with genocide perpetrators. The series, I argue, is grounded upon a formal realism that makes it highly effective in depicting scenes of weird fiction, whose defamiliarizing effect can rely on combining conventional, highly realistic settings, characters or tableaux with strange elements that pervert and yet do not render them unrecognizable. In conversation with critics and writers such as Ian Dawe, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Simon Spiegel and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, I attempt to explore the formal strategies adopted by the series in order to create scenes of weird fiction and their ethical implications.
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‘I pledge you!’: Disability, monstrosity and sacrifice in Wytches
More LessAbstractIn the introduction to Freakery (1996), editor and disabilities scholar, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, charts a shift in the West’s cultural perception of and relation to ‘freaks’, arguing that the extraordinary body once viewed with wonder became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a site of error. Michel Foucault ([1984] 2010) identifies the same trend on a broader scale, demonstrating that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain populations – the mad, the criminal, the impoverished, the queer – were rewritten as a social disease blighting normative society. This social equation endures to this day; one has only to scan recent blockbusters to identify the monstrous body as evil, the deformed body as deficient and expendable and, by contrast, the able body as the practically un-killable hero. In this context, the thematic achievement of Scott Snyder et al.’s Wytches (2015) is notable for its refusal to adhere to this equation, and further for its articulation of a positive alternative to it. Wytches, a Gothic horror from the first page, inverts the Victorian equation of horror with madness and monstrosity. While the comic’s eponymous antagonists are unquestionably monstrous, inhuman, and child-eating to boot, they are easily escaped and mainly act in response to the vile, selfish morality of the townsfolk they neighbour. This article first reviews theories of difference and othering as articulated by Rosemarie Garland Thomson and Michel Foucault, and expands understandings of ‘freakery’ and difference to include not just the corporeal but also the mental via Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Max Nordau and Roy Porter. It then argues that Wytches’ monstrous use of normative bodies against the dedicated rescue of its neuroatypical protagonist by abled and disabled characters alike, subtly and compellingly re-inscribing the freaked body not only as a heroic body but as a wondrous one, and argues fiercely against the long-standing social equation of difference and innate evil.
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Beware the living dead: The corpo-reality of comics
By Tina HelbigAbstractHalf-buried skeletons, ripped-off body parts, rotting zombies, insects feasting on human flesh – these and other nightmarish scenarios, in which the healthy, living human body has been grotesquely deformed, forcefully violated or almost unrecognizably altered are well-known topoi in Gothic comics. Scenes like these depict Julia Kristeva’s understanding of the abject – something that (metaphorically, sometimes literally) threatens to chip and munch away the fragile border which we have erected to separate and defend ourselves from everything other, and which we desperately try to fend off. Yet, why do mere pictures as they are presented to us in comics have such a strong effect on us, given that they are not the ‘real thing’? W. J. T. Mitchell argues that ‘we are stuck with our magical, premodern attitudes towards [...] pictures’, and that we take them as ‘vital signs’, meaning ‘not merely signs for living things but signs as living things’ – or, in the case of some Gothic horror images, as deceased or undead things, which seem to be nevertheless quite ‘alive’ in their impact on the reader’s psyche. These deliberations, based on cultural observations, are supported by neuroscientific research on the processing of visual stimuli and are, for example, utilized by behavioural psychology. Even though comics are commonly defined as addressing only one physical sense, namely sight, I argue in this paper that particularly in the case of images of the uncanny and the abject, touch plays a decisive role as well. At the same time that we imagine to see the real thing, we also fear to touch the real thing. Thus, in comics, the fear of ‘death infecting life’ – to use Kristeva’s words – is heightened by the reader’s direct physical contact with the medium in which the abject is depicted. Uncannily, the border between the pictures and our own corporeality is transcended and thus the ability of comics as a medium to provoke abjection is enhanced.
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Gotham City and the Gothic literary and architectural traditions
By Alex FitchAbstractIn 1998, the various monthly Batman titles published by DC Comics depicted the fictional Gotham City as being rocked by an Earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale. The eighteen-issue storyline explored all the dramatic potential of this event, but a primary reason why this story was included in DC’s output was to have an excuse to no longer make the comic book Gotham look like the city as portrayed in the 1990s Batman movies. On-screen, thanks to the work of set designer Anton Furst who had worked on Tim Burton’s first Batman in 1989, the city was depicted as a retrofitted sixteenth-century urban nightmare, with gargoyles and buttresses jostling space for neon lights and advertising hoardings. While Batman in the comics had always been seen as a modernist urban hero, Burton’s influences came from the tradition of European fairytales and horror films, so his collaboration with Furst – who had previously designed the film of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves (1984) – was apt in bringing a very different sensibility to his vision of the superhero film. This was then represented in the pages of 1990s Batman comics, with the city redesigned to match its image on film. This article looks at representations of the Gothic aesthetic in the pages of Batman: Destroyer and other visions of the caped vigilante that highlight the Gothic potential of the character and his city, and whether a more Gothic Gotham suits a darker Dark Knight.
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Reviews
Authors: Daniel Marrone and Eszter SzépAbstractThe Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital in the Field of American Comics, Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo (2016) Palgrave Macmillan, 156 pp., ISBN: 9781137561961, h/bk, £37.99
Unflattening, Nick Sousanis (2015) Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 208 pp., ISBN: 9780674744431, p/bk, £18.95
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