MORE CRITICAL APPROACHESTO COMICS

MORE CRITICAL APPROACHES
TO COMICS
In this comprehensive textbook, editors Matthew J. Brown, Randy Duncan,

and Matthew J. Smith offer students a deeper understanding of the artistic
and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing
key theories and critical methods for analyzing comics.
Each chapter explains and then demonstrates a critical method or approach,
which students can then apply to interrogate and critique the meanings and
forms of comic books, graphic novels, and other sequential art. Contribu-
tors introduce a wide range of critical perspectives on comics, including dis-
ability studies, parasocial relationships, scientific humanities, queer theory,
linguistics, critical geography, philosophical aesthetics, historiography, and
much more.
As a companion to the acclaimed Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories
and Methods, this second volume features 19 fresh perspectives and serves
as a stand-alone textbook in its own right. More Critical Approaches to
Comics is a compelling classroom or research text for students and scholars
interested in Comics Studies, Critical Theory, the Humanities, and beyond.
Matthew J. Brown, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Values in Medicine,

Science, and Technology and Associate Professor of Philosophy, History of
Ideas, and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Since 2008, he
has run the Comics and Popular Arts Conference, an annual, peer-reviewed,
academic conference on comics and pop culture studies that takes place in
Atlanta annually on Labor Day Weekend. He teaches Comics Studies in the
Humanities Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Randy Duncan, Ph.D., is Professor of Communication and Director of the

Comics Studies Program at Henderson State University. He is co-author of
the widely used textbook The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture
(2015) and co-author of Creating Comics as Journalism, Memoir and Nonfic-
tion (2015). Dr. Duncan is co-founder, with Peter Coogan, of the Comics
Arts Conference, held each summer in San Diego. In 2009 Duncan received
the Inge Award for Outstanding Comics Scholarship and in 2012 he
received the Inkpot Award for Achievement in Comics Arts. Duncan and
Matthew J. Smith are editors of the Routledge Advances in Comics Studies
series.
Matthew J. Smith, Ph.D., is Interim Dean in the College of Humanities and

Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Communication at Radford University
in Radford, Virginia. He serves in the presidential line of succession for the
Comics Studies Society and has co-authored nine books. These include The
Secret Origins of Comics Studies (2017) and The Power of Comics: History,
Form and Culture (2015). He and Randy Duncan are also co-curators on
“Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes,” a traveling exhibit that debuted at the
Museum of Popular Culture in Seattle in 2018.
MORE CRITICAL
APPROACHES TO
COMICS
Theories and Methods
Edited by Matthew J. Brown, Randy

Duncan, and Matthew J. Smith
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Matthew J. Brown, Randy Duncan, and Matthew J. Smith to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-35952-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-35953-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-43369-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Minion
by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
Matthew Brown dedicates the book to Sabrina Starnaman, who
got me into this mess, to Damien Williams and Scott Nokes,
my longest collaborators in comics and pop culture studies,
and to my students, who helped me see
the need for this book.
Randy Duncan dedicates this book to Tommy Cash because,

whenever writing and editing books about comics becomes
a bit of a grind, conversations with Tommy remind me that
comics can be fun.
Matthew Smith wishes to dedicate this book to those good

friends who have kept the conversation about comics going
over the years, especially Robert C. Shelek and Christopher
Krahel, two stalwarts from back home in
the Valley.
C O N TE N TS
List of Figures x
List of Tables xii
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Contributors xiv
Introduction 1
MATTHEW J. BROWN, RANDY DUNCAN, AND MATTHEW J. SMITH
PA RT I
Viewpoint 5
1 Critical Theory: Celebrating the Rich, Individualistic
Superhero 7
MATTHEW P. MCALLISTER AND JOE CRUZ
2 Postcolonial Theory: Writing and Drawing Back (and

Beyond) in Pappa in Afrika and Pappa in Doubt 20
CHRISTOPHE DONY
3 Critical Race Theory: Applying Critical Race Theory to

Black Panther: World of Wakanda 37
PHILLIP LAMARR CUNNINGHAM
4 Queer Theory: Queer Comics Queering Continuity: The

Unstoppable Wasp and the Fight for a Queer Future 48
VALENTINO L. ZULLO
5 Disability Studies: Disrupting Representation, Representing

Disruption 61
KRISTA QUESENBERRY
vii
CONTENTS
6 Critical Geography: Brotherman and Big City: A

Commentary on Superhero Geography 75
JULIAN C. CHAMBLISS
7 Utopianism: The Utopia Conundrum in Matt Hawkins and

Raffaele Ienco’s Symmetry 88
GRAHAM J. MURPHY
PA RT I I
Expression 103
8 New Criticism: Ordered Disorder in Jaime Hernandez’
“Flies on the Ceiling” 105
ROCCO VERSACI
9 Psychoanalytic Criticism: Visual Pathography as a Means of

Constructing Identity: Narrating Illness in David Small’s
Stitches 119
EVITA LYKOU
10 Autographics: Autographics and Miriam Katin’s We Are on

Our Own and Letting It Go 134
ANDREW J. KUNKA
11 Linguistics: Comics Conversations as Data in Swedish

Comic Strips 145
KRISTY BEERS FÄGERSTEN
12 Philosophical Aesthetics: Comics and/as Philosophical

Aesthetics 160
AARON MESKIN AND ROY T. COOK
13 Burkean Dramatistic Analysis: An Echo of Diversity:

Dramatistic Analysis of Comics 175
A. CHEREE CARLSON
PA RT I II
Relationships 189
14 Adaptation: From Mason & Dixon by Pynchon to Miller &
Pynchon by Maurer 191
DAVID COUGHLAN
viii
CONTENTS
15 Transmedia Storytelling: Hyperdiegesis, Narrative Braiding,

and Memory in Star Wars Comics 206
WILLIAM PROCTOR
16 Parasocial Relationship Analysis: “Like Losing a Friend”:

Fans’ Emotional Distress After the Loss of a Parasocial
Relationship 221
RANDY DUNCAN
17 Historiography: Incorporating Comic Books into Historical

Analysis: Historiographical Cross-Reference and Wonder
Woman 233
ADAM SHERIF
18 Bakhtinian Dialogics: Comics Dialogics: Seeing Voices in

The Vision 246
DANIEL PINTI
19 Scientific Humanities: The Scientific Origins of

Wonder Woman 261
MATTHEW J. BROWN
Index 275
ix
FIGURES
2.1 The cover of Pappa in Afrika (2010) 21

2.2 The cover of Pappa in Doubt (2015) 29
2.3 “Nsala, of the District of Wala”, Pappa in Doubt (2015),
pp. 70–71 31
2.4 “Extinction”, Pappa in Doubt (2015), p. 29 32
4.1 The Unstoppable Wasp #1 (2018), p. 1. Justin Whitley and Elsa
Charretier 55
5.1 Woman with facial disfigurement by cell-phone light in The
House That Groaned by Karrie Fransman (Jonathan Cape, 2012) 69
5.2 “Do or Diet Group” members in The House That Groaned by
Karrie Fransman (Jonathan Cape, 2012) 70
5.3 Demi Durbach blends into the upholstery in The House That
Groaned by Karrie Fransman (Jonathan Cape, 2012) 71
6.1 Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline # 1, p. 5, panel 1 (2008) 82
6.2 Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline # 1, p. 14, panel 2, partial
panel 1 (2008) 83
6.3 Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline # 1, p. 15, panel 1 (2008) 84
7.1 The Asia capital in Shanghai. Symmetry #5 (2016) Matt Hawkins
and Raffaele Ienco 99
7.2 The Latin capital in Orlando. Symmetry #7 (2016) Matt Hawkins
and Raffaele Ienco 99
8.1 The story’s very first page, a largely wordless and initially
disorienting entry into the narrative that juggles multiple
timelines and establishes several tensions. “Flies on the Ceiling,”
Love and Rockets Book 9, p. 1 (1991) Jaime Hernandez 112
8.2 An entirely wordless and visually fragmented page in which Izzy
encounters one of the story’s several “versions” of Satan, this
time a mysterious man dressed in black. “Flies on the Ceiling,”
8.3 A page juggling at least two timelines that depicts Izzy’s fragile and
fragmented consciousness after she has run away from the man and
x
FIGURES
Beto. “Flies on the Ceiling,” Love and Rockets Book 9, p. 11 (1991)

Jaime Hernandez 116
8.4 The bottom three panels of the penultimate page, a wordless
sequence in which Izzy confronts the story’s final “version” of
Satan, a woman dancing in the town square. “Flies on the Ceiling,”
9.1 A portrait of an alternative identity. Featuring a mouthful of
angry selves who try to speak, one from within the other, the
author is trying to express his anger and pain. Excerpt(s) from
Stitches: A Memoir p. 234 129
9.2 The innocent past self and the tormented present of the
narration, intertwined in a single image, juxtaposing two
levels of reality and their obvious connections. Stitches:
A Memoir, p. 291 131
11.1 Speech balloons in Rocky #2948 (2013), Martin Kellerman 146
11.2 Prolonged moment panel transitions in Rocky strips #3436,
#3437, #3438 (2013), Martin Kellerman 147
11.3 Ballooning and lettering in Fucking Sofo (2010), Lena Ackebo 153
11.4 Dialog gutters in Rocky #2764 (2013), Martin Kellerman 156
13.1 Daredevil: Vision Quest pg. 38 (2003, rpt 2015), David Mack 183
14.1 Miller & Pynchon p. 25, panels 4 and 6 (2012), Leopold Maurer 202
15.1 The opening crawl in Darth Vader #1 (2014), Kieron Gillan and
Salvador Larrocca 215
15.2 Vader learns that Luke Skywalker is his son in Darth Vader
#6 (2014), Kieron Gillan and Salvador Larrocca 218
18.1 Hark! A Vagrant (2011). Kate Beaton 251
18.2 The Vision (2018), Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta 256
18.3 Behold the Vision from cover of Avengers #57 (1968),
John Buscema 257
19.1 “The Rubber Barons,” Wonder Woman #4 (1943), p. 9,
William Moulton Marston and Harry G. Peter 268
xi
TABLES
11.1 CA notation system for transcription 149

11.2 Transcription of the first two panels of Figure 11.3 (in English
translation) 154
11.3 Transcription of Figure 11.4 (in English translation) 157
xii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We want to thank our Routledge editors, Erica Wetter and Emma Sherriff,
for their guidance and support. We are especially grateful to Denis Kitchen
for providing a cover image that works so well with the image he provided
for the cover of the first volume of Critical Approaches to Comics.
xiii
CONTRIBUTO RS
Kristy Beers Fägersten, Ph.D. is Professor of English linguistics at Söder-

törn University, Sweden. She is the author of Who’s Swearing Now?
Social Aspects of Conversational Swearing (2012), editor of Watching TV
with a Linguist (2016), and co-editor of Advances in Swearing Research
(2017). Her current research on Swedish comic strips includes language
play as humor, the depiction of alcohol consumption, and the (mis)
alignment of visual and textual framing.
A. Cheree Carlson, Ph.D. is a Professor of Communication in the College
of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University, Downtown
Phoenix Campus. Her research has historically been focused on court-
room oratory as cultural text. Her interest in comics and popular culture
is mainly focused on non-fiction, especially graphic journalism.
Julian C. Chambliss, Ph.D. is Professor of English with a Joint Appoint-
ment in History at Michigan State University. In addition, he is a core
participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Crit-
ical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research interests
focus on the race, identity, and power in real and imagined urban
spaces. He is co-editor and contributor for Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men:
Superheroes and the American Experience (2013), a book examining the
relationship between superheroes and the American Experience. His
newest books are Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on
the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domain (2018), which explores
questions of culture, identity, and politics in the MCU, and Cities
Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018), a reader
that examines African-Americans in media and culture.
Roy T. Cook, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minne-
sota – Twin Cities. He works in the philosophy of mathematics, the phil-
osophy of logic, and aesthetics (especially of popular art). He is co-editor of
The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (with Aaron Meskin) and The
Routledge Companion to Comics (with Frank Bramlett and Aaron Meskin).
xiv
CONTRIBUTORS
David Coughlan, Ph.D. is Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick,

Ireland, and the author of Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He has published on contemporary literature,
graphic narrative, and Critical Theory in the journals Parallax, ImageTexT,
Derrida Today, College Literature, Critique, and Modern Fiction Studies, and
in several edited collections, including Heroes of Film, Comics and American
Culture (McFarland, 2009) and Grant Morrison and the Superhero Renais-
sance (McFarland, 2015).
Joe Cruz is a Ph.D. candidate in mass communications at the Donald
P. Bellisario College of Communications at Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity. Cruz is the current research assistant for the Don Davis Program
in Ethical Leadership. He has published and presented about political
engagement in social media, ideology in cinema and comic books, and
data capitalism.
Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Media Studies
at Quinnipiac University. His research primarily focuses on black popu-
lar culture. His scholarly work has appeared in Journal of Graphic Novels
and Comics, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of Sport and Social
Issues, M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture, and various
anthologies on comics, film, television, and sports.
Christophe Dony, Ph.D., is a liaison librarian at the University of Liège,
Belgium, where he teaches information literacy and is a member of the
postcolonial research group CEREP and the comics research group
ACME. His research interests include open science, Comics Studies, and
postcolonial theory. He has written on the socio-poetics of the DC/Vertigo
imprint and its distinguished character in the American comics field. He
has also co-edited the multi-contributor volumes Portraying 9/11: Essays
on Representations in Comics, Literature, and Films (2011) and Comics in
Dissent: Independence, Alternative, and Self-Publishing (2014).
Andrew J. Kunka, Ph.D. is Professor of English and Division Chair at the
University of South Carolina Sumter. He is the author of Autobiograph-
ical Comics from the Bloomsbury Comics Studies Series. In addition to
writing about autobiography, he has also published on Dell and Gold
Key Comics, Will Eisner, Kyle Baker, Jack Katz, comics noir, and race
and comics.
Evita Lykou holds a Ph.D. from the University of York, on Autobiography,
Psychoanalysis and the Graphic Novel. With an academic and profes-
sional background in Communication, Media and Culture and a strong
focus on the artistic and cultural movements of the twentieth century she
has worked across disciplines and texts and studied various strands of
the humanities. She is currently an independent researcher on the
xv
CONTRIBUTORS
graphic medium, comics, literature, and translation, and working as

a translator in Athens, Greece.
Matthew P. McAllister, Ph.D. is Professor of Communications, Communica-
tion Arts and Sciences, and Women’s Studies at Penn State. His research
focuses on political economy of media and critiques of commercial culture.
He is the co-editor of Comics and Ideology (2001, Peter Lang) and Film and
Comic Books (2007, University Press of Mississippi). He has published in
such outlets as Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Com-
munication, and Journal of Popular Culture.
Aaron Meskin, Ph.D. is Head of the Department of Philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Georgia. He works on a variety of issues in aesthetics, the philosophy
of art, the philosophy of food, and philosophical psychology. He co-edited
The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach and The Routledge Compan-
ion to Comics. Before July 2019, Aaron was Professor of Philosophical Aes-
thetics at the University of Leeds.
Graham J. Murphy, Ph.D. is Professor with the School of English and Liberal
Studies (Faculty of Business) at Seneca College (Toronto). In addition to
ongoing work and co-editing The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk
Culture, Cyberpunk and Visual Culture, Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical
Perspectives, and co-authoring Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion,
other publications appear in The Cambridge History of Science Fiction,
The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, ImageText:
Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation¸
Foundation, and The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
Daniel Pinti, Ph.D. is Professor of English at Niagara University, where he
teaches Comics and Graphic Narrative as well as Early British Literature.
His recent and forthcoming publications include articles on Gene Luen
Yang’s American Born Chinese, Matt Fraction’s and David Aja’s run on
Marvel’s Hawkeye, and Brian K. Vaughan’s and Fiona Staples’ Saga. His cur-
rent research continues to explore how Bakhtin may be used in Comics
Studies.
William Proctor, Ph.D. is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at Bourne-
mouth University, UK. He has published widely on numerous topics,
including Batman, James Bond, The Walking Dead, Stephen King, and
Star Wars. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently fin-
ishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Trans-
media, for Palgrave Macmillan. He is co-editor of Transmedia Earth:
Global Convergence Cultures with Dr. Matthew Freeman (Routledge,
2018); co-editor of Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production
and Reception with Dr. Richard McCulloch (University of Iowa, 2019);
and co-editor, alongside Bridget Kies, of the themed section of
xvi
CONTRIBUTORS
Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on

“Toxic Fan Practices” (2018).
Krista Quesenberry, Ph.D. is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at
Albion College and an Associate Editor for the Letters of Ernest Heming-
way, Volume 5 (1932–1934) (Cambridge). She holds a dual-title Ph.D. in
English and Women’s Studies from Pennsylvania State University. Krista
is currently working on a book-length project that formulates an inter-
disciplinary methodology for feminist-literary criticism, as well as project
that connects identity and diagnosis in graphic memoirs. Her recent
comics research has appeared in The Journal of Graphic Novels and
Comics and Life Writing.
Adam Sherif is an academic historian based at the University of Lincoln
(UK), specializing in historical theory and methodology. With Jane
Chapman, he is co-author of Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural
Record and Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima (both 2015). He is also
a contemporary comic book critic and Eisner Award winning retailer
with Orbital Comics, London.
Rocco Versaci, Ph.D. is an English Professor at Palomar College in San
Diego, where he teaches composition, creative writing, and literature
(including comics). His writing has appeared in The English Journal, The
International Journal of Comic Art, Midwestern Gothic, and The George-
town Review. In addition, he is the author of This Book Contains Graphic
Language: Comics as Literature (Bloomsbury, 2007) and That Hidden
Road: A Memoir (Apprentice House, 2016). More information is available
at www.roccoversaci.com.
Valentino L. Zullo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at
Kent State University and a licensed social worker practicing as a maternal
depression Therapist at OhioGuidestone. He leads the Get Graphic pro-
gram at Cleveland Public Library and is American Editor of the Journal of
Graphic Novels and Comics. He has published articles in Inks: The Journal
of the Comics Studies Society, Asylum: A Magazine for Democratic Psych-
iatry, and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
xvii
INTRODUCTION
Matthew J. Brown, Randy Duncan, and Matthew J. Smith
We (in this case just Randy and Matt) conceived of the original Critical
Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods (2012) in response to a gap in
the literature. It seemed that if other media had methods textbooks that
helped students adopt a critical approach to their messages (take, for
example, Vande Berg, Wenner, and Gronbeck’s Critical Approaches to Tele-
vision, 2004) then so should Comics Studies. Others agreed, and the first
volume was honored with both the Peter C. Rollins Book Award in Sequen-
tial Art/Comics and Animation Studies and a nomination for “Best Educa-
tional/Academic Work” in the Will Eisner Comic Book Industry Awards.
Due to the success of that book, Routledge pressed us to consider updating
it with a second edition. Then, along came Matthew Brown, a fervent
adopter of the first volume with the idea of not merely editing what had
been published in 2012, but adding a second volume. After all, the methods
in the 2012 book were still valid and valuable, and cutting some of them to
add just a few new methods would not do justice to the ever-expanding
breadth of approaches in Comics Studies. We recognized that Matthew
would help bring a fresh perspective to the selection of methods and invited
him on to the editorial team for, not a new edition, but a companion
volume. We (now Matthew, Randy, and Matt) believe the talented scholars
recruited for this project have made More Critical Approaches to Comics:
Theories and Methods a worthy companion to the first volume.
The word “critical” appears in the title of this book just as it did in the
companion volume. In a couple of reviews and face-to-face encounters,
fellow scholars expressed some disappointment that the first volume did not
completely live up to its title. While they generally liked, and even used the
book, they lamented, “It’s not what I thought it was going to be.” What
they meant was that not all the methods presented were Critical Theory
approaches. We were using the old school (pre-Frankfurt School) term
“critical” to refer to scholarship that involves description, analysis, and
evaluation. In that broad sense of critical analysis, a variety of approaches,
including Critical Theory, can be employed in the analysis stage of the
process.
1
BROWN, DUNCAN, AND SMITH
However, in retrospect, the first volume of Critical Approaches to

Comics might have been a bit lacking in actual (Frankfurt School) Crit-
ical Theory approaches. Providing broader coverage of the dominant per-
spective in the humanities is one of the reasons for creating this
companion volume. Another reason is to stay abreast of (or at least not
far behind) the developments in the robust field of Comics Studies. Due
to the interdisciplinary nature of Comics Studies, the literature in the
field benefits from a steady infusion of different approaches, with conver-
sation analysis, parasocial relationship theory, and psychoanalytic criti-
cism among those contributions that have come to our attention since
the previous volume.
In the first volume we placed a good bit of emphasis on production,
from creative decisions to corporate decisions. This volume is more, but not
exclusively, focused on reader response and on content analysis. The
approaches employed in this volume reveal that the emotional reactions
readers have to comics and the meanings they derive from them can be
determined by a variety of factors that we have categorized as Viewpoints,
Expression, and Relationships.
The approaches under the rubric of Viewpoints deal with social perspec-
tives or ideologies, or they involve political or contextual critique. There
might be occasional reference to the viewpoint of the author, but, for the
most part, the methods in this section suggest how comics can be read
through various perceptual filters.
The perceptual filters suggested by most of the approaches presented in
the Viewpoints section are versions of Critical Theory, an approach that
seeks to destabilize the widely accepted and often unquestioned concepts
that support the dominance of certain groups and structures, and to eman-
cipate the voices, usually of marginalized and oppressed groups, that have
been suppressed by those in power. The members of the Institute for Social
Research at the University of Frankfurt who laid the foundations of Critical
Theory, and perhaps even more so their acolytes, took to heart Marx’s
response to Ludwig Feuerbach that “The philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx, 1969, 15). Crit-
ical Theory is an activist strain of scholarship that seeks to have a liberating
influence by calling attention to the power structures that stand in the way
of a more just and equitable society, starting from an analysis of class struc-
tures and expanding to consider gender, race, colonialism, sexuality, and
disability. As a family of approaches to the interpretation of literary and cul-
tural artifacts, including comics texts, Critical Theory looks at the functions
of such artifacts in supporting and naturalizing such power structures, as
well as their potential for destabilizing them through counter-narratives.
Over the past forty years, most humanities scholars have been trained in
Critical Theory and have adopted the progressive ideology inherent in the
approach
2
INTRODUCTION
The Viewpoints, Expression, and Relationships sections of this book are

contrived rather than naturalistic divisions that do not precisely reflect the
practice of scholarship. For instance, while the Viewpoints approaches deal
primarily with ideas (content), most of them also take into consideration
how ideas are operationalized in comics through formal aspects such as
panel juxtapositions and art style. Because the form and content of comics
are inseparable, virtually any critical analysis applied to comics will deal, at
least peripherally, with expression.
The approaches in the Expression section focus more intensely on the
formal aspects of comics, including properties of visual form, sequential lan-
guage, and narrative strategies. Robert C. Harvey, whose comics criticism
evinces an appreciation for both clever gag strips and riveting adventure
comics, does not totally discount the importance the story itself, but his pri-
mary litmus test for a good comic is “when words and pictures blend in
mutual dependence to tell a story and thereby convey a meaning that nei-
ther the verbal nor the visual can achieve alone without the other” (Harvey,
1996, 4). The approaches in this section deal to some degree with the inter-
action and inter-animation of the textual and the pictorial, whether that
blending be employed in producing a visual pathography, visually represent-
ing realistic talk-in-interaction, or depicting trauma in autographics. An
analysis of comics form can be truly enlightening only in relation to the
content of the comic, and vice versa.
Thus, aspects of both content and form find their way into the third sec-
tion of the book. However, the approaches in the Relationships section put
the primary focus on intertextual, contextual, and paratextual relationships
between comics artifacts and other texts, media, and artifacts. There have
always been some comics that exist in relationships with the source material
from which they are adapted or draw inspiration. Increasingly, comics exist
in relationships with other mediums that adapt their content or as just one
portion of a transmedia story. Sometimes comics content relates to real-
world events, including scientific and philosophical thought. Readers can
have relationships with publishers, creators, titles, or characters. In the case
of long-running comic strips and serialized comic books, readers can have
decades-long relationships with fictional universes or characters. Comics
always exist within a complex web of relationships, and this is one of the
least explored aspects of comics. The approaches described in the Relation-
ships section provide the tools for reducing that deficit of attention, and
new ways to understand comics not just as a medium or an art form, but
an aspect of the cultural life of many people around the world.
We hope that More Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods
will be a useful resource for professors and graduate students who are
already producing comics scholarship, but our primary target audience is
the growing number of potential comics scholars who are studying comics
in a variety of courses. The book is designed to give students the tools they
3
BROWN, DUNCAN, AND SMITH
need to actively engage in the analysis of comics. These tools are necessary
to uncover the layers of meaning, relationships, and functions of comics
that move beyond surface readings to scholarship. Each chapter explains
and then demonstrates the application of a method or approach that stu-
dents will be able to follow in their own critical analysis of comics. It is our
hope that by applying a variety of perspectives and critical methods to ana-
lyzing the comics they find intriguing students will develop a deeper under-
standing and appreciation of the communicative power and cultural
significance of comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels.
Bibliography
Harvey, Robert C. 1996. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1969. Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume One.
Trans. W. Lough, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Smith, Matthew J., and Randy Duncan. 2012. Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories
and Methods. New York: Routledge.
Vande Berg, Leah R., Lawrence A. Wenner, and Bruce E. Gronbeck. 2004. Critical
Approaches to Television. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
4
Part I
VIEWPOINT
1
CRITICAL THEORY
Celebrating the Rich, Individualistic Superhero1
Matthew P. McAllister and Joe Cruz
Introduction
In the 2017 Warner Brothers movie Justice League, the seemingly ordinary Bruce
Wayne (the alter ego of Batman) is asked by new recruit Barry Allen (a.k.a. The
Flash), “What are your superpowers again?” Wayne replies, dryly, “I’m rich.”
This exchange exemplifies a long-established key attribute of Bruce Wayne,
a character who inherited Wayne Manor, Wayne Enterprises, and his vast wealth
—net worth $9.2 billion in 2015, according to Time (Davidson 2015)—but
through single-minded determination and training also molded himself into
“The World’s Greatest Detective.” Similarly, Tony (“I am Iron Man”) Stark, also
(in some versions of the character) an inheritor of a large family estate worth
even more than Wayne Enterprises (Stark’s net worth $12.4 billion, again from
Time2), developed his own path through ingenuity and individualistic vision. So
central was Iron Man’s wealth to the character that Stan Lee even joked that he
first considered as possible names for Tony Stark’s metal persona “Rich Man,”
“Super-Financier,” and “The Mighty Industrialist” (Lee 1975). Although both
Batman and Iron Man are clearly superheroes, they are also known as being
abrasive and intolerant of others, often presented as a way of demanding great-
ness (for Wayne) or calling out BS (for Stark). Both characters have also been
the heroes of their own stories for decades: Batman since 1939, and Iron Man
since 1963.
Such characterizations flow with established cultural tropes about the
value of individualism and the assumed connections between the accumula-
tion of wealth, genius, and single-mindedness. The accumulative lessons of
these tropes can justify the legitimacy of our dominant economic system,
capitalism, which arguably is inherently exploitative and inequitable. This
chapter explores the insights that one scholarly perspective, critical theory,
can bring to the ideologically infused stories and characters that are found
in comics. These stories and characters teach us lessons about what to value
in society, who our heroes are, and what they should be like. These stories
7
and characters, though, have relationships to larger structures of power,

including capitalism, the patriarchy, heteronormativity, and whiteness, and
often serve to legitimize these larger structures. Critical theory helps to
highlight the relationship of media content to larger structures of power,
and to remind us that, even in comic books, “there are no innocent texts”
(Durham and Kellner 2012, 4).
Underlying Assumptions of the Approach

Social systems in any society can have embedded in them inequitable power
relationships. Simplified examples include class differences in capitalism,
gendered inequities in patriarchy, racism and whiteness in white-dominated
societies, sexual identities and structural homophobia in heteronormativity,
and hardships against the disabled in ableist systems. Critical theory in
media studies typically explores why and how dominant ideology—cultural
meanings that reinforce the perspectives and positions of those in various
sectors of power in society—is reflected and reinforced in our media sys-
tems. When the celebration of dominant ideology is so complete that it
becomes naturalized in media (and other cultural systems), it approaches
hegemony. In hegemonic cultural forms (the messages that circulate in
media, education, and religion, for example), the dominant power structure
of a society is assumed, becomes essentialized, and is treated as inevitable.
Although critical theory often is associated with exploring the values of cap-
italism and how media systems reinforce this economic system and the
power of economic classes who benefit most from capitalism—the roots of
critical theory are found in Marxist analysis—other social systems in which
inequities occur and are enduring may be informed by scholarship with
critical-theoretical assumptions. These include certain versions of feminist
media studies, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability studies. Crit-
ical theory’s emphasis on dominant ideology in media is often contrasted
with other approaches—such as particular versions of cultural studies—that
foreground the fluidity and complexity of media’s ideological meanings, the
degree to which the polysemic, multiple-meaning nature of media messages
allow for oppositional ideologies, and how audiences appropriate these
meanings in their own lives in sometimes negotiated or even subversive
ways. There are instances of media content that is created outside of the
dominant media system, and in such cases, critical theory may highlight
truly radical or counter-hegemonic ideas in such oppositional or alternative
media (in the case of comics, see Sabin 1993).
With its emphasis on the perpetuation of dominant ideology, critical
theory is often associated with the intellectual tradition known as the Frank-
furt School. In terms of its influence on media studies, this tradition is espe-
cially exemplified by Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s essay, “The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” originally published
8
CRITICAL THEORY
in the 1940s (reprinted 2012). As scholars who were influenced by intellec-

tual traditions such as the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and who
fled Nazi Germany for New York City during World War II, the authors
were concerned that the totalitarianism that they escaped from was being
duplicated through the mass-production logics and cultural messages in US
popular culture. Frankfurt scholars argued that the industrialization of cul-
tural forms like studio-produced movies, syndicated comic strips, and pop
music—by using the same economically efficient logic of the assembly line
and mass-production factory—emphasized standardization and the uniform-
ity of ideas. The role of advertising and promotion further reinforced pro-
duction routines of media. An assumption in Frankfurt critical theory is
that the same ideas are repeated through multiple outlets of mass entertain-
ment. Critical theory thus often underscores continuities across different
media texts, rather than an in-depth analysis of one text. They argue that
mass-media entertainment forms tended to be more alike than truly differ-
ent, including reoccurring character types like the plucky heroine, dedicated
physician, and rugged cowboy.
While the Frankfurt theorists argued that “true” difference and individualis-
tic thought can exist—especially in elite art forms like avant-garde theater and
classic symphonies—it is rarely found in mediated content. Instead, character
types found in media are more of a “pseudo-individualism”: heroes offer only
minor stylistic differences from each other, and ultimately are offering the
same range of values and behaviors. For example, one 1930s movie cowboy
used six-shooters, another rifles, another wore black, another played a guitar,
but all were basically the rugged hero who shoots bad guys on a lawless fron-
tier. The scope of difference tended to be limited to ideas that flowed with cap-
italism. Ideas outside of this range—ideas that offered some potentially
fundamental or structural criticisms of capitalism and inequity—were not por-
trayed at all, or were symbolically contained or negated. Rebellious heroes, for
example, who seem to go against the system ultimately reinforce the status quo
by bringing their stories to a satisfactory closure, returning in sequels, and
working within the system even if they crack wise about its contradictions.
Other characters who critique capitalism or other established systems of power
were villains or tragic characters with mental health issues or hopelessly naive.
The Frankfurt authors emphasized that such messages were not inten-
tional propaganda, but rather the result of how mass media were created in
industrial capitalism. As they argued of media corporations, “their ideology
is business” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2012, 60). Ultimately, modern US
mass media are designed to generate a profit, and their production is
designed to be efficient and predictable toward that goal. However, with the
profit motive as the sole driver of decisions, there could be unintended con-
sequences of media’s production logic, including the majority of meanings
in industrial mass media as collectively celebrating conformity and accept-
ance of the realities of capitalism.
9
The Frankfurt School specifically, and critical theory more generally, has
influenced modern media studies in several ways. Work engaging the polit-
ical economy of media—critical approaches to media economics including
patterns of ownership and advertising and their influence on content—is in
debt to the perspective (Bettig 2002; Hardy 2014). Critical theory also reson-
ates in scholarship that points to the repetitive nature of media, its commer-
cial influences, and how it delegitimizes or negates criticism of social
structures of power (about television see Gitlin 1979; Meehan 2005).
Critical theory can, then, highlight the hegemonic implications of specific
cultural meanings found in modern media that reinforce the economic
status quo. For the purposes of this chapter, one especially relevant message
that previous critical work has noted involves stories found in media that
celebrate a particular kind of business entrepreneur—the individualistic,
industrialist genius—who thrives in capitalism; it is an enduring narrative
found throughout the history of industrialized US media.
As the next sections detail, such characterizations and their ideological
implications are also found in the comics.
Appropriate Artifacts for Analysis

Comics are especially suitable for critical theory analysis. Comic books
occupy a dual reality in the public imaginary. On one hand, they are dis-
missed as fatuous and innocuous fantasies for young readers; on the other,
they are seen as capable of capturing and reinforcing ideological discourses
(a point argued by Dorfman and Mattelart 1971, reprinted 1984). Scholars
have highlighted the ideological messages in comics (for example McAllis-
ter, Sewell, and Gordon 2001), even arguing, in one classic work of critical
theory applied to comics, that Disney-based comics served as capitalist
imperialism when distributed to South American countries looking to
develop more socialist or left-influenced governments (Dorfman and Matte-
lart 1971; reprinted 1984). Many comics are created in the context of large-
scale capitalist enterprises, most notably in the case of comic strips by large
syndicators like King Features Syndicate (owned by Hearst Communica-
tions), or in comic books through publishers like Marvel (owned by Disney)
and DC (owned by Warner Media). Both daily comic strips and monthly
comic books are designed to be reproduced for long stretches of time, and
in repetitive formats. Most comics are created and promoted around
a single character or a small group of characters who appear in that comic
for years. The stories may feature the same basic narrative arcs and plot
progressions, and often the same themes. Some of the most enduring char-
acters—and the circulation of a stable meaning in those characters—in our
popular culture are based in comics. Horkheimer and Adorno, for instance,
discuss the hapless white-collar worker Dagwood Bumstead, the husband of
the title character in Blondie, a “gag” comic strip that has been produced
10
CRITICAL THEORY
and nationally distributed virtually every day since its debut in 1930. Many
of its gags are about the lazy nature of Dagwood as a worker, or how much
he eats and sleeps.
Comic-book characters such as Superman and Batman similarly have
been fixed in the popular imagination for decades. They appear in monthly
comic books that are consistently the same basic length and format. The-
matically, they are part of the relatively stable genre of superhero comics
that argues, over and over, that problems are best solved through physical
conquest and that clearly designated evil exists, is a threat, and needs to be
conquered. This genre dominates the medium to such a degree that the
masculinist tendencies of physical conquest may mark it as a hostile space
for girls, women, and non-cis males (Orme 2016).
The establishment of one particular type of comic-book superhero—the
individualist with massive wealth—seems especially suitable for critical
theory analysis, as the rest of this chapter explains.
Procedures for Analysis

Critical theory will often examine the industrial context of a media artifact,
but typically a key focus is to engage the repetition of similar, hegemonic
messages and themes in a series of media texts. It asks, what are the domin-
ant ideological messages found in media, how do they relate to larger struc-
tures of power, and how may they be hegemonic (reinforcing dominant
structures in society)?
Key steps in applying critical theory for media content such as comics
include:
• Identifying hegemonic ideas that flow with dominant inequalities of

society or celebrate dominant systems such as capitalism, and that may
appear in mainstream media like comics. Previous work on critical
theory is often a key aspect in understanding how such ideas have
developed and their implications.
• Deciding on the category of media content to which to apply the ana-
lysis. A particular challenge in critical theory, as exemplified by Hork-
heimer and Adorno, is the emphasis on the repetition of ideas,
especially as appearing in popular and well-circulated media content.
An emphasis on repetition means that ideas circulate not only in one
“text,” such as a single issue of a comic book, although analysis may
focus on one text if it is viewed as especially significant to understand-
ing a dominant theme. However, repetition of hegemonic ideas could
involve an entire narrative world (such as the Marvel Universe), genre
(superhero comics), series, character, or long-term storyline.
• Since such a textual category (narrative world, genre, series, character, seri-
alized plot) may involve hundreds of individual texts (such as issues of
11
a comic book), this can make the analysis daunting. In such cases, what
may be involved is the reading of previous scholarship and popular exam-
inations about a series or character to understand its history, and limiting
the analysis to a few especially exemplar textual artifacts.
• Applying textual analysis to construct an interpretation of particular
“texts” (e.g. film, tv show, advertisement, comic books) supported by
various sources that include published scholarship, the researchers’
expertise, related cultural artifacts that may supplement the texts, and
the texts themselves (McKee 2003, 33). Researchers build a case to make
sense of the possible cultural meanings of these texts. Textual analysis
may focus on a variety of elements in media content to highlight pos-
sible hegemonic meanings: dialogue or written words that explain
actions; the backstories of characters; the labeling, behaviors, and stated/
implied motivations of heroes, villains and supporting characters; the
look of characters, including their gender, race, and physical characteris-
tics; the morals of stories that audiences are expected to learn, often
indicated by how a story ends or musings by characters or narrators.
Artifacts Selected for Sample Analysis

Because in typical superhero stories the line between good and evil is clearly
drawn, the main characters—the superheroes who nearly always vanquish
evil—embody the type of lifestyle a virtuous individual should pursue. In
turn, their individual characteristics become associated with virtue. Since
many heroes originate from wealthy backgrounds (Iron Man, Batman, Black
Panther, Green Arrow, Emma Frost), readers may associate their net worth,
access to resources, and immediate networks with the most ideal individual
traits. The wealthy superhero often expresses technocratic and pseudo-
individualistic tendencies; that is, they perceive science and technology
(developed through their personal resources) and single-mindedness as cru-
cial tenets to the pursuit of justice. For this analysis, the hegemonic ideas
highlighted were the industrialist, individualistic, and single-minded charac-
teristics of both Batman and Iron Man. A few well-known texts involving
the characters were chosen to exemplify these ideas.
Both Batman and Iron Man are characters with long histories of popularity,
and fairly consistent backstories and motivations. Batman has regularly been one
of the most popular characters in American popular culture since his introduc-
tion in the 1930s (for scholarly reviews, see Brooker 2001; Pearson, Uricchio,
and Brooker 2015). He has been featured in numerous comic-book and comic-
strip titles, films, and animated cartoons, and has had a consistent presence in
the toy industry. Batman is DC Comics’ most-licensed character worldwide
(Block 2014). Iron Man is a valuable commodity for Marvel Comics because of
his enduring popularity and successful cinematic appearances. As a member of
the Avengers, Iron Man is part of Marvel Comics’ most profitable property
12
CRITICAL THEORY
(after Spider-Man) (Block 2014). Batman and Iron Man deserve critical analysis,
particularly because of their pervasive presence in a variety of media, and
because their empowerment as wealthy technocrats helps illuminate current dis-
courses about capitalism, masculinity, and American individualism. The below
analysis pulls from several especially notable examples that illustrate Batman’s
and Iron Man’s personas, and how these celebrate the idea of the rich, individu-
alistic superhero.
Sample Analysis
Finger, Bill, and Bob Kane. 1939a. “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.”
Detective Comics, 27, DC Comics.
Finger, Bill, and Bob Kane. 1939b. “The Batman Wars Against the Diri-
gible of Doom.” Detective Comics, 33, DC Comics.
Kaminski, Len. 1994. “The Sound of Thunder.” Iron Man, 1, 304, Marvel
Comics.
Lee, Stan, and Larry Lieber. 1963. “Iron Man Is Born!” Tales of Suspense,
1, 39, Marvel Comics.
Michelinie, David, and Bob Layton. 1981 “Escape from Heaven’s Hand.”
Iron Man, 1, 152, Marvel Comics.
Miller, Frank. 1986. “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.” The Dark
Knight Returns, 4, DC Comics.
Waid, Mark, and Alex Ross. 1997. Kingdom Come, DC Comics.
Waid, Mark. 2000. “Tower of Babel, Part 1: Survival of the Fittest.” JLA,
1, 43, DC Comics.
If critical analysis attempts to understand the entrenchment of a hegemonic
portrayal, then here we review the ideological aspects of the wealthy male
industrialist as an intrepid, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualist.
This persona has been engrained in the American psyche since the Indus-
trial Revolution. The perceived tenacity and inventiveness of the likes of
Henry Ford and Howard Hughes and, more recently, Steve Jobs and Elon
Musk, are often treated by the media and entertainment industries as noth-
ing short of legendary (Peck 2014). All have been featured in numerous
films, documentaries, and/or news coverage that lionize their exploits.
Media stories of rich capitalist innovators paint them as individuals who
overcome hardship, are rebellious against the current system, and bring
a singular vision and success to their enterprise (Wilner et al. 2014). Stories
may also celebrate wealthy individuals who are beneficial to the overall
public good and are “job creators” (Peck 2014). The “heroicization” of the
wealthy especially is applied to those who are white and male (Hamilton
2013; Liu and Baker 2016). This notion of the rebel and anti-establishment
CEO captures the “rugged individualism” that is often presented as exempli-
fying the American Revolution and remains fixed in our social fabric. As
13
the acolytes of personal rights would declaim, autonomy begets innovation;

government oversight, social accountability, and collaboration are barriers
to be overcome if not obliterated altogether. In turn, it is only through the
individual pursuits of wealthy industrialists—not public or collective enter-
prise—that society truly flourishes.
The traditional male industrialist embodies the hyper-individualistic
characteristics expected of the American people if they wish to succeed in
the current capitalist system. Media coverage of the CEOs’ persona implies
that they have survived on their own, prioritizing their interests over the
common good, with little or no assistance from the broader community
(Mims 2018). Conservative media such as Fox News tend to reinforce this
narrative when it romanticizes wealth, power, and individuality by high-
lighting the self-centered ventures of CEOs from important companies as
inherently beneficial to society as a whole (Peck 2014). However, even in
other media such as the business sections of newspapers, rich CEOs—often
from the tech industry—are portrayed as the ultimate visionaries: individ-
uals worth emulating to unleash a successful life in a capitalist system
(Wilner et al. 2014). They may even seem “super” in their own right
because they act like single-minded individuals who opt to bypass authority,
and sometimes government oversight, to pursue their personal projects.
Elon Musk, for example, often framed as the “genius” behind the Tesla elec-
tric automobile, has added to his image of being both hyper-rich and indi-
vidualistically quirky through stunts that showcase his financial and social
stature like launching a car into space. It should not be a surprise that
Musk has expressed his fandom and admiration for superhero characters,
especially Batman and Iron Man (Word 2017).
Like the portrayal of the entrepreneurial CEO, some of the most popular
superheroes command massive wealth, lead multinational companies, and
belong to large aristocratic networks. They include Oliver Queen, a.k.a.
Green Arrow, Marc Spector, a.k.a. Moon Knight, and, perhaps most import-
antly, Batman and Iron Man. Not coincidentally, these characters draw
many of their “special” abilities from their access to vast economic resources
and cutting-edge technology. Batman uses an armory of expensive gadgets
and vehicles to combat crime, while Iron Man depends on his suit’s weap-
ons and abilities to best his enemies. In other words, being rich may earn
you a place among the likes of Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Hulk.
Even though they belong to different comic-book universes, Batman and
Iron Man share similar financial profiles that allow a public persona of
being “wealthy playboys” and provide powers through accumulation of
advanced technologies; they also both have individualistic personalities that
often signal troubled relationships with other characters. In many ways,
Batman and Iron Man are the ultimate representations of American indi-
vidualism and citizen empowerment (Robinson 2018). Their adventures
often emphasize the need to safeguard their rights to privacy, owning
14
CRITICAL THEORY
property, and often operating autonomously from government. This, of

course, describes many superheroes, but in this case both Batman and Iron
Man have access to surveillance and weaponized technology. Both charac-
ters embrace developing their advanced, proprietary technology in seclusion
and away from the law (Hendrix 2008). Both characters’ interactions with
the notion of privacy are depicted in various key scenarios throughout their
respective comic-book history. These characteristics are evident with
a passing knowledge of the characters’ histories. However, some are hinted
at in each character’s early comic-book appearances.
For example, at the very first appearance of Bruce Wayne, Batman’s
secret identity, in Detective Comics #27, he is described as a “young social-
ite,” is dressed in a stylish suit, and is spending his leisure time with an
important public figure, Gotham City’s Police Commissioner Gordon. Later
in the story it is revealed that Bruce Wayne is Batman (Finger and Kane
1939a May). In a more detailed origin sequence a few issues later, the
comic establishes the character’s wealth as key and at first he is a rich loner.
(Robin was introduced a few issues later.) Sitting by himself in an opulent
sitting room and before a timely, inspirational bat flies through his window,
Wayne begins to consider life as a crime-fighter by musing that “Dad’s
estate left me wealthy. I am ready” (Finger and Kane 1939b November).
Similarly, Iron Man’s first trademark suit was built in relative seclusion. In
his origin story, Tony Stark, a genius military-weapons manufacturer, is injured
in an explosion and kidnapped by the war criminal Wong-Chu, who forces
him to build weapons in a cave (Lee and Lieber 1963). The explosion leaves
Stark with a fatal heart wound and only a few days to live. Unlike Bruce
Wayne, Tony Stark does have assistance in becoming a superhero. Ho Yinsen,
another prisoner who is a physicist, helps Stark builds his signature armor and
escape (Lee and Lieber 1963). Stark’s involuntary isolation serves as
a metaphor for the current type of pseudo-individualism that permeates media
narratives. His prodigious intellect conjures the idea for the iron suit in obscur-
ity and although he receives assistance from another equally intelligent person,
it is not an equitable situation. Credit for the versatile, nearly indestructible
iron suit is ultimately attributed solely to Stark’s ingenuity, a move that mirrors
the celebration of wealthy capitalists such as Thomas Edison, largely crediting
with “inventing” the motion picture camera at the expense of contributions
such as those of his employee, William Dickson (“William Kennedy Dickson,”
N.D.). In the producerist mindset, where “job creators” are much more valu-
able to society than laborers (Peck 2014), Stark, as a wealthy industrialist, has
more to offer the common good than Ho Yinsen. The public and media indus-
tries treat current CEOs with the same level of veneration and mysticism. After
various failures to launch one of the first personal computers in the 1980s,
Steve Jobs became infamously detached from the public eye, only to reemerge
from obscurity in the late 1990s to found Pixar Animation Studios and intro-
duce the iMac. Like Tony Stark, he “locked himself away to produce
15
a paradigm-shifting invention” (Hendrix 2008). While the media framed Jobs’

previous isolationism as “eccentric,” his colleagues tend be less charitable. They
often describe his seclusion and perceived single-mindedness as arrogance, and
an inability to embrace collaboration (CNET News Staff 1996).
Iron Man’s individualistic identity manifests through how he uses and
enhances his suit (Stefanopoulou 2017). Since his entrapment at the hands
of Wong-Chu, Tony Stark has built numerous suits that were intended to
improve on previous models. Each new one possesses a unique ability like
stealth (Michelinie and Layton 1981) or incredible strength (Kaminski 1994)
that only Iron Man understands and can activate. Stark’s mastery and
access to his armor affords him social and economic stature (Hogan 2009;
Stefanopoulou 2017). Because of the various abilities granted by his suits,
Stark has the privilege to access superhuman circles (e.g. the Avengers).
The need for privacy and seclusion especially shapes Batman’s persona.
Unlike Iron Man, who typically operates from the publicly known Stark Enter-
prises, Batman retreats to a cave located under Wayne Manor to concoct his
plans. However, Batman’s brand of individualism diverges from Iron Man’s in
various ways. For example, he expresses his single-mindedness through antagon-
istic behavior towards group collaboration. Although he has had numerous part-
ners across the years (most notably of course Robin), his interactions with other
superheroes tend to be marked by tension and paranoia. Arguably the most cele-
brated illustration of Batman’s “leadership style” occurred when he disciplined
the rebellious Guy Gardner (one of the many Green Lanterns) with a knock-out
punch in a 1987 issue of Justice League International (Giffen and DeMatteis
1987). The “Tower of Babel” storyline explores Batman’s distrust of others—in
this case, the Justice League (JLA). Since most JLA members possess super-
human abilities, Batman is wary of them because, if they were to go rogue, he
rationalizes that no force on Earth would be able to stop them (Waid 2000).
And because he lacks superpowers, he is aware of his limitations if he were to,
say, battle the incredibly strong Wonder Woman hand to hand. Using his vast
resources, he devises a plan to neutralize all the heroes by exploiting their weak-
nesses. In this particular case, Batman perceives global security as paramount to
safeguarding the common good. His immediate collective, the JLA, poses
a threat powerful enough for him to ignore his in-group loyalty. Conversely,
with only his cunning intellect and access to advanced technologies, Batman
demonstrates that, despite his limitations as a non-superpowered being, anyone
could beat the JLA if they have enough money and power.
Batman’s radical pseudo-individualism is perhaps best exemplified by
some of his actions near the climax of the infamous The Dark Knight
Returns graphic novel. This story finds Batman retired from fighting crime
and living a rather mundane life. With crime running rampant in Gotham
City, Bruce Wayne, now a 55-year-old, decides to don the cowl once more.
However, his new brand of vigilantism, where he beats up gang members
and surveils the city potentially violating citizens’ rights to privacy, finds
16
CRITICAL THEORY
him at odds with the local and federal authorities. The US government dir-
ects Superman to bring in Batman to face justice and a showdown between
“The Man of Steel” and “The Dark Knight” becomes inevitable (Miller
1986). Because he is no match for Superman, Batman secludes himself to
build a robot armor that could help him fight Superman. Like Tony Stark
and Steve Jobs, Bruce Wayne isolates himself to create a “paradigm-shifting”
artifact that could level the playing field (Hendrix 2008). In this context,
Batman’s robot suit serves as a metaphor for citizen empowerment, particu-
larly that which is concerned with providing community surveillance when
law enforcement is perceived to have failed. Batman’s isolationist noncon-
formity is also reinforced in another celebrated alternative-future story, King-
dom Come, a graphic novel designed to highlight the mythic nature of
superheroes (and the human crises and angst such beings would trigger).
Another character in this story, Wonder Woman, calls Batman out about his
individual-genius image: “You have the nerve to swagger out of your cave
and expect everyone to bow before your precious wisdom!” (Waid and Ross
1997, 172).
Both Iron Man and Batman, then, exemplify the rich, genius entrepreneur,
a persona that is celebrated in media coverage of rich businessmen. We see this
most clearly in the mythos created around both the historic “captains of indus-
try,” but also in more recent profiles of Internet and new-tech billionaires. The
Wall Street Journal saw the explicit connection between Tech CEOs and the
superhero label as so strong, and ultimately blinding to their drawbacks, that
they implored, “the age of the tech superheroes must end” (Mims 2018).
However, the long-enduring cultural story of the rich hero may also explain
even more impactful trends. Depictions of Batman’s and Iron Man’s actions in
comic books warrant scrutiny due to the current state of our technological and
political landscape. Much of President Donald Trump’s cult-like appeal for his
supporters, after all, is rooted in his image of an individualistic business genius,
a self-made millionaire who mastered “the art of the deal” and who for many
seasons on the reality program The Apprentice would bluntly judge others as
inadequate in proclamations from his very own Trump Tower. It perhaps, then,
was not a harmless indulgence when, as reported in The Washington Post
(Cavna 2015), as a Presidential candidate, Trump answered a boy’s question
(“Are you Batman?”) without hesitation: “I am Batman.”
Notes
1 The authors wish to thank Aya Al Khatib and Ziyuan (Maggie) Zhang for their
help with the research for this chapter.
2 Time ranks T’Challa, the Black Panther, as the richest superhero; in fact, they
label him as “undoubtedly the wealthiest fictional character of all time,” with per-
sonal wealth in the trillions. However, his royalty and communitarianism (in
terms of Wakanda, at least) place him in a different symbolic relationship with
his wealth than Wayne or Stark.
17
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2
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Writing and Drawing Back (and Beyond) in Pappa
in Afrika and Pappa in Doubt
Christophe Dony
Introduction
Readers who have never come across Anton Kannemeyer’s work may be
intrigued, to say the least, just by looking at the cover of his anthology
Pappa in Afrika (2010). This cover (Figure 2.1) is indeed a parody of the
(in)famous comic cover of Tintin in the Congo (1932) by Hergé. Tintin in
the Congo has been described as the colonial comic par excellence (Rifas
2012), notably for its stereotypical (mis)representation of Congolese people
as inferior, inept, primitive, or marginal. Hergé’s colonial gaze and aesthetic
also undoubtedly lie in his visual tokenizing of the black body, for which
the artist systematically relies on golliwog and coon iconography – that is,
grotesque characters with “very dark skin,” big clown-like lips, “wild-
rimmed eyes,” and “wild, frizzy hair” (Pilgrim 2000, n. p.). As a result, Kan-
nemeyer’s reproduction of Hergé’s racist iconography in the twenty-first
century may seem offensive and troublesome to many. Yet, paradoxically
enough, Kannemeyer’s use of Hergé’s aesthetic is meant as a critique of
colonial discourse and ideology, and their persistence even in so-called post-
colonial times.
This becomes especially clear when examining how Kannemeyer
employs other subversive elements to denounce fantasies, violence, and
anxieties surrounding colonial discourse and its legacy, which Tintin in
the Congo articulates narratively and visually. For example, the presence
of a dead black man as well as several mutilated black characters con-
demns the violence inherent in the process of colonization. Their suffer-
ing and grotesque traits seem to be the direct result of an ongoing
modern form of (neo)colonization, which Kannemeyer references by tag-
ging boxes amidst the luggage of Tintin’s avatar with mentions of oil
field service multinational companies, international aid, and genetically
modified foods. Implied here is that all of these products and the
20
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Figure 2.1 The cover of Pappa in Afrika (2010). © Anton Kannemeyer
companies or organizations from which they originate have, in one way

or another, participated in the exploitation and misery that have plagued
many people and countries in Africa, both during and after the colonial
period. Kannemeyer’s addition of mainly distressed or dead black charac-
ters also produces an uncanny effect, especially for Western eyes, that
21
CHRISTOPHE DONY
sharply contrasts with the almost idyllic but mostly fantasized African
landscape from Hergé’s original cover. This cover, the reader might
remember, features nothing but Tintin’s car in the middle of an empty,
savannah-like landscape, with a giraffe prominently standing in the back-
ground. This type of romantic landscape was common and popular in
the colonial imaginary because it helped legitimize Europeans’ real and
cartographic takeover as well as their settlement, all the while minimizing
the idea of violent territorial intrusion and appropriation (Huggan 1989;
Huggan and Tiffin 2015). In addition to debunking this colonial represen-
tation of Africa as an empty space, Kannemeyer suggests that coloniza-
tion also played an important role in the extinction of wildlife. The “real”
giraffe from Hergé’s cover has indeed disappeared on the cover of Pappa
in Afrika. Kannemeyer’s cover still features a giraffe, but a wooden sculp-
ture of one that is stacked in the car of Tintin’s avatar. This subtle
change in form may be said to epitomize colonizers’ inclination to liter-
ally tame species and lands to advance colonial projects, including the
crafting of colonial fantasized memorabilia.
The cover of Pappa in Afrika contains several other subversive elements
besides those described above, some of which will be examined later on. For
now, suffice it to say that the previously discussed revisions illustrate a form
of “writing back,” which is the critical framework adopted in this chapter.
Writing back can be defined as a form of postcolonial appropriation
whereby artists adopt and adapt colonial traditions and discourses to better
expose their “flaws, shortcomings and politics” (Nayar 2015, 13), and then
possibly modify their very form(s) or mode(s). Writing back can thus pro-
vide an approach for the examination of the type of appropriation and sub-
version of colonial discourse and aesthetic such as those found in Pappa in
Afrika’s cover.
In this chapter, an expanded version of the writing back paradigm will
be applied to various comics and formal elements from Kannemeyer’s
anthologies Pappa in Afrika (2010) and Pappa in Doubt (2015). The read-
ings of the elements presented in this chapter are based on certain assump-
tions about what the writing back paradigm is and what it can do. It is
therefore first necessary to critically engage with these assumptions and
their theoretical underpinnings before the framework is applied.

The first underlying assumption is that a text which writes back does so in
engaging with another individual text or a body of texts and with the
underlying socio-cultural, ideological, and political realities that these texts
reflect and shape. This engagement with what lies beyond textuality and
narrative is what distinguishes the writing back paradigm from other critical
concepts based on relationality, such as intertextuality, intermediality, or
22
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
genre theory. These critical concepts from literary and media studies are
concerned with how texts and narratives engage with other texts and narra-
tives; they provide a rationale for describing and analyzing how writers and
artists adapt, expand, or provide commentaries on fictional worlds and/or
literary traditions. However, while they are helpful in establishing typologies
of textual and narrative relations and in highlighting writers and artists’
possible influences and (af)filiations, these approaches generally show little
concern for extratextual issues such as ideology and politics.
A second underlying assumption is that the political and ideological tenets
underlying the writing back paradigm are the result of the model’s roots in post-
colonial theory. In The Empire Writes Back, one of the foundational critical texts
of postcolonial studies which conceptualized the writing back paradigm, the edi-
tors argue that postcolonial literatures engage with and reflect on the effects of
the imperial process and colonization even after the dismantling of former colo-
nial powers (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2002, 2). This seminal work also
posits that many a postcolonial text contests and exposes the discriminatory sys-
tems of all kinds imposed by colonizers on colonized people, which include gov-
ernment procedures and regulations, economic and socio-cultural models, but
also linguistic and literary traditions. In writing back against these models, post-
colonial authors have sought to reclaim colonized people’s voices, heritage, and
agency. In fact, postcolonial authors have often aimed to revise colonial histori-
ography and Western literature’s Orientalist aesthetic (Said 1985). Orientalist
representations of places, cultures, and “others” abound in Western literature
and testify to its long-held “denial of the value of the ‘peripheral,’ the ‘marginal’
and the ‘uncanonized’” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2002, 3).
A third assumption is that the writing back mode can take many different
forms. For example, many postcolonial writers have revised a particular Western
classic, thus articulating a writing back mode around a clear one-to-one textual
correspondence. This is notably the case in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966),
which builds on of the “mad woman in the attic” trope present in Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) is another example that is
woven around Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest
(1969) focuses on revising Shakespeare’s The Tempest (ca. 1611). These postcolo-
nial narratives reflect the weight of Western cultural and literary traditions in
former colonies, and how various strands of discrimination against and misrepre-
sentations of former colonized people were deeply ingrained in Western narra-
tives. Of course, all of these authors may engage with different aspects of the
Western canon. As John Thieme reminds us in his exploration of a postcolonial
canon: “a heterogeneous range of societies ha[ve] experienced colonialism” differ-
ently, and there are accordingly “major disparities between the ways in which”
particular authors “wrote back” and “engaged with the canon” (Thieme 2001, 2).
On the whole, however, this type of writing back generally aims to “redesign,
relocate, reevaluate the classic protoworld” (Doležel 1998, 206), that is the “ori-
ginal” fictional world as it was first imagined in the source and often “classic”
23
CHRISTOPHE DONY
text, whose narrative elements and themes often serve as springboards for revi-
sion or expansion of said fictional world.
These narrative transformations generally affect and comment on charac-
ters, space, and time. For example, characters whose voices and roles were
downplayed in the source text, notably because of their status, position, or race,
may be given more prominence. The psyche and personality of major charac-
ters from the source text can also be revised so as to expose how its characters
both reflect and shape discriminatory and paternalistic discourses and attitudes.
Moreover, spatial and temporal settings from the source text may be redesigned
so as to draw attention to often previously overlooked locales or histories, or
simply to offer alternative perceptions of history than those conceived by West-
ern historiography. Finally, even if this has been the focus of less critical atten-
tion (Goebel and Schabio 2013; Munos and Ledent 2018), these narrative
transformations can be intertwined with a reevaluation of specific poetics and
politics of storytelling which can comment on formal and stylistic elements,
genre traditions, or tropes, especially those that present whiteness, traditional
masculinity, heterosexuality, “truth” and temporal linearity as normative. These
revisions do not necessarily target a Western literary text, but a broader “world-
view” as constructed and perceived by Western discourses. Writing back can
thus be understood in a much broader way than bilateral textual relations.
A fourth underlying assumption is that most narratives to which a writing
back mode can be assigned sustain the spatial metaphor of a culturally and
politically dominated periphery that is subordinated to an authoritative
center. This is because the very concept of writing back was built on spatial
reflections and vocabulary. This concern for this spatial dialectic is implied in
the previously referenced The Empire Writes Back, whose title alludes to
a 1982 article “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance” by Salman Rush-
die. In this article (Rushdie 1982), the writer contends that language and lit-
erature constitute means to resist and fight colonialism. Drawing on
Rushdie’s line of reasoning, Aschroft et al. later theorized the writing back
mode to explain how authors from former colonies (i.e. the periphery)
revised Western literary and cultural traditions to expose the disastrous con-
sequences and traumas caused by colonial centers.
The prominence of this spatial dialectic underlying the writing back model is
precisely what has led critics to attack the critical framework. In their postmod-
ern conceptualization of imperialism, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri argue that the writing back paradigm is obsessed with colonial history and,
as such, reinforces the prevalence of binary oppositions such as colonizer/colon-
ized and center/periphery (Hardt and Negri 2001). There is no doubt that colon-
ization has had a significant impact on formerly colonized people and their
literary histories. However, assessing all literature coming from formerly colon-
ized regions as primarily concerned with contesting colonial historiography and
Western aesthetic is questionable. This is a view shared by literary critic Evan
Maina Mwangi, who argues that many African writers foreground textual and
24
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
literary conversations with each other, thus articulating relations that go beyond
the “‘writing back to the colonial center’ paradigm”(Mwangi 2010, 4).
Postcolonial writers’ increasing “preoccupation with the Self, with one’s
history – literary and non-literary” (Ghazoul 2013, 127) – allegedly points
to the outmoded character of the “writing back to the Empire” paradigm.
Writing back to the West and to the English canon was particularly popular
among what could be labeled the first generation of postcolonial authors,
that is, authors who engaged with the colonial history of a former colony
and that of its metropolis during, or shortly after, the process of decoloniza-
tion because they experienced it firsthand. Postcolonial writers and artists of
later generations seem to have moved away from this pattern. Many of the
reasons behind this shift lie in the rise of globalization. Globalization,
understood as the increasingly faster flow of capital, cultural goods, and
people around the world, has undermined the importance of national sover-
eignty, and possibly the need for postcolonial artists to revise a national
past and history as deeply intertwined with colonization. Moreover, trans-
cultural and transnational issues arising from various forms of global migra-
tion may have pushed artists to scrutinize forms of identification beyond
the scale of the national. Another possible reason for the decline of the writ-
ing back paradigm may be that writers and artists who have not actually
experienced colonialism or the processes of decolonization can only under-
stand this traumatic past indirectly. Contemporary postcolonial artists may
therefore struggle to deal with a colonial past and history which they may
not directly relate to, or whose details they do not entirely possess.
Despite its decline and ideological shortcomings, the writing back para-
digm should not be entirely dismissed, as some have argued (Fasselt 2016,
155; Mongia 2016, 67). Rather, writing back as a mode of contesting and
revising ideological, political, and narrative authorities could be expanded so
as to go beyond what it has meant so far. The very act of writing back is,
indeed, a moving target, whose mode and forms can vary according to
medium-specific issues and particular historical and cultural junctures. After
all, postcolonial theory itself has moved beyond the narratives and processes
underlying decolonization to accommodate new critical practices that are
anchored in our global era and its “neocolonial imbalances” (Wilson, Sandru,
and Welsh 2010, 2); it has indeed “further modulated and refined its engage-
ment with neo-imperial practices” by increasingly considering issues of envir-
onment, gender, race, and migrancy (Wilson, Sandru, and Welsh 2010, 1).
There is thus no reason that these new soundings in postcolonial theory
would not apply to the writing back mode, or its expanded version.

Readers can start a critical analysis through the writing back lens by identifying
the differences and similarities between the relevant narratives, traditions, or
25
CHRISTOPHE DONY
discourses that the writers and artists engage with: In what ways are characters,
space, and time re-evaluated at the level of the fictional world or story space?
How are genre, traditional discourses, or narrative traditions revised, and to
what effect? How much of the protoworld(s) or prototext(s) is appropriated or
adapted?
Readers may also look beyond traditional textual and discursive trans-
formations to examine how stylistic and medium-specific elements such as
gridding and layout strategies, color palette, line style, or even publication
format and seriality may contribute to an expanded writing back agenda. It is
beyond the scope of this chapter to outline analytical procedures for each of
these aspects, especially as each of them can be tackled from different critical
angles. And it is, of course, very unlikely that a writing back mode can be
applied or achieved in regard to all of the previously mentioned aspects. Next
to providing commentaries on narrative and genre revisions, my own analysis
will mainly focus on two of these formal and comics-specific elements,
namely line style and seriality, which I now briefly turn to.
According to comics critic Jared Gardner, line style is “the one feature of
comics that marks them as profoundly different … from both the novel and
film” (Gardner 2012, 56 quoted in Tarbox 2016, 144); it articulates
a particular voice, “not the metaphorical ‘voice’ of narrative theory, but the
human voice of oral storytelling, of song, or performance” (Gardner 2012,
66 quoted in Tarbox 2016, 144). Gardner actually coins the term “voice-
print” to highlight how comics artists visually and aesthetically expand on
storytelling traditions in unique ways by visually and aesthetically “join[ing]
together,” as Tarbox puts it (Tarbox 2016, 144), “voice and writing, orality
and print, performance and text” (Gardner 2012, 66 quoted in Tarbox 2016,
144). As Tarbox suggests (Tarbox 2016, 144–56), the concept of “voiceprint”
can be used to examine how artists may adopt and/or adapt a dominant or
popular line style and color palette for various reasons, including lineage
and symbolic capital or, more interestingly for our concern, writing or
drawing back purposes.
Gardner also pinpoints seriality as another important narratological
aspect of comics in his exploration of the medium’s history of storytelling.
He defines comics’ seriality as “an economy” that “simultaneously epitom-
izes and travesties the logic of consumer capitalism” (Gardner 2012, 26). In
other words, Gardner suggests that seriality is intrinsically and paradoxically
connected to repetition and change since what underlies serial storytelling is
the ongoing development of a particular fictional world (see Saint-Gelais
2011), whose boundaries and features may be reconfigured by artists desir-
ing to distance themselves from the weight of continuity, fidelity, or trad-
ition. Obviously, the nature of serial narratives, which can “exist as entities
that keep developing in adaptive feedback with their own effects” (Kelleter
2017, 1), may be used by artists wishing to push this adaptive feedback to
its limits.
26
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

An expanded writing back approach can be applied to any comic that consist-
ently questions a dominant system of representation, narrative tradition, or
worldview. Comics actually produced in an actual postcolonial context may
offer more relevant samples. But the very idea of postcolonial comics goes
beyond particular national and historical boundaries, especially as transnational
and global aspects have animated worldwide comics production for decades
(see Denson, Meyer, and Stein 2013; Dony 2014). This is a view also shared by
the editors of Postcolonial Comics, who tend to bypass the very phrase and
argue that “ninth art [comics] in global contexts records historical critique, pol-
itical action, or emergent transnational narratives of trauma, gender, protest,
and global exchange” (Mehta and Mukherji 2015, 5). As a result, it may be pos-
sible to stretch the writing back mode to particular comics produced in the US,
Europe, and Japan, especially those that challenge issues of dominant continu-
ity and/or the normative realities that a particular publisher may present as
central in their uni- or multiverse.
Artifact Selected for Sample Analysis

Anton Kannemeyer can be described as a central figure in the world of
postcolonial comics as he has been very influential in the development of
a South African comics culture. In the early 1990s, he co-founded the Bit-
terkomix magazine with Conrad Botes. As its title indicates, the magazine
features comics whose tone and content can be described as bitter, virulent,
and disquieting. This is because both Botes and Kannemeyer have used Bit-
terkomix to notably display and comment on their anger, anxieties, and
fears regarding South Africa’s particular racial politics and multiracial envir-
onment. Publishing more and more diverse artists over the years, Bitterko-
mix became one of the central forces for the development of an indigenous
comics culture in South African. This development was also influenced by
Kannemeyer’s increasing fame through exhibitions in galleries worldwide.
Many of the cartoons and short graphic narratives featured in Kannemeyer’s
Pappa in Afrika and his sequel Pappa in Doubt were either previously pub-
lished in Bitterkomix or featured in previous exhibitions. As such, his
anthologies are quite representative of his eclectic and long-spanning
oeuvre. Moreover, they are also worth examining as they articulate a type of
serial storytelling that further participates in and comments on Kanne-
meyer’s many references to Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin.
Sample Analysis
Kannemeyer, Anton. 2010. Pappa in Afrika. Auckland Park: Jacana.
Kannemeyer, Anton. 2015. Pappa in Doubt. Auckland Park: Jacana.
27
CHRISTOPHE DONY
Anton Kannemeyer has grown up and lived for most of his life in South
Africa, where he was raised in a middle-class environment where white Afri-
kaner culture prevailed. White Afrikaner culture is mainly associated with
rather conservative and Christian values; its dominant political force through-
out the twentieth century is the system that enforced racial segregation and
the apartheid regime. Of course, many contemporary white Afrikaners now
struggle and feel uneasy with the traumatic past and regime that their ances-
tors directly implemented or (in)directly supported, a system which contem-
porary generations of white Afrikaners may or may not have witnessed
firsthand, and in which they may not have directly participated. Anton Kan-
nemeyer is clearly critical of this white Afrikaner culture and its underlying
colonial legacy in postcolonial times. His oeuvre, which contains many auto-
biographical narratives, consistently shows signs of distress, resentment, and
guilt towards this “old” white Afrikaner culture, what it has come to repre-
sent, and – more generally – the ghosts of colonialism beyond South Africa.
One of these signs is undeniably the tears dropping from the face of Tin-
tin’s avatar in the covers of both albums (see Figure 2.1 and 2.2), more specif-
ically in the top banner that mimics the types of logo that used to appear in
the weekly Franco-Belgian comics magazine Le Journal de Tintin and some
editions of The Adventures of Tintin, including newspaper ones. This type of
logo usually depicted a close-up shot of Tintin and Snowy smiling, or a body
shot of Tintin and Captain Haddock in adventurous poses. The presence of
this type of logo thus functioned as a brand with particular genre and publi-
cation markers, indicating to readers that they might expect cheerful and
action-packed serial adventures with rather merry and daring characters in
the publication(s), whose traditional serial installments in weekly or daily
publications ensured reassuring repetition. The figure of Tintin’s avatar
crying in Kannemyer’s albums sharply contrasts with these generic and publi-
cation markers. So does the title of the second anthology, Pappa in Doubt.
The latter indeed suggests that Tintin’s avatar and who he can stand for – at
times a white everyman in postcolonial Africa, an alternative reporting figure
to Tintin, or sometimes possibly the artist himself – is overwhelmed by the
weight of colonial history and its postcolonial legacies. Both the covers of
Pappa in Afrika and Pappa in Doubt thus foreshadow painful and difficult
narrative episodes that are at odds with the general tone and the rather linear
and non-evolving model of seriality characterizing The Adventures of Tintin,
that is a series with characters whose established age, psychology, and back-
ground are not much developed over time so as to create a deep sense of
reader familiarity and a quasi-canonical heritage that is hard to shake off.
This challenging of serial and generic markers becomes especially obvious
upon closer examination of what Kannemeyer’s albums actually contain. Most
album editions of The Adventures of Tintin usually offer extended narratives of
approximately 48 colored A4 pages – the historical album standard in Franco-
Belgian bande dessinée. Though similar to this format in size and shape,
28
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Figure 2.2 The cover of Pappa in Doubt (2015). © Anton Kannemeyer
Kannemeyer’s albums are in fact collections of single-page cartoons and short

graphic narratives. Tintin’s avatar remains a central figure in many of Kanne-
meyer’s comics, but many of them focus on different characters, historical
moments, and settings, including traumatic episodes of colonial history and
reflections on contemporary South African politics and multiracial society.
Thus, Kannemeyer’s albums do not follow a clear chronological organization,
29
CHRISTOPHE DONY
neither do they reflect on or shape one specific socio-cultural reality. Rather,

taken together, his comics offer a multitude of perspectives on a variety of
topics, all of this in various drawing styles that range from clear line aesthetic –
the dominant style – to more realist- or expressionist-like drawing modes.1
This eclecticism in terms of form, subject matter, and aesthetic clearly
subverts the coherence and cohesion underlying the storyworld and flat
serial model of The Adventures of Tintin; they present everything but
reassuring repetition or compulsive pleasure. Even if a sense of redundancy
is present when Kannemeyer reuses the figure of Tintin’s avatar and/or
Hergé’s clear line aesthetic, uncanny feelings transpire from these episodes
rather than a nostalgic or comforting familiarity.
Various elements further destabilize the serial and generic markers
underlying The Adventures of Tintin. First, attentive viewers will have
noticed from the covers of Pappa in Afrika and Pappa in Doubt that Tin-
tin’s avatar has become bald, which suggests aging. This calls into question
how Hergé’s character, just like countless superheroes, was never affected by
the ravages of time. Moreover, the aging of Tintin’s avatar suggests that the
politics of storytelling of The Adventures of Tintin and their underlying
ideologies may have literally “gotten old.” The outmoded character of
Hergé’s politics of storytelling, including its generic aspects, is reinforced by
how Kannemeyer’s comics suggest a “questioning mode” rather than an
“answering one,” with introvert characters rather than assertive persona.
This is notably the case of “Nsala, of the District of Wala” (Figure 2.3) and
“Extinction” (Figure 2.4), both of which challenge the merry-go-happy
adventure tone of The Adventures of Tintin and even Tintin’s detective
skills and ability to solve mysteries.
“Nsala, of the District of Wala” (Figure 2.3) is a double-page spread car-
toon which replicates a historical photograph of a Congolese man, Nsala,
looking at the severed hand and foot of his daughter, a victim of the Anglo-
Belgian India Rubber Company militia in the early twentieth century.
According to the biographer of Alice Seeley Harris, the English missionary
who took the original photograph, Nsala “hadn’t made his rubber quota for
the day so the Belgian-appointed overseers had cut off his daughter’s hand
and foot,” whose “leftovers” they then “presented” to Nsala (Smith 2014,
54). Just like Nsala, who lingers on this shocking atrocity in the frozen clear
line cartoon, the reader cannot pause at this image without being able to
fully comprehend the trauma that it registers, which by definition “brings
us to the limits of our understanding” (Caruth 1995, 4).
Another example of a pausing, self-absorbed, and doubting character is
found in “Extinction” (Figure 2.4). In this image, Tintin’s avatar – who
strikingly resembles the artist, as can be seen in various autobiographical
narratives in both albums – is trying to make sense of his childhood. This
is indicated in the intertextual relation with the reference to Thomas Bern-
hard’s novel Extinction (1986), which the character is absorbed in. Quite
30
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Figure 2.3 “Nsala, of the District of Wala”, Pappa in Doubt (2015), pp. 70–71. ©
Anton Kannemeyer
similarly to the character in this picture, the protagonist of Bernhard’s

Extinction is forced to deal and reconnect with the undesired legacy and
troubling values that his family has championed but that he abhors: fascism
and conservative Christian traditions. Like Bernhard’s protagonist, Tintin’s
avatar struggles to deal with his own troubling past, which is also tied to
trauma and discrimination as is indicated in the figures and toys on the
floor, among them gollywog dolls with severed limbs. The legacies of colo-
nialism in this cartoon also indirectly transpire in the background out of
the window, a beautifully manicured garden, whose tending is still often
mainly done by black people in South Africa, or by other “others”
elsewhere.2 The troubling questioning mode that the cartoon presents, then,
lies in its ironic and paradoxical juxtaposition of conflicting ideas. On the
one hand, the cartoon points to the possible and needed extinction of “old”
white Afrikaner culture and values with its reference to Bernhard’s novel.
On the other, the persistence of the legacies of colonialism, and its residual
elements such as gollywog dolls or manicured gardens, conveys the need
and importance to acknowledge and remember this traumatic past. After
all, as a note hanging in the artist’s studio represented in the “Black” story-
line stipulates: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to
repeat it” (Kannemeyer 2015, 57).
31
CHRISTOPHE DONY
Figure 2.4 “Extinction”, Pappa in Doubt (2015), p. 29. © Anton Kannemeyer
If Kannemeyer’s albums subvert many of the generic codes of The

Adventures of Tintin, there is nonetheless another staple genre practice from
Hergé’s series that Kannemeyer does not entirely discard, namely the figure
of the reporter. In The Adventures of Tintin, the protagonist is a reporter.
But, just like Superman or Spider-Man, his reporting skills are but a pretext
for his adventures. Tintin is rarely shown actually writing or reading. Nor
does he really cover stories; rather the places and people he visits form the
background for stories which are never reported, but happen before the
readers’ eyes as the events of the narration unfold. In contrast, the eclecti-
cism of Kannemeyer’s albums suggests more “authentic” reporting. His nar-
ratives do describe events, and the ways in which these events are presented
express views and opinions, admittedly sometimes very controversial ones.
In fact, despite Kannemeyer’s use of gollywog iconography, many of his nar-
ratives still appeal to a certain sense of postcolonial justice – albeit a difficult
32
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
and complex one that exposes human rights abuses and racial injustice while
simultaneously digging up and reusing colonial history and iconography. In so
doing, Kannemeyer engages in a type of memory work that criticizes Tintin’s
inability to use and mirror “true” and contemporary reporting techniques.
Moreover, it could be said that Kannemeyer uses an avatar of Tintin to challenge,
as Vanessa Russell would put it in her discussion of the “mild-mannered”
reporter in American comics, the “superhero’s vision of omniscience” (Russell
2009, 229). In this sense, Kannemeyer’s use of an aged avatar of Tintin in
a “replacement capacity for the superhero” and the original Tintin brings him
closer to the likes of comics artists using “alternative” reporting figures such as
the ones that Russell discusses, namely Joes Sacco and Art Spiegelman (Russell
2009, 229). Interestingly enough, however, Kannemeyer employs a very different
voiceprint from that of these artists.
According to Gwen Tarbox, Sacco, Spiegelman, and Jacques Tardi have
championed a dominant voiceprint for the representation of geopolitical con-
flicts, human suffering, and traumatic experiences in comics (Tarbox 2016,
145). The characteristics of these artists’ voiceprint include “the use of tightly
drawn, often jagged lines, crowded panels, and extensive shading within
a black, white, and gray palette to present hyper-realized examples of human
suffering under oppressive political regimes” (Tarbox 2016, 145). In contrast,
Hergé’s clear line aesthetic is anything but scratchy, dirty, or frenetic. Rather,
its core principle is that of neatly black contoured shapes, whose visual
“smoothness” is reinforced by the use of flat and pastel-like colors. According
to Hergé’s critics, this particular visual style emphasizes readability insofar as
it allows readers to focus on text and therefore immerse themselves in the
fictional world (see Peeters 2011). By extension, clear line aesthetic has been
associated with a lack of narrative/visual complexity (see Tarbox 2016, 146).
Obviously, Kannemeyer reuses this clear line style and its underlying
ideas of readability and simplicity to represent highly controversial and
traumatic experiences, which are rather “hard” to read. In so doing, he can
be said to draw back to, or rather beyond, the dominant Western voiceprint
practiced by Sacco, Tardi, and Spiegelman. Kanneyer’s use of clear line aes-
thetic forces readers to contemplate and pause on his comics precisely
because of the uncanny effect that they produce in juxtaposing “easy and
readable” visuals with “difficult” and politically charged subject matters,
which range from colonial history and its devastating legacy to interracial
rape, political corruption, and (un)political correctness.
In the cover of Pappa in Doubt (Figure 2.2), Kannemeyer even goes one step
further in ironically twisting this poetics of clear line aesthetic. Black characters
are amalgamated with apes as they appear in trees only and are still racially
stereotyped with clear line aesthetic and golliwog iconography. In contrast, the
animals in the same jungle as the black characters are drawn in a slightly more
realistic aesthetic, as is indicated in the use of some crosshatching and more
graphic details. By highlighting this difference in visual treatment, Kannemeyer
33
CHRISTOPHE DONY
writes and draws back to how colonial explorers and zoologists accounted for
new animal species in very detailed ways in their logbooks or sketchbooks,
whereas they failed to do so with indigenous populations.
Conclusion
The expanded writing back agenda that transpires from Kannemeyer’s Pappa
in Afrika and Pappa in Doubt takes different forms. This chapter has examined
how some of these forms – including genre revision, a recontextualization of
voiceprint, and a challenging of linear seriality – participate in the challenging
of narrative, cultural, and ideological issues yoked to colonial historiography,
its legacy, as well as comics-specific traditions. This multilayered contesting
goes well beyond bilateral textual revisions dealing with the narratives and pro-
cesses of decolonization or the English literary canon, which used to be central
in what could be called the first phase of the writing back paradigm. Kanne-
meyer’s expanded writing back agenda could further be examined in other
comics and cartoons whose poetics and politics of storytelling further compli-
cate and subvert yet other narrative, visual, and cultural traditions than the
ones explored in this chapter.
Notes
1 In Pappa in Doubt, these last two drawing styles are, for instance, respectively
represented in his portraits of filmmaker David Lynch (see Kannemeyer 2015, 35)
and writer Chimanda Ngozi Adichie (see Kannemeyer 2015, 61), and in a parody
of Edward Munch’s painting The Scream, which shows a stereotypical gollywog
character in distress on the Nelson Mandela bridge.
2 A very similar cartoon to Kannemeyer’s “Extinction” was first published as the
cover of a special issue of Le Monde Diplomatique (October 2010). In this cover,
quasi identical to the painting “Extinction”, Kannemeyer had placed a gollywog
figure in the garden. In a personal communication with the artist (Kannemeyer
2018), Kannemeyer claims that he was dissatisfied with the quality of the printing
of this painting and that he therefore created a new one, from which he removed
the gollywog figure because of censorship and controversy with art galleries. More
generally speaking, manual and housekeeping labor done by black people in South
Africa is also the topic of Kannemeyer’s series of cartoons “Splendid Dwelling”
(Kannemeyer 2015, 10: 76–77).
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. 2002. The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 2nd ed. London; New York: Routledge.
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Cathy Caruth, 3–8. Baltimore; London: John Hopkins University Press.
Denson, Shane, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, eds. 2013. Transnational Perspec-
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New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.
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Doležel, Lubomír. 1998. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
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Littérature Internationale 7: 12–13.
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digm: Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s
A Grain of Wheat.” Poetics Today 37 (1): 155–179.
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Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio,
127–140. New York, NY: Routledge.
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Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2015. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Ani-
mals, Environment. 2nd ed. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge.
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———. 2015. Pappa in Doubt. Auckland Park: Jacana.
———. 2018. “Pappa in Afrika & Doubt.” Message to Christophe Dony. 16 October 2018.
E-mail.
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Frank Kelleter, 1–6. Ohio State University Press.
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tities. London; New York: Routledge.
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Gateways and Walls: Under Construction, edited by Daria Tunca and Janet Wilson,
59–67. Leiden; Boston: BRILL.
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tures: New Webs of Meaning.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (1): 1–5. https://
doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2017.1419840.
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Rushdie, Salman. 1982. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” The Times,
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Superman.” In The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, edited by Angela Ndalianis,
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3
CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Applying Critical Race Theory to Black Panther:
World of Wakanda
Phillip Lamarr Cunningham
Introduction
Prior to an apparent backlash from comic book retailers, Marvel had been
engaged in a fairly overt campaign of diversity and inclusion for several
years.1 Hallmarks of this campaign included not only publishing more titles
featuring protagonists of color but also hiring writers of color to script these
titles. Among those hires were prominent African American writers Ta-Nehisi
Coates and Roxane Gay. Coates had risen in prominence as a correspondent
for The Atlantic and began scripting a new volume of the previously defunct
Black Panther in April 2016 on the heels of Between the World and Me (2015),
his critically acclaimed treatise on being black in America. Shortly thereafter,
Gay—English professor, essayist, and novelist—became the first black woman
to write for Marvel when she assumed writing duties on Black Panther: World
of Wakanda, the prequel series to Coates’ Black Panther.2
Gay’s scripting of Black Panther: World of Wakanda drew much war-
ranted attention because of her status as the first black woman to do so.
However, it is also significant because Gay is an openly queer feminist who
has espoused the importance of intersectionality. When asked about making
feminism more inclusive, for instance, she stated,
Feminism has to [realize] it’s really about intersectionality … That

just means that we inhabit more than one identity. I’m not just
a woman. I’m Haitian American. I’m Catholic. I’m from Nebraska.
I have a body. I have tattoos. I mean not all of these identity mark-
ers matter as much as others.
(Schachner 2015)
Gay’s use of the term intersectionality evidences her awareness of critical race
theory (CRT), as it essentially was coined by civil rights advocate Kimberle
37
Williams Crenshaw, one of CRT’s preeminent scholars. Moreover, her commit-

ment to exploring the intricacies of intersectionality is evident in works such as
Bad Feminist, her collection of essays, and in Black Panther: World of Wakanda,
a story featuring two queer black women protagonists.
As such, applying critical race theory to a textual analysis of Black Pan-
ther: World of Wakanda seems apropos. Reading Black Panther: World of
Wakanda as counter-story reveals how, through revision, authors of color
can deliver transcendent narratives that not only subvert majoritarian
norms but also reveal new possibilities in the otherwise predominantly
white, hypermasculine, heteronormative superhero genre.

Historically, comics—particularly superhero comics—have either avoided
depicting characters of color or, more perniciously, relied heavily on stereo-
types. As evidence of the former, Black Panther—the first black superhero—
would not make his debut until 1966, over thirty years after the comic book
format was introduced; furthermore, nearly another decade would pass
before he or any other superhero of color received an eponymous title.
Regarding the latter point, though he notes that recent superhero comics
have allowed for nuanced depictions of non-white characters, Marc Singer
nonetheless contends that they “have proven fertile ground for stereotyped
depictions of race” (Singer 2002, 17).
Moreover, superhero comics also tend to reflect a hypermasculine, het-
eronormative ethos. As scholars such as Norma Pecora have suggested,
superheroes tend to be powerful white men while women tend to be young
and attractive or old and frail (Pecora 1992, 61). Superhero comics also
tend to tamp any expressions of gender nonconformity or alternative sexu-
alities (Shyminsky 2011, 289). As a result, queer characters are rarities, with
queer characters of color perhaps being even rarer.
Critical race theory, which emerged from the interactions between and
findings of activists, attorneys, and legal scholars, proffers that race and
racism are salient in American society, that counter-storytelling is a primary
means by which writers of color can combat racism, and that racial
advances are tolerated only to the degree to which they serve white self-
interest (Delgado and Stefancic 2012, 17). In literature, scholars and writers
have utilized CRT both to highlight how narratives open up space for
change and reform and to create those narratives themselves. For instance,
Toni Morrison uses CRT to examine how literary constructions of blackness
have helped to shape concepts of whiteness in Playing in the Dark: White-
ness in the Literary Imagination (1992) while also engaging with CRT in her
novel Paradise (1997). Increasingly, CRT is concerned with intersectionality,
or the ways in which other social categories—gender and sexuality, for
instance—overlap and intersect with race.
38
Along with an interest in examining intersectionality in the text, scholars

are interested in the ways in which narratives—both fictional and nonfic-
tional—function as counter-stories. Theorists assert that stories are major-
itarian, as they tend to favor white, heterosexual men of means (Delgado
and Stefancic 2012, 17). Therefore, counter-storytelling involves subverting
these majoritarian norms, oftentimes through reconstruction or reimagina-
tion in literary texts. Critical race theorist Richard Delgado notes that coun-
ter-stories play a role in challenging preconceptions, showing new
possibilities, stirring the imagination, and deconstructing or destroying
beliefs (Delgado 1989, 2414–2415).

Most texts are suitable for reading through a critical race theory lens. As
mentioned above, since counter-storytelling is an aspect of CRT, those texts
written by people of color are well suited. However, one should not assume
that the absence of overt racial themes or a lack of characters of color
means that CRT cannot be applied. Critical race theory is an oppositional
theory, which means that it primarily is interested in highlighting and cri-
tiquing the ways in which whiteness is assumed as normal or default.
Absence often can tell us a great deal about authorial intent, genre and
industrial practices, and the like. For example, as literary scholar Gregory
Rutledge suggests, systemic racism—coupled with the notion that it is self-
indulgent—has limited the amount of black science fiction and fantasy stor-
ies in publication (Rutledge 2001, 236). Such also has been the case with
comics until recent years.
Procedure for Analysis

As one reads a text or series, he or she should keep the following questions
in mind. First, with some notable exceptions, most comic books ostensibly
are not about race or racial issues. However, even the absence of characters
of color or racial themes speaks volumes. One might be inclined to ask,
why are there no characters of color present in the narrative? Are they
being symbolically annihilated? The term symbolic annihilation, originally
coined by theorist George Gerbner, means “the way cultural production and
media representations ignore, exclude, marginalize, or trivialize a particular
group” (Klein and Shiffman 2009, 56). Is the genre of the text or series typ-
ically averse to including characters of color (such as fantasy or science fic-
tion, as previously mentioned)?
Second, in what way does the narrative reinforce or challenge prevail-
ing notions about race? For instance, do characters conform to estab-
lished archetypes or stereotypes (e.g. black characters are strong or
physically imposing, Asian characters are highly intelligent, etc.)? If not,
39
how do these characters undermine or challenge these preconceived

notions?
Third, how do other aspects of the characters’ identities impact their por-
trayal and actions? For example, if a character is a person of color who also
is queer and/or has a disability, how do these other characteristics shape his
or her role in the narrative?
Fourth, if the text is mainstream and/or predominantly white, what func-
tion do the characters of color perform in the narrative? Do they valorize
or otherwise shape the actions, behaviors, or outcomes of the white
protagonist(s)? If so, in what ways?
Finally, if the text is written by a writer of color or a writer known to
address race or racial issues, is he or she intentionally doing so in the text?
Does the writer have a history of doing so in his or her other works? If so,
are there any consistent threads that run through his or her work, and do
any of those threads appear in the text being analyzed?

This analysis will focus on the first five (of six total) issues of Black Panther:
World of Wakanda. These five issues represent a complete story arc and all
are written by Roxane Gay. Gay was purposeful in crafting a narrative
about two black queer women, as she notes in a Huffington Post interview:
“I’m focusing on black women and the two lead characters are in
a relationship … That’s never been done before. So that’s definitely going to
be a hallmark, of writing black queer women into the Marvel canon”
(Brooks 2016).
In works prior to and following Black Panther: World of Wakanda,
Roxane Gay has shown a penchant for counter-storytelling. For instance, in
her review of Gay’s short story collection Difficult Women, Megan Mayhew
Bergman highlights how frequently Gay subverts traditional tropes through
narratives featuring women who are sexually liberated or who have fighting
prowess and men who lack these qualities (Mayhew Bergman 2017). Along
with an interest in examining intersectionality in the text, this chapter is
concerned with the ways in which Black Panther: World of Wakanda func-
tions as a counter-story. As a result, this chapter also aims to highlight how
Gay herself should be viewed as a critical race theorist.
Sample Analysis
Gay, Roxane. Black Panther: World of Wakanda #1–5. New York: Marvel,
2017.
To understand completely how Roxane Gay constructs Black Panther: World of
Wakanda as counter-story by engaging in reconstruction and reimagination,
40
one must understand some aspects of the Black Panther mythos. Black Panther
made his debut in Fantastic Four #52 (1966), in which the eponymous super-
hero is brought to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda so that T’Challa
—the nation’s king and totemic guardian Black Panther—can test his might in
preparation for his battle against his primary antagonist, Klaw. Wakanda is
a technologically advanced yet isolated kingdom that T’Challa rules justly and
wisely throughout much of his history. The Wakandan desire to protect its
vibranium—a metal upon which Wakanda’s technology is based—often clashes
with Black Panther’s globetrotting adventures with The Avengers, however.
Nonetheless, despite the occasional tension between T’Challa and his citizenry,
he generally is depicted as noble.
Much of the Black Panther mythos was established by his co-creator Jack
Kirby and writer Don McGregor, who helmed Jungle Action featuring Black
Panther (1973–1976) and the first volume of Black Panther (1977–1979).
However, writer Christopher Priest (1998–2003) and filmmaker Reginald
Hudlin (2005–2010)—both of whom are African American—are primarily
responsible for further developing the character and Wakanda’s history.
Priest’s run included the creation of the Dora Milaje, T’Challa’s bodyguards
and potential consorts. The first Dora Milaje that readers encounter are
Nakia and Okoye, both of whom are teenagers and based on popular black
supermodels Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell (Joyner 2018). Hudlin
altered the depiction of the Dora Milaje, making them more warriorlike and
completely bald, yet they still remain subservient to and potential brides for
T’Challa.
The current iteration of Black Panther interrogates T’Challa’s rule of
Wakanda. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates,
The question about race is ultimately just a question about power …

It’s how human beings organize themselves around power, how they
exploit, how they use it … The dude’s in this mythical country
Wakanda where everybody’s black. So obviously you don’t have the
same context of race. But certainly the issues of power, of organizing
power, are still there.
(Peters 2018)
T’Challa’s reign has come under fire after Wakanda had been invaded and
nearly destroyed by the intergalatic tyrant Thanos, whose attention was
drawn to Wakanda partly due to Black Panther’s interactions with foreign
supergroups. The opening arc of Coates’ Black Panther involves T’Challa
wrestling with civil unrest fueled by the powerful psychic Zenzi and her
partner, rebel leader and shaman Tetu. In Black Panther #1, within the
midst of this unrest, former Dora Milaje captain Aneka—who had been
imprisoned for assassinating a chieftain who had been sexually assaulting
young women in his village—is rescued by her lover and former Dora
41
Milaje Ayo. Aneka and Ayo abscond with stolen prototype Midnight Angel
armor and vow to liberate women throughout Wakanda.
Aneka and Ayo play a significant role in Black Panther; however, as one
might expect, the narrative revolves around the titular character (though
Coates does partly decenter him). Roxane Gay’s portion of Black Panther:
World of Wakanda, however, primarily focuses on Aneka and Ayo’s rela-
tionship prior to the events of Black Panther #1.3 Indeed, Black Panther:
World of Wakanda takes Coates’ project of decentering Black Panther even
further by limiting his—and men’s in general—appearance, which serves
not only to heighten his absence from Wakanda in the grander narrative
but also to develop the protagonists and other women characters.
To be certain, women have not been marginalized throughout the publi-
cation history of Black Panther; indeed, from characters like Shuri—T’Chal-
la’s sister who also has served as Black Panther—to Storm—the powerful
X-Men leader who controls the weather and T’Challa’s ex-wife, women cer-
tainly have received their due. However, the Dora Milaje typically have been
depicted as loyal and subservient with two exceptions. Nakia, one of the
first Dora Milaje, becomes obsessed with T’Challa after he kisses her while
under the influence of the demon Mephisto’s sorcery; later, Queen Divine
Justice—a Wakandan girl raised in America—often proved to be quite rebel-
lious against authority (although she remained loyal to Black Panther).
Gay establishes the Dora Milaje’s subservience in the first issue of Black
Panther: World of Wakanda. The issue begins with the latest Dora Milaje
recruits appearing before head trainer Mistress Zola and Aneka during an
induction ceremony. Among those recruits is Ayo, who immediately raises
Aneka’s ire by proving to be somewhat of a stubborn braggart. Ayo—who
boasts that she was raised in the same manner as her brothers—is an imme-
diate foil to Aneka, who is measured and dutiful. To humble Ayo, Aneka
defeats her in a sparring session but, afterwards, laments that Ayo and the
rest of the recruits “must be broken before they can be built into what
Wakanda needs them to be.” The use of the term broken here is significant,
for it suggests that becoming Dora Milaje requires being forced into service
and molded into potential wives for T’Challa. It reminds readers that,
though they may be fierce warriors who serve an importance purpose, Dora
Milaje lack agency and, much to the chagrin of some of them, do not wish
to serve. Indeed, Dora Milaje are conscripted from the various Wakandan
tribes in order to maintain peace. Prior to Black Panther: World of
Wakanda, there had been relatively little consideration of what this obliga-
tion has meant for the women chosen to serve. Nonetheless, despite their
contentious interactions, Aneka and Ayo develop amorous feelings towards
each other. However, Aneka’s commitment to her captaincy, and her status
as a potential consort, force her to repress and hide her feelings towards her
trainee. Ayo, however, has no qualms about pursuing the relationship.
42
Ayo embodies Gay’s penchant for telling stories of “difficult women,”

about which she has stated,
I think women are oftentimes termed “difficult” when we want too

much, when we ask for too much, when we think too highly of
ourselves, or have any kind of standards … I wanted to play with
this idea that women are difficult, when in reality it’s generally the
people around them who are the difficult ones.
(Fesenthal 2017)
Ayo’s unwillingness to capitulate fully to the demands of her position and

to hide her admiration for Aneka certainly qualify as “difficult.” In
the second issue, for example, Aneka and Ayo bicker over Ayo’s harsh
interrogation of a protester who feigned an assassination attempt on Shuri,
who serves as queen and Black Panther in T’Challa’s absence, to draw atten-
tion to how T’Challa’s involvement with The Avengers leaves Wakanda vul-
nerable. Aneka retains her allegiance to patriarchal rule by reminding Ayo,
“We are here to serve. We are women T’Challa could marry. We do not
question his decision.” Ayo harshly replies, “I am many things, but I am
not foolish. And I will serve, Captain, but I will never marry the king. What
antiquated nonsense. And … frankly, I am surprised you would consider
such a thing.” Afterwards, the two finally consummate their relationship.
Though Aneka and Ayo are the main protagonists, they are not the only
examples of powerful black women or black women exercising agency in
Black Panther: World of Wakanda. Readers see other black women authority
figures throughout the series, including Shuri and Ramonda, the Queen
Mother of Wakanda and widow of T’Challa’s father T’Chaka. However, the
two other women of importance are the aforementioned Mistress Zola and
Folami, another Dora Milaje recruit who finds that her role is too confining.
To the degree that Aneka and Ayo are the overt realization of some of
the Dora Milaje’s desire for agency, Mistress Zola is the suggestion that this
desire always had existed. She immediately recognizes that Aneka and Ayo
are in love. Whenever Aneka rebuffs the notion, Mistress Zola calmly
advises her to confront her feelings. Rather than prevent Aneka and Ayo’s
coupling, Mistress Zola seems to encourage it by pairing them together on
assignments. Her wisdom either comes from years of observation of and
allowing other Dora Milaje to couple or comes from her own experience.
After all, at least three generations have passed since a reigning Black Pan-
ther has taken a Dora Milaje for his bride, leaving them to either remain
chaste or engage in clandestine affairs.
Folami, on the other hand, is another brash Dora Milaje recruit who
finds it difficult to adjust to her new life. Unlike Ayo, Folami is fiercely
loyal to the throne, but her lack of strength and fighting prowess cause her
to lag behind in her training. Mistress Zola discovers that Folami is quite
43
perceptive and secretive, so she assigns her to remain close. However, when
the Dora Milaje decide to sever ties with T’Challa after Thanos upends
Wakanda and Black Panther strikes a secret pact with Namor, Folami
immediately informs Shuri and Romanda of the Dora Milaje’s dissent.
Folami is disappointed when Shuri and Romanda announce that they still
trust the Dora Milaje and chide Folami for informing them. As she leaves
the court, she is approached by a man with a note from someone named
Aoko, who later injects Folami with nanites that increase her strength and
agility. Folami finally shows Mistress Zola her newfound abilities and tells
her that she—like her mysterious benefactor Aoko—wishes to avenge
Wakanda. Thus, like Aneka and Ayo, Folami no longer is confined by her
own limitations.
To the degree that T’Challa is Aneka and Ayo’s foil in absentia,
Folami proves to be the ever-present threat in Black Panther: World of
Wakanda. Their individual pursuits of agency come into conflict when
Lesedi, a woman from Folami’s village of Kagara, begs the Dora Milaje to
protect the women villagers from Chieftain Diya, who has been forcing
himself upon them with impunity as the men of the village will not inter-
vene for fear of ostracization. Chieftain Diya also is Folami’s father, so
she rushes to warn her father of the Dora Milaje’s plans to intervene.
Meanwhile, Aneka—who laments letting her feelings for Ayo distract her
after Queen Shuri’s apparent death—rushes off to Kagara to investigate.
There, she witnesses Chieftain Diya bringing in another young woman
and discovers the other women he has locked in cages. When he refuses
to surrender, Aneka kills him and frees his captives. She subsequently is
imprisoned and charged with murder, as an enraged Folami threatens to
kill Ayo in retaliation.
Though they are in opposition to each other, Aneka, Ayo, and Folami
function as vessels for Roxane Gay to explore black women’s anger. As Gay
notes in a New York Times op-ed,
When women are angry, we are wanting too much or complaining or

wasting time or focusing on the wrong things or we are petty or shrill
or strident or unbalanced or crazy or overly emotional. Race compli-
cates anger. Black women are often characterized as angry simply for
existing, as if anger is woven into our breath and our skin.
(Gay 2016)
However, in the same article, Gay argues that anger can be useful, particu-
larly the kind that can “stir revolutions,” and distinguishes it from rage
(Gay 2016). In doing so, Gay draws from writer, activist, and critical race
theory stalwart Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger,” Lorde’s 1981 keynote
presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference. In
the presentation, Lorde suggests that women’s anger—especially in the face
44
of racism—is “the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial

distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming,
betrayal, and coopting” (Lorde 1997, 278). Moreover, Lorde distinguishes
between masculine conception of anger—brute force and destruction—and
the feminine realization of anger, which she views as transformative and
indicative of growth (Lorde 1997, 274).
Aneka—eventually—and Ayo epitomize the form of righteous anger to
which Gay and Lorde refer whereas Folami is consumed by the rage against
which Gay cautions. As word arises that more Wakandan womens’ lives are
in peril, the three former Dora Milaje find themselves at cross purposes.
Folami plots to kill Ayo as an imprisoned Aneka pleads with the guards to
save Ayo. Meanwhile, Ayo consults Mistress Zola to find a way to rescue
Aneka. Mistress Zola gives Ayo a key to an armory containing prototype
Midnight Angel armor, which she steals and utilizes to rescue Aneka. Later,
Mistress Zola searches for Folami to prevent her from seeking out further
vengeance and obtaining more of the nanites that appear to have corrupted
her. As Mistress Zola implores Folami to overcome her lust for vengeance,
Folami slays her as she vows that she will not be stopped. As such, Black
Panther: World of Wakanda juxtaposes justifiable anger used for the service
of others and unbridled rage that proves self-serving.
Roxane Gay’s Black Panther: World of Wakanda arc concludes on an
uplifting note. The newly freed and empowered—both by armor and
through love—Aneka and Ayo retreat to a secret cave where they vow to
live freely and to liberate oppressed women throughout Wakanda. Readers
of Black Panther learn that the duo eventually lead a group of women to
take over territory in the Jabari Lands, where they establish law and order
in the midst of open rebellion against T’Challa.
As literary scholar andré carrington indicates, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recon-
ception of the Dora Milaje in Black Panther emerged from his discomfort
with Christopher Priest’s original portrayal (carrington 2018, 227). However,
carrington is not wholly dismissive of Priest’s run, as he notes that the
aforementioned Nakia storyline is Priest’s attempt to reflect upon power
differentials by highlighting the taboo nature of T’Challa and Nakia’s kiss-
ing. But he argues that both Priest and Coates “position black women’s
empowerment as the staging ground for a conflict between value systems”
(carrington 2018, 233).
However, Roxane Gay’s positioning as a queer women of color and her
utilization of CRT in Black Panther: World of Wakanda allow her to deliver
a powerful counter-story, one that further reconstructs the Dora Milaje and
the Black Panther mythos. Black Panther: World of Wakanda reflects Gay’s
inclination to tell stories of “difficult women” and to examine how intersect-
ing identities shape one’s experiences. Thus, like Toni Morrison and Audre
Lorde before her, Roxane Gay should be conceived as not only a powerful
literary figure but also an effective critical race theorist in her own right.
45
Notes
1 In an interview with ICv2 following the March 2017 Marvel Retailer Summit,
Marvel Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing David Gabriel stated, “What
we heard [from retailers] was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They
didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe
that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales”
(Griepp 2017). These comments attempted to rationalize Marvel’s cancellation of
a slew of its titles, many of which featured people of color and women.
2 Poet Yona Harvey—who wrote a back-up story in Black Panther: World of
Wakanda—became the second black woman ever to write for Marvel. The series
also featured the art of black women artists Afua Richardson and Alitha
E. Martinez, both of whom had drawn for Marvel previously.
3 Black Panther: World of Wakanda was intended to be a companion series to Black
Panther; however, it was canceled after six issues. The final issue was written by
Rembert Browne.
Brooks, Katherine. 2016. “Real-Life Superhero Roxane Gay Is Writing Queer Black
Women Into Comics.” Huffington Post (blog). October 3, 2016 (2:19 p.m.). www.huf
fingtonpost.com/entry/roxane-gay-world-of-wakanda_us_57f28b98e4b082aad9bc66ac.
carrington, André. 2018. “Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’s Black
Panther, 1998–2016.” American Literature 90 (2): 221–250. https://read.dukeupress.
edu/american-literature/article/90/2/221/134537/Desiring-Blackness-A-Queer-
Orientation-to-Marvel-s.
Delgado, Richard. 1989. “Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for
Narrative.” Michigan Law Review 87 (8): 2411–2441. JSTOR.
Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. 2012. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Second
edition. New York: New York University Press.
Fesenthal, Julia. 2017. “Roxane Gay on Writing Difficult Women and Her Outlook on
2017.” Vogue. January 3, 2017. www.vogue.com/article/difficult-women-roxane-gay-
interview.
Gay, Roxane. 2016. “Who Gets to Be Angry?” New York Times. June 10, 2016. www.
nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opinion/sunday/who-gets-to-be-angry.html.
———. 2017. Black Panther: World of Wakanda #1–5. New York: Marvel.
Griepp, Milton. 2017. “Marvel’s David Gabriel on the 2016 Market Shift.” ICV2.
March 31, 2017. https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/37152/marvels-david-gabriel-
2016-market-shift.
Joyner, Jazmine. 2018. “Who Are the Dora Milaje? What You Need To Know About
the Badass Women of ‘Black Panther’.” Slashfilm. February 15, 2018. www.slashfilm.
com/who-are-the-dora-milaje/.
Klein, Hugh and Kenneth S. Shiffman. 2009. “Underrepresentation and Symbolic Anni-
hilation of Socially Disenfranchised Groups (‘Out Groups’) in Animated Cartoons.”
Howard Journal of Communication 20: 55–72.
Lorde, Audre. 1997. “The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 25 (1/2): 278–285.
JSTOR.
Mayhew Bergman, Megan. 2017. “Roxane Gay, Rescuing Women from the Margins.”
The Washington Post (Washington, DC), January 10, 2017.
46
Pecora, Norma. 1992. “Superman/Superboys/Supermen: The Comic Book Hero as

Socializing Agent.” In Men, Masculinity, and the Media, edited by Steve Craig, 61–77.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Peters, Micah. 2018. “The Evolution of Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’.” The Ringer. Febru-
ary 14, 2018. www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2018/2/14/17012374/marvel-black-
panther-comics-history.
Rutledge, Gregory. 2001. “Futurist Fiction & Fantasy: The Racial Establishment.”
Callaloo 24 (1): 236–252.
Schachner, Anna. 2015. “Roxane Gay and Erica Jong Discuss Feminism and It Instantly
Gets Awkward.” The Guardian (London, UK), September 7, 2015. www.theguardian.
com/books/2015/sep/07/roxane-gay-erica-jong-feminism-racism-culture-decatur-
book-festival.
Shyminsky, Neil. 2011. “‘Gay’ Sidekicks: Queer Anxiety and the Narrative Straightening
of the Superhero.” Men and Masculinities 14 (3): 288–308. http://journals.sagepub.
com.libraryproxy.quinnipiac.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/1097184X10368787.
Singer, Marc. 2002. “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of
Race.” African American Review 36 (2): 107–119. JSTOR.
Solórzano, Daniel G. and Tara J. Yosso. 2002. “Critical Race Methodology: Counter-
Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research.” Qualitative
Inquiry 8 (1): 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780040200800103.
47
4
QUEER THEORY
Queer Comics Queering Continuity: The
Unstoppable Wasp and the Fight for a Queer Future
Valentino L. Zullo
Introduction
With the publication of Gay Comix #1 in 1980, Howard Cruse wrote in the
foreword:
[i]n drawing this book, we gay cartoonists would like to affirm that
we are here, and that we live lives as strewn with India-Inked prat-
falls, flawed heroics, quizzical word balloons and surreptitious truths
as the rest of the human race and even a few talking animals.
(Cruse, 1980, foreword)
Cruse’s declaration captures a defining characteristic of the gay and lesbian

liberation movement and similar threads that would inform early queer
theory: the need to assert one’s presence through universalization and same-
ness to the rest of humanity. A comix anthology by gay and lesbian car-
toonists queered what could be portrayed in the medium. However, Cruse’s
description of the sameness of gay experience with the rest of humankind
(and even a few talking animals) would be challenged today, along with
many early theorists of gay and lesbian identity and the gay liberation
movement. Such groups often had no place for queerness beyond gay, often
male, white, and able-bodied persons as their representatives.
I open with Cruse’s announcement, a courageous clarion call for gay and
lesbian cartoonists in 1980 because it captures a shift in understanding
queerness. Cruse’s anthology series and declaration forever changed comics,
but asserting gay and lesbian identities in comics is somewhat of a less
queer event today as such identities have become established categories
unto themselves. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and its success on Broadway,
or Sina Grace’s Iceman are examples of this shift. As Hillary Chute remarks,
referring to the critique of Batman and Robin and Wonder Woman as gay
48
QUEER THEORY
by Fredric Wertham, “[c]omics used to be read paranoically as gay code; in

contemporary comics queer identity is openly announced” (2017, 350). As
the position of queerness in comics and the larger culture has shifted, so
has our ability to both learn from it and critique it. Thus, once established
as experiences unto themselves, the queer categories that were once hidden
from view, repressed, and denigrated continue to be explored and expanded
to consider other forms of queerness and lived experience without a need of
justification or the narrative of sameness. If queerness is that which is not
seen or rather obfuscated through structures of power—as the personal lives
of these cartoonists had been—then what is queer shifts. Queer theory, ever
transforming by definition, finds energy in this fluidity and explores estab-
lished categories and norms to reveal the faultiness of binary thinking and
the violence engendered by accepting norms without question, thus foster-
ing new possibilities. Cartoonists like Cruse, including Trina Robbins, Mary
Wings, Alison Bechdel, and others queered comics so that future creators
could continue to challenge the form and the stories that might be told.

Queer theory by definition is difficult to capture, as the very concept resists
classification, but for the purposes of this introduction, it is best to under-
stand queer theory as the theoretical discourse that upends our assumptions
that serve to undergird oppressive structures of power. Namely, those
assumptions that reinforce heteronormativity and harmful gender norms.
As Donald Hall articulates, “if there is one thing for which ‘queer theory’
generally has little respect, it is hidden agendas with their unspoken, uninte-
grated norms and assumptions” (2002, 1). For example, J. Jack Halberstam
captures this use of queer theory in The Queer Art of Failure. Halberstam
asks, “what kind of reward can failure offer us?” Because in a patriarchal
society, “feminine success is always measured by male standards” (3–4).
Thus, failing may only mean to not achieve based on male standards and
traditions that have typically excluded women. It may appear at first like an
odd question to someone not familiar with queer theory, why we are ques-
tioning ideas such as success, but it is not success that is being interrogated
here but its definition and thus what it excludes. Queer theory queries that
which is established—traditions and belief systems that are taken for
granted and cause harm to others.
Queer theory’s interest in questioning categories and tradition is reflected
in its history of not having one particular origin story, but rather many.
The theoretical assumptions that define “queer theory” emerged from many
different forms of thought and activism. The origin story of queer theory in
the academy includes the increased investment in the study of lesbian and
gay identity and the gay and lesbian liberation movement, as well as the
feminist movements and the many splinter feminist groups that emerged in
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VALENTINO L. ZULLO
the second half of the twentieth-century. As Heather Love argues, though,

the main difference between the earlier discourses on lesbian and gay iden-
tity and queer theory today is that “[e]arly gay and lesbian criticism tended
to ignore the difficulties of the past in order to construct a positive history;
queer criticism by contrast has focused on negative aspects of the past in
order to use them” (2009, 18). It is difficult to identify all the threads that
led to queer theory, the rise of critical theory in the academy being one of
them, though it seems to have been coined as a term by Teresa de Lauretis,
when she held a conference on the subject in 1990 (Halperin, 2003, 339).
With its origins in the study of sexuality and feminism, queer theory is
often used to explore identity categories, including those that were previ-
ously imagined as stable such as heterosexuality. For example, why did we
have to see homosexuality and heterosexuality as a binary for so long? They
are unique experiences not reliant upon one another. It is not that queer
theory wants to be rid of heterosexuality, but rather asks, is this a sufficient
category to describe people? Once we have accepted that there is no need
for the binary of these two categories, we also begin to recognize other
identities that are excluded, pansexuality or asexuality being two of those.
This simple explanation captures what happens when the binary is broken
down. The purpose is not always to deconstruct, though it can be useful if
the aim is to open up, make more inclusive, or democratize. Queer theory
has further been used to explore subjects including the working class, child-
hood, structures of time, disability and many more ideas and debates far
too expansive for this introduction.
Early theorists whose work would define queer thought—though they
may not have identified as queer theorists—include Michel Foucault and
Judith Butler. Foucault’s contributions in The History of Sexuality (1978)
identified the construction of the homosexual (and thus the heterosexual) as
an identity category in the nineteenth century. Foucault argued that in that
period, contemporary identity politics were born as we became individuals
whose actions defined the categories we would use to label ourselves. Thus,
a homosexual was someone who had sex with members of the same sex.
Butler, building on the work of Foucault and surveying the ideas of the
many feminist groups of the 1970s and 80s in Gender Trouble (1990),
explored how our genders are not stable, but rather performances contin-
gent upon social and historical moments.
Many early theorists were critiqued for not acknowledging the lived
experience of other intersecting categories such as race, religion, class,
ability, and other factors that affect gender and sexuality. This critique is
captured in the debates between Lee Edelman and Jose Muñoz. In his
work on the “future,” Edelman advocates linking queer theory to Freud’s
conception of the “death drive,” embracing negativity, in short, to suggest
that the future is constructed in heteronormative terms and we should
reject the idea of the future (2004). Edelman believes that the idea of the
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QUEER THEORY
future is tied up with reproduction and fantasy of a world that will never
come to pass. We are in a sense held down by a belief that we are fight-
ing for the future, though Edelman would suggest it does not exist. In
response, he believes we might embrace negativity in an effort to chal-
lenge the establishment, focusing on the present and recognizing the
death and pain that surrounds us. However, Muñoz declares that this
rejection of hope linked to the future is only applicable to people who
have power in queer theory, meaning white gay men. Furthermore,
Muñoz brings the “future” back into the conversation of lived experiences
as he states,
arguing that the fact that this version of futurity is currently winning
is all the more reason to call on a utopian political imagination that
will enable us to glimpse another time and place: a “not-yet” where
queer youths of color actually get to grow up.
(2009, 95–96)
A common critique of queer theory is that those theorists that elevate

antinormativity are often privileged enough to be speaking of such an idea.
While there are strains of queer theory that privilege antinormativity as
a destabilizing force, this is only one way to use queer theory; there is also
a way to look at empowering disenfranchised subjects by taking apart the
structures of power, or creating new avenues. It is the latter side of queer
theory I will focus on in my chapter, which at times may appear feminist,
even psychoanalytic. If it does, this is for the following two reasons. First,
queer theory is indebted to these theoretical models and thus often looks
like them. Second, I want to stress that this is my version of queer theory,
but it is only one version and furthermore inflected by my experience as
a social worker. Thus, my queer theory takes a relational, practical
approach, sometimes even utopian like Muñoz rather than antisocial like
Edelman. Queer theory is multivalent and always inflected by our own
standpoints and experiences.
Appropriate Artifacts/Subjects/Phenomena for Analysis

Nearly all aspects of comics form and culture can be explored using queer
theory. This includes the comics medium proper and analyses of the con-
tent, fan culture, readership practices, convention culture, communities
formed through comics both online and in person, and more. Utilizing Eve
Sedgwick’s (1990) thought about “queerness as both a universalizing and
a minoritizing discourse,” Dariek Scott and Ramzi Fawaz declare “anyone
and everyone can be queer, but actual queers are a minority group in the
larger culture; similarly, comics end up in the hands of nearly everybody,
but comic book readers are a niche (read: queer, nerd, outcast, weirdo)
51
VALENTINO L. ZULLO
group” (2018, 198). The comics form as a hybrid already establishes itself as
queer, lending itself to this study. Furthermore, queer theory can be used to
question and disassemble the established dynamics of comics culture, much
of which has excluded women, people of color, queers, and other minority
groups.

Queer theory can be useful in the study of comics to explore the form and
culture related to the medium. For the purposes of the study of comics,
a reader may consider the ways that a text “queers” (that is, upends the
established norms in a way that challenges underlying hierarchies and
assumptions) established narratives in comics including the representation
of bodies, the types of stories told or how a character might challenge the
very form. Paul Petrovic (2011), for example, writes an essay about Kate
Kane, Batwoman, queering the panel borders of Detective Comics when she
is introduced through the art of J.H. Williams III. An analysis should focus
on the ways that established norms including identity categories, the form
of comics, or other assumptions related to the larger field of comics such as
fan engagement are queered. Queer theory should be utilized not to re-
categorize comics but to offer new opportunities to rethink comics, and the
assumptions that corporations, creators, and consumers may participate in
or reinforce unconsciously. The procedure that the reader is enacting is not
merely in exposing the problem but rather exploring an idea that might
offer new understanding of comics and more significantly, possibility for
the future of comics. Reading with queer theory does not mean imposing
a queer reading onto the text, but asking what is queer about the text or
what it is queering.

In the sample analysis, I will explore Justin Whitley and Elsa Charretier’s
The Unstoppable Wasp, which offers a queer feminist critique of
a convention of mainstream comics: continuity. As with literature, there is
a canon of stories and continuity is the mainstream comics’ version, which
determines what is and is not part of a character’s (or even a universe’s)
agreed-upon history. Continuity can be used to reinforce the assumptions,
stereotypes, and structures of power that have built and maintained the
masculinist nature of the Marvel Universe. The series questions one use of
continuity and captures how this towering tenant of comics has swallowed
up and obscured the lives of women and other members of minority com-
munities. Offering an important critique, The Unstoppable Wasp creates an
opportunity to rewrite the history of erasure that continuity has facilitated.
Whitley and Charretier proffer questions that allow us to think about the
52
QUEER THEORY
culture of comics and fandom that misuses continuity to police comics. For
example, when a character’s identity changes, as with the introduction of
a female Thor or a female African-American “Iron Man,” there has been
resistance and even threats against creators from the so-called “fan commu-
nity.” This resistance and violence is often wrongly couched in the idea of
continuity. Sexist and racist fans declare some version of “it ruined my
childhood.” The critiques offered in this series reveal how continuity can be
used at times to limit the possibilities of comics, and, in its place, the series
imagines a vision of a queer future.
The first arc of The Unstoppable Wasp details the story of Nadia Pym
(later van Dyne), the long-lost daughter of Hank Pym with his first wife
Maria Trovaya and her entrance into the Marvel Universe. Prior to her
appearance in the Avengers only months before the publication of the series,
Nadia’s existence was unknown: she had been locked up for many years per-
forming research for a Russian black ops agency—the Red Room—but she
had recently escaped and immigrated to the United States. She recounts all of
this in a flashback, providing the reader with an introduction to her life, so
the story can be read as standalone. Nadia begins her life in the United States
and quickly establishes a plan to seek out the female geniuses of the Marvel
Universe. Upon entering continuity, she begins to queer it and question the
establishment of the Marvel Universe as she asks, in this first issue, where are
all the female geniuses? Because of limited space, I will focus primarily on the
first issue of the series, exploring how The Unstoppable Wasp sets up
a narrative to queer continuity in Marvel comics and how we can use what is
learned from this story to think about comic book culture.
Sample Analysis
Whitley, Jeremy, and Elsa Charretier. The Unstoppable Wasp. New York,
NY: Marvel, 2017.
The first issue of the series opens with Nadia Pym following Kamala Khan,
Ms. Marvel into a bakery (Figure 4.1). Because Nadia has spent her entire
life locked up, she is only beginning to be introduced to the customs and
practices of U.S. American culture. This first page queers the very core of
American superhero comics: Superman’s origin story. Instead of landing in
Kansas, raised by white parents in the “heart of America,” Nadia’s story
begins with her walking through Manhattan into a bakery that serves Paki-
stani desserts. The creators queer the narrative of what is “American” by
introducing a “foreigner” to Pakistani donuts as one of her first endeavors
into the culture of the United States. Nadia’s guide is a Pakistani-American,
which opens her up to a non-traditional experience of U.S. American soci-
ety. That is to say, by non-traditional, it queers the assumption that when
entering the U.S., the first introduction to cultural practices is always going
53
VALENTINO L. ZULLO
to be an interaction with white, middle-class America: the Kansas of Superman

or the diner of Archie comics. While this is not Nadia’s origin story, this is the
first issue of her series and this opening scene offers one of many different
paths that a person entering the United States and participating in its cultures
may experience. The queering of traditions, history, and continuity will define
The Unstoppable Wasp’s run. The text is queer in that it asks readers to rethink
the history and tenants of the superhero story, offering a new vision of the
future, rejecting a universal path, and instead opening new ones.
The creative team, however, does not offer this alternative simply to
upend the typical story of the superhero or what one might look like with-
out purpose. By including Kamala, the comic utilizes the visual to set up
a false binary that it will deconstruct. Nadia, who is white, may immediately
be seen as the character who is introducing Kamala to American culture in
this initial scene. That binary is quickly disassembled, however, as Kamala
is in fact Nadia’s guide. The creative team does not offer one singular defin-
ition of Pakistani-American culture either. Nadia asks Kamala, “Are those
the most delicious ones?” assuming that she knows all about Southeast
Asian foods, but Kamala remarks, “I don’t know. I haven’t tried everything”
(Figure 4.1). The series does not reject all knowledge, though, as the baker
does have answers, as one would expect. His status as baker is not torn
down, but expectation that a Pakistani-American should know everything
about that culture is broken down. The purpose here is to ask the reader to
question the assumptions of what someone’s introduction to “American”
culture might be, and to rethink our own expectations, establishing the
model for the type of questions that Nadia will ask in the series. After leav-
ing the bakery, Nadia crosses the street without looking both ways. Ms.
Marvel makes light of knowledge differences when she says, “You never
know where the gaps in the knowledge might be” (Whitley and Charretier,
2017a). But as we will see in this comic, it’s the gaps in knowledge that
allow Nadia to be creative and challenge the norms that others have
accepted. In forgoing these restrictions even of stereotypes, we open up new
creative possibilities for the future.
The story, then, takes on the superhero genre as masculinist, male-
driven, and exclusionary. Following this scene in the bakery, a short battle
takes place holding to the tenets of the superhero comic; however, this fight
scene does not set up an ongoing narrative for a villain, but will establish
the queering of comics continuity. A female scientist piloting a giant robot
attacks the city. During the battle Nadia recognizes her as Monica Rappac-
cini, but not as a villain, rather as a great scientist whose work she knows
well. Rappaccini states that part of her reason for attacking the city is that
women are not valued, she could not find work in science, so she became
a super villain. The conversation critiques the fact that the superhero narra-
tive is dominated by men, as Nadia says to Rappaccini: “Wait! You became
a super villain? That’s super disappointing. Your biochemistry work was
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QUEER THEORY
Figure 4.1 The Unstoppable Wasp #1 (2018), p. 1. Justin Whitley and Elsa Charretier.
© Marvel
revolutionary.” And Rappaccini responds, “And it still is! But all the world
hears about are male blowhards like Bruce Banner and Hank Pym” (Whitley
and Charretier, 2017a). Many of the female villains in this series share
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VALENTINO L. ZULLO
a similar narrative. The isolation that is felt by some of these women leads
them to become villainous.
Rappaccini’s remark during the battle is the impetus for the rest of the
story arc: the search for female geniuses and the fight against the structures
of power that have isolated them. Nadia begins to question why women sci-
entists are not valued; she asks, where are they? Having been locked up in
a black ops facility her entire life working with the papers of women scien-
tists she imagines that they must all be respected based solely on their
work. This is not true. Then, Bobbi Morse, Mockingbird, informs Nadia
about “the list,” which she describes in the following way: “S.H.I.E.L.D. has
this list of the smartest people in the world. It’s been the same for years
until just recently. It always bothered me.” She continues, “And it got me
thinking about who made these lists, right? Other guys, other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents,
other superheroes. All these guys have known each other forever. They don’t
seek new people out” (Whitley and Charretier, 2017a). Explicit in her question-
ing is how the list serves as a metaphor for male supremacy. The “list” is part
of hegemonic structures of power, made by men for men, to preserve the status
of men.
There is an important feature in naming “the list” because for a new reader to
Marvel comics, it serves as a metaphor for male power and control of the future
of knowledge development in comics. But for readers who know what “the list”
is, the names reveal that not only is it masculinist but it is mired in violence, and
in a history of power and destruction in the Marvel Universe. Included on that
list are many villains such as Doctor Doom and Doctor Octopus. Of course,
there are heroes on “the list” such as Reed Richards, Mister Fantastic, and Tony
Stark, Iron Man, but even they have participated in acts of violence and dark
groups, such as the Illuminati, that have led to much destruction in the Marvel
Universe. One has to wonder what the list does other than identify geniuses. It
serves to exclude. This leaves characters like Bobbi Morse locked out of what has
become a boys’ club. A boys’ club that protects even abusers and villains for the
sake of sustaining male supremacy. Notably, only recently have men and women
of color joined the ranks including T’Challa, the Black Panther, or Amadeus
Cho, the Hulk, and now Lunella Lafayette, Moon Girl. In a genre where power
seems to be of utmost importance, we easily forget that that in making the story
world more democratic and inclusive, we must also uncover the women scien-
tists of the world and other positions beyond being a superhero, and recognize
how continuity has locked them out.
In questioning the concept of “the list,” Nadia exposes the accepted truth
that despite all the women in the Marvel Universe only one has ever made “the
list,” at “no. 27” according to Bobbi Morse (Whitley and Charretier, 2017a).
And it has only recently been questioned that there might be people smarter
than Reed Richards or Tony Stark. Placing pressure on our assumed truths
offers opportunity to question the idea of continuity, a part of comics that
often goes unchecked. In an interview, comics writer Chuck Dixon states,
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QUEER THEORY
Continuity is a framework. I always find it more instructive than

restrictive. Continuity is just the readership’s perceived reality for
whatever comic you’re writing. You get into the feel of it and build
on it rather than constantly looking for ways to tear it down.
Sometimes there are stories you can’t tell. But generally these are
stories that shouldn’t be told in any case.
(Klaehn, 2014, 120)
What Dixon’s statement reveals, unintentionally, is the idea that continuity

has been used to exclude. For example, no creative team has taken on the
challenge of “the list” in any significant way because it just is a part of the
Marvel Universe. Continuity is instructive, but it can also be limiting and
excluding. Continuity has been used as an argument against the inclusion of
characters of different genders, races, ability, and sexualities as fans claim
their narratives are being lost. Unlike continuity, Muñoz states, “Queerness
is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on
potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (2009, 1). Nadia
rejects this moment, this list, and instead creates a new space for women,
disobeying the structures of power.
The creators understand the power of the categories that we establish,
and know that they exclude and in doing so do harm to others including
female scientists such as Rappaccini, whose isolation led to her villainy.
Thus, Nadia aims to queer the list of geniuses in the Marvel Universe. The
final page of the first issue depicts Nadia Pym declaring that she will
uncover the archive of the Marvel Universe’s history and in doing so she
challenges the idea of the list. She declares: “I’m going to make them
rethink that whole list.” Her intention is not to simply uncover these
women, but to restructure the very model that has left women out. Nadia is
in many ways like another favorite figure of queer theory, Antigone, who
refused to submit to the law and defied Creon in order to give her brother
Polyneices a proper burial. As Mari Ruti has articulated, “Antigone’s act is
antisocial but it is not antirelational; it opposes hegemonic forms of social-
ity” (2017, 108). Ruti captures an important distinction: in refusing to
submit to the established law, Antigone leaves behind the society as she
knows it, but she does it for the sake of her family. Nadia refuses to submit
to the establishment—continuity—but does not become a reclusive genius,
nor does she take the path of the villain. Rappaccini’s response is antisocial;
Nadia’s is relational. Nadia intends to start a new community as she
declares that she lost part of her life, so she intends to use the rest of her
life to make a difference. Nadia imagines a queer, inclusive future.
Furthermore, in naming her group “G.I.R.L.” Nadia recovers the part of
her that was lost—her girlhood, and the lives of many others that would be
lost. Her work will honor the girl who was captured and forced to work for
the Red Room. Nadia remarks later that the Red Room chose girls because
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VALENTINO L. ZULLO
they appear less dangerous (Whitley and Charretier, 2017b). By showing

that they are powerful and smart she reverses the commonly held belief that
girls are not dangerous or rather cannot be dangerous. In this image Nadia
is seen standing in front of papers and other files—an uncovered archive—
and her shadow is that of her super suit suggesting that this is a mission for
a superhero. It will be a new era of superheroics. There are images of face-
less women behind Nadia on this final page, suggesting they exist but have
not been named, identified, or perhaps they have been erased. Thus, Nadia
upends the archive of Marvel Comics history in order to uncover those
characters and stories that have been locked out or forgotten. Whitley and
Charretier create a comic book that pays respect to the wishes of Virginia
Woolf to uncover the lives of female geniuses. And in the final issue, in
homage to Woolf, one of the newly discovered female geniuses remarks,
“I’ve never had a room of my own before” (2017c).
Despite queer theory finding its origins in feminist theory, there has
been “a presumption that queer and feminist writings are theoretically
incompatible in their modes of reference, their priorities and their calls for
action” (Richardson, McLaughlin, and Casey, 2006, 3). The two were posi-
tioned in a binary where queer theory focused too much on sexuality and
feminist theory too much on gender. However, as The Unstoppable Wasp
makes clear, the two cannot be separated, as the queering of the categories
that exclude these women also shares a priority with feminism. The
empowerment of women is central to the deconstruction of structures of
power that protect the boys’ club that something like “the list” sustained.
The queering of the superhero comic is integrally connected to a feminist
awakening of all women, women of color, women with different abilities,
and women with different identification of gender and sexuality seen in this
series. There is no separation.
The kinship narrative between women is further underscored as
a queer response to the harms of continuity that has isolated women and
sustained the boys’ club. Once Nadia becomes a naturalized citizen, she
rejects the violence passed down to her from her father, who she learns
was a domestic abuser, and she takes the last name of van Dyne,
the second wife of her father, Hank Pym, as, she says, “it’s the only
name I really know” (Whitley and Charretier, 2017c). Janet van Dyne has
been Nadia’s mentor throughout the series and the creative team once
again queers the legacy of comics because women in superhero stories
rarely pass on a mantle and, when they do, it is because the previous
character is dead or depowered. Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp, is
still around; she is a mentor and, in the end, she creates a space for
Nadia to continue her research where they work together with the other
female geniuses. Further queering stereotypes, Nadia’s stepmother is not
the villain in the story but rather is her support system. In the end, this
story deconstructs the structures of power that have locked women out
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QUEER THEORY
and gives them a new avenue through Nadia’s G.I.R.L. program with the
help of her newfound team.
“The list” embodies the toxicity of some parts of mainstream comics cul-
ture: the rabid fandom that does not enjoy the history of comics and con-
tinuity, but rather aims to use it as a way to lock others out. This may
range from policing who can be a fan to proclaiming that comics culture is
being destroyed by the inclusion and representation of members of minority
communities. The Unstoppable Wasp reveals the artificiality of these cat-
egories that serve to sustain a past led by male supremacy. The series also
reveals how easy it was to accept without question the basis of this idea—
that all of the men in the Marvel Universe were smarter than the women.
This is a reality that the comics community must also address—that for too
long it has been a boys’ club. Adding women to “the list,” including at the
top of “the list,” queers structures of power and the underlying assumptions
and stereotypes, but it does not change past continuity. Sexist fans who use
the term “continuity” as part of their argument against change are misusing
the concept. Nadia and G.I.R.L. don’t change the past, rather they queer the
future narrative of comics continuity when they reject the structures that
have locked them out and begin producing knowledge on their own terms
in their own model that is more inclusive. Rather than being forced to
negotiate with the system that has locked them out, Nadia and the other
women create a new one. Comics such as The Unstoppable Wasp, thus,
renew the queerness of comics exhibited in stories such as the early Wonder
Woman of William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter because, I believe, if
comics is queer, this becomes most visible in their fight for the future.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Chute, Hillary. 2017. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. New York,
NY: HarperCollins.
Cruse, Howard, ed. 1980. Gay Comix #1. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated
by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Pantheon.
Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Hall, Donald E. 2002. Queer Theories. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Halperin, David M. 2003. “The Normalization of Queer theory.” Journal of
Homosexuality 45.2–4: 339–343.
Klaehn, Jeffery. 2014. “‘Batman Is All about Contingency Planning’: An Interview with
American Comic-Book Writer Chuck Dixon.” Journal of Graphic Novels and
Comics 5.1: 118–122.
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Love, Heather. 2009. Feeling Backward. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
New York, NY: NYU Press.
Petrovic, Paul. 2011. “Queer Resistance, Gender Performance, and ‘Coming Out’ of
the Panel Borders in Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III’s Batwoman: Elegy.” Journal
of Graphic Novels and Comics 2.1: 67–76.
Richardson, Diane, Janice McLaughlin, and Mark E. Casey, eds. 2006. Intersections
between Feminist and Queer Theory. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ruti, Mari. 2017. The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects.
New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Scott, Darieck and Ramzi Fawaz. 2018. “Introduction: Queer about Comics.” Ameri-
can Literature 90.2: 197–219.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Whitley, Justin and Elsa Charretier. 2017a. The Unstoppable Wasp #1. New York, NY:
Marvel Comics.
Whitley, Justin and Elsa Charretier. 2017b. The Unstoppable Wasp #3. New York, NY:
Marvel Comics.
Whitley, Justin and Elsa Charretier. 2017c. The Unstoppable Wasp #8. New York, NY:
Marvel Comics.
Suggested Reading
Berlatsky, Noah. 2015. Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter
Comics, 1941–1948. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
carrington, André. 2018. “Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’s Black
Panther, 1998–2016.” American Literature 90.2: 221–250.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2008. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.”
Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1/2: 111–128.
D’Agostino, Anthony Michael. 2018. “‘Flesh-to-Flesh Contact’: Marvel Comics’ Rogue
and the Queer Feminist Imagination.” American Literature 90.2: 251–281.
Sammond, Nicholas. 2018. “Meeting in the Archive: Comix and Collecting as
Community.” Feminist Media Histories 4.3: 96–118.
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5
D ISAB ILITY STUD I ES
Disrupting Representation, Representing Disruption
Krista Quesenberry
Introduction
Disability is a convenient, though complicated, term. It is both precise and
generic; it is an identity category but one so large that its boundaries are
contested. Simi Linton describes disability as “a medically derived term that
assigns predominantly medical significance and meaning to certain types of
human variation” (Linton 2010, 224). Linton’s phrasing highlights that what
we call disabilities are simply variations, not aberrations or distinct categor-
ies, and that the term gains its authority primarily from its medical uses.
Though the history of the term dates back centuries, its contemporary
usage was in many ways crystallized by the disability rights activists of the
late twentieth century. In 1975, the British advocacy group the Union of
Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) established that: “it is
society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something
imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily iso-
lated and excluded from full participation in society. Disabled people are
therefore an oppressed group in society” (qtd. in Shakespeare 2010, 267).
This social construction theory connects the term disability with other cat-
egories of identity and with opportunities for social and political mobiliza-
tion. Indeed, from the term disability, we can define ableism as analogous to
the forms of discrimination we call sexism and racism (Linton 2010, 223), and
we can distinguish the opposite of disabled with the terms able-bodied or non-
disabled (along with dis/ability), which recognize human variations without
privileging norms, similar to the interplay between transgender and cisgender.
However, in contrast with most identity categories, disability is a grouping
that includes everyone. Even if we may not currently identify as having
a disability, we have all been in the past or will be in the future a part of the
disability community—because we may break an arm, develop a chronic illness,
or experience age-related vision and hearing loss. According to Tobin Siebers,
society “prefers to think of people with disabilities as a small population, a stable
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population,” consisting of recognizable and congenital physical conditions, such

as dwarfism, blindness, or a missing limb. But, in fact, Siebers writes, “[o]nly
15% of people with disabilities are born with their impairments,” and except in
cases of illness or major accidents, most people experience disability as a cycle
“from disability to temporary ability back to disability” (Siebers 2001, 742). Of
course, it is important not to think of every difficulty as a disability, even as we
recognize that disabilities cover such a wide variety of conditions—diagnosed or
undiagnosed; predictable or unpredictable; completely or partially disruptive to
daily living—and the term “disabled” may be largely unhelpful as a blanket cat-
egory for personal identification. Instead we can think of the term disability as
codifying shared experiences of exclusion, stigma, pathologization, and discrim-
ination in our analyses of social norms and cultural objects—like comics.

Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that intertwines scholarship,
education, and activism relevant to embodied experiences of impairment and
disability. Though it shares a great deal of common ground with methodolo-
gies rooted in feminism, critical race studies, and queer theory, disability
studies further underscores the significance of individual experiences relating
to built environments, embodiment, and participation in daily activities. Like
other identity-based critical methods, disability studies generally aims to
undermine targeted social standards of normalcy in ways that have broad
implications. Literary disability studies, particularly when paired with Comics
Studies, reveals the common perception of “a normal body” and “a normal
life” to be fictions that can fuel discrimination and disenfranchisement.
Disability studies recognizes two major frameworks for analyzing this
distinction between “normal” and “disabled” bodies: First, the medical
model or individual model situates a disability as a dysfunction or abnor-
mality in the body and treats it as a problem to solve through medical
intervention. Second, the social model or social construction theory situates
the root of the problem in a culture’s pervasive negative attitudes, as well as
in inaccessible structures and spaces—these are problems that can be solved
through awareness, consideration, and institutional design, rather than med-
ical treatment. As noted in the UPIAS statement, above, the social model
distinguishes an impairment (a condition) from a disability (the social
experience of non-inclusive responses to impairments). It is this social
model that has brought about landmark legal protections, such as the 1990
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States and the 1995
Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) in the United Kingdom, which offer
protections against inequality in employment, transportation, voting, and
housing, as well as legal requirements for accessibility tools like barrier-free
entrances. According to G. Thomas Couser, the primary benefit of the
social model is that it “acknowledges that disability is everybody’s business
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DISABILITY STUDIES
and that disability may be addressed more effectively and universally by

accommodation than by rehabilitation,” an acknowledgement that effectively
“challenge[s] the very norms that marginalize and stigmatize disabled
people” (2009, 30). Even so, disability studies scholars, including Siebers
and Couser, continue to resist the dominance of the social model, particu-
larly in so much as it emphasizes social, structural, and systemic concerns
over more individual, embodied, and emotional experiences of disability
(see also Snyder and Mitchell 2001; Clare 2004; Shakespeare 2010; Donald-
son and Prendergast 2011).
Comics is a medium that can accomplish what social construction theor-
ies cannot—the recognition of disability experiences in their rich singularity,
physicality, affect, and social construction, all at the same time. According
to Susan Merrill Squier, “comics can convey the complex social impact of
a physical or mental impairment, as well as the way the body registers
social and institutional constraints” (2008, 74). Squier further emphasizes
that the verbal-visual conjunction of comics makes disability narratives
“most fully possible” by incorporating “pre-verbal components: the gestural,
embodied physicality of disabled alterity in its precise and valuable specifi-
city” (86). As such, disability narratives use comics to entangle the structural
and systemic concerns of the social model with the personal, individualized,
interpersonal, embodied, and emotional experiences that the social model
leaves out.

The comics that attract the most scholarly attention regarding disability tend
to fall into two categories—superhero comics and graphic memoirs. Serial
comics, zines, underground comics, and web comics offer significant material
for further disability studies analysis, but they have not yet garnered the same
levels of attention that superhero comics and graphic memoirs have.
In superhero comics, disability studies scholars have found fantastically
exaggerated bodies and a long history of diverse texts through which to
track changes in social attitudes about disabilities. The most immediate and
obvious examples of disability in comics are characters such as Professor
Charles Xavier, who uses a wheelchair, or Daredevil, who is blind. These
characters carry their realistic disabilities into the fantastic world of the
Marvel Universe, offering a type of disability representation on a par with
the contributions that other Marvel characters like Black Panther and more
recently Ms. Marvel (Kamala Kahn) and Miss America (America Chavez)
have made for racial/ethnic, gender, age, and sexuality diversity in super-
hero comics. Beyond these examples, even just within the Marvel Universe,
we can yet observe many additional representations of impairments—in the
prostheses used by Wolverine and Thor, the physical traumas of Doctor
Strange and Iron Man, and the monstrous transformations of The Hulk and
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The Thing, for instance. These characters illustrate hyperactive social con-
cerns over bodies, human limitations, and mortality, which scholars such as
José Alaniz and Ramzi Fawaz have tracked through the characters’ represen-
tations over time and across media. In recent years, scholars have also
begun shifting the critical discussion of superhero comics away from histor-
ically sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, ableist, and other prejudicial examples
toward praise for the ways that the superhero comic may also enable visions
of embodiment and relationality not possible in more realist comics (see,
especially, Fingeroth 2004; Jeffery 2016; Chute 2017).
On the other end of the comics spectrum, graphic memoirs have
offered scholars a level of realism that balances out the fantasy elements of
superhero comics, along with the detailed personal narratives that are
often lacking in sociological, legal, and political discussions of disability.
Deeply personal and literary narratives such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) and David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir
(2010) often appear in these analyses (see, for instance, El Refaie 2012;
Chute 2017; Kunka 2018). At the same time as life-writing scholars have
begun to devote more attention to comics, graphic medicine has emerged
as a field of study associated with the health humanities and medical edu-
cation. Graphic medicine scholars generally identify as the field’s earliest
text Justin Green’s 1972 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and
carry that forward to memoirs like Ken Dahl’s Monsters (2009), Sarah Lea-
vitt’s Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me (2010), and
webcomics like Allie Brosh’s “Adventures in Depression” (2011) and
“Depression Part Two” (2013) series for Hyperbole and a Half. Addition-
ally, graphic medicine incorporates narratives by family members, care-
takers, and medical practitioners, such as Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer
(2006), Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s through the Looking
Glass (2016), and MK Czerwiec’s Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS
Care Unit 371 (2017).

Disability theories—like disability experiences themselves—are varied and
inconsistent. There is no singular, simple way to apply disability theory, and
the methods themselves may vary widely depending on the medium, time
period, and subject of the disability narratives under examination. Instead,
there are questions that we can ask of a text with the goal of increasing our
sensitivity to disability-studies themes—namely, identity and identification,
built environments, and challenges to social norms. These themes are, of
course, far from exhaustive, but they will offer a baseline to reveal the contribu-
tions a text makes to cultural attitudes about disability and awareness of dis-
ability’s effects on individual lives. With the questions relevant to identity and
identification, we center the experiences of the characters with disabilities, and
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DISABILITY STUDIES
we allow those characters to determine the language we use in scholarly ana-

lysis. And with the questions about built environments and challenging social
norms, we can begin to address the ways disability narratives convey forms of
discrimination and disadvantage that are unique to disability experiences,
along with the ways that comics creators provoke us to consider what a more
just and accommodating world might offer to people with disabilities.
Identity and identification questions: How do the characters refer to them-
selves; how do they self-identify? How do they refer to their conditions or
impairments? Do the characters use formal, medical language, or do they
prefer inventing descriptions for their experiences in ways that are unique to
the individual? If the latter, how does the language of that experience differ
from how the impairment might be described medically, legally, or in slang
terms? How do the characters refer to their bodies, and do their bodies influ-
ence their self-identifications? Do the characters self-identify in terms that
suggest “shame, blame, and fear” (Charon 2006, 30–33), or do they use lan-
guage that suggests pride, community, and autonomy? Are the characters
represented as fitting in with or existing outside of “normal” society? Do the
characters use any particular metaphors (visual or verbal) for helping others
understand their impairment(s)? How do the characters visualize their
experiences? And in what ways do intersecting identity categories—such as
race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and religion—affect their experi-
ences of disability?
If we agree that disabilities are socially constructed, then we must also
pay attention to the ways that characters with disabilities interact with non-
disabled characters by asking questions such as the following: Do other
characters treat characters with disabilities compassionately and grant them
autonomy? Or are the characters with disabilities treated with pity and
offered unsolicited advice or assistance? Do nondisabled characters treat the
characters with disabilities as childlike, unruly, helpless, tragic, or delicate—
if so, when, where, how, and why does this happen? When the characters
with disabilities describe or discuss their conditions, do other characters
accept and believe their accounts, or are the characters with disabilities sub-
jected to questioning, disbelief, denial, erasure, or an unfair burden of
proof? Do able-bodied characters stare or gawk at the characters with dis-
abilities, and do they avoid eye contact or speak directly to them and main-
tain eye contact? Are the characters with disabilities generally able to speak
for themselves, or do other characters speak for them? Are characters repre-
sented as independent or as interdependent (relying on one another for
care, support, and survival)?
Built environment questions: What day-to-day activities—especially moving,
working, going to school, meeting up with friends, eating, sleeping, and enjoy-
ing leisure activities—are made especially difficult because of environmental
challenges for characters with disabilities? In other words, how are characters
with disabilities participating in or being excluded from society? What specific
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obstacles are encountered, and what specific accommodations exist or are

invented for these obstacles? From what aspects of a “normal” or full life are
the characters with disabilities restricted? And how are those restrictions over-
come or worked around, if they are? What emotional responses do such obs-
tacles or restrictions elicit in the characters with disabilities; how do the
challenges or exclusions make these characters feel? Otherwise, how do the
characters with disabilities feel when they have access and are fully able to par-
ticipate in social spaces and activities? Are there unique, imagined solutions to
environmental challenges suggested by the characters with disabilities?
Challenges to social norms: How does the comic contribute to upend-
ing social norms? How does the story dispel fear or challenge stereo-
types? What historical and social wrongs does it aim to rectify? How do
the individual experiences in the story resist a reader’s inclination for
generalization, stereotyping, or assumption? How does the comic offer
readers fresh or alternative ways of understanding the world? How does
the comic or how do the characters develop a sense of community
around a particular viewpoint, which is informed by the experience of
disability? What new knowledge or perspective does the narrative reveal?
How does the narrative disrupt or reorient readers’ expectations about
life, society, or the very act of reading? And how does the comic intro-
duce new ways of describing, imagining, or envisioning disabilities and
people who have them?
This final set of questions is the most complex but also may be the most
important. In comics, the author depicts not only the person with
a disability but often the impairment itself, and the ways that impairments
are drawn can establish or reinvent the iconography of the condition. Ian
Williams argues that personal storytelling in comics produces an “unofficial”
iconography that contrasts with normalizing medical visualizations and cre-
ates new ways of representing disease, whether or not the author necessarily
means to challenge the official knowledge (2015, 129). For instance, when
a doctor discusses an eating disorder, that doctor may provide a diagram of
brain neurons or a chart of eating habits, but for Katie Green in her comic
Lighter than My Shadow (2013), that eating disorder takes the form of
a scribble shape that hovers over, around, and inside her, influencing her
every daily choice and her entire view of the world. In this way, Green
offers a new visual language for understanding the non-visual experiences
of her impairment, which in turn may create or redirect public perceptions
of the impairment, including both its causes and its effects. Comics that are
visually innovative may, in fact, teach us new things about the impairments
they depict, and they may further influence both social and medical norms
relevant to the impairment. Ultimately, these epistemological and onto-
logical questions are the most likely path to upending standards of nor-
malcy and are an important merge point between the academic and activist
arms of disability studies.
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DISABILITY STUDIES

Karrie Fransman summarizes her 2012 graphic novel The House that
Groaned as:
set in a converted Victorian building with six one-bedroom apart-

ments housing six lonely individuals. […] The inhabitants of 141
Rottin Road could only have stepped out of the pages of a comic
book. There’s our heroine, Barbara, the man-made Barbie; Matt,
the retoucher who cannot touch; Janet, the tormented dietician;
Marion, the hedonistic matriarch of the Midnight Feast Front;
Demi Durbach, a grandmother who literally blends into the back-
ground; and Brian, the twenty-something bloke who’s sexually
attracted to diseased and dying women. Yet as we learn the stories
behind these extreme characters, it becomes apparent we may
share similar issues as individuals and as a society.
(“The Body” 2012, emphasis mine)
Immediately in this description, we can see that these diverse humans are at
once odd and normal, complex and yet utterly ordinary.
I’ve selected this novel because it resists some of the standard approaches
of disability studies, while reinforcing others. First and foremost, this is
a novel. Like Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012), which has already
attracted some attention in both disability and Comics Studies, Fransman’s
novel merges the humdrum everyday experience of the individual that we
see in graphic memoirs with the extreme circumstances and physical exag-
geration that are more commonly associated with superhero comics. Novels
that engage with disability in both realistic and fantastical ways offer oppor-
tunities to push against the commonplaces of disability studies and even to
expand its territories of analysis. Additionally, this novel is not about dis-
ability—or ability—in a way that distills into a clear and direct message; the
characters are radically intersectional, which engages disability but is not
centered on it. With Fransman’s at once realistic and “extreme” melting pot
of identities, readers come across disability in its many varied and mundane
forms, much as we do in real life. Finally, it is important to note that The
House that Groaned is not a perfect narrative about disability experiences.
Rather, it is messy and sometimes offensive: people with disabilities are
both normalized and treated as “freaks,” and the characters can be both
kind and unkind to one another. And the good guys don’t even necessarily
win in the end.
On the whole, Fransman’s novel asks us not only to watch how charac-
ters offer positive and negative models of thinking about disability but also
to monitor how we, ourselves, react to the characters—are we outraged
when they face prejudice? Do we share their frustration when environments
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KRISTA QUESENBERRY
are inaccessible? Are we approving or disapproving of this diversity of

human bodies? Do we find ourselves on the side of acceptance or the side
of discomfort when we evaluate Fransman’s reorientation of what is
“normal” versus “abnormal”? And why?
Sample Analysis
Fransman, Karrie. 2012. The House That Groaned. London: Square Peg.
We begin by taking stock of how the characters self-identify and how they
are identified by others. In general, the characters do not make use of
social or medical labels, aloud or even in their own thoughts: Janet never
names her restricted eating as anything more than a “diet,” and Matt’s
constant use of gloves discloses his anxiety about human touch without
ever directly naming a condition. Demi Durbach does not comment on
her depression or reclusiveness, and she refers to her debilitating physical
condition as simply a case of “bad lungs.” The characters resist pathologiz-
ing their conditions with technical jargon—in fact, they probably do not
view their impairments as medical conditions at all. Instead, they under-
stand their identities in terms of worries and choices, habits and prefer-
ences, or simply personality quirks. They do not represent themselves as
victims or even as “disabled,” which allows them the freedom of identifica-
tion as individuals, rather than examples of a diagnosis.
The “diseased and dying” women, in Fransman’s terms, who are pursued
by the tenant Brian do not have the opportunity to self-identify—in fact,
they hardly speak at all. On one hand, Fransman’s novel is accepting of
Brian’s sexual objectification of these women, which contributes to the treat-
ment of them as abnormal and as unappealing sexual objects outside of the
context of Brian’s fetish. But on the other hand the novel does offer
a reprimand when Brian and his neighbors engage with these women in
ways that demonstrate intolerance.
Brian’s first scene in the book is a conversation in his apartment with one
such woman, who remains unseen while Brian fumbles and is trying to dem-
onstrate his interest in her. The reader sits in the position of Brian’s guest
when he leans sideways on the couch and looks her straight in the eyes to
deliver what he seems to think is a compliment: “I thought to myself: Now
there’s a girl who understands the importance of having some fun … living
each day … like it’s her last.” Her hand enters the next panel with a “SLAP”
before Fransman cuts to a full-page image of the emaciated woman, wearing
a hospital band and a Band-Aid where an IV likely was. She leaves immedi-
ately. Not only do we see Brian’s genuine and well-meaning desire to impress
and compliment the woman, but we also see that she does not appreciate his
objectification or his tasteless joke. Fransman allows Brian to make this cringe-
worthy comment, but she also shows him suffering the repercussions.
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DISABILITY STUDIES
Later, with a woman he has picked up at the “Supporters of Women

with Facial Disfigurement” meeting, Brian and his guest meet Barbara and
Matt in the hallway during a power outage. Fransman again highlights the
woman’s impairment with a full-page close-up lit only by a candle, and the
character's face almost appears to be melting. But then, when Barbara utters
a “Gasp!” and Matt exclaims “AARGH,” the woman snipes back, “Jesus!
Calm down” (Figure 5.1). Again, Fransman makes a spectacle of the
woman’s face, but when another character in the book responds accord-
ingly, the character with a disability stands up for herself. The world is not
kind to these women, but they are strong and capable of resisting the preju-
dice they meet in these encounters.
Shifting our attention to the built environment of the tenement house,
we find characters whose weight is a barrier to access and easy movement.
When Brian meets Marion on the stairs, she has fallen outside his door,
which he blames on the “rising damp” in the uneven floorboards. Marion
admits that she is more prone to falls at this weight, “now that [she] can’t
see [her] feet!” but Brian’s attention to the building shifts the blame from
her body to the floor—a tripping hazard that would cause problems for
anyone, not only those who are overweight. Additionally, when the mem-
bers of Janet’s “Do or Diet Group” fill the hallway, Barbara and Brian have
difficulty navigating past them. Brian’s and Barbara’s small frames are con-
trasted against the much larger, rounded figures of the diet group members
(Figure 5.2). While the reader’s attention is on Brian or Barbara, however,
Fransman also depicts the discomfort and excessive intimacy of these too-
large bodies being squished into a too-small space. They hold their bodies
Figure 5.1 Woman with facial disfigurement by cell-phone light in The House That
Groaned by Karrie Fransman (Jonathan Cape, 2012) © Square Peg
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KRISTA QUESENBERRY
Figure 5.2 “Do or Diet Group” members in The House That Groaned by Karrie Frans-
man (Jonathan Cape, 2012). © Square Peg
tight, lean to avoid crowding each other, and eventually perch on Janet’s
tiny chairs, each touching someone on all sides—they do not have enough
space to exist, and their discomfort is evident. In these scenes, Fransman
gives readers an opportunity to examine our own responses: are we con-
cerned with the discomfort of the overweight people, or do we blame them
for taking up space and making movement in the hallway difficult for the
characters with more socially accepted body types?
We also see the importance of environment in this novel with the char-
acter Demi Durbach, the widow with “bad lungs” who lives on the top
floor. In one scene, Barbara visits Demi’s apartment to complain about
a leak in the roof, and the two get to talking: Barbara’s bright white hair
and dress, as well as her bare arms and legs, stand out against the blue, pat-
terned upholstery, while Demi’s figure melts into her furniture. From
a distance, Barbara appears to be talking to an empty chair (Figure 5.3). In
another scene, Demi moves around the apartment while a hired woman
cleans every room without seeing Demi’s figure in the lampshade, the book-
shelf, or the curtains. Demi’s invisibility is a visual metaphor for her insig-
nificance—she does not leave her apartment, and as a result she becomes
part of it.
Later, Demi attempts to leave the apartment by slinking along the banis-
ter, but she reaches only a few steps past her door before wheezing so badly
that she decides to turn back. Although she can move with ease around the
apartment, her lung condition makes it impossible for her to leave—and
even if she made it downstairs, she surely would never make it back up.
Demi is confined to her apartment not only by her lung condition but also
by the stairs themselves. Although Fransman offers no iconography of the
specific impairment Demi has, this blending of Demi Durbach into the
background constitutes an iconography for her experience of isolation,
which is the result of her illness and immobility. The more she blends into
her surroundings, the less her family, neighbors, and even her hired help
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DISABILITY STUDIES
Figure 5.3 Demi Durbach blends into the upholstery in The House That Groaned by
Karrie Fransman (Jonathan Cape, 2012). © Square Peg
will acknowledge her; she is present but not a participant, which is an

experience often described by people with disabilities.
Even so, Demi remains cheerful and interested in the people living in
and around the apartment building. She may not be able to fully participate
in the social life of the neighborhood, but she is also not asking to be trea-
ted as a victim or a charity case. Demi’s situation highlights the fact that
she might be capable of living a fuller or more “normal” life if she had
better advocates to speak up for her needs. For instance, her life would be
significantly different if the apartment had an accessible entrance and an
elevator or, instead, if she lived in a street-level apartment. Demi, nonethe-
less, seems content living within her private space. Her story is a narrative
of imprisonment—a confinement in which she is somewhat complicit—at
the same time as it questions our normative social impulse of pitying the
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KRISTA QUESENBERRY
widow for what might be seen as her missing out on a “normal” life. At the
end of the novel, Demi finally does make her way to the ground level when
the building collapses, and just as she blended into her walls and furniture,
she seeps into the ground, wearing a giant grin and breaking free of her
confinement.
One of the major destabilizing accomplishments of the novel as a disability
studies text is the way that Fransman nearly evaporates the distinction between
body and environment, as in Demi Durbach’s story. These characters are part
of this leaking, creaking building, and the building itself draws them into con-
tact with one another so that they seem to have interwoven (rather than inde-
pendent) lives. From this understanding, the novel offers a powerful argument
that bodies—like buildings—have stories. For each character, the novel includes
at least one flashback to explain the particular circumstances that have led the
character to this point, and before most of these flashbacks Fransman provides
splash pages featuring photographs captioned “The Building of Rottin Road,
1865.” These photos draw the reader’s attention to the backstory of the build-
ing as parallel to the backstory of the characters, revealing a history not always
apparent on the surface—their bodies, like the dilapidated house, represent
their cumulative responses to wear, tear, and trauma.
Janet’s disordered eating comes from years of abuse by her mother and
a husband who was cheating on her with another man; Marion’s unrelent-
ing hedonism and carelessness about death is the result of her parents’ neg-
lect; Matt’s fear of being touched derives from his father’s physical abuse
while blaming Matt for his own mother’s death in childbirth; and even Bar-
bara, whose body is repeatedly described as “perfect,” turns out to have
been assigned male at birth and to have obtained her “Barbie” body through
a lifetime of transitioning. Fransman makes clear that the bodies we see in
the novel represent the culmination of many years of the characters man-
aging, mitigating, and masking their personal challenges in an effort to
appear “normal” to strangers, including their neighbors. Fransman’s charac-
ters build their bodies and personalities as the construction workers built
their home, in layers and over time.
Although Fransman does not provide a particularly fresh iconography
for the impairments her characters experience, this comparison of the build-
ing to her characters nonetheless represents their unique individuality—they
resist any stereotyping or categorization as “people like that.” Indeed, the
novel is so committed to intersectionality that we, as readers, have in this
book an opportunity to encounter a range of our own prejudices and pre-
sumptions as soon as we pass over the threshold at 141 Rottin Road.
Though there is much more to say about The House That Groaned, this
reading suggests that we should approach our fellow humans with caution
and compassion. Importantly, that attitude is not based on pity or sympathy
for Fransman’s characters but on the basis of each character’s individuality.
The world is not always kind to these characters, and they face it. The
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DISABILITY STUDIES
characters may not be able to overcome their impairments, but they none-
theless carve out a life and a form of happiness that suits them, individually.
We might take from Fransman’s novel the message that all bodies contain
these kinds of backstories, even the “perfect” ones. And, as such, knowing
that these forms of human variation are universal, we should enter relation-
ships and interactions with one another as though we are crossing the
creaky floorboards in the attic of an old converted Victorian home—taking
careful, gentle, compassionate steps lest we cause the entire enterprise to
tumble to the ground.
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Charon, Rita. 2006. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. New York:
Oxford.
Chute, Hillary. 2017. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. New York:
HarperCollins.
Clare, Eli. 2004. “Excerpt from ‘Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies.” Excerpt of a talk
delivered at Michigan State. https://eliclare.com/what-eli-offers/lectures/stolen-bodies.
Couser, G. Thomas. 2009. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing.
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and Emotion: ‘There’s No Crying in Disability Studies!’” Journal of Literary and
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Foss, Chris, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen, eds. 2016. Disability in Comic Books
and Graphic Narratives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Shakespeare, Tom. 2010. “The Social Model of Disability,” in The Disability Studies
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Realism of the Body.” American Literary History, 13, no. 4 (Winter): 737–754.
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6
CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY
Brotherman and Big City: A Commentary on
Superhero Geography
Julian C. Chambliss

The critical geography approach to reading comics emphasizes that the spa-
tial relationships depicted in comics correspond to material, conceptual, and
experiential questions about how we define space. Informed by humanities
scholars steeped in textual analysis, Comics Studies has become a dynamic
space to discuss how comic pages express the way spatial concerns reflect
socio-cultural concerns in the United States. From Scott McCloud’s Under-
standing Comics, where he defines the mechanics of how comics panels
work, to recent works such as Comic Book Geographies, which place comics
within a geohumanities framework, the idea of space and its depiction
within comics has drawn considerable attention (Lefebvre 1992; McCloud
1994; Dittmer 2014a). In terms of the superhero comic book genre,
a relationship between the city and hero has informed how we understand
the genre. As Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling write in the introduction to
Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, “comics
are inseparably tied to the notion of the ‘city’” (Ahrens and Meteling 2010).
What they mean is the rise of modern comics, especially in the United
States, is linked to themes of anti-urbanism, immigration fears, racial anx-
iety, technophobia, and “apocalyptic” religious belief (Page 2010, 4).
Comics then stand at the intersection of a broader transformation in
urban culture. As Ian Gordon writes in Comics Strips and Consumer Cul-
ture, 1890–1945, comics can be seen as an “outcome of the process of
modernization” and as a “humor-based response to the problem of rep-
resentation faced by a society in transition” (Gordon 2002, 6). Thus, the
comics such as Richard F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid provided a window on
the congested landscape created by mass urbanization. In this space,
white ethnic immigrants and their experiences informed the commercial-
ized visual culture that transmitted values about American society and
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JULIAN C. CHAMBLISS
prompted urban residents to read social standing through consumer

action (Lears 1995, 19). Outcault, who would go on to create Buster
Brown, used the “jug ears, two buck teeth, beady blue eyes, and yellow
nightdress” character to present “theater of the city” stories that captured
class, race, and consumer impulses in urban America (Meyer 2019). The
multiracial urban landscape was not equal even though artists and pub-
lishers came from many identities. Instead, these publishers defined their
identity in opposition to African-Americans (Gordon 2002, 60). The
visual template created by early comics highlight the limitation of the
form in terms of diversity as racial caricatures persisted (Mahar 1999).
The earliest newspaper strips to feature black characters, Little Black
Sambo and Poor Lil Mose, offered the distortive physicality and comedic
adventure white readers expected. The evolution of the medium brought
limited transformation as the expectation around race and space con-
tinued to shape the appearance and placement of black characters.
The creation of the superhero genre allowed Metropolis (1938) and
Gotham (1939) to graft a binary between triumph and failure already asso-
ciated with the modern city onto superhero stories. Alex Boney grounds the
superhero within the modernist framework. As he explains, the origins of
the medium “can be tied directly to development in various print and visual
media” while the genre is “rooted deeply in wider cultural forces of the
modern age” (Boney 2013, 43). A popular medium with millions of adult
and adolescent readers in the 1930s and 1940s, the characters created in the
formative years of the genre are a model that continues to shape the con-
temporary cultural landscape. These characters map a process of identity
formation, community participation, and civilizing dedication that denies
the complexities of urban life in favor of the mythology of American experi-
ence. The black comic book characters that emerged in the 1940s continued
to operate within the racist subtext of the broader society. While characters
such as Ebony White, created by Will Eisner in The Spirit (1940), and
Whitewash Jones, created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in the pages of
Young Allies (1941), appeared in sidekick roles, these characters could never
be seen as full heroes in the same way as their white counterparts (Eisner
2000; Lee et al. 2009). Indeed, Eisner defended himself in 1978 against the
accusation of racism by saying he drew Ebony White as a “creature or pat-
tern of the time.” In his mind, Ebony was a caricature of blackness, and
such caricature persists in popular culture (Eisner 2011, 76).
As Bradford Wright explains in Comic Book Nation: The Transformation
of Youth Culture in America, the depiction of African-American characters
in comic books evolved to reflect liberal expectations about racism and the
struggle for civil rights in the 1960s (Wright 2003, 237). Thus, as the civil
discourse about racism evolved, comic book characters reflect these changes
in their origins, adventures, and personas. In 1966 Black Panther debuted,
offering a black character that shattered racial barriers, but who offered
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CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY
little in the way of commentary about racism in the United States. Here
too, T’Challa/Black Panther is depicted as an African King and Wakanda is
a futuristic African nation untouched by slavery. Thus, while the character
broke from the stereotype, the geography that informed his story was firmly
outside the United States and externalized concerns about race and racism
to Africa. By the 1970s the critique of Black Power politics, which became
identified with groups such as Oakland’s Black Panther Party for Self-
Defense, gave rise to characters dedicated to black neighborhoods and black
concerns such as Luke Cage. Based in Harlem and focused on black villains
and urban crime, Cage was a blaxploitation superhero, borrowing from
a cinematic genre that used black space, music, and aesthetic to define itself
(Guerrero 2012). While reactive to the black political experience, concerns
about urban crime and poverty defined these characters. As superhero
comics continue to evolve, the geography of action reflects the culturally
informed logic. Superheroes with cosmic concerns and “street-level” heroes
inhabit a shared universe, but their narrative adventures come together in
special events and publication tie-ins.

The critical geography framework offers the opportunity to consider how
this spatial isolation reflected a cultural narrative about the dangers posed
by urban space. In describing Batman’s Gotham City, William Uricchio
highlights how the interdependence of the hero and the city sustain the
logic of the comic book narrative (Uricchio 2010, 120). This narrative struc-
ture, however, is unstable, as the serial continuity in superhero stories exist
in a hierarchical structure built across time by multiple authors (Reynolds
1994). The consistency of the fictional universe in comics series incorporates
elements of the real world, and as comics scholar Martin Lund points out,
“potential aspects that are not yet recorded” to create the reader’s experi-
ence (Lund 2013). We understand these elements as part of a malleable gen-
erative landscape shaped and re-shaped to consider every possible kind of
urban experience. The comics page offers an “amplification through simpli-
fication” to create a compelling backdrop for considering common concerns
about urban problems (McCloud 1994). While the superhero genre provides
a means to translate social and cultural narrative about urban spaces and
imagine potential solutions, often Alternative Comics provide a space for
realism that challenges the conformity of the mainstream understanding of
the urban experience. Thus, depending on the genre, the critical geography
reading of the comics page allows us to consider societal concerns about
community stability, power dynamic within the community, and the effect
on identity on shaping experience. This reading of comics geography
acknowledges that creators offer another avenue to understand the field of
experience that defines the city (King et al. 2007).
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JULIAN C. CHAMBLISS

By utilizing a critical geography framework to examine space in comics, we
engage an interdisciplinary framework that considers how comics provide
a dualistic understanding of space. Jason Dittmer suggests that understand-
ing the relationship between comics and space might best be understood as
tensions between place/space and context/content (Dittmer 2014b, 17). The
“place” in comics refers to how comic book representations of space con-
tribute to and reinforce identity attached to placemaking. The evolution of
the city and comics, especially in the U.S. context, gives rise to a spatial
relationship linked to the transformation of the urban landscape. The comic
strip and later the comic book rely on what Jens Balzer described as “semi-
otic shift” linked to urbanization. The signification found in the urban
space, from consumer advertising to visualized landscapes defined by bill-
boards, signage, and people created the context to understand comics in the
United States (Balzer 2010, 25). The urban aesthetic offered by early comic
strips captures this process and offers a visual and textual archive of the
urban experience. Writing about the comics form, Anthony Enns offers
a unique means to understand the modern city by providing an archive of
urban experience that is referential to both the history and feeling associated
with the urban experience (Enns 2010, 45–46). The centrality of the city
persists in the superhero comic book stories. Growing from a “geographic
imagination” informed by the aggregation of publishers in New York City,
the superhero relies heavily on concerns about crime and societal instability
linked to urbanization (Dittmer 2014b).
Understanding context and urban experience in superhero comics ask us
to consider how the medium has struggled to define itself. As we have seen,
while the notion of comics linked to the urbanization and modernity is
clear, the scholarship on comics has sought to push beyond the juvenile
limitation associated with the superhero genre. As the literary narrative
around comics has developed, more complex readings of the comic page
have emerged. Thierry Groensteen’s “spatio-topical parameters” offer theor-
etical framing of visual narrative from a European perspective and Charles
Hatfield emphasizes that Alternative Comics provide multiple tensions that
provide “interpretative options and potentialities” that force comics readers
to employ different “reading strategies, or interpretive schema” to draw
meaning (Hatfield 2005, 36; Groensteen 2007, 27–34). Hilary Chute points
out that the superhero story remains central to the public narrative about
comics in part because they provide storylines motivated by failure and the
specter of civil disorder that is always attached to the city (Chute 2017, 75).
The questions about urban stability and the creation of community are
associated with the many urban imaginaries that define contemporary cul-
ture. The concerns about urbanization, immigration, and industrialization
that defined the early twentieth century have been displaced by tension
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CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY
about the transformations linked to smart cities and surveillance, infrastruc-

ture and the resilient city, and diversity and the multicultural city. The
social, spatial, and material characteristic are linked to design, planning, and
policy, yet scholars increasingly recognize how imagination informs how we
see the contemporary landscape (Lindner and Meissner 2018). Building on
Henri Lefebvre’s emphasis on space as a social product that reinforces capit-
alist concepts and Michel Foucault’s critical assessment of space in Discip-
line and Punish: The Birth of Prison (1975), which argues that space can be
used to exert control over bodies in space, the link between people, space,
and state has been a preoccupation of scholars (Foucault 1995). The concept
of urban imaginary and power these authors suggest is expanded upon in
the literature on planning and urbanization. Scholars such as M. Christine
Boyle highlight how planning discourses, which grew from multiple con-
cerns about the physical city and its social makeup, were melded together
into a practice that imagined better urban spaces (Boyer 1983). The juxta-
position of real and imagined spaces informs critical geography discussion
about the impact of “critical geographic imagination” and its effect on the
spatiality of human life (Soja 1996, 2). It is in this context that we can
examine the interaction around locality, environment, and community that
define the geography of the superhero comic.
Place questions: How do superhero characters relate to their space? How
much does the city provide justification and motivation for the character
and his action? While the setting for superhero stories is always urban, the
relationship between hero and place differs among superheroes. The
emphasis on protecting the community and defending space is one way we
can read the relationship between the superhero and the city. In writing
about the relationship between New York City and Marvel Comics, Jason
Bainbridge argues that the key to understanding the difference between
Marvel and DC superheroes is to understand that “Marvel superheroes are
very much these ‘extraordinary’ figures ‘in an ordinary world’” as opposed
to DC superheroes—including Batman—who function more as archetypes
in “heightened and exaggerated” cities, kept removed from our own (Bain-
bridge 2010, 166). By examining how comics depict this relationship we can
discern how the long tradition of urban anxiety that gave rise to the super-
hero continues to shape the genre.
Context questions: How do the relationships within the city shape the
hero and generate narrative? To what extent are they used to create a story
world and how do these anxieties manifest in characters and actions within
the story? While characters such as Superman and Batman fight crime, over
time a distinction between “street-level” heroes and those facing cosmic
threats developed with Marvel Comics’ Silver Age renaissance. The central
tenet that New York “grounds the fantasy” in the real world is a guiding
principle as Stan Lee, the legendary editor for Marvel, explained. An effect-
ive hero needs to be in “the real world, or if the story is set in an imaginary
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world, I have to try to make that imaginary world as realistic-seeming as

possible” (Lee 2013). Joe Quesada, Marvel editor from 2000 to 2011,
explained, “We don’t have Metropolis. We don’t have Gotham City. It’s
important to us to keep the real world real” (Jennings 2003). This emphasis
on New York as a “character” in superhero stories calls attention to how
the city provides a vehicle to support the fantastic. Indeed, Lee explains that
it is the contrast between the hero and the normal world that creates the
engagement for the reader (Lee 2013). The stereotypical depiction of
Harlem as a site of urban crime in Marvel’s Luke Cage: Hero for Hire in the
early 1970s, or DC Comics’ decision to place Black Lightning, their first
black superhero, in Metropolis’ “Suicide Slum” relied on established aware-
ness about crime in black communities to create a justification and motiv-
ation for the heroes. The geography within the story relies on a context of
urban disorder to facilitate the story.
Artifact Selected for Analysis

Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline, written by Guy A. Sims and drawn by
Dawud Anyabwile (credited initially as David J.A. Sims) was one the first sig-
nificant successes of the independent black comic book market. The two
brothers began the project in 1989. The series starred a black hero named
Antonio Valor, who worked to combat social apathy in “Big City.” As Adilifu
Nama noted in Super Black: American Pop Culture and the Black Superhero,
the meaning of a black superhero goes beyond the formula of the genre
because black superheroes “symbolize American racial morality and ethics”
by providing visual signifiers of the social discourse around race (Nama 2011,
4). Thus, while the black hero’s goal may fit the form of the genre, the func-
tions, such as addressing crime, fighting corruption, and promoting commu-
nity betterment are hampered by the reality of black urban experience.
As part of the explosion of independent comics published in the late
1980s and early 1990s, the publication shares characteristics of the inde-
pendent comics that emerged in the 1970s. Charles Hatfield describes the
emergence of what he defined as “Alternative Comics” from “Underground
Comix” as the deliberate cultivation of a unique artistic practice, ambitious
alternative narratives, and rejection of mainstream dependency on formulas
(Hatfield 2005, 4–6). Hatfield argues that the original promise of U.S. comic
art lay with the “unique subculture” associated with Alternative Comics.
From this space came work that challenged “formal and cultural boundaries
of comic art.” Hatfield’s definition and analysis of Alternative Comics are
meaningful for his focus on a subculture that sought to seek readers beyond
the youth-oriented narratives that had defined comics since the 1950s.
With this shift came a more nuanced engagement with urban experience.
Channeling a popular culture increasingly shaped by an emphasis on multi-
cultural awareness, minority-owned comic publishers such as ANIA and
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CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY
Milestone Media place black creative voices in the position to produce stor-
ies that sought to address the black experience (“Featuring ‘Black American
Comic Artists’ focus; Grass Green Sketchbook” 1993). This distinction aptly
described Brotherman, one of a group of black-created comics that emerged
in the early 1990s. Brotherman was a standout success. First sold by the cre-
ators at black-oriented comics trade shows such as New York Black Expo,
the publication exploded in popularity, finding a black audience that felt
underserved by the major comic book publishers (Gayles 2009). The series
ran from 1992 to 1996 and sold 750,000 copies without support from
a major comic book publisher or access to the direct market distribution
system (Howard, Priest, and Gates 2017).
Sample Analysis
Sims, Guy A., and Dawud Anyabwile. 2009. Brotherman: Dictator of Discip-
line. Edited by Sascha Sims. Volume 1 edition. Big City Entertainment, Inc.
In “My Interest is in Your Account,” the first issue of Brotherman, a context
of urban anxiety is established in the introductory text:
Welcome to the last place on Earth … Overrun by the crime and

vermin determined to keep it that way … where the light of hope
has been snuffed out by the musty blanket of despair … where
every tomorrow is every yesterday’s nightmare from which you
cannot awake … welcome to Big City … abandon all hope … until
now … for upon the horizon stands the visage of Justice … one
who has seen the evil and accepted the challenge … the last place
on Earth has a new resident … Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline.
He’s here and … Everything’s gonna be alright.
(Sims and Anyabwile 2009)
Building on the established trope of urban distress associated with the super-
hero cities, panels in Brotherman quickly establish that “Big City, USA” is
a congested urban environment struggling with the consequences of systemic
failure. Like Gotham City for Batman, the distressed conditions in Big City
signal to the reader why the hero is needed. Moreover, like Gotham and
Batman, Big City offers a space for the creator’s imagination about urban prob-
lems to be manifest. Panels juxtapose a teeming cityscape with scenes of social,
political, and economic breakdown throughout the story to heighten the sense of
institutional failure. The creators use narration to embellish how the system does
not work; as one panel explains, “Big City Food Inspectors say that it is illegal to
sell milk over five weeks old. They’re lookin out for our better health, huh?”
(Sims and Anyabwile 2009). In Brotherman, the collective imagination about
a troubled urban landscape shapes the story.
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JULIAN C. CHAMBLISS
Figure 6.1 Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline # 1, p. 5, panel 1 (2008) © Guy A. Sims
Into this landscape enters Assistant District Attorney Antonio (Tony) Valor,
who will adopt this superhero persona in the course of the story, but is first
introduced standing outside the “Big City Courthouse” (Figure 6.1). The first
adventure in Brotherman #1 revolves around a mysterious bank robber called
the Seductress. The story serves to establish Valor as an altruistic hero who
seeks to challenge the apathy at the core of the systemic failure on display in the
city. The creators use the looming façade of the courthouse to establish his char-
acter’s mission and a broader debate about the “system” of justice. Thus, long-
running debates about crime, poverty, and ghettoization connected to the urban
experience are given form in “Big City.” As the conversation continues, Valor
explains to his colleague: “When you begin to look at yourself as part of the
solution, you join the ranks in the battle against the slime of society” (Sims and
Anyabwile 2009).
Such a pronouncement signals to the reader that the “system” will be a central
element examined in the series. While the justification that the legal system is
weak is traditionally used to frame vigilante narratives, this story also questions
the citizen’s apathy. Valor’s dedication to justice places him at odds with the
system that will not help people in Big City, but it also sets him apart from urban
residents that, through inaction, allow crime. As he opts to face the challenge
from the story’s villain, his decision to create a heroic persona is framed in rela-
tion to the city (Figure 6.2). As he looks out on the iconic skyline, he states, “Des-
tiny is born of one who secures a purpose” (Sims and Anyabwile 2009). Thus,
Brotherman’s origin is bound to the challenge of the city and its failed system. In
this way, Big City is a character, much the same as Marvel’s New York. The city’s
environment provides justification and inspiration for the hero’s actions.
While elements of the first issue correspond to classic superhero tropes
around crafting a secret identity and fighting crime, a distinct aesthetic
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CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY
Figure 6.2 Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline # 1, p. 14, panel 2, partial panel 1 (2008)
© Guy A. Sims
shaped by black urban culture informs the structure of Brotherman. The

extradiegetic element such as panel narration allows writer Guy A. Sims to
emphasize that “Big City, USA” is a culmination of narratives about the
failed “inner city” and the dangers found there. While on the surface this
mimics characters such as Batman, Valor/Brotherman does not have
resources, gadgets, or powers, merely a concern for the community and
a desire to fight the apathy that allows for the ineffective status quo. Big
City’s problems call attention to debates about the causes of urban disorder
and the role of culture (Gayles 2009).
These narrative points are heightened by the art of Dawud Anyabwile
(credited as David J.A. Sims). As an artist, Anyabwile described his art as
growing from hip-hop culture in Philadelphia. This culture, however, bor-
rowed heavily from the superhero forms. From the persona the rappers
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JULIAN C. CHAMBLISS
create to the lyrics steeped in tales from everyday life, hip-hop and comics
are connected. Darryl McDaniels, the DMC of Run–DMC, cites characters
such as Black Panther and Falcon as inspirations for his creativity and often
articulates his DMC persona as one half of a dual identity (Fields 2017).
The very first commercially successful rap record, “Rapper’s Delight” by the
Sugarhill Gang, name drops Lois Lane and Superman, starting a tradition of
comic-inspired lyrical acrobatics. Thus, the aesthetic of hip-hop signals not
only an urban experience, but also a superhero geography. Articulating an
urban experience and providing a critical perspective on the “socio-political
conditions” affecting the black community, the fusion of hip-hop aesthetic
into Brotherman does not distract from the superhero element, but serves
to highlight the similarity between the forms. (Forman 2011, 1–2).
With a core element of the culture tied to urban graffiti culture in
New York, the visual aesthetic in Brotherman also links to the recognizable
geography. Anyabwile’s art reflects an emerging hip-hop culture cognizant
of the perils facing the black community. Initially working as an airbrush
artist, he also cites African-American artists such as Ernie Barnes, whose
style of body elongation is on display throughout the comic, and Overton
Lloyd, who gained fame creating art for George Clinton’s Parliament Funka-
delic (Chambliss and Cullen 2016). Combining these black artistic influ-
ences allowed Anyabwile to create a vivid cast of characters. While
mainstream comics continue to reflect expectations defined by 1960s and
70s public debates, Brotherman and other black creator-created comics from
the 1990s provide a sense of authenticity.
While Brotherman’s characters, setting, and narrative resonated with
a mostly black reading public, the comic as a whole provided a window
on the urban experience that examined questions of cultural, political,
and economic development typical of public debate about urbanization in
Figure 6.3 Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline # 1, p. 15, panel 1 (2008) © Guy A. Sims
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CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY
the United States. In creating Brotherman, the authors leveraged the

assumptions about city life to provide justification and motivation for
their hero. Within the critical geography, the diegetic space provides an
example of the possibilities and limitation associated with urbanization.
The characters’ placement within the story world and the environment
they inhabit rely heavily on extradiegetic understanding of long-debated
concerns about inner-city decline. Indeed, “Big City, USA” is a suggestion
that the extremes of urbanism have been realized, and the consequences
for the residents are clear. The panels in Brotherman offer a cityscape
with abandoned buildings mixed in with billboards and commercial
extremes that signal to the audience they have entered a different world,
but with a hero that at once is unique, but fulfills the tropes of the genre
(Figure 6.3). Valor’s costumed persona is a simple coat and mask. He has
no superpower beyond his dedication to making a difference in the city.
The mission and place align as villains in the story never exceed the
bounds of the story world. Viewing Brotherman through a critical geog-
raphy framework that highlights the setting justifies the story world and
provides the creators with the opportunity to craft stories that act as
meditative vignettes to consider the challenges offered by the modern
city. In the process, they craft a genre story that corresponds to long-
established debates about the effect of urbanization on the American city
while acknowledging the tropes of superhero.
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Bainbridge, Jason. 2010. “‘I Am New York’ Spider-Man, New York City and the Marvel
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Dittmer, Jason, ed. 2014a. Comic Book Geographies. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
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7
UTOPIANISM
The Utopia Conundrum in Matt Hawkins and
Raffaele Ienco’s Symmetry
Graham J. Murphy
Introduction
The inspiration for this chapter is Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme
(1985–1986), a largely undervalued twelve-issue limited series published by
Marvel Comics during that watershed period in the eighties when superhero
narratives grew increasingly darker and more self-reflexive. In Squadron
Supreme, the Earth’s super-powered defenders are facing a crisis: after
having defeated an alien invasion, the Squadron’s Earth is on the verge of
socio-economic and ecological collapse. Power Princess (modeled after
Wonder Woman) suggests the Squadroners take a more active role in
repairing the world: “I could never make anyone—not even you—believe
Utopia was attainable. Maybe now in the wake of mass chaos, people will
want to believe me” (#1.25). Hyperion (modeled after Superman) shares this
vision and convinces the rest of the Squadron that “[w]e should actively
pursue solutions to all the world’s problems—abolish war and crime, elim-
inate poverty and hunger, establish equality among all peoples, clean up the
environment, cure disease and even cure death itself” (#1.27). A key dissent-
ing voice is Nighthawk (modeled after Batman), who cannot abide by his
teammate’s new direction: “How meaningful will a utopia be if it is a gift
and not something man has earned by his own labors? What if the people
will not accept this utopia you give them? Will you force them to take it?”
(#1.27). Overruled by the Squadron and its members’ embrace of the
Utopia Project, Nighthawk quits the Squadron and begins forming
a resistance group organized around stopping the Squadron. The final issue
culminates in an all-out battle between the Squadron and Nighthawk’s
forces, and at one point Nighthawk has the opportunity to lecture
a (temporarily) defeated Hyperion: “Your utopian system is a failure
because it requires beings as powerful and good as you to prevent its abuse.
Today’s utopia could be tomorrow’s totalitarian state” (#12.346). Although
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Nighthawk (and others) is killed in the melee, his logic proves victorious:
the Squadron realizes it must not continue forcing utopia upon the people
and, indeed, the violence and trampling of civil rights in the name of secur-
ity and good intentions force the Squadron to dismantle the Utopia Project
altogether.
It is this tension between Hyperion and Nighthawk that articulates the
internal tensions facing Utopianism and some of the central questions that
are raised when thinking or dreaming about a better future; namely, how
will an improved world be achieved and function? Who implements the
policies and procedures designed to usher forth a better future? Where does
individualism fit within the broader goal of the common wealth? Or what is
the cost of achieving the world of tomorrow (for better or worse)? These
questions—i.e., what I’ll call the utopia conundrum—sometimes fuel fic-
tional depictions of alternate futures, including such English-language comic
books as Judge Dredd (1977—), Watchmen (1986–1987), The Dark Knight
Returns (1986), V for Vendetta (1982–1985; 1988–1989), American Flagg!
(1983–1988), Irredeemable (2009–2012), Bitch Planet (2014—hiatus), Tokyo
Ghost (2015—hiatus), and such long-running series as X-Men, The Avengers,
and so forth. Comic books can therefore offer occasions for exploring the
utopia conundrum, even if such opportunities may be few and far between
and represent a relatively small corner of Utopian studies; nevertheless, as
comic books continue to gain increased critical traction, this art form can
prove fruitful for a broader understanding of the utopia conundrum.

Pre-eminent Utopia scholar Lyman Tower Sargent defines Utopianism as “the
dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people
arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society than
the one in which the dreamers live” (“Three” 3). Utopianism is therefore
a process of social dreaming that “focuses on everyday life as well as matters
concerned with economic, political, and social questions” (Sargent, Utopianism
5). In much the same fashion, Fátima Vieira writes, “[u]topists depart from the
observation of the society they live in, note down the aspects that need to be
changed and imagine a place where those problems have been solved” (8).
Utopianism is therefore a critical vehicle that can take many different shapes
and forms, including such intentional societies as communes and cooperative
communities, social theory or critical discourse, and literary utopias, arguably
the most well-known “face” of Utopianism (Sargent, “Three”).1
Most western readers are likely very familiar with the negative utopia, a.
k.a. dystopia, thanks in no small part to the consistent inclusion of Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953),
or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) on high school and
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“Best Of” reading lists. Sargent defines the negative utopia as a “non-existent
society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and
space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as consid-
erably worse than the society in which that reader lived” (“Utopian”). The
negative utopia is often viewed as the opposite to the positive utopia, a.k.a.
eutopia, a “non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally
located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader
to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived”
(Sargent, “Utopian”). Although it is tempting to see them as antinomies, the
eutopia and dystopia are more akin to a fluctuating continuum than diamet-
rically opposed terms, a point I’ll return to later.
A central assumption underlying popular (mis)understandings of Utopianism
is that the eutopia must refer to a perfect world, a perfection whose unobtainabil-
ity is often the grounds for rejecting Utopianism as fanciful wish-fulfillment.
Utopianism and literary utopias in general, however, are not about perfection.
Sargent has explored this common error of utopian perfection and has shown
that some of the earliest literary utopias, including Thomas More’s foundational
text Utopia (1516), depict positive utopias that are far from perfect (“A Note”).
In a similar fashion, Vieira is succinct: “the idea of utopia should not be con-
fused with the idea of perfection” (7); nevertheless, this equation—i.e., “utopia
= perfection”—is pervasive, a by-product of poor assumptions and innumer-
able (and insufferable) websites on the subject matter. For example, in her
New Yorker article “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction,” Jill Lepore writes of
President Barack Obama evoking a utopian sentiment in a January 2008
speech: “That was the lightning, the flash of hope, the promise of perfectibility.
The argument of dystopianism is that perfection comes at the cost of freedom.”
Lepore repeats the error when she later reports that Raphael Hythloday, the
protagonist of More’s Utopia, ventures to the isle of Utopia “where he found
a perfect republic.” The fictional Utopia in More’s treatise, however, is not
a perfect republic at all, but these are the types of comments about Utopianism
and perfection that malign the positive utopia by equating it to an impossible
perfectibility and subsequently position the dystopia as the seemingly inevitable
consequence of failing to achieve perfection.
The shortcomings of the “utopia = perfection” equation are particularly
notable in more recent incarnations of social dreaming. For example,
Utopia scholars have repeatedly shown Utopianism is much more compli-
cated than inaccurate binary configurations. As a result, we now speak of
the critical utopia, which is
a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally

located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous
reader to view as better than contemporary society but with difficult
problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve.
(Sargent, “Utopian”)
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It is the imperfect critical utopia that negates the darkness of the dys-
topia without nostalgically embracing the positive utopias of yesteryear;
instead, we find utopian societies in critical utopias keeping the flame of
Utopia alight by valuing hopeful futures without ignoring the difficulties of
achieving and sustaining social transformations, even at the risk of failure
or collapse. Nevertheless, the desire for a positive utopia, the desire for
a positive social transformation, continues to fuel these narratives. Similarly,
the critical dystopia is also a more recent development, a
non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally

located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous
reader to view as worse than contemporary society but that normally
includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dys-
topia can be overcome and replaced with a eutopia.
(Sargent, “Utopian”)
In these texts, hope emerges that the society can awaken from its social
nightmare and embrace a brighter future, perhaps even pushing the dys-
topia to collapse. Possibly the most popular examples of the critical dystopia
are Young Adult (YA) dystopias that typically feature teenaged protagonists
whose coming of age is enmeshed with a rebelliousness directed against
often authoritarian institutions and governments. Popular examples include
Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy [The Hunger Games (2008), Catch-
ing Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (2010)], Veronica Roth’s Divergent series
[Divergent (2011), Insurgent (2012), and Allegiant (2013)], Ambelin Kway-
mullina’s Tribe series [The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012), The Dis-
appearance of Ember Crow (2013), and The Foretelling of Georgie Spider
(2015)], Ally Condie’s Matched trilogy [Matched (2010), Crossed (2011), and
Reached (2012)], and Adam Rapp and Mike Cavallaro’s graphic novel Decel-
erate Blue (First Second, 2017), to name only a few of what is otherwise
a heavily populated YA dystopia market. In any event, both critical utopias
and critical dystopias are more nuanced, more challenging, and more pro-
vocative in their handlings of social dreaming than traditional eutopias and
dystopias and it is the critical utopia and critical dystopia that are largely
fueling our current social dreamings, even if the terminology isn’t as well
known to the general public.

While there are no definitive procedures or steps to follow when it comes to
exploring Utopianism in literary utopias—except, perhaps, abandoning the
“utopia = perfection” equation—there are some tactics that provide a useful
handle on the critical subject matter. A first step, perhaps the key step, when it
comes to a close reading of a text is to pay careful attention to the character arc
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of the protagonist(s) as they come to greater terms with the surrounding socio-
political world. For example, the character arc in the eutopia has been tied to
an external traveler typically arriving in the foreign society and being given
a tour of the eutopia by a native citizen. This traveler is our real-world proxy
and often carries or embodies our own socio-political assumptions and expect-
ations; the native citizen offers our proxy contrasting points of view on every-
thing from economic policies to familial arrangements, from gender relations
to food preparation. The traveler will often initially bristle at the eutopia’s
socio-political arrangements, but will typically end up a believer or convert by
the end of the tour, perhaps returning to the “real” world to proselytize on the
virtues and wonders of the eutopia. In the end, just as the traveler comes to
believe in eutopia and recognize the failings of home, so too does the author
implicitly expect the reader to accrue a similar degree of critical self-reflection
and awareness; as a result, the tour is a key vehicle for the author to unpack
the eutopia and its often significant social differences and, by extension,
advance the social critique(s) that underwrites the text in the first place.
As the dystopia came to prominence in the early twentieth century, the
narrative pattern of an external traveler on a tour of eutopia was revised
accordingly: our proxy was transformed from a tourist into a citizen living
in the nightmare society, eliminating the need for a tour guide. Therefore,
as we watch the protagonist awaken to the society’s horrifying conditions—
i.e., dehumanization, lack of free thought, profound censorship, etc.—their
internal and external struggles define their awakening and social growth
which, in turn, fuel the socio-political critique. This revised pattern of the
native citizen engaging in some fashion with the surrounding utopia is also
a mainstay of both critical utopias and critical dystopias, so character arc is
a vitally important tool to a better understanding of the social critique that
is the lifeblood of literary utopias.
While our focus is typically anchored to the protagonist(s), the importance of
broader social configurations cannot be understated. In other words, it is import-
ant to consider that simply because a utopia favors the common wealth at the
expense of individuality doesn’t by default turn it into a nightmare. Alternate
societies can successfully privilege the good of the common wealth over individ-
ual aspirations or goals, even celebrating the utopian citizen’s ability to put the
will of the people ahead of individual needs and desires. Granted, this is
a difficult position to reconcile: given the dominant influence of both the dys-
topia and critical dystopia in popular culture, it is common to equate the
common wealth to some Orwellian or Huxleyan vision of robotic monotony.
The audience can be forgiven for supporting the protagonist’s defiant struggle to
assert (typically) his individuality against the collectivity, even if that collectivity
may benefit the individual and the larger community. After all, ideal utopias
often resist an all-too-familiar global neoliberalism whose celebrating and
rewarding of individual wealth and personal growth at the expense of communal
prosperity are hallmarks of westernized nations. It is therefore not uncommon
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for an audience to have significant difficulties buying into the notion that the
common wealth in literary utopias can actually foster individual happiness and
social growth because accepting this notion means rejecting some (or all!) of
what capitalism values and rewards out here in our “real” world. In sum, a focus
on the common wealth, the de-emphasis on individualism, and depictions of
post-capitalist societies are often staples of both ideal and nightmare societies
and these staples can be used to show positive visions of alternative societies just
as readily as negative visions.
Finally, we must always avoid the inclination to jump to premature con-
clusions about the literary utopia and Utopianism in general. In this vein,
while character arc and social configurations are valuable keys when it comes
to critical reading, unearthing authorial intent can also be instrumental; after
all, while an audience isn’t beholden to what the author necessarily intends in
a literary work, Sargent does remark that it is vitally important to “try to
understand to the best of our ability both the work the author intended and
the work the reader creates” (“Three Faces,” 6). There are no easy or fool-
proof ways to determine authorial intent, but the internet makes it increas-
ingly easy to find interview material and other related documents that
provide insight into authorial intention that can help bolster our reading and
interpretation of literary utopias. In sum, social dreaming is complex: it fea-
tures complementary and conflicting drives, oppositional and appositional
desires, and a wealth of possibilities when it comes to alternative futures and
societies; therefore, dispelling the “utopia = perfection” equation, tracking
character arcs, paying close attention to social configurations, and conducting
research into the author and subject matter should go a long way to helping
avoid pre-determined sets of assumptions or hasty judgments that can overly
(or inaccurately) influence our critical reception of the content.

Comic books are problematic when it comes to Utopianism for a number of
reasons. Chief among them is the monthly or semi-monthly production
cycle, which means a successful comic must entice readers to come back for
each installment. As a result, depictions of nightmare societies typically hold
more narrative traction because it is comparatively easier to pile nightmare
upon nightmare to generate narrative tension—i.e., to keep selling issues—
than to build a successful franchise around ideal and fully realized alternative
societies. The prevalence of dystopian locales in comic books is evident in
such aforementioned titles as Judge Dredd, V for Vendetta, Bitch Planet, or
Tokyo Ghost, as well as in the exploits of Spider Jerusalem in Warren Ellis
and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan (DC, 1997–2002), Major Motoko
Kusanagi in Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell (1989–1990), and Alcide
Nikopol in Enki Bila’s The Nikopol Trilogy (La Foire aux immortels (1980); La
Femme piège (1986); Froid Équateur (1992)), to name only a handful of titles.
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GRAHAM J. MURPHY
The preponderance of comic book dystopias is particularly notable in

mainstream superhero comics where the super-powered protagonists often
travel into the future to find nightmares of unparalleled horrors, evidenced
most famously in Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin’s “Days
of Future Past” in X-Men #141–142 (Marvel, 1981) or more recently in
Brian Azzarello, Keith Giffen, Dan Jurgens, and Jeff Lemire’s The New 52:
Futures End (DC, 2014–2015), Mark Millar and Steve McNiven’s Old Man
Logan (Marvel, 2008–2009), or Ethan Sacks and Marcco Checchetto/Fran-
cesco Mobil’s Old Man Hawkeye (Marvel, 2018). In such cases, exploring
the utopia conundrum isn’t the driving force of the plot, which means the
depth of critical analysis into Utopianism is typically quite shallow as the
nightmarish future is often simply the background for the larger narrative,
not the point of the story itself. In fact, Matthew Wolf-Meyer argues main-
stream superhero narratives are largely antithetical to constructive explor-
ations of Utopianism. Writing specifically about the prototypical superhero,
Superman, Wolf-Meyer notes that the super-powered Kryptonian (and the
wealth of superheroes that followed him) is unable to “uphold the philo-
sophical responsibility that Friedrich Nietzsche thought so vital to the pos-
ition of the übermensch, whose purpose was to ‘go under,’ to bring
humanity the lessons learned, metaphysical or otherwise, as post-humans,
in an attempt to affect utopia” (Wolf-Meyer 501). American superheroes
may flirt with Utopianism, but any revolutionary energy or alternative
ideals these stories might embody are sacrificed by their creators because
such super-powered beings often act “against humanity, rather than for it,
retaining the hegemonic capitalism, rather than promoting utopia” (Wolf-
Meyer 501). There are, of course, exceptions, including Mark Gruenwald’s
Squadron Supreme, but superhero narratives overall are quite vacuous when
it comes to thinking through the complexities of Utopian social dreaming.

Matt Hawkins and Raffaele Ienco’s creator-owned Symmetry (Top Cow/
Image, 2015–2016) eschews the predilection for dystopias in its decidedly
non-superhero take on Utopianism. Matt Hawkins is a comics veteran
thanks to his work with Top Cow Productions/Image Comics; as a result,
he arguably has more latitude in his creator-owned work than writers’
output from such mainstream publishers as Marvel (Disney) and DC
(Warner Bros.) that are part of larger corporate empires. Ienco, meanwhile,
has been an industry mainstay for two decades. Matthew Box describes
Ienco’s artwork as resembling “that of an oil painter with a full grasp of
darkness and light, producing very bold, very supple, and incredibly realistic
characters and objects.” Although Box is reviewing Ienco’s Mechanism
(Image, 2016), the same assessment can be applied to Symmetry as the art-
work for both series is practically identical. Utopianism is also a central
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UTOPIANISM
focus for Symmetry, not merely background material. As Hawkins makes

clear, he has written “Dystopian science fiction (Aphrodite IX) and there is
SO much of it out there in Young Adult (YA) books and film adaptations
that I’ve gotten a bit sick of it” (#1, n.p.).2 This comment is from extra-
diegetic material Hawkins provides at the end of each issue (and collated at
the end of each of the two volumes). He calls this material “Sociology
Class” and it provides details into his approach to the topic, including
a series of websites to elaborate upon his musings on the subject matter.
This content gives readers added insight into authorial intent and eliminates
quite a bit of ambiguity; in other words, it is hard to disagree with Haw-
kins’s goals when he explicitly states them in the “Sociology Class” com-
mentary. Finally, Symmetry does have its weaknesses, including some
underdevelopment of this alternative society, chiefly a result of limiting the
narrative to four-issue arcs that easily accommodate bundling into trade
paperbacks; nevertheless, in spite of its flaws, the series remains a useful
exercise in how comic books can explicitly address the utopia conundrum.
Sample Analysis
Hawkins, Matt and Raffaele Ienco. Symmetry #1–#8. Los Angeles: Top Cow
Productions/Image Comics, 2015–2016.
Symmetry currently consists of eight issues divided into two narrative arcs
(Volume One and Volume Two), with a third arc promised should the first
two volumes sell enough units. Symmetry’s first four issues focus on the
characters Michael, Matthew, Maricela, and, to a lesser extent, Elder Sharon,
a representative of the Council of Elders, while the second volume, set
twenty years after the events of Volume One, narrows its focus to Julia, Mat-
thew and Maricela’s daughter, although secondary characters are awkwardly
introduced later. As befits a literary utopia, both volumes give a range of
details about this far-future society, known only as the Society. For example,
the Society emerged following a period of warfare and socio-economic
inequity, but war, violence, sickness, and starvation have all been eliminated
on a global scale. There is also a greater life expectancy and citizens volun-
tarily choose their own gender, which suggests gender equality has been
achieved, even if this aspect of the narrative is disappointingly underdevel-
oped. The proliferation of robot labor also means the Society is post-
capitalist with no discernible currency, no social class divisions, and no
exploitation of labor. Finally, the Responsive Artificial Intelligence Network
Archetypes (RAINA) is an implant providing every citizen access to the
System Optimizer for Longevity (SOL), an elaborate online network that
permeates the entirety of the Society. It is RAINA that ensures connectivity
to SOL and is part of the broader enterprise that allows the Society to func-
tion for the betterment of all its citizens.
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GRAHAM J. MURPHY
Symmetry, however, doesn’t open with a celebration of the Society;

instead, it begins with the death of Matthew, Michael’s brother, who is acci-
dentally chased off a roof by robot Pacifiers. With his dying breath, Mat-
thew asks of a trio of Pacifiers, “Why … why were we never told the
truth?” (#1, n.p.). Matthew’s death and his final utterance are the result of
events that started three days earlier. Michael and Matthew had joined
other travelers on a floating luxury liner headed to Wolf Creek mountain
resort when a solar flare triggered an electromagnetic pulse that crashed the
liner. The survivors quickly discovered they were cut off from RAINA:
“Imagine never having to do anything for yourself,” Michael explains.
“Everything being provided for you without any effort of your own. You
felt safe, with a sense of belonging to the community through RAINA. And
then suddenly it was gone” (#2, n.p.). At the same time, Michael meets
Maricela, the Latina daughter of a political diplomat, and they are immedi-
ately smitten with one another. Although Michael, Maricela, Matthew, and
Elder Sharon are rescued only a few days after everyone else, their return to
the Society is cold comfort: the Council of Elders decided to permanently
quarantine all survivors in a “Containment Returnee Center” (#3, n.p.) lest
their short-lived offline experiences corrupt the Society as a whole. Fearing
what it means to live without RAINA, Elder Sharon tries to poison Michael
and Maricela in a “mercy killing” because she believes “[i]t’s a kindness. All
the others affected are being sent apart. Separation is worse than death” (#4,
n.p.). Matthew’s death at the start of the issue, having fallen from the roof-
top with Pacifiers in hot pursuit, was a foregone conclusion since he had
already been poisoned, but his final distraction of the Pacifiers helps
Michael and Maricela escape the quarantine.
Interspersed in this first narrative arc are also scenes that depict the sur-
vivors’ general condition three, four, and five years after the Wolf Creek
incident and the subsequent quarantine: the survivors have split into fac-
tions and in some cases fomented rebellion against the Council of Elders.
The survivors are not only fighting against the Pacifiers but also against
themselves in civil conflict, and both Michael and Maricela emerge as dom-
inant voices for the rebellion, which sets up the narrative conditions for
the second arc’s depiction of Julia’s problematic interactions with the
Society.
Julia has no RAINA and has lived off-the-grid on a tropical island with
a dog, some robots, and a reprogrammed Pacifier named RAM to act as
parent, teacher, and friend. Unfortunately, she must flee her tropical sanctu-
ary and visit the complex Archives in each of the Society’s four nations to
learn about the Society’s secret history, thereby giving Hawkins and Ienco
the opportunity to flesh out more details about their future utopia. Julia’s
tour of the four nations’ respective Archives prompts resistance from each
nation, including prejudicial attitudes and assassination attempts. Neverthe-
less, every obstacle Julia faces, coupled with the knowledge she gains, are all
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for the greater good: SOL reveals it needs Julia to help alter humanity’s evo-
lution beyond the static Society and usher forth an even brighter future, all
as part of its programming to service humanity’s needs. Although Julia
cannot join this evolving Society, the second arc ends on a hopeful note as
a new Society is poised to emerge and SOL begins to reveal to Julia the
entire secret history of the Society, presumably the content for an as-yet-
unreleased third arc.
Symmetry’s narrative arc highlights the utopian conundrum: the elimin-
ation of warfare, starvation and social inequities show the Society has clear
benefits; yet, Michael learns that everyone in the Society is being drugged in
some fashion to keep them happy and amenable. This is an appalling reve-
lation and one we’d expect to find in an oppressive government trying to
keep its citizens complacent. Similarly, while the Council of Elders truly
believes quarantining the Wolf Creek survivors is for both their own protec-
tion and the safety of the Society, the Council also begins discussing forced
chemical sterilization so the survivors won’t breed RAINA-less children.
Finally, the Society’s reliance upon symmetry is embodied by four social pil-
lars—Community, Peace, Harmony, Equality—achieved at the cost of diver-
sity: the global population is evenly divided into four ethnic factions
(White, Latin, Africa, and Asia) that are largely separated from one another.
This is one of the key reasons Michael, Maricela, and, later, Julia are pur-
sued by the Elders of Society of all four nations: they embody ethnic diver-
sity in a society (or Society) that values ethnic homogeneity as a synonym
for symmetry.
The Society is clearly designed around racial purity, segregation, and
compliance, which are largely unsavory notions to most readers, particularly
when it comes to the Society’s antiquated notions of blood and soil that
echo today’s alt-right, white nationalism, and recent resurgences of popu-
lism across the globe. At the same time, this four-faction system of racial
separation has produced thousands of years of peace and is not to be too
easily discarded, as evident in the first arc’s narrative voice. Michael is nar-
rating the events of the first four issues after they have already occurred.
The first four issues are therefore a series of interconnected flashbacks that
Michael is recording for Julia, beginning with the solar flare and spanning
the subsequent five years. Interestingly, Michael characterizes to Julia the
post-flare years as “[a] dark age [that] was about to return” (#1, n.p.). This
dark age was therefore not before the solar flare, when the utopia was func-
tioning optimally; the dark age is after the solar flare when Michael and
others are freed from RAINA and disconnected from SOL and the Society.
If the Society is supposed to be a nightmarish society, it would be more
logical for Michael to have described the five-year period after the solar
flare as some kind of awakening or blossoming of new awareness, not
a dark age.
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GRAHAM J. MURPHY
Even with the benefit of hindsight and having lived through five years of
events, Michael still laments to Julia, “I wish I could make everything the
way it used to be. It was better. We lived long lives of leisure and happi-
ness” (#1, n.p.). Granted, Michael acknowledges when speaking of Maricela
that in the Society “love and independence are incompatible to that world.
Once tasted they’re impossible to repress” (#1, n.p.); at the same time, he
admits to Julia that “I don’t know if I would have made the same choices if
I knew what I know now” (#4, n.p.). The Society therefore cannot be
a complete nightmare, otherwise Michael would surely have expressed his
fervent support for throwing off the yoke of oppression; instead, despite
becoming a leader in the rebellion, Michael still begrudgingly admits to
positive features of the Society.
The utopian conundrum that is the central focus of Symmetry’s plot is
visually reinforced by Raffaele Ienco’s illustrations. For example, Ienco suf-
fuses the comic book with bright primary colors and panels that show no
evidence of destitution or decay in the cities, which all lend credence to the
Society as a positive utopia. The panel borders and gutter work reinforce an
openness in the Society rather than enclosed, bordered, or claustrophobic
panels that might typically accompany a negative utopia. Splash pages and
double-page spreads—i.e., landscape layouts—also provide beautiful visuals
of each of the four nations. For example, a large, ivy-encrusted pyramid
(albeit fortified by weaponry) dominates Julia’s (and our) field of vision in
her first exposure to the Africa nation’s capital in Zanzibar (#6, n.p.); simi-
larly, white birds are prominently flying through the sky in the landscape
layout depicting the Asia capital in Shanghai (#5, n.p.; Figure 7.1). The
Latin capital in Orlando is suffused with ornately domed buildings with red-
dish-copper spires, while pink petals are blowing through the greenery and
sailboats in the background float on blue ocean water (#7, n.p.; Figure 7.2);
in a comparative fashion, trees are growing near the buildings and green
leaves are blowing through the landscape layout depicting the White capital
of Los Angeles. The pages therefore depict the Society with seemingly
never-ending vistas of beautiful architecture, clean skies and water, and nat-
ural greenery amidst technological advances that collectively reinforce the
positivity and grandeur of this global utopia.
Interestingly, the White capital of Los Angeles is the only one illustrated
in the evening, as if Ienco is paralleling this darker setting with the more
openly hostile response by the White Council of Elders to Julia’s arrival.
Tellingly, the dominance of neon and the cityscape evokes a coldness to Los
Angeles that contrasts with the obvious warmth of Julia’s other capital
visits, even if these visits have stoked resentment and triggered violent
responses. It is only upon Julia’s arrival at the warmthless White capital
(where she is isolated from all outside contact) that the details she has been
assembling from the other Archives finally begin to click into place. The
White Council of Elders destroys its Archive and tries to kill Julia and her
98
Figure 7.1 The Asia capital in Shanghai. Symmetry #5 (2016) Matt Hawkins and Raf-
faele Ienco. © Courtesy of Top Cow Productions, Inc
Figure 7.2 The Latin capital in Orlando. Symmetry #7 (2016) Matt Hawkins and Raf-
faele Ienco. © Courtesy of Top Cow Productions, Inc
GRAHAM J. MURPHY
compatriots from the other nations with an age-old rationalization: “The

needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and we did nothing to
enrich ourselves” (#8, n.p.). And, of course, the civil violence and bloodshed
that accompany the Society are similarly depicted using splash pages and
landscape layouts: the crash of the luxury liner; a burnt Maricela struggling
to live; civil unrest and rebellion, etc. These violence-imbued images stand
in apposition to the images of utopian beauty; in other words, Ienco’s
splash pages and landscape layouts position the grandeurs of the utopian
Society alongside the bloody cost(s) of utopia, the promise of a bright
future fueled by the secrecy, bloodshed, and violence that underpin the uto-
pian Society.
Symmetry also shies away from the cliché of robotic maleficence, or the
tired story of an Artificial Intelligence threating to wipe out humanity. Visu-
ally, SOL, with its glowing green eyes and seemingly menacing tentacles, is
a monolithic device that towers over its human operators, evoking
a mechanical threat to humanity that is common to science fiction narra-
tives. In addition, the Pacifiers are monotonic robots adorned in impeccable
suits and blue faceplates, linking this Society to an emotionless bureaucracy
that is mirrored in the cold rationalizations of an Elder Council willing to
engage in incarceration, sterilization, and murder, all for the greater good.
What becomes clear is that despite the temptation to view SOL and the
Pacifiers as antagonistic forces, this techno-utopia’s greatest threat is the
people who are running the system: as Hawkins writes in “Sociology Class,”
“[t]he idea with SOL and our A.I. is that it has humanity’s best interests at
heart, but humans screw everything up. We’re the problem” (#6, n.p.).
While SOL may be a monolithic computer system that is the lifeblood of
the Society, in the end it must follow human commands and its manipula-
tions of socio-political conditions and individuals are all ultimately designed
to fulfill its programming to better the human condition. By the end of
Volume Two, the Society has not been overthrown and replaced with some
robot-driven dystopia or collapsed under the weight of its internal conflicts;
instead, Julia has helped the Society to evolve and embrace diversity with
the promise of a better life on Earth. At the same time, the utopian funda-
mentals of the evolving Society, including the four-faction system, remain
largely unchanged and are the foundation for an even more ideal future
(barring any course corrections in a possible third volume).
Symmetry provides its readers with the utopia conundrum writ large,
which Hawkins clearly articulates in the “Sociology Class” material when he
asks his readers, “Would you be willing to sacrifice what makes you ‘you,’
in order to make a world free of hunger, sickness, violence and poverty?”
(#1, n.p.). The series therefore defies easy encapsulation and shows the limi-
tations, if not uselessness, of thinking about Utopianism in binary terms, or
eutopia vs. dystopia. As a result, how to classify Symmetry—is it a critical
utopia? is it a critical dystopia? is it something else?—proves an ongoing
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source of energetic debate for my students and should remain so for readers
(although I strongly contend it is a critical utopia). In the end, however,
coming up with a firm designation for Symmetry misses the broader point:
Symmetry shows Utopianism is not a noun, but a verb. It is an act of social
dreaming (verb), not a social dream (noun). Or, as Fátima Vieira puts it,
Utopianism and utopias are “thus to be seen as a strategy. By imagining
another reality, in a virtual present or in a hypothetical future, utopia is set
as a strategy for the questioning of reality and of the present” (23). Utopian-
ism is therefore not about reaching or fortifying the destination, something
the Elder of Councils of all four nations in Symmetry fail to realize; instead,
as SOL realizes and, in turn, tries to effect through its subtle manipulations
of Michael, Maricela, and Julia, Utopianism is about perpetually progressing
or moving towards utopia, always preferring the symmetry of movement
over the stagnation of stillness.
Notes
1 For a full exploration, see Sargent’s “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.”
2 In order to accommodate an absence of page numbers in either Symmetry’s indi-
vidual issues or the collected volumes, the citation can only include the issue/
chapter number and the “no page” (n.p.) designation.
Box, Matthew. “Mechanism #1 —‘A.I. Think, Therefore A.I. Am’; Analysing Raffaele
Ienco’s New Image Series.” Broken Frontier. 16 August, 2017. Accessed 26 Novem-
ber 2018. www.brokenfrontier.com/mechanism-raffaele-ienco-image-comics/
Gruenwald, Mark, John Buscema, Bob Hall, Paul Ryan, and Paul Neary. Squadron
Supreme. 1985–1986. Marvel Comics, 2003.
Hawkins, Matt and Raffaele Ienco. Symmetry #1–#8. Los Angeles: Top Cow Produc-
tions/Image Comics, 2015–2016.
Lepore, Jill. “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction.” The New Yorker. 5 and 12 June,
2017. Accessed 20 August 2018. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/
a-golden-age-for-dystopian-fiction
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination.
London and New York: Methuen, 1986.
Murphy, Graham J. “Gotham (K)Nights: Utopianism, American Mythology, and
Frank Miller’s Bat(-topia).” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 4.2 (Winter
2008). www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/
———. “‘On a More Meaningful Scale’: Marketing Utopia in Watchmen.” Journal of
the Fantastic in the Arts 28.1 (2017): 70–85.
Ndalianis, Angela. “Comic Book Superheroes: An Introduction.” The Contemporary
Comic Book Superhero., edited by Angela Ndalianis. New York: Routledge, 2009, 3–15.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. “A Note on the Other Side of Human Nature in the Utopian
Novel.” Political Theory 3.1 (February 1975): 88–97.
———. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1–37.
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———. Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.

———. “Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography from 1516 to the
Present.” Penn State Libraries Open Publishing. n.d. Accessed 04 August 2018.
https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/home
Vieira, Fátima. “The concept of utopia.” The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Litera-
ture. Ed. Gregory Clayes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010, 3–27.
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. “The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero
Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference.” Journal of Popular Culture
36.3 (January 2003): 497–517.
Yockey, Matt. “Somewhere in Time: Utopia and the Return of Superman.” The Velvet
Light Trap 61 (2008): 26–37. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vlt.2008.0007
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Part II
EXPRESSION
8
N E W CR I T I C I S M
Ordered Disorder in Jaime Hernandez’
“Flies on the Ceiling”
Rocco Versaci
Introduction
An inherent irony awaits any movement that features the word “new” in its
name. The prefix suggests that the movement is fresh and unique, but the
irony is that freshness has an expiration date. Such has been the fate of
New Criticism, which is generally regarded with quaintness by contempor-
ary literary scholars. Nevertheless, the related interpretive approaches that
were collectively referred to as New Criticism were “the dominant form [of
literary criticism] from the late 1930s until about 1970” (Barnet 1996, 122)
and had a lasting impact on literary study in two major ways. First, during
their nearly half-century heyday, New Criticism and its proponents essen-
tially created the literary canon—those works deemed to be “exemplary”
and therefore most worthy of study in classrooms of all levels. And second,
arriving with these works were the New Critical methods by which to study
them, chief among them being “close reading” or explication de texte. The
New Critics read works closely by paying particular attention to certain
elements—discussed below—and this methodology largely framed how lit-
erature was understood and taught by generations of students, including
those who would become literature professors themselves.
The roots of New Criticism emerged as early as the 1920s, but the move-
ment itself was not given a name until 1941, when one of its most promin-
ent practitioners—John Crowe Ransom—published The New Criticism. This
book, along with Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn (1947) and the
work of various scholars that appeared in The Southern Review, The Kenyon
Review, and The Sewanee Review are among the key works of New Criti-
cism. Some of these scholars include I.A. Richards, Allen Tate, and Robert
Penn Warren, who co-authored with Brooks the popular textbook, Under-
standing Poetry.
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ROCCO VERSACI
New Criticism is not without its faults, the most significant relating to its
impact on the canon and best articulated by Paul Lauter, who contends that
the movement “represented an elitist … mode of critical dissection and
worked with a narrow set of texts amenable to its analytic methods,” which
meant that meaningful canonical debate “receded ever further toward the
margins” (Lauter 1991, 137). Despite this and despite the fact that New
Criticism per se is not typically taught in literature classes today, its legacy
is that its basic method of close reading continues to be important to stu-
dents and scholars because it forms the first step of most analytical
methods.

Although the New Critics were “far from unified” (Wellek 1978, 613), they
nevertheless shared key assumptions. First, the “New” in New Criticism sig-
naled its break from previous methods of literary analysis, most notably histor-
ical criticism (which examined literary works in their cultural contexts) and
biographical criticism (which examined literary works in the context of their
author’s life and other writings). In the estimation of Brooks—the movement’s
de facto spokesperson (Brooks 1979, 592)—analyzing a literary work in relation
to larger contexts denies the “essential nature of poetry” and leads to a grim
reduction whereby “the poetry of the past becomes significant merely as cul-
tural anthropology, and the poetry of the present, merely as a political, or
religious, or moral instrument” (Brooks 1947, x–xi). Thus, a key assumption
of New Criticism is that “a work of literature is complex, unified, and
free-standing” (Barnet 1996, 121). This last descriptor—“free-standing”—
is perhaps the defining feature of New Criticism, whose practitioners focus
exclusively on the work itself. It should also be noted here that while
Brooks and many other New Critics focused their analyses on poetry,
they used that word as synonymous with “work of art” when speaking of
criticism generally (Bressler 2007, 59).
Two other important assumptions are expressed by Brooks when he
writes, “in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated”
(Brooks 1951, 72). First, the critic’s role is not simply—or even primarily—
to uncover a work’s “meaning,” but to focus on how that meaning (content)
is fused to presentation (form). The word “successful” reveals a second
assumption: some works are simply better than others, and one goal of the
critic is to identify and celebrate those superior examples. While many
methods of literary analysis make judgments about the merit of a text, this
objective is explicit for New Critics.
But what makes an artistic work “successful”? For one thing, all of its
parts are interrelated and function together to support the “whole” (Brooks
1951, 72). For another, it “contains oppositions, ambiguities, ironies, [and]
tensions” (Lynn 2001, 14) which then must be resolved (Brooks 1947, 207).
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It becomes the responsibility of the critic to “unravel the various apparent

conflicts and tensions within each poem and ultimately to show that the
poem has organic unity” (Bressler 2007, 63). The title of Brooks’ The Well
Wrought Urn—a reference to Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” one of
Brooks’ favorite works—is, in fact, his metaphor for a successful poem:
a supremely crafted, self-contained art object.

One reason the New Critics chose poetry was that this form provides
a generally smaller “canvas” that allows sustained, precise attention to con-
tent, form, and the complex relationship between them. For at least two
main reasons, therefore, comics are ideal artifacts on which to practice New
Critical methods. First, comics’ visual elements invite readers to read
closely; one must engage with the complicated interplay of images within
a panel, panels within a page, and pages within the entire story. Second,
this blending of word and images makes manifest the inseparability of form
and content that the New Critics championed. In his book Adult Comics,
Roger Sabin writes that a comic “does not ‘happen’ in the words, or the
pictures, but somewhere in-between, in what is sometimes known as ‘the
marriage of text and image’” (Sabin 1993, 9). This conception that comics
operate through a complicated interdependence of word and image is
echoed by many comics scholars, most notably Scott McCloud in Under-
standing Comics (1993) and Charles Hatfield in Alternative Comics: An
Emerging Literature (2005). Virtually any work in this medium would be an
appropriate, if not ideal, object on which to perform a New Critical reading,
though its techniques would work best on smaller pieces, such as short stor-
ies (as opposed to longer graphic novels), for much the same reason that
many New Critics focused on poetry.

The New Critic’s practice of close reading demands that the first steps are
to read and reread the comic thoroughly to identify its various elements
and exhaustively list them. Close reading is a messy process, and before the
various elements can be assimilated into a coherent interpretation, it is
necessary to first see what is there and remember that not everything will
factor into a final interpretation.
One important element is the comic’s text, which must be examined
for all of the features that interested the New Critics: meanings and con-
notations; symbols, imagery, idioms and/or figures of speech; tone; irony,
and ambiguity; narrative point of view and voice. In a comic, additional
questions apply. Specifically, how is language presented (i.e., narration,
dialogue, thoughts, sound effects, details in the panels’ compositions) and
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what are the effects thus created? Do any of the words take on pro-
nounced visual characteristics (e.g., drawing a word like “SWOOSH” in
letters that sweep across a panel to mimic an object or person’s
movement)?
These questions form a segue to consideration of the visuals in general.
Is the comic in black and white or color? If black and white, how is it
shaded? If color, what is the palette? What is the style of the artwork? Help-
ful here is the aesthetic representational strategy outlined by McCloud, in
which he posits all comic art as falling somewhere within a triangle whose
three points are “realistic,” “iconic,” and “abstraction” (McCloud 1993,
52–53). Are there recurring visual images, motifs, and/or patterns?
What is the comic’s visual structure? This question must be broken
down further. What is the nature of the panels (e.g., number of panels per
page, shapes used, patterns of usage, etc.)? What are those panels’ significant
compositional details and how are they arranged? What are the visual per-
spectives/points of view in the panels? How do the panels work together to
form a page layout? What kinds of transitions are used between panels?
How do these transitions manipulate time and space? What is shown, what
is not shown, and what are the effects of each? Continuing with the issue of
time, how does the story present its chronology? Is it in sequence? Is the
sequence tight or loose (i.e., large jumps in time)? Is the chronology frag-
mented (e.g., flashbacks, multiple timelines)? If fragmented, how many
timelines are there and how are they coordinated?
From a New Critical perspective, these observations become the raw
material with which to answer the main questions that determine the “suc-
cess” of a given art object: Do all of the “parts” support the “whole”? What
tensions are set in motion and how are they resolved?

The story we will analyze is Jaime Hernandez’ “Flies on the Ceiling,” from
the long-running series Love and Rockets (Fantagraphics, 1982–present),
a comic that features the work of brothers Jaime, Gilbert, and (less fre-
quently) Mario Hernandez. “Flies” focuses on Isabel (“Izzy”), a woman who,
at the story’s beginning, is haunted by images from her past of divorce,
abortion, and attempted suicide—all events that have estranged her from
her family, and in particular her father. She travels to Mexico, where she is
approached by an unnamed man to help him care for his young son, Beto,
and she soon becomes integrated into their family. Before long, she has
various encounters with a figure we are meant to understand is Satan, who
assumes various forms and guises. What is never made clear, however, is
whether he actually haunts Izzy or if she imagines him. She leaves the man
and Beto but continues to be plagued by this demonic figure. After a period
of self-imposed isolation, Izzy returns to the two and has one final
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encounter with Satan before leaving for good. There is certainly much more
to the larger context of this story, its main character, and their talented cre-
ator, but in keeping with the New Critical focus on the work itself, the
above summary will have to suffice.
One caveat here: this particular comic is especially dense and layered, so
what I offer here is a New Critical reading of the comic, despite the fact
that New Critics often felt they delivered the reading of whatever they hap-
pened to be analyzing.
Sample Analysis
Hernandez, Jaime. “Flies on the Ceiling.” Flies on the Ceiling: Volume 9 of
the Complete Love & Rockets, Los Bros Hernandez, Seattle, Fantagraphics
Books, Inc., 1991, pp. 1–15.
Close reading reveals much about this particular story; first and foremost is
that the narrative has a distinct pattern. Although not delineated into dis-
crete parts—as stanzas in a poem, for example—the story nevertheless has
distinguishable “sections,” where Izzy moves between periods of stability
and turmoil. The first two pages constitute an initial section, as they set in
motion various tensions that recur throughout the story. The second section
consists of pages 3 through 5, where Izzy travels to Mexico, meets the man
and Beto, and, after some initial resistance, joins them to form an ersatz
family. The third section consists of pages 6 and 7, where Izzy has her first
encounters with Satan in the form of, respectively, an old woman and
a man in black. The fourth section consists of pages 8 through the top row
of page 12, where Izzy has fled her new family and, in her isolation, has
ongoing encounters with Satan that culminate in a dream sequence where
she gives birth to monsters. The fifth and final section consists of the
remainder of page 12 through page 15, where Izzy returns to the man and
Beto after some time passes, finds a brief and uneasy peace, encounters
Satan again to learn that her father has died, and then leaves for good.
Also apparent is that this narrative develops primarily through images;
nearly two thirds of the comic’s panels contain no text at all. The text that does
appear is mainly dialogue within word balloons, the exceptions being a handful
of panels that contain text in background details (pages 1, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13);
a sound effect (page 10); a brief letter that Izzy writes to her mother (page 9);
the story’s title (page 2); and the final panel’s “the end” (page 15).
As for the visuals, there is quite a bit to notice, starting with the artistic
style. The comic is in black and white with very little gray shading; instead,
the images have a chiaroscuro effect that creates sharp visual contrast
between light and dark. Despite this impressionistic choice, the overall style
tends toward realism, though some “cartoony” elements such as sweat
drops and “anger steam” appear at times of heightened emotion. The one
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noticeable break from this aesthetic is a single panel depicting a hyper-

realistic portion of a demon’s face (page 11).
But the comic’s most striking visual element is its structure. Every page,
with the exception of the splash page, is a grid of nine panels of equal size
and shape. Also noteworthy is that within the individual panels of these
grids is a great deal of variety. In terms of point of view, most of the panels
present a third-person perspective by showing Izzy speaking and interacting
with others while some present a first-person perspective by showing Izzy’s
perceptions and memories as if through her eyes or consciousness. In both
perspectives, however, the angles of sight are quite varied; one panel might
feature—to borrow film terms—an extreme close-up, such as a tearful Izzy
in profile (page 1), while another might feature an extreme long shot, such
as Izzy walking up a hill (page 8). The panel compositions themselves are
also varied in terms of details; some panels are crowded with details while
others are stark. Panel-to-panel transitions are similarly varied. While many
sequences are fluid and use clear visual cues that dictate the flow of action
or the passage of time, others break from an ordered pattern and create
“disruptions,” most of which render the narrative more disorienting and
impressionistic than sequentially coherent (pages 1–2, 7, 10, 11–12, 14).
Taking all of this into consideration reveals a very interesting element of
this comic—while its panel layouts are rigidly organized, its panel compos-
itions vary greatly along several lines.
There are also several recurring visual motifs: images of family, and espe-
cially motherhood (pages 1, 4–6, 11–13, 15); fathers (Izzy’s on pages 1, 9,
15, and Beto’s throughout, but with a visually obscured face on pages 3–6);
crucifixes and other Catholic symbology (pages 4–5, 8–9, 11–13, 15); and
Satan, whose “appearances” are multiform: a grotesque figure with phallic
protrusions (page 2), an old woman holding a chicken (pages 6, 13), a silent
man in black (page 7), a voice emanating from a crack in the wall (pages
8–9), a lucha libre wrestler in a devil’s costume (page 9), a demon face
(page 11), and a young woman dancing at a street fiesta (pages 14–15).
A quick cross-referencing of the page numbers listed above establishes that
several of these motifs appear in the same places throughout the story, sug-
gesting correlation.
This list of observations can now be shaped into a New Critical analysis
to see if “Flies on the Ceiling” is a “successful” art object by achieving unity
in presenting, developing, and resolving its central tension. First, obviously,
is to establish that central tension—no small feat, for the tensions in “Flies
on the Ceiling” are legion; in fact, the story presents itself almost completely
in terms of conflict: Izzy versus her father; Izzy versus the man and Beto;
Izzy versus Satan; and Izzy versus herself. These concrete conflicts suggest
larger, abstract conflicts: past versus present, isolation versus community,
and reality versus imagination/delusion. The central tension should encom-
pass these and also—if the work is unified—be reflected in the form. And in
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fact this is the case: tension exists between white and dark space in the art,
in the story’s back-and-forth narrative arc, and—most significantly—in its
ordered layout of disordered panels. My choice of words in this last
example is deliberate, for in them lies what I argue is the comic’s central
tension: order versus disorder, which is apparent from the very beginning
of the story.
The opening two pages may, on an initial reading, appear chaotic, but in
actuality they establish both the narrative pattern by which the central ten-
sion will play out and present an aesthetic that embodies that tension. I’ll
begin with that aesthetic, or the story’s form. On page 1 (Figure 8.1) the
first panel depicts a house precariously balanced on the edge of a hill and
orients the reader to a particular place. That order evaporates as the
remaining eight panels alternate between contextless images. Some of these
images—a broken wedding photo, the exterior of a Planned Parenthood
clinic, a family argument, bandaged wrists—seem grounded in times and
places different from the images of Izzy at her typewriter, but even these
latter images lack coherence: the visual perspective shifts radically from
a side view, to a front view, to a close up of her hands, to an extreme close-
up of her tearful face. All of the panels, in fact, deliver a radical mix of per-
spectives—not only in the angles of sight, but also between first person and
third person. The details in panels 3, 5, and 6 (numbering the panels left to
right and top to bottom) appear to come through Izzy’s eyes, while the
remaining panels are presented “outside” of Izzy’s eyes. A careful rereading
reveals that these images depict tension between the character’s present
(attempting to write) and her past (various conflict-laden incidents), but the
uniformity of panel size, shape, layout, and style presents everything, visu-
ally, at the same level of reality, so the time shifts are not apparent. By pre-
senting wide variations in time, space, and perspective in a consistently
structured style, page one establishes an aesthetic of “ordered disorder.” So
“ordered” is this presentation, in fact, that the page’s layout presents
a subtle reinforcement of Izzy’s struggles; the images from her past create
an “X” pattern over the entire page, suggesting—through the form—that the
conflicts from her past negate her stability in the present. The next page—a
splash (one large, single panel)—embodies the central tension as well. The
image, mostly black, contains a side view of Izzy along with a side view of
a horned individual with a phallus and with two more phallic objects pro-
truding from his chest. Here, in terms of the drawing style, tension exists
between the “order” of a clearly-lined Izzy and the “disorder” of the min-
imal, gestalt-like rendering of Satan.
These opening pages also present the tension between order and disorder
in the narrative. It is clear that Izzy’s apparent anguish stems from specific
incidents in her past—the broken wedding photo represents her divorce; the
conservative protesters and Planned Parenthood clinic represent her abor-
tion; and the bandaged wrists represent her attempted suicide. Izzy’s guilt
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Figure 8.1 The story’s very first page, a largely wordless and initially disorienting entry
into the narrative that juggles multiple timelines and establishes several ten-
sions. “Flies on the Ceiling,” Love and Rockets Book 9, p. 1 (1991) Jaime
Hernandez © Fantagraphics Books, Inc
here and as subsequently developed is clearly rooted in her particular faith

(or lack thereof); even a lapsed Catholic like myself can remember that
divorce, abortion, and suicide are taboo in the eyes of the Church. In
response to Izzy’s guilt as presented on this first page, the second page
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NEW CRITICISM
delivers a kind of “answer” to it and establishes a narrative pattern: immedi-

ately following images of her guilt, Satan “appears.”
This pattern emerges throughout the story, where images of family and
motherhood are often paired with images of crucifixes, and these are fol-
lowed by Izzy’s Satanic encounters. In the penultimate panel on page 4, for
example, we see Izzy, the man, and Beto seated around the dinner table as
the man proclaims, “Now we’re more like a family, eh?” The very next
panel is an image of separation and guilt: in the foreground, the man
smokes, while in the background and behind a window, Izzy slumps in sil-
houette beneath a crucifix (page 4). On the following page, Beto and Izzy
hold hands in the marketplace, and Beto asks her if she is going to stay
with them longer, to which she replies, “I think so.” Again, visible above
her head is a crucifix atop a church (page 5). In the next panel, she has her
first encounter with Satan—the old woman with the chicken—who tells her,
“I know who you are” (page 6). Later on that same page, Beto tells his
friend, “Isabel is going to be my mother soon,” and on the following page,
Izzy has her second encounter with Satan—this time as a man dressed in
black (page 7). Finally, near the end of the story, Izzy returns to the village
and is reunited with the man and Beto. In the bottom row of the page, the
three walk hand in hand, but two panels later, Izzy wakes, a crucifix visible
on the wall above her head (page 13); she then sets out to leave again, only
to encounter Satan for the last time, now in the form of a dancing woman.
The tension of order versus disorder in these scenes is clear: “order” is rep-
resented by the man and Beto who are, in effect, stand-ins for the husband
and child that she lost in her past; and “disorder” is represented by images
of her guilt (crucifixes and Satan). She is even told (or imagines she is told)
as much by Satan: “it’s not your sins but your guilt that allows me to come
to you” (page 8). In effect, every moment of stability—order—that Izzy
attains with the man and Beto is undercut and counterbalanced by guilt—
disorder.
This tension is also apparent in the story’s larger narrative structure
and its different “sections,” as mentioned above. Specifically, there is
a clear pattern in Izzy’s literal movements. She begins in a state of dis-
order, and she runs away to Mexico. She finds order with the man and
Beto, but then encounters disorder in the form of the old woman and
the man in black, so she runs away again, this time to a stark room in
an unnamed town. This central section represents the most “disordered”
part of the story, where Izzy has conversations with Satan, appears to
vomit lizards, attempts to flee, and then dreams that she gives birth to
reptilian creatures, echoing Satan’s statement that he “may come to [her]
as [her] own baby” (page 9). She then returns to the man and Beto,
where she is briefly stable, represented in four sequential and wordless
panels where they are all together as a family (page 13). But then she
encounters Satan one final time before running away for good. The
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narrative moves Izzy between the twin, antagonistic poles of order and
disorder.
As it does, it continues its aesthetic of ordered disorder. One embodi-
ment of this aesthetic is the panel transitions. Such transitions require vary-
ing degrees of “closure,” defined as the work required by a reader to make
the connection between two or more given panels (McCloud 1993, 73).
Transitions that make minimal changes in time, space, and/or logic require
“little closure” (McCloud 1993, 70) and are fairly ordered; by contrast,
larger changes—including those “which offer no logical relationship between
panels whatsoever” (McCloud 1993, 72) are more disordered. This latter type
appears in the story at points where Izzy’s state of mind is most fragile—on
the first page, as already discussed, but also when she encounters the man in
black (page 7—see Figure 8.2), and when she has run away and is alone
(page 11—see Figure 8.3). In both cases, there are rapid shifts in perspective,
reflecting Izzy’s inner disorientation and turmoil. In the scene on the bridge,
there is little change in time or place, but every panel is from a different
angle and distance, and first- and third-person perspectives are once again
mixed (panels 4 and 8 are in first-person POV, and the remaining panels
are in third-person). In the scene on page 11, there are several transitions
that make large, disorienting leaps of time and space. The narrative moves
from a panel of Izzy curled around a toilet in which she has vomited liz-
ards, to two panels of her in a village with her suitcase, to a single panel
of a demon’s face that originates, presumably, from Izzy’s imagination, to
three panels depicting a memory or fantasy of a mock wedding between
a young girl (Izzy?) and Jesus (as represented by his severed head), to the
sequence’s five-panel climax (the first two of which complete this page),
where Izzy imagines birthing monsters. Throughout these sections, the
rigid nine-panel structure provides order to “contain” the disorder. One
row of panels on page 14 (see Figure 8.4) perfectly captures this aesthetic.
These three wordless panels show Izzy approaching the dancing woman,
and they employ a technique that is common in comics—breaking a single
image into several panels. In this case, the overall image is a wide shot of
a crowded street, but the gutters create breaks and allow Izzy to appear in
each panel as she moves from left to right and toward the woman. On the
surface, this sequence is unlike any other place in the story, but in fact it
captures the essence of ordered disorder in two ways. First, the panels
“order disorder” by creating a static image of a dynamic scene where Izzy
walks and people dance. Second, the “multiple Izzys” appearing in a single
wide shot would indicate disorder, yet the presence of the two gutters creates
a formal order to those images of her.
New Critics were very interested in how tensions resolved; such reso-
lution was, in fact, a sign of unity (Bressler 2007, 63). In “Flies,” the ending
stands as an embodiment of and statement about its central tension. After
Izzy’s final confrontation with Satan, she tells the man that her father is
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NEW CRITICISM
Figure 8.2 An entirely wordless and visually fragmented page in which Izzy encoun-
ters one of the story’s several “versions” of Satan, this time a mysterious
man dressed in black. “Flies on the Ceiling,” Love and Rockets Book 9, p. 7
(1991) Jaime Hernandez © Fantagraphics Books, Inc
dead and she can return home (page 15). At the same time, however, she
also tells him that “it’s not over” (page 14) and that Satan “refuses to give
[her] up” and may come to her later as “flies on the ceiling” (page 15).
While a kind of order is restored through the death of her father, it is clear
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Figure 8.3 A page juggling at least two timelines that depicts Izzy’s fragile and frag-
mented consciousness after she has run away from the man and Beto.
“Flies on the Ceiling,” Love and Rockets Book 9, p. 11 (1991) Jaime Hernan-
dez © Fantagraphics Books, Inc
that disorder will persist in Izzy’s life through the continued future presence
of Satan. This lack of resolution at the story’s end would seem to indicate,
from a New Critical perspective, a flaw in that the central tension of order
versus disorder has not been resolved. But the story’s apparent lack of
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NEW CRITICISM
Figure 8.4 The bottom three panels of the penultimate page, a wordless sequence in
which Izzy confronts the story’s final “version” of Satan, a woman dancing
in the town square. “Flies on the Ceiling,” Love and Rockets Book 9, p. 14
(1991) Jaime Hernandez © Fantagraphics Books, Inc
resolution is in fact entirely consistent with the interpretation thus far,

where order and disorder have existed in tension, in balance. Izzy’s lack of
resolution therefore is her resolution, for in her life order and disorder bal-
ance each other; this balance exists in both the content of the story and in
the form of its telling.
From a New Critical perspective, therefore, “Flies on the Ceiling” is an
exemplary comic because it is a unified art object wherein “all parts of
the poem are interrelated and support the poem’s chief paradox” (Bressler
2007, 63). Even seemingly minor details reinforce the “balance” between
order and disorder. Consider the various male figures in the story. First
is Izzy’s father, a clear antagonist. His physical absence from the story,
however, requires a presence to create balance, so “substitutes” emerge—
specifically, the man and Satan. Although the man is kind and not
a threat to Izzy, his initial presence in the story is visually depicted as
ominous; in his initial appearances, his face is noticeably obscured (pages
3–6). When Izzy gives him her diary to read, he responds that he would
never judge her (page 6). Once he ceases to be a threat (a substitute for
her judgmental father) she has her first encounter with Satan, who then
fills that role. That he does is established overtly—Izzy tells him that he
“sound[s] like [her] father” (page 9)—but also subtly; even though Satan’s
various forms suggest gender ambiguity, Izzy always uses the masculine
pronoun when referring to him. An even more subtle detail that
reinforces the idea of order and disorder existing in balance appears in
the story’s very first and last panels. The former depicts a precariously
balanced house, which suggests the ruination of home; the latter depicts
the man and Beto huddled in the dark beneath a crucifix, which calls to
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mind the lost husband and child. Together, these panels capture the total-
ity of Izzy’s guilt as established throughout the story. By “bookending”
Izzy’s story, these images provide an ordered, symmetrical frame to that
story’s disorder.
A well-wrought urn, indeed.
Barnet, Sylvan. A Short Guide to Writing about Literature. 7th ed. New York: Harper-
Collins, 1996.
Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4th ed.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1947.
———. “My Credo.” The Kenyon Review 13, no. 1 (Winter 1951): 72–81.
———. “The New Criticism.” The Sewanee Review 87, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 592–607.
Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson, MS: University
Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Hernandez, Los Bros. Flies on the Ceiling: Volume 9 of the Complete Love and Rockets.
Vol. 9. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, Inc., 1991.
Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Lynn, Steven. Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory. 3rd
ed. New York: Longman, 2001.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1993.
Wellek, René. “New Criticism: Pro and Contra.” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (Summer
1978): 611–624.
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9
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Visual Pathography as a Means of Constructing
Identity: Narrating Illness in David Small’s Stitches
Evita Lykou
Introduction
The following analysis of Stitches is based on an initial hypothesis that the
comics medium bears strong resemblance to the dream-work, as this has
been analysed by Sigmund Freud in his The Interpretation of Dreams and
later psychoanalytic texts. Psychoanalytic theory turned criticism is an appli-
cation of the vast psychoanalytic literature1 and its various approaches on
the bodily, psychic and cultural interconnections to texts and authors (or
any piece of art and its creator). The importance of psychoanalytic criticism
is pointed out by Elizabeth Wright in Psychoanalytic Criticism, and is
mainly focused on investigating the analogies between art and the mechan-
isms of the psyche, taking into account the relationship between creator and
creation as well as between the audience and the piece of art, and incorpor-
ating these relationships to a wider cultural and historical context (Wright
2000, 6).
In order to apply psychoanalytic criticism to comics, we need to take
into account the strong association of visual images with the (Freudian)
psyche, and a straightforward relevance of the graphic novel to the structure
of dreams as well as striking similarities of the comic strip to the procedure
of image-production and distorting-operations of the dream process. Fur-
thermore, the “visual grammar” of a graphic novel’s art reflects the conflicts
of the unconscious and exposes the psychological processes that take place
during the reconstruction of a plotline. Consequently, the extent of repre-
sentability in comics is certainly of a different nature, and arguably greater,
in comparison with other media, whilst, simultaneously, the conventions of
traditional narrative are kept intact.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud associated dreaming with a visual
representation of language (Freud 2006, 293–294); furthermore, he ends up
considering dreaming a language in and of itself. According to Freud, the
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EVITA LYKOU
literal or manifest content of a dream constitutes a de facto language which,

after analysis and transcription to verbal and textual language, can be recast
as a visual representation. If we consider grammar to be a tool, or mechan-
ism, to arrange language in terms of a chronological narration, Freud’s
account of dream-grammar coincides with comics theorist Scott McCloud’s
assertions about temporal arrangement in comics. In Understanding Comics,
McCloud claims that the pictorial representation in a single illustrated panel
can encompass many moments, not necessarily apparent prior to experience
with the medium. Just as the often incoherent manifest content of dreams
reveals through interpretation their latent content or hidden meaning which
is governed by proper grammar, similarly, comics, when read, are inter-
preted in the mind of the reader to a grammatically coherent narrative,
beyond what is presented in the drawings appearing on the page.

The first assumption is that the very construction of the graphic medium is
of major psychoanalytic interest, as it combines the generation of visual
images with the narration of a story. This function is strikingly similar to
the procedure of the dream-work as this has been described by Sigmund
Freud in his The Interpretation of Dreams. This connection gives ground to
assume further that throughout a work expressed in the graphic medium
one can find plenty of psychoanalytic material, which can be discussed
along with the relevant theories.
In this case we are making use of the Freudian concept of a psychoanalytic
construction of identity, through the composition of an autobiography, to
discuss David Small’s graphic memoir as an example of a visual pathography.
The basis of this analysis is that the narration through the comics medium is
a rather straightforward demonstration of the process of the construction of
the idea of the self, which is a major psychoanalytic concern, always in line
with the historical and cultural context within which it has been constructed.
Graphic autobiographies are an excellent sample on which to apply psy-
choanalytic criticism, as the published material is already so close to the
idea of the self, and the points that need to be extracted are definitely sig-
nificantly more straightforward. Exercising on such ideal material equips us
with the interpretive tools that are necessary to expand the psychoanalytic
approach to non-memoirs, having learned to interpret the text, the drawn
lines, the space between the panels and ultimately the comics medium as
a whole.
Visual pathographies, in particular, give the extra edge of introducing the
subject of trauma and suffering within the content itself; it is straightforward
and revealed, not concealed under any kind of pretence. Pathography is
a genre speaking of both illness and health, or the lack of it, reaching up to
the finest details of the human mind (for which we use the psychoanalytic
120
term “psyche”) that are involved with feelings of safety, comfort and under-
standing of the self. And these matters affect not only the narrating “I”, but
they involve its entire family and social circle, or, as literary theorist Jeremiah
Dyehouse suggests: “what is also at stake through pathography is an ethics of
response that would transform the moral intensities that circulate around the
actualities of trauma, illness and dying” (2002, 211).
The general point is that every author inscribes traces of unconscious
thoughts (which have been part of their identity construction process) in
the complexity of the medium they use to narrate their story. The reader
perceives such unconscious thoughts and translates them into a personal
perception, inflicting their own unconscious thoughts upon the existent
material provided by the author.
Appropriate Artefacts for Analysis

The field for the application of psychoanalytic criticism is large and not
limited to any specific thematic categories within the corpus of comics
works. The primary element of the medium, that is the visual, permits
numerous psychoanalytic approaches, allowing for a variety of interpret-
ations depending on the main text content and the psychoanalytic school
applied.
Autobiographical graphic novels are a good starting point in the sense
that the very personal nature of such key texts and the convenience of
researching the connections between the author’s intentions and the artefact
(whether coming from related or unrelated author interviews, an introduc-
tion or related bibliography) provides ample material for the application of
psychoanalytic theories.
Other accessible genres are superhero comics, where one can apply mul-
tiple theories on the Ego and Superego, fantasy comics which allow for
a very creative and thorough analysis based on dream-theories, and horror
or war comics providing a spacious field for a discussion regarding various
psychoanalytic disturbances (trauma management, post-traumatic stress dis-
order, etc). The application of psychoanalytic criticism on the above-
mentioned genres is very much aided by their thematic nature, which
strongly resembles psychoanalytic concepts facilitating the research and
study which will provide you with the links necessary for a successful
interpretation.
However, there is no reason why psychoanalytic criticism should be
limited to any kind of comics genre – as it is not limited to any specific
literature genres either. The very nature of comics, their visual aspect in
particular, makes the medium a perfect candidate for the application of psy-
choanalytic criticism, although for other key texts (e.g. comic strips) you
may need a more advanced grasp and more thorough understanding of the
psychoanalytic literature, probably more appropriate for postgraduate level.
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EVITA LYKOU
We should note here that the approach is significantly different depending

on whether we are handling a text created by a single artist or a collective
piece of work. The former is again more accessible on a beginner’s level, as
the latter demands a vastly more complicated argument, very well grounded
in the relevant literature.

Psychoanalytic criticism intends to provide a more thorough understand-
ing of the links between the themes emerging from a literary text and the
very process of creation, the thoughts and intentions of the author, as
well as the relation between the text and the interpretive aspect for the
reader. This is not to say that we treat the text assuming the intentions
of the author (this is by no means the appropriate approach), nor that
we need to have them stated in order to proceed to psychoanalytic criti-
cism. What we do is more like detective work, painstakingly figuring out
patterns that can be explained through psychoanalytic theories, and
based on said patterns move on to provide an interpretation which
offers meaningful explanations regarding the artefact and its cultural
context.
Psychoanalysis as a practice occurring through culture and is fundamen-
tally based on the function of language. The story of the patient is as
important a factor as the activity of narrating this story to a therapist (or
writing it down in any form of art, sequential art included). As a result it
isn’t only the content that matters, but the structure of the narration as
well. The association between psychoanalysis and language, this integral
bond which makes them inseparable, is the major reason why psychoanaly-
sis is so closely related to literature and literary criticism, as, according to
Elizabeth Wright, “every single utterance, spoken or written, is invaded by
the unconscious” (2000, 112).
Along with matters of language, psychoanalysis is a theory about the idea
of the self and the general notion of identity. The question of identity is
fundamental in the era which followed the romantic nineteenth century, the
era of modernism which to a large extent has been shaped by the construc-
tion of psychoanalysis. The theories which occurred then looked into the
mentality of individuals in a more complex and extensive way than had
ever happened before. Indeed, as Anthony Elliott describes it, “Selfhood and
personal identity become increasingly precarious in conditions of modern-
ity, as the individual loses all sense of cultural anchorage as well as inner
reference points” (1996, 9). The sense of personal identity is closely con-
nected to the psychoanalytic narrative. The identity is structured around
narrative and emerges as a result of it. The more fragmented and conflicted
the psychoanalytic narrative is, the more troublesome is the conceived idea
of the self. Stephen Frosh notes that
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[t]he self, as summary and integration of personal being, is not

a fixed entity: it is constructed out of the bits and pieces of experi-
ence and is in dialectic relationship with social organization. It is
full of conflict, particularly between what is desired and what is
encountered.
(1991, 31)
As with every kind of criticism, your starting point should be a good first
acquaintance with at least the general terms of psychoanalysis, in order
to have a sense of what you will be looking for during your close read-
ing. Equipped with this understanding you would proceed to a very thor-
ough reading of the key text, to find points of interest related to the
above-mentioned theories (examples of potential points of interest are,
but are by no means limited to: transference, libido, repression, the Oedi-
pus complex, fixation, defence mechanisms, pleasure principle, Eros,
Thanatos (the death drive), the symbolic, the uncanny, taboo, repressed
memories, narcissistic neurosis and any matter concerning the construc-
tion of identity). The interrelation of text and image is immensely
important, and should not be neglected. From the perspective of Comics
Studies, theorists such as McCloud, Harvey, Eisner and Groensteen will
provide you with ample insights for understanding these interrelations,
and depending on your chosen subject, always with a critical eye you
could selectively draw useful material from film studies, the theory and
history of photography, history of art and any cultural and academic
aspect of the visual and the graphic. You are looking for emerging pat-
terns, recurring elements and contradictions, which will give you hints
for specific points of reference.
After you have read and distinguished the specific points which you will
later analyse in your essay, you proceed to construct a “roadmap” of the
key text, perceive it as a whole, and note at what point in the narration you
find the previously selected extracts (patterns, recurrences, contradictions,
etc.), figuring out what purpose they serve. You construct thus a research
hypothesis, proposing an interpretation. For instance, in the case of autobio-
graphical graphic novels and graphic memoirs the patterns emerging and
the interrelations of content and theory point easily towards the concept of
the construction of identity, shaping the research hypothesis. At this point
you make connections between your suggestions and previous work done,
both in your chosen field of theory and perhaps on the key text itself. Any
additional material, such as author interviews, factual data regarding the
era, location and circumstances described in the key text, is also welcome,
useful and indeed necessary at this stage. How is this information related to
the “roadmap”? Does it reveal any additional aspects which are not obvious
on first sight? How does the key text relate to its historical and cultural
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EVITA LYKOU
surroundings? The last question is of major importance in terms of psycho-

analytic criticism.
Artefact Selected for Sample Analysis

The interpretive goal of this essay is to demonstrate the psychoanalytic and
deeply personal approach of David Small to his own personal story, through
the narration of his life as much as his medical history intertwined with his
troubled parental relationships. Incidents from the graphic novel will be
analysed as an example of how the comics medium is a rich field in which
to search for applications of psychoanalytic criticism.
The graphic novel Stitches is a graphic memoir, written and illustrated
by David Small, narrating his troublesome, dark and tormented childhood
in Detroit in the 1950s. His story starts at the age of six, with multiple flash-
backs to his infancy, highlighting a number of personal issues that only
become clear when the whole of the autobiography has been constructed
and everything is set out in the open for the author of the autobiography to
comprehend, and for the critics and audience to interpret. Stitches is written
in black and white, and shades of grey. Everything in this story is grim, yet
the very narration of the story, the action of articulating the trauma is
uplifting by definition.
Stitches is a characteristic example of a visual pathography, rich in inter-
pretive details. Published in 2009, it is a highly acclaimed graphic memoir,
named one of the ten best books of 2009 by Publishers Weekly and Amazon.
com, being a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, finalist for the 2009 National
Book Award for Young People’s Literature and a 2010 Alex Awards recipient.
Sample Analysis
Small, David. 2009. Stitches: A memoir. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
The hero in Stitches is growing up in a troubled family, in an unstable and

tense environment which is particularly due to the reserved and domineer-
ing personality of the author/protagonist’s mother. The character of the
mother is presented as sentimentally withdrawn, nervous, with frequent out-
bursts of rage forcing the entire family to construct coping mechanisms in
order to retain their personal integrity at the cost of losing the capability to
bond with each other. A note at the very end of the book gives a brief
explanation for the situation described throughout the novel: the mother
has always been suffering crippling, albeit silent, pain due to a genetic
defect. She has also been maintaining a secret life as a lesbian, a subject that
is only momentarily touched on in the book but never analysed in any sig-
nificant detail. Both her illness and pain and her secret sexual orientation
made her become bitter and rough. Sickly as a child, David, the hero of the
124
novel, the childhood persona of the author, is subjected by his father (a

medical doctor) to radiation therapy.
In the USA of the 1940s and 1950s this was, as described in the novel,
the standard practice for children born with respiratory problems. Along
with medicines, shots, enemas and osteopathic manipulations, David would
receive “two to four hundred rads” (Small 2009, 258) in X-rays on a pretty
much regular basis. His medical ordeal is presented early in the book, in
a dark atmosphere, depicting the small baby that is himself being treated on
a medical table. The fear and the pain drawn in his eyes highlight a page-
long sequence culminating with a revealing image of the baby David
strapped onto the X-ray table.
This is the image of an imposing close-up on the baby’s face where the
point of view seems to be from within the X-ray machine. Up until this
point all of the characters, including the child-self of the hero, have been
graphically portrayed somewhat roughly (in terms of the drawing), and
their faces are enriched with the peculiarities of each character as they are
being introduced. This image, of the baby, holds nothing of a past or
a future. It is an image of absolute baby innocence. Even though it is pre-
sented at the very beginning of the novel (on page 22), and there are no
specific hints as to how the plot is going to unfold, this image of utmost
innocence demonstrates a value judgement of the self. Of the self as com-
pletely innocent and pure, who is nonetheless going to be inflicted with
something nasty, as the medical equipment on the panels above and below
creates a sinister and rather ominous atmosphere.
Indeed, during his adolescence, David develops an imposing tumour on
his neck, the removal of which also results in the removal of part of his
vocal cords. As if this wasn’t enough, before his diagnosis, the obvious
growth in his neck goes ignored by his parents for several years. Not only
has he been given cancer by his father, but also their neglect and indiffer-
ence has probably resulted in an aggravation of his condition to the point
where he ends up with a permanent disability.
This introductory material is starting to justify why Stitches can be read
as a “visual pathography”, a term rather specific and quite interesting in its
own terms. A pathography brings into the intellectual product that is an
autobiography a bodily aspect. The suffering of the body becomes construct-
ive material for narration, the narration is built around the particularities of
the illness, and the bodily functions acquire a status of theory. The narra-
tion of illness in any form (fictional or biographical) is directly related to
the kind of the illness in question. Pathology dictates the course of the
story, it shapes the plot and carves the characters into the likeness of the
illness; the symptoms of different conditions produce different situations,
different patients, different mentalities and different narratives. These varied
forms are structured in accordance with the medical and cultural subtext
each condition carries through history, as well as with the objective bodily
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EVITA LYKOU
and psychological effect the symptoms have on the patient. Accordingly,

physical illness and psychological state are intertwined and, under certain
circumstances, cannot be differentiated.
Such matters have been discussed thoroughly by Susan Sontag, in an
intense autopathographical essay titled Illness as Metaphor (written and pub-
lished in 1978) which she composed after her experience with cancer, which
she describes as “a demonic pregnancy” (Sontag 1991, 14). Furthermore,
she suggests that “nothing is more punitive than to give a disease
a meaning – that meaning being invariably a moralistic one” (Sontag 1991,
59). According to Sontag, illness is time and space, it is a state of being, not
only something that defines you but also something that grows to be insep-
arable from yourself, imposing on you an identity and characteristics which
will be present long after the illness is gone. David Small has been perman-
ently characterized not only by his cancer, but mostly by his disability, the
absence of his vocal cord, which has sentenced him to live in a state of
semi-silence, a lack of voice. This lack of voice is predominant in the book,
even when describing the time before his operation. The retrospective appli-
cation of the self-view is of psychoanalytic interest.
The remembrance of the life lived is constructed along the way of narrat-
ing the autobiography. According to Jerome Bruner, “an autobiography is
not and cannot be a way of simply signifying or referring to a ‘life as lived’.
I take the view that there is no such thing as a ‘life as lived’ to be referred
to” (Bruner 1993, 38). From the viewpoint of Bruner, life is shaped and
structured during the act of writing an autobiography. Experiences and
memories are put into place, neatly arranged in a clear storyline, con-
structed and reconstructed until they all fit the narrative plot. Again, this is
to no extent an act of intentional manipulation of the audience; it is
a psychoanalytic process in order for the narrating “I” to make sense of
their lives. Making sense is the essential precondition for the narration to
exist. It is also an essential precondition for an individual in order to carry
on with one’s life. The material we are presented with, however, is always
open to interpretation, which can come from critics, the audience or the
author themselves.
This is not to say that a new personality – or a new person – has been
created via the process of autobiography. It is more to say that the narrator/
author has by the completion of an autobiography created a methodology –
a theory – about interpreting their life. Travelling through language and its
restrictions, through reincarnating the past and its impossibility, Spicer tells
as that “autobiography is impossible and exists. The desire for autobiography,
the fantasy of autobiography, can withstand its impossibility; I would suggest
that it necessarily withstands its own impossibility” (Spicer 2005, 392).
Later on, David is diving into an imaginary world of fantasy and fun
that he uses as an escape tool out of his tediously ordinary and to a large
extent unbearable life. The left page presents him literally diving into his
126
drawing paper and on the right one we see him sliding down a tunnel,
which ends in a stomach-like cavity, filled with friendly, cartoony creatures.
Before this he has been explaining how as a child he was fascinated by Alice
in Wonderland – “I had fallen in love” (Small 2009, 56), he says. His playing
was an attempt to reach to the magic land of Alice, a carefree, joyous land,
where he would be free and happy, even though, the world of Alice is more
of a dystopia than a dreamy location. The presentation of his descent into
this imaginary land holds the quality of a dream, the awkward shapes, the
experience of falling, the transformation into something as playful and
cheerful as his fantasy friends. Trying to put this picture into language is
difficult. It is hard to describe what we see in a meaningful and coherent
way. In order for this sequence to be re-narrated into oral language, it has
to be interpreted and filled with answers to a latent question “why?”, as
a simple description will not be enough and may not even be possible.
In his theory of comics, Scott McCloud discusses at length the notion of
closure, a fundamental element of comics to which he appoints the role of
grammar. Closure is the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving
the whole” (1993, 63). This formulation of “closure” refers to the action that
takes place between panels, the interval space which is not presented graphic-
ally but has to be induced by the reader, and creates the course of the story
by adding information in the gutter between the panels. The third part of
Stitches, entitled “Three and a half years after the first diagnosis,” starts with
the protagonist in a hospital bed. David’s parents have finally taken their son
to the doctor, and a routine operation is arranged for the removal of what is
considered to be a benign cyst. At the very end of the previous part, the
mother during an enraged outburst burns some or most of David’s books.
Nabokov’s Lolita is the only book mentioned by title, and she refers to it as
“Smut!” (Small 2009, 153). The final panel of this chapter is an image of the
burning bin, flames atop it and a thick smoke mushroom.
Immediately after that, David is in the hospital at three and a half years
after the first diagnosis, but it is rather unclear how long it has been since
the end of the previous chapter. His operation is going to take place in the
morning. However, when he wakes up from sedation, the lump is still there,
everyone is behaving weirdly and he is told by his father that he will need
a second operation, adding that “We will be bringing in a specialist to do it
tomorrow morning” (Small 2009, 168). Still, he is reassured, “I told you,
nothing is wrong! Now get some rest” (Small 2009, 169). The same night
David receives an even more surprising visit from his mother. Her behav-
iour is unprecedented.
She seems to be fighting to overcome her usual restrained self while at
the same time struggling not to become sentimental. When David asks her
what she is doing there she responds, “I suppose I have the right to visit
my own son” (Small 2009, 171). She appears to be crying, but she is still
unable to express herself or demonstrate any amount of healthy emotional
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EVITA LYKOU
response. Instead she is aggressively trying to make amends, asking her son
if he needs something, telling him that she will get him anything he wants,
adding, “Within reason of course.” David tells her that he forgot to bring
with him the book he was reading, then sarcastically adds, “But oh, wait.
I forgot. You stole that from my room and you burned it up” (Small 2009,
172). After two panels of a staring contest the mother walks out of the
room, slamming the door. She comes back with Lolita. At this point the
reader does not know yet that the reason why the surgery has been post-
poned was a malignant tumour. The odd behaviour of the mother is a sign
of something being exceptionally unusual.
The reader can figure this out in the long pauses between action. A clock
is ticking while the mother is out. The sound effects (“tk, tk, tk, tk, klik,
klik”) add time-depth. Time goes by, offering a sense of continuity, and in
the absence of the mother, the big gap between two “kliks” and many “tk,
tk, tks”, the reader proceeds to produce meaning. We use closure to make
sense of the events on the paper. We create links, we think of alternative
possibilities, invest time and energy. This process, this closure, works as
a very strong adhesive, holding the plot together and allowing it to move
forward to the next incident in a very personal way, triggering emotional
responses in the reader. According to McCloud, “in a very real sense
comics is closure” (McCloud 1993, 67); without this aspect the medium
wouldn’t be able to hold itself together. The visual narrative is significantly
different than any other kind of narrative; particularly because the interpret-
ation of the visual is inevitably personal and subjective for each and every
recipient of the medium. Comics, using the element of closure, manage to
diversify the impression that each reader acquires, for each reader has to
interpret the time and space gaps between panels, which in psychoanalytic
terms leaves a whole lot of space open for useful interpretations.
After the operation has taken place, David wakes up to realize that he is
unable to speak. He has received no previous warning about it, he is not
expecting it, it is a massive shock. Furthermore, his throat has been per-
manently marked with a large scar, which is presented to the reader in
a detailed close-up through his mirror the first time that he gets to change
his bandages himself. He describes it as such: “A crusted black track of
stitches; my smooth young throat slashed and laced back up like a bloody
boot. Surely this is not me. No, friend. It surely is” (Small 2009, 191). This
scar, with everything it implies, becomes an aspect of his identity. Not grad-
ually, not smoothly. Immediately and forcefully his identity has opened up
to include a mark which will define him indefinitely. The image is visually
exaggerated, presented with the intensity of a traumatic memory. The
reader is given not only the information about the outcome of the surgery,
but also the information of its impact on a psychological level. It is not the
language used here, nor merely the visual presentation. It is the mixture of
both, and the added interpretations that make this panel so forceful.
128
David will find out that his cyst was actually cancer by accidentally read-
ing a letter his mother has been writing to his grandmother. When the
word “cancer” has been spoken, everything falls into place, but everything
also falls apart. “Cancer” and all the associated mythology of cancer
becomes a new identifying agent for David. The attempt to silently deal
with this realization pulls him down. When he is confronted by his parents
about his behaviour the illustration is forceful. The author is drawing him-
self, trying to express his anger and pain, demonstrating a mouthful of
angry selves who try to speak, to scream, try to escape his damaged throat
and articulate his confusion (Small 2009, 234; Figure 9.1). This is a portrait
of an alternative identity. One he wishes he could have had, but he never
had the opportunity to acquire. Instead, he whispers his first revolution:
“What about you? Have you nothing to say to me?” (Small 2009, 235). His
parents do not understand; they haven’t learned to expect a retort from
Figure 9.1 A portrait of an alternative identity. Featuring a mouthful of angry selves

who try to speak, one from within the other, the author is trying to express
his anger and pain. Excerpt(s) from Stitches: A Memoir p. 234. © 2009
David Small. Reprint by permission of W. W. Norton & Company and
McClellan & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada
Limited. All rights reserved
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EVITA LYKOU
David. The crucial moment when he finally finds words to give an explan-
ation is framed by the parents’ figures. They almost graphically suffocate
David’s figure, when he murmurs, “About my cancer” (Small 2009, 236).
This crucial moment is not handled with sympathy. The parents give
a brief and harsh response, not even an explanation: “Well, the fact is, you
did have cancer. But you didn’t need to know anything then … And you
don’t need to know about it now. That’s final!” (Small 2009, 238). David is
denied a decent explanation, as well as an apology. Soon after, at the age of
fifteen, David gets into therapy. The importance of the character of the ther-
apist is never shown in a direct way within the novel, but it is more than
obvious by the way the author chooses to depict this person. The therapist
is drawn as the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. The importance of
Alice for this novel and its narrative structure has been pointed out before,
and the reappearance of a character from this line of the story is
a conscious act, which tells more than what is written between the panels.
And what is written there is heavy already. “I’m going to tell you the truth”
(Small 2009, 253), says the rabbit-doctor. “Your mother doesn’t love you.
I’m sorry, David, it’s true. She doesn’t love you” (Small 2009, 255). The
next scene is once again focused on the eyes, a technique frequently used in
Small’s graphic style. The realization comes through a long stare. The psy-
choanalytic truth has been spoken, it is out there, and it is going to cause
change, major identity change, and life-changes as well. The articulation of
great truths (whether it is the objective truth or not, which is always irrele-
vant in terms of interpretation) stands out in memory and this pivotal
moment repeats itself in the form of several intense incidents during the
narration of the autobiography.
Later in the story, David is invited to dinner by his father. During this
dinner, he gets to hear his father’s confession about the way he had used
the X-rays on him as a baby. “I gave you cancer” (Small 2009, 287), he
hears, this being an attempt on behalf of the father to relieve himself from
the burden, with little or no care about the impact this would have on his
son. Still no apology is articulated. The realization comes to David through
a series of portraits and close-ups which culminate into a double portrait of
himself as a baby and as a teenager (himself at the present of the narration)
(Figure 9.2). The beautiful and dashing innocence of the baby, as described
earlier, intertwines with the tormented eyes of present David, re-establishing
the conviction that what he is going through is something that had been
done to him, something imposed onto him by the actions of others, their
decisions ruining the perfection, innocence and beauty of the baby that he
once was (Small 2009, 291).
Michael Sheringham suggests that “a memory is a memento: a memorial
to remind us – for the future – of what is no longer; a material substitute
in place of what is absent” (1993, 313). This materiality is expressed through
the text of the autobiography as a document that is bound to survive the
130
Figure 9.2 The innocent past self and the tormented present of the narration, inter-
twined in a single image, juxtaposing two levels of reality and their obvious
connections. Stitches: A Memoir, p. 291. © 2009 David Small. Reprint by
permission of W. W. Norton & Company and McClellan & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. All rights reserved
passage of time: “in saving experience from the ravages of time and in over-
coming the discontinuity of past and present, memory turns anterior into
interior and converts time into (inner) space” (Sheringham 1993, 289).
Through the process of the autobiography the interior self is transferred
into an exterior materiality, invoked into the text and brought forth into
the world.
The last scene we are discussing here is David standing next to his
mother’s deathbed. Soon after the traumatic incident with his father’s rev-
elations, at the age of sixteen David moves out and creates a life of his
own, away from the stressful and painful reality of his parents’ home. At
the age of thirty he receives news of his mother dying. When he arrives
at the hospital, his mother is unable to speak, due to a medical tube
down her throat, and David is voiceless as well, since he has been
screaming in the car all the way from upstate New York to Detroit, in
order to elevate the crippling pressure of his intended visit, which has
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EVITA LYKOU
deprived him of the little voice he had left after his operation. He can
only touch her hand, caress her face and look her in the eye. A lonely
tear coming from her may be the only sort of apology (or regret) he ever
received.
His mother dies that same night. In a 2014 paper Ilana Larkin points out
how the character of the mother is presented with blank eyeglass lenses on
most occasions throughout the novel. When this is not happening, the
exception is of great significance. In her last moments, David’s mother is
re-humanized, still wearing her glasses, but her eyes clearly visible through
the lenses, conveying messages that were neither spoken nor otherwise
expressed. This image casts doubt upon the therapist’s declaration that
David was never loved by his mother, but it doesn’t contradict it
necessarily.
Everything up to this point in the memoir has been stages in a process.
The process of writing the autobiography, constructing a script which then
has to be put into words and into images, which will be revised and
redrawn, and will undergo many alterations until the final product of the
graphic novel is presented to the public. In this particular case the psycho-
analytic approach is illuminating the stages of this construction through the
visual medium, demonstrating how the creative approach followed by the
author brings forth traces of his unconscious which can be perceived and
interpreted anew by the reader.
Note
1 Which begins from but is not limited to Freud. An introductory chapter on psy-
choanalytic criticism allows space to focus only on Freudian criticism. Further
study suggestions, however would include Post-Freudian Criticism, Carl Gustav
Jung, Object-Relation Theory, Jacques Lacan and numerous more postmodern
approaches to the subject.
Bruner, Jerome. 1993. “The Autobiographical Process.” In The Culture of Autobiog-
raphy: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik, 38–56.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Dyehouse, Jeremiah. 2002. “Writing, Illness and Affirmation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric
35: 208–222.
Elliott, Anthony. Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Postmodernity.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996.
Freud, Sigmund. 2006. Interpretation of Dreams. London: Penguin.
Frosh, Stephen. Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self. Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1991.
Larkin, Ilana. 2014. “Absent Eyes, Bodily Trauma, and the Perils of Seeing in David
Small’s Stitches.” American Imago 71 (Summer): 183–211.
132
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, MA:
Kitchen Sink.
Sheringham, Michael. 1993. French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to
Perec. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Small, David. 2009. Stitches: A memoir. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Sontag, Susan. 1991. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. London:
Penguin.
Spicer, Jakki. 2005. “The Author Is Dead, Long Live the Author: Autobiography and
the Fantasy of the Individual.” Criticism 47 (3): 387–403.
Wright, Elizabeth. 2000. Psychoanalytic Criticism. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
133
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Autographics and Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our
Own and Letting It Go
Andrew J. Kunka
Introduction
Most studies of autobiographical comics (such as Chute 2008, 2010; Gard-
ner 2008; El Refaie 2012) trace the genre back to the underground comix
movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Justin Green’s Binky
Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), as well as some of Robert
Crumb’s earlier works and Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s “Goldie” and “Bunch”
stories. However, strains of autobiography can be found throughout the his-
tory of the comics medium, dating back to early comic strips by creators like
Winsor McKay and Bud Fisher and going through the advent of the comic
book in the 1930s and 1940s (Kunka 2018a, 2018b). Since the publication of
Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: My Father Bleeds History (1986), autobiographical
comics have been at the forefront of Comics Studies scholarship (see Witek
1989), and such works as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2004) and Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) have achieved canonical status in the field, des-
pite the desire of comics scholars to resist canon formation. In more recent
years, Raina Telgemeier’s young adult graphic novels, Smile (2010) and Sisters
(2014), are continuous best-sellers, inspiring another generation of creators
to take up autobiographical comics. Among the recent examples of autobio-
graphical comics, Mirian Katin’s We Are on Our Own (2006) and Letting It
Go (2013) follow Spiegelman by focusing on Holocaust survivors and their
children; however, in this case, unlike Spiegelman, Katin is the child survivor
of the Holocaust.

Approaches to analyzing prose autobiography are frequently applied to
autobiographical comics (see, for example, El Refaie 2012; Kunka 2018a),
often with the result that the comics medium somehow challenges or even
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undermines common assumptions about the genre. Such analysis begins

with Philip Lejeune’s (1989) “autobiographical pact,” which makes claims
for the unity of the author, narrator, and protagonist in an autobiographical
text (p. 22). That is, the reader assumes that the “I” telling the story of their
experiences is the author of the work. However, one basic question demon-
strates just how autobiographical comics can challenge fundamental
assumptions about the genre: Who is the “I” or narrator in autobiographical
comics? When we think of the “I” in prose autobiography, as with Lejeune’s
“autobiographical pact,” we generally think of the first-person narrator
through whom the events are focalized. However, El Refaie (2012), citing
Herman (2011), breaks down the authorial self into three parts: “the real-life
I (the author), the narrating I (the self who tells), and the experiencing
I (the self told about)” (p. 53, original emphasis). In comics, therefore, these
three components are clearly separate.
The “narrating I”—the “eye” or camera through which we see the events
unfold—is not the creator’s eyes or point of view (with some rare excep-
tions). The camera eye functions more like an objective, third-person narra-
tor, and we see the “experiencing I” or autobiographical subject as
a character in the story and as an avatar for the creator. Still, yet another
“narrating I” can also function in graphic memoir: the retrospective narrator
who speaks through caption boxes or other textual forms. This narrator is
neither the “camera-I” who focalizes the story nor the “experiencing I” we
see as the character in the story. This is instead the present-day version of
the creator who is looking back on their experience, much like the first-
person narrator of a prose autobiography. Not all creators use such
a narrator (for example, Jeffrey Brown doesn’t, nor does Miriam Katin in
We Are on Our Own), but it is a fairly common storytelling technique.
Therefore, comics fragment an authorial self that readers otherwise assume
to be a unified, singular narrator in conventional prose autobiography. In
fact, scholarship on autobiographical comics has developed the convention
of applying separate names to the creator and subject. The creator of the
work is usually referred to by last name (Katin), while the first name
(Miriam) is used for the narrative’s protagonist or subject. While this is
a practical convention used to avoid confusion between creator and subject,
it also emphasizes that a distinction needs to be made between the two even
if they are essentially the same person.
Gillian Whitlock (2006) first coined the term “autographics” as applied
to graphic memoir “to draw attention to the specific conjunctions of visual
and verbal text in the genre of autobiography, and also to the subject posi-
tions that narrators negotiate in and through comics” (p. 966). However,
autographics is not limited to comics, but instead covers any autobiograph-
ical work that combines both visual and verbal elements, like social media
posts, zines, children’s illustrated books, multimedia presentations, and so
on. As Whitlock and Poletti (2008) explain, autographics “indicat[es] from
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the first its attention to the multiple modes and media of autobiographical
texts, and to the tensions between ‘auto’ and ‘graph’ in the rapidly changing
visual and textual cultures of autobiography” (p. v). By this definition, then,
the “auto” or self who creates the visual and verbal components of the work
can be referred to as the “autographer.”
Autobiography in comics lends itself to a variety of critical approaches,
but none more prevalent than trauma theory (Chute 2008, 2010). Gardner
(2008) argues that comics autobiography “allow[s] the autographer to be
both victim of trauma and detached observer” (p. 12). That is, creators may
be relating their own personal traumatic experiences, but they are drawing
and narrating them from a more distant perspective, imagining how
a “detached observer” would view the proceedings. This is a unique func-
tion of comics, and Chute (2010) highlights it more when she argues that
the comics medium has elements that make it particularly suited to reveal
traumatic experiences and render them visible: “graphic narrative, invested
in the ethics of testimony, assumes what I think of as the risk of representa-
tion” (p. 3, emphasis original). Trauma studies in general tends to focus on
traumatic experiences as unspeakable or unrepresentable, but Chute shows
that comics do the opposite, and that there is an ethical component to such
representation. Of course, not all autographers reveal the graphic details of
their traumatic experiences—many put such scenes outside the panel
border, for one—but Chute highlights that creators have an ethical choice
to show or not show. In addition, comics, by their very nature, are frag-
mented into panels, and that element can often be used to show the frag-
mentation of traumatic memory, another common topic of trauma studies.
Much of the analysis of autobiographical comics comes down to the
available choices that creators have to tell their stories, and some of these
choices veer widely from those available in prose autobiography. While all
autobiographers have the license to fudge details, compress timelines, or
merge characters to allow for more streamlined and effective storytelling,
autographers have considerably more flexibility with the truth. The very
formal properties of comics always already place the works in precarious
relation to the truth. The narrative is mediated through the artist’s subject-
ivity and style—they make choices about their avatars, for example, which
can never look exactly like them in the way that, say, an author photo can.
And comics can also foreground questions about truthfulness and veracity.
As El Refaie (2012) explains, “some graphic memoirists are much more
interested in reflecting their feelings toward their own past in an authentic
manner than in claiming to portray the ‘absolute truth’” (p. 44). This dis-
tinction involves favoring a kind of “emotional truth” that can sometimes
be at odds with verifiable facts or a visually realistic style.
Autobiographical comics creators also often foreground the act of cre-
ation—that is, the artist shows the work of creating the comics that the
audience is reading. Doing so allows the artist to present the choices that go
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into the creative process: that often the creator must make creative decisions
that can call into question the veracity of the events depicted. Spiegelman
does this in the second volume of Maus (1991), where he shows how the
success of the first volume has raised serious moral questions about his pro-
ject and his profiting from the Holocaust. He depicts himself wearing
a mouse mask and sitting at his drawing board, which is positioned at the
top of a pile of dead bodies. This is not, of course, meant to be a literal
image, but instead a figurative representation of how Spiegelman feels that
he has built his career on the bodies of millions of murdered Jews. In many
cases, foregrounding the act of creation lends a kind of authenticity or cred-
ibility to the work and the artist: they are being transparent about the cre-
ative process and the mediated nature of autobiography. Charles Hatfield
(2005) refers to this concept as “ironic authentication” (p. 125): that auto-
biographical comics demonstrate authenticity by acknowledging that the
“truth” as they present it is a construction, and something like total truth-
fulness is impossible.

At first glance, one might assume it is easy to spot an autobiographical
comic. Usually, some paratextual information will identify it even before we
start to read the book: a front cover that identifies the work as a “memoir,”
a blurb on the back cover, the book’s location in a bookstore or its categor-
ization in a library or online bookseller, or a review. Once we open the
book, we can identify conventions of the genre at work: most notably, is
there a character that shares the same name as the creator and/or resembles
them? In such cases, a clear, unequivocal generic identification signals that
the work can be analyzed as an autobiography.
However, many works function on the fringes of the genre and may not
be so easily identified. Sometimes, a creator will take on an “autobiograph-
ical persona” who has a different name, like Justin Green’s Binky Brown
and Phoebe Gloeckner’s Minnie Goetze. In other cases, a creator will put
their autobiographical persona in clearly fictional settings, as when Stan Lee
and Jack Kirby tried to crash Sue Storm and Reed Richards’s wedding in
Fantastic Four Annual 3 (1965). The comics medium offers creators many
different opportunities to challenge conventions of autobiography, leading
readers to rethink their expectations about both autobiography and comics.

In general, autographics looks at the unique aspects of the image/text rela-
tionships in comics and demonstrates their function in life writing. As is
evident in Whitlock’s (2006) definition of “autographics,” comics most often
apply visual and verbal elements to a narrative (or image/text), so an
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obvious way to analyze autobiographical comics would be to break down

those various elements and demonstrate how they perform specific, even
unique, functions in the genre. Such elements can include the artists’ draw-
ing style (especially in the way that they depict themselves), page and panel
layouts, coloring, lettering, and so on. Not all of these elements will factor
into every analysis of autobiographical comics, but very often a creator will
choose innovative or experimental approaches to one or all of them, and all
can have an impact on the reader’s experience of the narrative.
The creator’s narrative choices come into play here as well. Does the
story follow a linear, chronological pattern, or does it move backward and
forward in time? How does the creator cue the reader regarding time shifts?
What does a creator choose to show or not show in the narrative? Was the
work created retrospectively or currently as the events were unfolding (like
a diary)?
Finally, autographics can include the “materiality” of comics. For
example, the way in which the work was published can be important to its
interpretation. Was it published in comic book form (the saddle-stitched
“pamphlet”) or in the graphic novel (squarebound) format? Was it pub-
lished serially or as a single book? Was it published in multiple formats
(such as serial-to-collection)? If so, how do the different formats affect the
reading experience? Were changes made between formats? What choices
went into the book’s design? Was the comic self-published by the creator?
Was the work a web comic? These are all questions that can affect the
experience of any comics, but they can be specifically relevant to autobiog-
raphy. For example, a creator may publish a webcomic diary, documenting
their life on a regular basis, giving the reader a sense of immediacy, with
the events unfolding before their eyes rather than following a contained,
predetermined narrative.

Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own and Letting It Go work particularly
well to demonstrate some of the unique features of autobiographical comics.
The two function as companion pieces: the former is referenced frequently
in the latter, and we see the impact of her creative success with We Are on
Our Own on Miriam’s life. Most important, Letting It Go reveals Katin’s
unresolved trauma as a Holocaust survivor and shows her struggle to find
such a resolution.
We Are on Our Own documents two-year-old Miriam’s (named “Lisa” in
the story) escape with her mother from Nazi-occupied Hungary in
1944–1945, and the ultimate, against-all-odds reunion with her father at the
war’s conclusion. Letting It Go takes place between 2007 and 2010, as Mir-
iam’s son, Ilan, decides to move to Berlin with his girlfriend, Tinet. This
plan triggers Miriam’s unresolved childhood trauma, as she associates
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everything German with the Holocaust. The memoir, then, follows the path
of her reconciliation with her traumatic past, which readers should know
about from the former work.
Both works foreground many of the creative choices that the autographer
has available, and these choices lend themselves to analysis in a way that can
be applied to other autobiographical comics. In addition, Letting It Go is par-
tially about the creation of an autobiographical comic, as Miriam struggles to
make a narrative about events that she is currently experiencing.
Sample Analysis
Katin, Miriam. 2006. We Are on Our Own. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.
Katin, Miriam. 2013. Letting It Go. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.
In comparing We Are on Our Own and Letting It Go, the former appears to
be a straightforward comics narrative: mostly black and white with clearly
delineated panels. It tells a primarily linear narrative about a mother and
daughter’s escape from Nazi-occupied Hungary, and it concludes with the
mother and father reuniting at the war’s end. As Katin told Yevgeniya
Traps in a 2013 interview, “The first book stood on its own, a story from
A to Z, a start and a finish.” Another, more famous Holocaust graphic
memoir—Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986 and 1991)—features Art interview-
ing his father about his Holocaust experience as a part of the research pro-
cess, and the narrative moves back and forth between the memories and the
interview. That research process, and how it reveals the strained father/son
relationship, is a vital part of the memoir. Katin leaves that research process
out, which may not seem remarkable unless contrasted with Maus. Instead,
she closes the narrative with a brief statement about her source material:
a real sense of myself as a small child and the reality of the fear
and confusion of those times I could understand only by reading
the last few letters and postcards my mother had written to my
father. They survived the war with him.
(p. 125)
Those letters gave Katin access to the immediate emotional truth of the experi-
ence because her own fear and confusion was lost in her childhood memory.
As such, the narrative feels self-contained, perhaps misleadingly so. The
final two pages of the memoir show Lisa crawling under the dining room table
to play with her toys. One might expect this scene to reveal a return to child-
hood normalcy. However, Lisa’s play becomes immediately violent: she pre-
tends a ball is a bomb dropped from an airplane, landing on her doll (p. 120).
A male figure becomes a “bad soldier” and a stuffed dog represents a dead dog
from earlier in the narrative. Finally, Lisa takes a fork and violently stabs the
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male doll. The images appear frenetic and hastily sketched as the fork extends
outside of the panel borders and the doll’s head cannot be contained within the
panel. These images signal that the story does not have the neat resolution one
might expect with the family reunion. The violence and trauma that is
imprinted on Lisa’s psyche will continue past the story’s end.
The book signals the reader to think of it as a children’s story even
before they open the book. The front and back covers are constructed from
the thick cardboard material common to children’s “board books.” By using
this material, the publisher (Drawn + Quarterly) sets up expectations that
become ironic as the memoir progresses: while it is a child’s story, the final
scene reveals how the traumatic experience causes a loss of childhood inno-
cence that the board book symbolizes.
Almost the entire book is black and white—more accurately a gray,
graphite tone from Katin’s pencil-only art. However, moments of color
appear that call attention to its use because they stand out so obviously and,
therefore, demand an interpretation of their purpose. The special use of
color is evident before the reader even opens the book. The cover image—a
version of which also appears on page 47—depicts two panels: one with
a red Nazi flag on the ground and another with a red Soviet flag flying
overhead as a mother and daughter walk beneath it (the image on 47 does
not contain the human figures). The book’s title and the author byline (“A
Memoir by Miriam Katin”) are also in red on a black background. This sets
up a color motif in the book, where red, in the form of the two flags, repre-
sents the oppressive governments that threaten Lisa and her mother
throughout. This motif is most fully realized on page 5, where six panels
repeat the same canted image of a double-paned window. At first, hints of
a blue sky peek out over the buildings. In each succeeding panel, a red Nazi
flag covers more and more of the window until the black swastika has
almost taken over the entire frame. The text on the page reads, “And then
one day, God replaced the light with the darkness” (p. 5). The absence of
color throughout the narrative, then, symbolizes the darkness imposed by
the oppressive and genocidal Nazi regime.
The brief color flashforwards also anticipate this ending. In these, Katin
shows Lisa just after giving birth to her son and later caring for him as
a toddler (Letting It Go shows her son’s birth, by Caesarean section). The
pastel color scheme seems to indicate that the darkness of the Holocaust is
past. However, the dialogue ironically undercuts that sense. The adult Lisa,
now a parent, feels peace at the birth of her son, but it is only a temporary
peace: “Everyone seems so calm and secure // One can almost believe that
it can last” (p. 6). Later, her toddler son destroys a block village that they
made together (p. 63), duplicating Lisa’s violent play at a similar age and
showing that the trauma of the Holocaust has crossed generational lines.
In addition, throughout the memoir, moments of violence and panic
appear chaotic, with panel borders breaking down or disappearing and
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AUTOGRAPHICS
Katin’s style becoming sketchy and abstract, as if hastily drawn. Pencil lines
that are thin and fine in other places become thick and rough, as if the side
of the pencil has been scraped on the page. In one scene, an aerial bombing
awakens Lisa while she’s sleeping in a farmhouse, and Katin depicts this
scene through four images of Lisa quickly sitting up and covering her ears,
but with no panel borders separating each of the images (p. 48). Above her
head, sound effects of “Boom!” and “Crash!!” explode, setting up Lisa’s
re-enactment of the experience with her dolls at the end. The penciling also
gives the impression that the work, like the work of trauma, is unfinished.
The most common steps of comics production include an inking stage over
the pencils, which doesn’t happen here. So, despite the sense of narrative
closure found in the family’s reunion, Katin’s style, including her choice of
drawing instrument and the color flashforwards, hints that the trauma
remains unresolved in the end.
So, Katin sets up several motifs in We Are on Our Own through color,
panel borders, and a penciling style that impact the reader’s experience of
the narrative. These motifs are then recalled in Letting It Go, which uses
bright colors and almost no panel borders throughout. These differences
highlight the different narrative approaches that Katin chose for each work.
We Are on Our Own is told retrospectively, the narrative gathered from her
parents’ memories, as Katin was too young to remember the events. There-
fore, most of the narrative is contained within solid panel borders, with
moments of chaos and violence breaking those borders. However, with Let-
ting It Go, Katin creates the memoir as the events happen, and so the lack
of panel borders and the combination of colored pencils with a more
abstract style give a sense of immediacy, of events unfolding in real time.
Katin describes her creative process, where she didn’t plan a story or even
page layouts, but instead just began to draw spontaneously: “What hap-
pened was, as I said, this was written in real time, with an enormous
amount of emotion and pressure and a lot of sort of hatred. I didn’t have
the patience for ink or watercolor,” though she did try, at the beginning, to
use traditional panel layouts (Traps 2013). Katin does, however, return to
dark pencils and panel borders at times when she flashes back to the war,
as with the story of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Vice-Consul in Lithu-
ania, who used his authority to issue Japanese visas in order to save 6000
Jews. Other moments show scenes from wartime Germany in the same
black-and-white, pencil style. Mihăilescu (2015) describes these shifts to
black and white as “a way to prove how the artist’s view of Germany has
kept the location frozen in time, at the level of World War II events”
(p. 157). These moments also make the reader recall the earlier work and
show the continuity between the two books, just as We Are on Our Own’s
color flashforwards set up the postwar world of Letting It Go.
As with We Are on Our Own, pencils make Letting It Go appear unfin-
ished, but colored pencils also seem more immediate: coloring, normally
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ANDREW J. KUNKA
a separate step later in the comics production process, happens simultan-

eously with the penciling instead. Early on, Katin highlights the challenges
of immediacy, in a page with four horizontal panels containing repeated
static images of the New York skyline and East River as a tugboat pulls
a cargo ship across the panels: “So, where does a story begin? // And if you
are inside that story right now, // in that situation and it hurts and say you
can draw, // then you must try and draw yourself out of it” (n.p.). This con-
trast between the retrospective and the immediate in the two works can
even be seen in the fact that We Are on Our Own is paginated throughout,
and Letting It Go is not. With an unpaginated book, a reader could feel
unanchored to the book’s progression by not knowing exactly how far along
they’ve read or how much is left.
This inside/outside distinction plays out in a key moment in the story
where we see an event and then we see Miriam talking about how she
wants to represent that event. While in Berlin for the first time, Miriam and
her husband, Geoff, visit the Neue Synagoge museum. There, visitors must
empty their pockets and place jewelry in a tray to leave with security. After
exiting the museum, Geoff realizes that he doesn’t have his wedding ring,
and he can’t find it when he goes back. At the bus station just before they
depart, Geoff tells the story of the lost ring, only to have the ring miracu-
lously fly out of his jacket pocket.
What may be just a mildly diverting anecdote turns into something more
significant a few pages later, when Miriam talks to her son, Ilan, about the
memoir she is working on. She explains that, in her version, Geoff won’t
find the ring: “It will be meaner that way. I want it as nasty as possible” (n.
p.). Ilan objects: “But Mom, lying about the ring conveys this idea that we
should continue to hold our prejudices based on history and not based on
direct experience. We know you had a nice time in Berlin” (n.p.). Katin’s
refusal to tell the story as it happened reflects her desire to give her memoir
the “emotional truth” of her persistent anger toward Germany. She doesn’t
want to give Germany the satisfaction of or credit for a happy ending. How-
ever, we already know that she tells the truth and shows that the ring is
found. Somewhere, between the conversation with her son and the comple-
tion of the memoir, Miriam decides to follow her son’s advice and tell the
truth, yet Katin does not include the moment of epiphany when that deci-
sion occurred. That absence creates an interesting slippage between the
graphic memoir Miriam creates in the story and the version we are reading.
It also reveals that the emotional truth of the memoir has shifted from
resentment to acceptance—she lets Germany have its happy ending.
Letting It Go also contains fantasy elements that wouldn’t have appeared
in the earlier work and may seem out of place in a nonfiction memoir. For
example, early in the memoir, Miriam finds many distractions preventing
her from working, including her husband’s music practice, which is repre-
sented by tangible musical notes that pound on her head. At another point,
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AUTOGRAPHICS
Katin shows birds in conversation outside of her apartment window. Later,

in Miriam’s final visit to Berlin, she is bitten by a bedbug infestation in her
hotel room. As she and Geoff leave, two bedbugs with hats, umbrellas, and
suitcases also exit the hotel and discuss Miriam:
“She said she will never come back to Berlin.”

“Her blood will be all over the city. That will call her back.”
“Who was sent with her?”
“Klaus und Mønica.”
“Lucky bastard.”
(n.p.)
The bedbugs provide the book’s moral in its final moments: Miriam has left
some of herself behind in Berlin, and she is also taking Berlin with her. However,
this moral is presented with some ambivalence. She had a triumphant visit to
Berlin, where original pages from her comics were displayed in a gallery show,
but that triumph was marred by the fact that she constantly itched from the
bedbug bites. She may have left something of herself behind in Berlin, but only
because of the pain and aggravation caused by the insects. And since two bed-
bugs are stowing away in her luggage, the bit of Berlin that she’s taking with her
will be the cause of further irritation. The bedbugs offer a clear moment where
Katin has sacrificed a literal truth for an emotional one. “I left something of
myself behind” is a kind of cliché; the bedbugs complicate the cliché’s sentimen-
tality. Miriam has not entirely resolved her negative feelings toward Germany in
the end, but her anger over Ilan’s move to Berlin has, at least, sated. Comics,
therefore, can visualize figurative or symbolic elements that don’t conform to
verifiable realism but nonetheless enrich the reader’s experience of the memoir.
Letting It Go has many other moments where Katin deploys innovative
and creative strategies to reveal her complicated relationship with Germany.
Overall, though, this memoir showcases a variety of artistic practices that take
advantage of the strengths and conventions of the comics medium. Together,
We Are on Our Own and Letting It Go offer readers a way to see how the
varied visual and verbal elements of comics like color, style, lettering, page
layouts, panel borders, choice of drawing instruments, and so on contribute
to autobiographical storytelling, especially in the communication of “emo-
tional truths” that make autobiography such a significant genre in comics.
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New York: Columbia University Press.
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Kunka, Andrew. 2018b. “Cranky Bosses, Rebellious Characters, and Suicidal Artists:
Scribbly, Inkie, and Pre-Underground Autobiographical Comics.” In Comics Studies:
Here and Now. Routledge Advances in Comics Studies, edited by Frederick
Luis Aldama, 44–56. London: Routledge.
Lejeune, Philip. 1989. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mihăilescu, Dana. 2015. “Haunting Spectres of World War II Memories from
a Transgenerational Ethical Perspective in Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own and
Letting It Go.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 6, no. 2 (June): 154–171.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2015.1027940.
Satrapi, Marjane. 2004. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon.
Spiegelman, Art. 1986. Maus I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon.
Spiegelman, Art. 1991. Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon.
Telgemaier, Raina. 2010. Smile. New York: Scholastic.
Telgemaier, Raina. 2014. Sisters. New York: Scholastic.
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Miriam Katin.” Paris Review, April 18. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/04/18/
an-enormous-amount-of-pictures-in-the-studio-with-miriam-katin/.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction
Studies 52, no. 4 (Winter): 965–979. https://doi.org/ 10.1353/mfs.2007.0013.
Whitlock, Gillian, and Anna Poletti. 2008. “Self-Regarding Art.” Biography 31, no. 1
(Winter): v–xxiii.
Witek, Joseph. 1989. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art
Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
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11
LINGUISTICS
Comics Conversations as Data in Swedish
Comic Strips
Kristy Beers Fägersten
Introduction
In his seminal work Understanding Comics (McCloud 1993), Scott McCloud
identified six different types of panel transitions that occur in comic strips and
even serve to characterize specific genres of comics. These panel transitions
include: 1) moment-to-moment, 2) action-to-action, 3) subject-to-subject, 4)
scene-to-scene, 5) aspect-to-aspect, and 6) non-sequitur transitions (4). Most
American, European, and Japanese comic strips (as surveyed by McCloud
1993, 6–77) make use of transitions 2, 3, and 4, which highlight variation in
action, subjects, or scenes. It follows, then, that images in comics tend to be
many and varied, and it is also often the images that do the bulk of work in
progressing the comic’s narrative. Images have thus traditionally been assigned
greater significance than text in comics, and, unsurprisingly, they tend to be
the target of most scholarly analysis. This chapter, however, shifts the focus to
comics texts, as it explores comic strips which are characterized by both an
over-representation of the seemingly rare moment-to-moment panel transition
and a correlated preponderance of text in the form of character dialog.
Moment-to-moment panel transitions show only subtle manipulations or
even no differences at all between panels, resulting in a deliberate minimizing
and marginalization of the depiction of physical action or changes in setting.
The visual aspect of such transitions reflects less of an effort to move the narra-
tive through time and space but rather serves to linger on one moment only.
When there is little to no change between panels in the action, subject, or setting
depicted, images become static and put fewer demands on the reader who,
instead, can direct her attention to the comics text. Moment-to-moment panel
transitions may thus be a predictable consequence of a desire to exploit the
resources of the comics medium to make the text all the more salient and signifi-
cant. In other words, there may be a correlation between moment-to-moment
panel transitions and dialog-dense comics, whereby the text more so than the
145
Figure 11.1 Speech balloons in Rocky #2948 (2013), Martin Kellerman © Kartago
Förlag
image progresses the narrative. This can be seen in the Swedish newspaper strip,
Martin Kellerman’s Rocky (1998–2018), where the moment-to-moment panel
transitions establish a super-ordinance of text over image, which is quite literally
represented by speech balloons that obscure the illustrations, as in Figure 11.1.
As additional examples from Rocky and another Swedish newspaper comic strip
included in this chapter will show, text in the form of character conversations is
foregrounded. This is achieved by moment-to-moment panel transitions occur-
ring not only over several panels, but also throughout several strips over a series
of days. The term “prolonged moment panel transitions” (PMPTs) is suggested
to refer to such multi-panel, moment-to-moment transitions, as illustrated
above, and to a greater extent in Figure 11.2.
In these example comics, an over-representation of moment-to-moment and
prolonged moment panel transitions enables attention to be paid—by both artist
and reader—to dialog, especially with regards to the conventions and mechanics
of face-to-face conversation. There is, however, currently little to no established
practice within comics scholarship of analysis of conversation in comics texts.
With the ultimate aim of promoting linguistic research in comics scholarship,
this chapter proposes that conversation analysis (CA), as the study of ordinary
conversation as social action, can provide a framework for investigating comics
in which resources are saliently exploited to foreground talk-in-interaction.

The tradition of focusing on image in comics is reflected in definitions of the
medium, such as that of McCloud (1993, 9), whereby “juxtaposed pictorial and
other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to
produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” helps to establish the pre-eminence
of image by omitting any mention of text. This focus on the pictorial aspects of
comic strips echoes Eisner’s (1985) definition of comics as “sequential art”,
which in turn is reminiscent of Kunzle (1973, 2), whose definition includes
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LINGUISTICS
Figure 11.2 Prolonged moment panel transitions in Rocky strips #3436, #3437, #3438
(2013), Martin Kellerman © Kartago Förlag
a “sequence of separate images” and a “preponderance of image over text.”

Accordingly, even current scholars and theorists either seek to understand text
only in relation to image (Bateman 2014, Cohn 2013, Magnussen 2000, Saraceni
2003, Varnums & Gibbons 2001), or outright privilege the image (Duncan 2012,
Lefèvre 2009, Magnussen 2000), thereby aligning with Groensteen’s (2007, 8)
assertion of its superiority, since, “except on rare occasions, in comics [the
image] occupies a more important space than that which is reserved for writing.”
However, as this chapter demonstrates, a number of contemporary Swedish
comic strips challenge this assertion of rarity and, in so doing, establish the
necessity of an apparatus that can account for the primacy of text in (some)
comics. The inclusion of linguistic analysis in comics scholarship remediates the
marginalization of text. The approach outlined in this chapter does not, however,
aim to reduce the critical role of image in comics, but rather showcases image as
a vehicle for foregrounding textual content.
147
Another assumption critical to moving forward with an application of conver-

sation analysis to comic strip texts is the relevance of panel relationships. While
McCloud’s panel transition paradigm has been subject to criticism (see Cohn
2010, 2013), it nevertheless does acknowledge the sequential nature of comic
strips and the role of panels in story progression. According to convention, much
more actually happens in comics than that which is depicted in the panels. It is
the space between panels, known as the gutter, that allows (or rather, requires)
the reader to determine what has transpired between them. This process is
known as closure, which McCloud defines as “the phenomenon of observing the
parts but perceiving the whole” (1993, 63). The more progression in time and
space from one panel to another, the greater the need for the reader to provide
closure. Many comics thus put a demand on readers to be highly involved to per-
form closure work, so as to allow for potentially rapid story progression or
dynamic story arcs based on recurring changes in action, scene, or subject.
Moment-to-moment panel transitions require very little closure
(McCloud 1993, 70) since little to nothing actually happens other than what
is depicted. The over-representation of moment-to-moment panel transi-
tions in contemporary Swedish comics is the result of general, cross-strip
focus on foregrounding dialog. The time which elapses in one comic strip is
equivalent to the amount of time it takes to speak or read the dialog. Pro-
longed moment-to-moment panel transitions not only make possible the
“real-time” depiction of continuous, face-to-face conversation, but also serve
to attribute importance to any minor changes in image that do occur
between panels, signaling these as significant to the conversational structure.
Finally, this chapter operates under the assumption that conversation analysis
(CA) can be applied to comics texts. Essentially, CA is a set of methods for
describing and understanding how people manage their own and others’ contri-
butions to talk-in-interaction. As the name indicates, the object of analysis is
conversation, which in CA equates to natural, unscripted, spontaneous talk-in-
interaction. The conversation to be subjected to analysis is first audio- or video-
recorded and then carefully transcribed to include both verbal and non-verbal
details; both the process and the product of transcription are central to CA. In
this chapter, I propose that comic strips “do the work” of transcribing by
employing the affordances and resources of the medium to depict both verbal
and non-verbal details of conversation. For this reason, the underlying assump-
tion of applying CA to comic strips is that they represent “recordings” of conver-
sation that are amenable to transcription and subsequent analysis.

Based on the work of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), Sacks (1995)
and Schegloff (2007), conversation analysis focuses on conversation as social
action, maintaining that life experiences are shared primarily through talk,
and that “ordinary conversation is the default version of talk” (Gardner
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LINGUISTICS
2008, 264). Conversation analysis is thus concerned with determining and

explicating the strategies people use to interact in conversation, including
contributing their own input and making sense of others’ contributions.
One reason for applying CA methodology to comics is thus to explore
the variety of techniques employed to represent dialog as authentic conver-
sation. In this regard, the guiding investigative question is: How are the
affordances of the comics medium exploited to represent features of face-to-
face conversation? To answer this question, comics texts must be tran-
scribed using a system of notation, such as in Table 11.1.1
Transcription aims to capture the structure, sequence, and sound of talk,
making visible the practices of participating in and managing talk-in-interaction.
Broad conversational phenomena such as interrupting, overlapping, or sequen-
cing of turn-taking can be conveyed via general conventions of ballooning, let-
tering, and spelling, which can also represent nuances such as non-standard
Table 11.1 CA notation system for transcription
Symbol Description
(.) A micropause – a pause of no significant length

(0.7) A timed pause – long enough to indicate a time
>< Pace of speech has quickened
<> Pace of speech has slowed down
: A stretched sound (can be repeated to show continuation)
CAPITALS Louder or shouted words
Underlining Denotes a rise in volume or emphasis
°° Lowered volume
(h) Laughter in the conversation/speech
h Aspiration, exhalation (can be repeated to show continuation)
.h Inspiration, inhalation (can be repeated to show continuation)
↑ Rise in intonation
↓ Drop in intonation
, Steady or slightly rising intonation
. Falling intonation and (temporary) stop in talk
- Interruption
? Question intonation
[] Overlapping speech
= Latching, occurs at the end of one sentence and the start of the next to
indicate that there was no pause between them
() Unclear section
(( )) An entry requiring comment but without a symbol to explain it
149
pronunciations, disfluencies, vocal modulations, laughter, background noise, and

other relevant audible or non-verbal features of the observed talk. For example,
whispering is represented by speech balloons with dotted lines, pauses by ellip-
ses, laughter by particles such as “ha” or “hee hee”, or latching by speech balloon
connectors.2 The process of transcribing will make salient the ways in which the
images and manipulations of the pictorial features of text serve to depict the
aural and structural details of talk-in-interaction.
Comics, especially those that are textually dense, can thus be used to expand
the purview of linguistic investigation. On the other hand, the application of lin-
guistic analysis such as CA can also further comics analysis by highlighting
details of image–text collaboration. Here, the analyst is encouraged to push back
against the “effect of concealment” (Groensteen 2007, 70–71) attributed to
speech balloons, asking instead: How do the textual features of a comic strip
create a space for image to contribute the conversational structure?

This chapter features examples from two of Sweden’s most successful con-
temporary comic strips, Rocky (1998–2018), by Martin Kellerman, and
Fucking Sofo (2010–2011), by Lena Ackebo. Each represents a serial narra-
tive format, featuring continuous stories with recurring characters and
unfolding in open-ended episodes. The format is well suited to and greatly
enabled by another common element among the featured strips, namely
their original publication in daily or periodical newspapers.
A significant feature of these comic strips is the fact that they are both
reality-based chronicles of the artists’ own lives or their observations of
others. Rocky and Fucking Sofo can thus be considered descendants of the
groundbreaking series American Splendor, by Harvey Pekar. As described by
another pioneer of comic artistry and narrative, Robert Crumb, American
Splendor is such an exact chronicle of the everyday that an identifiable plot
becomes elusive:
Hardly anything actually happens … mostly it’s just people talk-

ing … There’s not much in the way of heroic struggle, the triumph
of good over evil, resolution of conflict, people overcoming great
odds, stuff like that. It’s kinda sorta more like real life … as it
lurches along from one day to the next.
(Pekar and Crumb 1996, ii; emphasis added)
Works in the tradition of Pekar are inspired by the everyday aspects of life,
reflecting, according to Highmore (2002, 1), “the landscape closest to us, the
world most immediately met.” Schneider (2016, 45) has remarked that comic
strips are increasingly developing into “a certain kind of work that privileges
unexceptional everyday situations; stories that challenge any accurate plot
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LINGUISTICS
description, often deprived of any special events and inhabited by characters

doing nothing more than living out their own routines.” Venezia (2011) agrees
that such vérité comic strips are based precisely on “quotidian-ness” and are
appreciated by readers because of the recognizable themes of the everyday that
are incorporated into the story. He furthermore asserts that such comic strips
can and should be described as “ordinary, common, banal or even trivial”, and
argues that it is precisely the aspect of the everyday that most captivates readers.
Contemporary Swedish comic strips exhibit the hallmark features of vérité
comics in reflecting a focus on the everyday, quotidian aspects of life – par-
ticularly on day-to-day conversations. The prominent and distinct focus on
language, speech, and interaction is noteworthy. Ongoing and structurally
complex conversations among the comic strip characters are foregrounded,
to the extent that multiple speech balloons can dominate the panel space, par-
tially or totally obscuring the illustrations (as seen in Figure 11.1) and verbose
dialog can be maintained over several strips (as in Figure 11.2). Specifically, it
is through prolonged conversations, actualized in prolonged moment panels,
that the comic strip creators chronicle their own lives and/or the lives of
those they closely observe, with meticulous attention to linguistic detail. In
her article “Rocky talar framtidens svenska” (“Rocky speaks Swedish of the
future”), journalist Gabriella Håkansson (2007) concluded her summary of
Sweden’s linguistic prognoses with the statement, “In short, one hundred
years from now we will all talk like Martin Kellerman’s Rocky and no one
will find it odd at all.” This reference to the language of Rocky, one of the
nation’s most commercially successful comic strips, confirms the central role
of language and accurate linguistic representation.
An appreciation of attention to linguistic detail in Swedish comic strips
is similarly suggested in additional journalistic sources, specifically high-
lighting Martin Kellerman’s Rocky and Lena Ackebo’s Fucking Sofo. Both
series have been lauded for their realistic depictions of spoken interaction,
signaling an appreciation by the audience of the artists’ efforts to exploit the
visual and written medium of the comic strip to convey oral, conversational
features of language. Martin Kellerman has explicitly expressed dissatisfac-
tion in the few instances that his comic strip may deviate from the norm of
long, multiple conversational turns among his characters, stating that a lack
of verbosity feels like “cheating” (Spurgeon 2005). Lena Ackebo’s own
insistence on realistic depictions of speech and interaction manifests itself in
her practice of “saying the characters’ lines aloud to herself to confirm that
they actually sound like real speech” (Sköld 2010).
Sample Analyses
Ackebo, Lena. 2010. Fucking Sofo. Stockholm: Kartago Förlag.
Kellerman, Martin. 2013. Rocky – samlade serier 2008–2013. Stockholm:
Kartago Förlag.
151
Analysis 1: What Comics Can Tell Us about Conversation

The first step of a conversation analysis is transcription, which requires
a careful reading of the comics text so as to determine which strategies are
employed to depict distinct features of conversation. While the mechanics
of conversation are often evident in the comic strip itself, the process of
transcribing and the subsequent conversation analysis help to identify recur-
ring practices of talk-in-interaction as well as techniques native to the
comics medium used to represent them. In Figure 11.3, an example from
Lena Ackebo’s Fucking Sofo comic strip illustrates an array of conventions
for depicting conversation.
With regards to structure and sequencing, the example shows clear pat-
terns of:
• turn-taking, via distinct speech balloons with tails indicating speaker

• latching, via balloon connectors
• interrupting, via layering of balloons
And with regards to the oral features of speech, the example also
indicates:
• intonation, via punctuation such as exclamation points, question

marks, and ellipses
• volume, via bold-face lettering
• pronunciation, via non-standard spelling (e.g., *missommar, *vicka, *å)
The comic strip would be transcribed as shown in Table 11.2 (in English
translation). In the interest of conserving space, only the first two panels are
transcribed; however, the conversational pattern established in these panels
is repeated throughout, arguably minimizing the need for further transcrip-
tion for the purposes of explication.
The transcription confirms the recurring practice of latching, indicating
a rapid conversational pace. Another recurring practice is interrupting, con-
sistently performed by Female 2, which suggests her dominant role in the
triad. Looking ahead to the remaining panels, this dominance is further
established by her central placement between Female 1 and Female 3, the
fact that she alternately faces Female 1 and Female 3 while their gazes
remain fixed, and that she utters more exclamations than Female 1 or
Female 3, who instead pose more questions. Transcription thus yields
another kind of visualization of the comics conversation as it unfolds, draw-
ing our attention to potential peculiarities or anomalies of interaction, and
to how the order and organization of everyday talk is maintained often with
the help of non-verbal actions that otherwise could be overlooked as exter-
nal to the conversational sequence.
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LINGUISTICS
Figure 11.3 Ballooning and lettering in Fucking Sofo (2010), Lena Ackebo © Kartago
Förlag
Once a transcription is complete, a conversation analysis will focus primarily

on the following phenomena: turn-taking, repair, action, and action sequencing
(Sidnell 2016). First, turn-taking focuses on the mechanics of participating in
a conversation, including selection of speaker, overlapping, interrupting, and
153
Table 11.2 Transcription of the first two panels of Figure 11.3 (in English translation).
Panel 1 Female 1: they were there at midsummer and it was on like some island=
Female 2: =who now?=
Female 1: =Pam and them. there was a bunch of people there who slept
ov-
Female 2: -and what does he have to do with that?=
Female 1: =which he?=
Female 2: =the one with THE BOAT
Female 3: ((outside of dyad)) who now?
Panel 2 Female 1: yeah it was his boat and so he can hardly live in Italy. plus he-
Female 2: -oh man how STUPID you are. of course you can be from Italy
even if you live in Sweden=
Female 1: =oh well then you hardly speak Swed-
Female 2: -oh my god you can LEARN=
Female 1: =what?=
Female 2: =SWEDISH
Female 3: is this anyone I know?
pausing. In comics, turn-taking is represented by ballooning, which in Figure

11.3 is characterized by series of connected balloons, corresponding to latching.
Multiple turns by and between the interlocutors occur within each panel, with
the exception of panels 3 and 4, where single interlocutor turns are encased in
panels featuring close-ups of the figures. Here, the conversation seems to slow
down as the focus zooms in, allowing the reader to perceive the orderliness of
the turn-taking: left to right, one by one, before the pace accelerates again in
panels 5 and 6 as the focus zooms out. In the first and last panels, balloons that
break into the turn-taking sequence provide the conversation with structure,
establishing the recurring question, “Who now?” as the conversational anchor.
Second, repair targets instances of miscommunication and strategies of
coping with misunderstanding. Even in this regard, the “Who now?” questions
emerge as significant, occurring in five of the six panels. Repair sequences are
initiated by questions, eliciting either a clarification (often denoted by bold let-
tering) or further initiating an embedded repair sequence, as in panel 1.
Third, action refers to understanding what interlocutors accomplish via
talk, often in the form of speech acts such as complimenting, complaining,
inviting, promising, etc. The conversation depicted in Figure 11.3 is initiated
by a descriptive statement, but ultimately centers around one action only,
namely determining the identity of a single person. In this regard, the recur-
ring “Who now?” proves to be the conversation’s most critical question.
Finally, action sequencing concerns the structural relationship between turns.
This conversation is, in effect, one extended repair sequence, with requests for
154
LINGUISTICS
clarification begetting additional requests, such that repeated questions prevent

conversational progression. The conversational structure within each panel pro-
duces an overall action sequence similar to a perpetual repair loop.
Since the aim of CA is to describe how “social actors interact in ways
that are ordered and intelligible to themselves and to external observers”
(Pallotti 2007, 40), the analysis aims to illuminate how comics artists, as
social actors, make their texts intelligible to their readers. The analysis of
turn-taking, repair, action, and action sequencing in Figure 11.3 reveals how
an artist may use the material affordances of the comics medium to convey
both conventional and chaotic conversation in an intelligible way.
Analysis 2: What Conversation Can Tell Us about Comics

The process of executing a conversation analysis on comic strip data tem-
porarily draws the analyst’s attention away from the strip itself, so as to
focus on the conversational phenomena captured in the transcription. It is
important to return to the strip, however, to look more closely at the inter-
play of text and image, specifically at balloons and the space they both
occupy and create. The next example (Figure 11.4) is, at a cursory glance,
a multi-panel strip featuring several characters engaged in a conventional
conversation in which turn-taking is equally distributed.
The text of the first panel seems to confirm this impression, since two of
the characters alternate turns. As we continue reading, however, we realize
that the speech balloons in each of the remaining panels are not at all dis-
tributed between the characters, but instead are attributed to only one char-
acter. This conversational asymmetry is obvious in the transcription in
Table 11.3, where the speaking turns of the Bird character can be compared
to the non-verbal turns of the Chicken and Dog characters.
It is evident from the comic strip and the transcription that two or more
speech balloons within one panel, corresponding to an equal amount of
turns, are employed for utterances that could be contained in one balloon
or one turn. According to Groensteen (2007):
Two phrases that succeed one another in the mouth of the same
speaker form a unique enunciation if they occupy the same bal-
loon; but they are autonomized and become two distinct enunci-
ations if the author chooses, without so much as a change to the
frame, to place them in two separate balloons (often with a link
between them). […] A string of balloons (physically or implicitly
bound) produces the effect of an improvised discourse, as the char-
acter finds new ideas, supplementary arguments, or simply the suit-
able words. (p. 83)
155
The completion of a turn in conversation is normally associated with

relinquishing the floor and providing an opportunity for someone else to
take a turn. An enclosed speech balloon (indicating a completed turn) thus
not only occupies but potentially also creates space. From a CA perspective,
this space is meaningful because it may be filled with non-verbal action rele-
vant to the conversational structure. Once a balloon is closed, a turn is ren-
dered complete, and an opportunity to take another turn (or other action)
arises. If a subsequent turn (or turns) is taken within one panel, then
a particular kind of space is created, that which is between the speech bal-
loons. This can be considered a “balloon gutter”: a space between speech
balloons that prompts a closure process by the reader. Balloon gutters may
represent no more than the time required to switch speakers. However, they
may also encourage a more involved closure process by the reader to deter-
mine what has happened between the turns, especially those created by two
(or more) consecutive turns from the same speaker (as illustrated repeatedly
by Bird, above).
A conversation analysis of Figure 11.4 would confirm that, as Groensteen
suggests, a pause was inscribed. However, it would challenge Groensteen’s
focus on the speaker, by establishing as necessary a consideration of the
behavior of the other interlocutors. Multiple turns by one speaker may not
simply be a case of monologuing or improvising as Groensteen claims, but
a reaction to other participants’ non-verbal turns. In fact, Bird’s final turn is
an implicit acknowledgment of Chicken’s and Dog’s failure to engage in
verbal turn-taking, which forces Bird to provide a turn in their stead,
during which she voices a rebuttal to her previous accusations. It behooves
the analyst to consider the possibility that using multiple balloons to indi-
cate a series of turns by a single speaker is a conscious choice by the artist,
who, in so doing, wishes to communicate to the reader to look elsewhere
for signs of non-verbal conversational participation.
Transcription procedures for conversation analysis conventionally entail
the inclusion of non-verbal action that is pertinent to the conversational
structure and sequence. The transcript of the comic strip in Figure 11.4
Figure 11.4 Dialog gutters in Rocky #2764 (2013), Martin Kellerman © Kartago Förlag
156
LINGUISTICS
Table 11.3 Transcription of Figure 11.4 (in English translation).
Panel 1 Bird: ((jumps into a chair)) WOOHOO what are you guys talking
about?
Dog: u::m (.) Kim-jong Il?
Panel 2 Bird: oh what you think he’s funny or something? Because he has plat-
eau shoes and big hair and is a liar? FUCKING HILARIOUS
Chicken: [((looks sideways at Bird and drinks))
Dog: [((looks at Bird and drinks))
Bird: PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY STARVING OVER THERE. HAVE
YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THAT?
Panel 3 Bird: you guys maybe think it’s perfectly alright because it’s so far
away anyway but imagine IT WAS YOU who was sitting there
in the dark without internet and eating rats. huh?
Chicken: [((looks sideways at Bird))
Dog: [((looks sideways at Bird))
Bird: ((raises hands and laughs)) he looked fucking crazy
Panel 4 Bird: and it doesn’t help to just join a facebook group, you think he
cares about that?
Bird: eh, it’s not even worth discussing this with you, you’re goddamn
brainwashed.
Chicken: [((looks away and drinks))
Dog: [((looks away and drinks))
Bird: what the hell are you saying? YOU are brainwashed.
indicates that, although Dog and Chicken are silent, they are nevertheless
participants in the conversation, taking non-verbal turns which can be read
as occurring between Bird’s turns, that is, in the balloon gutter (the exact
timing of these turns is, however, open to interpretation). Finally, the tran-
script also reflects the overlapping of these actions (such as drinking or
head-turning), which underscores the conversational alignment between
Chicken and Dog.
Conclusion
As seen throughout the examples in this chapter, moment-to-moment panel
transitions are a recurring feature, and one aim of this chapter is to present con-
temporary Swedish comic strips as counter-examples to the reigning panel tran-
sition trends, such that moment-to-moment transitions are the norm, and any
other transition represents a noticeable deviation. While rare across the inter-
national comics landscape, moment-to-moment panel transitions are so
common in Swedish comic strips as to render them an identifiable, national char-
acteristic. This is due primarily to many Swedish comics artists’ shared focus on
157
dialog and an accurate depiction of face-to-face interaction, a focus which slows

the pace of a comic strip to that of a conversation. While text in the form of con-
versation is foregrounded and unequivocally the driving force of comic strip pro-
duction, image is no less important. The few and slight variations in panel
images are not trivial, but in fact their significance can be considered in inverse
proportion to their scope: the slightest change in image may be critical to the
reading of the depicted conversation. Conversation Analysis is thus an appropri-
ate methodology for investigating such comics as it requires meticulous tran-
scription in order to understand the organization and management of
conversation as social action, both within the confines of the panels and in the
larger context of comic art.
Notes
1 Adapted from the Jefferson Transcription System: www.universitytranscriptions.co.uk/
how-to-guides/jefferson-transcription-system-a-guide-to-the-symbols/
2 A comprehensive presentation of balloon types and lettering conventions can be
found on the “Comic Book Grammar & Tradition” page of Nate Piekos’ Blambot
website www.blambot.com/articles_grammar.shtml
Bateman, John. Text and Image: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide.
London: Routledge, 2014.
Bramlett, Frank (ed.). Linguistics and the Study of Comics. New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2012.
Cohn, Neil. “The Limits of Time and Transitions: Challenges to Theories of Sequential
Image Comprehension.” Studies in Comics 1, no. 1 (2010): 127–147.
———. The Visual Language of Comics. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Duncan, Randy. “Image Functions: Shape and Color as Hermeneutic Images in Aster-
ios Polyp.” In Critical Approaches to Comics, edited by Matthew Smith and
Randy Duncan, 61–72. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985.
Gardner, Rod. “Conversation Analysis.” In The Handbook of Applied Linguistics,
edited by Alan Davies and Catherine Elder, 262–284. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2007.
Håkansson, Gabrielle. “Rocky Talar Framtidens Svenska.” Dagens Nyheter, July 10, 2007.
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routle-
dge, 2002.
Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the Euro-
pean Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Lefèvre, Pascal. “The Construction of Space in Comics.” In A Comics Studies Reader,
edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 157–162. Jackson: University Press of Mis-
sissippi, 2009.
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Magnussen, Anne. “The Semiotics of CS Peirce as a Theoretical Framework for the

Understanding of Comics.” In Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical
Approaches to Comics, edited by Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christian-
sen, 193–207. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanem Press, 2000.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton: William
Morrow, 1993.
Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the
Form. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.
Pallotti, Gabriele. “Conversation Analysis: Methodology, Machinery and Application
to Specific Settings.” In Conversation Analysis and Language for Specific Purposes,
edited by Hugo Bowles and Paul Seedhouse, 37–68. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007.
Pekar, Harvey and Crumb, Robert. “A Mercifully Short Preface.” In American Splen-
dor Presents Bob and Harv’s Comics. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996.
Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 1995.
Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel A., and Jefferson, Gail. “A Simplest Systematics for
the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (1974): 696–735.
Saraceni, Mario. The Language of Comics. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversa-
tion Analysis I. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Schneider, Greice. What Happens When Nothing Happens: Boredom and Everyday
Life in Contemporary Comics. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016.
Sidnell, Jack. “Conversation Analysis.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 2016. http://
linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-
9780199384655-e-40. Accessed October 5, 2018.
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Spurgeon, Tom. “A Short Interview with Martin Kellerman.” The Comics Reporter.
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June 13, 2011.
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12
P H I L O SO P H IC AL AES T H ET I CS
Comics and/as Philosophical Aesthetics
Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook
Introduction
In this chapter we will introduce the methods of analytic philosophy in gen-
eral, and philosophical aesthetics in particular. After a brief historical tour
of the origins of this approach to the analysis of artworks and art forms, we
will use the tools of philosophical aesthetics to provide two sample analyses
of Scott McCloud’s seminal Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. The
first analysis examines Understanding Comics and its relation to philosoph-
ical aesthetics insofar as that work describes and defends a particular
account of the features and effects of comics. Our ultimate interest here is
in using Understanding Comics to explore the general issue of whether, and
to what extent, comics can philosophize. In the second analysis, we will use
theoretical tools developed within philosophical aesthetics (and, in particu-
lar, developed within the sub-sub-field known as philosophy of comics) to
analyze Understanding Comics as a metacomic—that is, as a comic about
comics. As we shall see, there is an important connection between these
two analyses.

The word “philosophy”, from the Ancient Greek philo and sophos, means
“love of wisdom.” The Western philosophical tradition (which will be our
concern here) has its origins in intellectual activities that began in the
Ancient world—primarily in the Mediterranean and the Middle East—and,
as the name suggests, its original concerns were quite broad, including most
of what we would now consider the sciences. Over time, various sub-
disciplines of philosophy, including, again, the sciences, branched off and
became independent areas of intellectual inquiry. In addition, philosophy
has itself fragmented into a number of distinct traditions.
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PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS
Here we will be concerned with the tradition known as analytic philoso-

phy. The mainstream European philosophical tradition gradually separated
into two separate strands during the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth century. Continental philosophy (originally so-
called because, unlike post-World War II analytic philosophy, the majority
of its practitioners called continental Europe home) emphasized the import-
ance of human experience and agency, and de-emphasized the priority of
the natural sciences. Analytic philosophy, on the other hand (which is the
more mainstream view in American and British philosophy departments
and communities), emphasized its continuity with science and especially
(pure) mathematics, and it has its roots in a positive appraisal of the math-
ematical and scientific revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, and a conscious attempt to replicate these scientific methods and
attitudes within philosophy itself.
Early on, analytic philosophy was particularly influenced by the advances
in mathematical logic associated with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell,
Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, centering philosoph-
ical research on the mathematico-logical analysis of philosophical ideas.
Other pioneers of the analytic approach, influenced by Wittgenstein’s later
work, eschewed formalism in favor of an approach—ordinary language phil-
osophy—according to which philosophical problems stemmed from misun-
derstandings of the everyday meaning of language. On either methodology,
the proper means for examining philosophically interesting or problematic
concepts, and for solving philosophical problems, is neither to examine the
world (an empirical approach) nor our ideas or mental states (idealism or
rationalism). Instead, the structure of both our concepts and the world is
reflected in the language we use to describe and interact with the world,
and hence the way to understand our concepts and the world is to engage
in logical or linguistic enquiry into the meaning and use of our language.
(For a good survey of the role of this linguistic turn in the origins of ana-
lytic philosophy, see Coffa 1993).
At its worst, such an approach can devolve into trivial squabbling about
the finer points of this or that definition of whatever notion is in question.
(Although even on this approach, philosophy’s investigation of meaning is
distinct from mere lexicography, which aims simply to capture how words
are used and provide “definitions” that supply the information necessary for
that use). But at its best such an analysis can provide deep insights into
how we use our language to carve up the world into categories we can
understand and manipulate in various ways. Either way, the sort of enquiry
that was thought to be characteristic of the linguistic turn was a primarily,
if not essentially, a priori affair: One explicated philosophically interesting
concepts, and hence solved philosophical problems, from the armchair, so
to speak: in principle, at least, philosophical work required nothing more
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than (deep and difficult) thought about what our words mean and how we
use them.
Of course, after over one hundred years, analytic philosophy has moved
beyond this narrow focus on linguistic analysis (in part because of the rise
of linguistics as a distinct academic discipline). A number of these recent
trends in analytic philosophy are worth mentioning:
The Realist Turn: In recent decades, many philosophers have

rejected the idea that philosophy is ultimately concerned with lan-
guage or thought about the world rather than with the world itself.
Philosophical theories, on this view, are not generally about words
or concepts but, rather, about objects, events, properties, and the
fundamental structure of reality.
Naturalism: A specific version of realism emphasizes the continuity

of philosophy and science, with a corresponding insistence that
philosophical theories be consistent with our best scientific theories.
Experimental Philosophy (or X-Phi): The cutting edge of philosophical

naturalism emphasizes the role experimental investigation—primarily
using the tools of cognitive sciences rather than mere a priori theoriz-
ing—in order to determine, among other things, the extent of cross-
cultural variation to be found in philosophically relevant judgments.
These twenty-first-century changes to the shape of analytic philosophy have

widened the scope of both the sorts of questions that can be asked within
philosophy and the sorts of approaches one might adopt to answer such
questions.
One of the most thriving sub-disciplines within analytic philosophy is
philosophical aesthetics. Philosophical aesthetics is the branch of philosophy
that examines theoretical and conceptual questions about art, beauty, and
related matters. Topics examined within philosophical aesthetics include
(but are certainly not limited to!):
• Examining the nature of art (and possibly providing a definition of the

concept ART).
• Formulating an account of the ontology of art—that is, explaining what
sorts of objects (e.g., physical or mental or abstract) artworks are.
Multiply-instanced artworks, such as novels, musical works, and
comics, are particularly interesting cases to explore.
• Determining the nature of aesthetic properties—that is, those experi-
enceable features of artworks which play a central role in critical dis-
course about art—and explaining the manner in which we experience
these properties.
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• Exploring and explaining representation and expression in art.

• Explicating the notion of artistic style.
Each of these issues has received extensive attention in the academic litera-
ture on philosophical aesthetics. (For a good overview of philosophical aes-
thetics, see Levinson 2005).
One recent trend in philosophical aesthetics that is particularly interesting
given the focus of this chapter is the move from highly general accounts of art
to multiple, distinct investigations of the individual problems raises by individ-
ual art forms—that is, the move from a monolithic philosophy of art to the
philosophies of the arts. (For an extended argument in favor of the latter
approach, see Kivy 2008). Such an approach allows the theorist to focus more
on what makes a particular art form distinctive, rather than restricting atten-
tion to what all art forms have in common, and has led to rich and extensive
literatures on the philosophy of film, the philosophy of literature, the philoso-
phy of music, and—yes—the philosophy of comics. (For a useful introduction
to various issues in the philosophy of comics, see Meskin and Cook 2012).

Perhaps the best way to understand how philosophical aestheticians might
analyze a comic or comics is to look at actual work that has been done in
recent years in the philosophy of comics. We shall focus on three ways in
which a philosopher might approach a comic: as counterexample, as evi-
dence for a theory, and as object of analysis in its own right.
Comics as Counterexamples
The provision of counterexamples is central to contemporary analytic phil-
osophy, but the practice of philosophers providing counterexamples goes
back at least as far as Socrates and Plato. Consider Socrates’s discussion of
justice in Plato’s Republic. Cephalus famously claims that justice amounts to
speaking the truth and paying your debts, but Socrates argues against him
by use of a counterexample:
Suppose that a friend when in his right mind has deposited arms
with me and he asks for them when he is not in his right mind,
ought I to give them back to him? No one would say that I ought
or that I should be right in doing so, any more than they would
say that I ought always to speak the truth to one who is in his con-
dition … But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your
debts is not a correct definition of justice.
(Plato 1894)
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Socrates’ argument helps us see the structure and function of a counterexample.

The philosopher confronts a theory (e.g., justice is telling the truth and paying
your debts) and considers what follows from it (i.e., what it entails). She then
describes a possible scenario which conflicts with some of those entailments and
infers from this that the theory is mistaken.
Note that counterexamples are possible scenarios. In fact, in the vast
majority of cases, philosophers appropriately appeal to merely possible scen-
arios to counterexample theories which, after all, are meant to tell us what
must be the case rather than merely what happens to be the case. But what
is actually the case is also possibly the case; that is, if something has hap-
pened, or does exist, then it surely is the sort of thing that could happen or
could exist. So philosophers may also provide counterexamples by describing
how things actually are. And this approach, counterexample by appeal to
actual cases, is common in the philosophy of art. After all, one does not
need merely possible cases to counterexample most generalizations about
art—artists have already generated those counterexamples on their own.
The use of counterexamples has been central to the investigation of
comics by philosophical aestheticians. So, for example, Meskin regularly
appeals to counterexamples in his discussion of the definition of comics:
various experimental and abstract comics are offered as counterexamples to
theories which hold that narrative is a defining feature of the form (Meskin
2007, 2016), and he also suggests that certain “gallery comics” provide
counterexamples to the claim that comics are essentially “reproductive” or
multiple (Meskin 2012). And Cook suggests that Batman #663, which he
describes as “essentially a prose short story, with occasional illustrations”
(2011, 289), is not strictly speaking a counterexample but can, nonetheless,
be used to construct counterexamples to any theory which holds that
comics essentially contain pictures.
Comics and Theory Building

Philosophers use counterexamples to criticize theories. But philosophers in
general, and philosophical aestheticians in particular, are not just in the busi-
ness of criticizing; they also aim to construct their own positive theories. In
fact, counterexampling an opposing theory is usually not enough to demolish
another theory. After all, one could always respond by arguing that the pro-
posed counterexample is not possible or—if possible—is misdescribed. Alter-
natively, one might argue that the theory in question does not entail what it
is said to entail. So to really put the nail in another theory’s coffin, one has to
develop an alternative theory of the phenomena in question.
Consider Cook’s development of his “mereological” approach to comics,
which holds (i) that comics need not contain pictures, but (ii) that something
is a comic only if it is part of a (possibly larger) comic which consists of, or
contains one or more, sequences of pictures (Cook 2011, 293). How does he
164
argue for these claims? His method is to describe a range of examples—

admittedly all merely possible—and then argue that the best explanation for
our judgments about those cases is his theory. Here comics and our judg-
ments about them are used to construct a theory rather than to argue against
one. And, again, such an approach is common in the recent literature in the
area. Wartenberg, for example, uses various examples (e.g., the Classics Illus-
trated version of Last of the Mohicans, a single panel comic from The Far
Side) in support of his contention that words and pictures in comics are on
an equal footing with respect to determining story-worlds and, in this way,
can be distinguished from examples of mere illustration (2012).
Comics as Objects of Analysis

Philosophers in general, and philosophers of art in particular, are typically
interested in criticizing and defending general theories (e.g., of truth, know-
ledge, art, beauty, etc.). As we’ve seen, philosophers of comics are no differ-
ent—they typically focus on general theoretical questions about comics. And
when they do discuss individual comics, this is often a means to some more
general theoretical end (viz., the development or demolition of some very
general theory about comics). But sometimes philosophers of art are inter-
ested in individual works for other reasons.
For example, David Carrier (2012) engages in an in-depth investigation
of Stéphane Heuet’s comics adaptation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost
Time. The goal here is not to counterexample some other theory nor—it
seems—to defend a general theory about how adaptation from prose fiction
into comics works. Rather, Carrier’s aim is more limited—he seeks to
understand “the relationship between the novel In Search of Lost Time and
Heuet’s comics version” and the distinct aesthetic experiences the two art-
works offer (189–190).
Meskin (2018) engages in a very different project. He focuses on the
long-running “gurume” [gourmet] manga series, Oishinbo, and argues that
specific episodes in that work contain significant philosophical claims about,
and insights into, the relationship between food and art.1
Finally, Cook (2012, 2014, 2015) examines John Byrne’s run on The Sen-
sational She-Hulk in order to explore the way that metafictional effects are
used within this comic in order to comment on the tropes and stereotypes
of mainstream superhero comics. The second analysis given below will con-
tinue this exploration of comics that are, in some sense, about comics.

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is a non-fictional 216-page comic first
published in 1993 (and republished more widely by William Morrow in 1994),
written and drawn by Scott McCloud, who is also the author of Zot! and The
165
Sculptor. The mostly black-and-white comic (see below) features a cartoon ver-
sion of McCloud himself as the narrator, who argues for a broadly formalist
account of the nature and mechanics of comic-book storytelling over the
course of nine chapters:
Chapter 1: Setting the Record Straight: In this chapter McCloud

defends an account of comics which holds that they are “juxtaposed
pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey
information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9)
Chapter 2: The Vocabulary of Comics: In this chapter McCloud dis-

cusses the building blocks of comics (words and images) and intro-
duces his picture plane: a triangular diagram mapping different
artistic styles on a two-dimensional grid whose co-ordinates meas-
ure (i) the degree of iconicity and (ii) the degree of (non-iconic)
abstraction of the art.
Chapter 3: Blood in the Gutter: In this chapter McCloud examines the

grammar of comics—that is, the way in which individual images or
panels combine to form larger meanings. In particular, he argues that
the central mechanism involved is closure, where we fill in missing
information between panels. Closure is “represented”, in a sense, by the
blank strip usually appearing between panels (i.e., the gutter).
Chapter 4: Time Frames: In this chapter McCloud examines the

ways that panel size and arrangement, as well as the size, arrange-
ment, and contents of speech and thought balloons, can be used to
control the experience of time when reading a comic.
Chapter 5: Living in Line: In this chapter McCloud examines the

way that artistic style, and especially the kind of lines one draws,
can affect the emotional content of a comic.
Chapter 6: Show and Tell: In this chapter McCloud examines the

word-image interactions that, although not necessary to comics, are
nevertheless distinctive when they do appear. He examines
a number of ways in which the pictorial content of a panel and the
text contained in captions, balloons, and elsewhere can interact in
such a way that the meaning of the sum is often (but not always)
greater than the meaning of either individually.
Chapter 7: The Six Steps: In this chapter McCloud takes a short detour
from theory, and explores what it takes to be successful (artistically,
rather than financially) as a comics artist (or artist more generally)
166
Chapter 8: A Word About Color: In this short chapter McCloud

considers the effect that color, and different kinds of coloring, can
have on the content and reception of a comic.
Chapter 9: Putting it All Together: In this chapter McCloud sums

up what has been accomplished, and uses the overall account to
situate comics within the larger artistic and cultural world.
McCloud has produced two additional non-fictional comics about comics:

Reinventing Comics (2000), which examines the impact computers, the inter-
net, and other recent technology have had on comics’ production and con-
sumption, and Making Comics (2006), which is a how-to text on the creation
of comics, framed by the theoretic picture developed in the first two volumes.
Sample Analyses
McCloud, Scott (1994), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York:
William Morrow.
Analysis 1: Understanding Comics and/as Philosophical Aesthetics

Our first analysis of Understanding Comics starts from the observation that
there is something profoundly philosophical about aspects of that work. That
is, McCloud may not be a professional philosopher, but his approach to
defining comics in the first chapter of Understanding Comics, which involves
revising various definitions in light of potential counterexamples while
explaining away other counterintuitive implications, bears important similar-
ities to the activity of philosophers engaged in criticizing and developing
theories.
Philosophical aestheticians have spilled a lot of ink exploring the rela-
tionship between various art forms and philosophy. The philosophical cap-
acities of literature have been explored by a range of authors (Gracia 2001),
and in recent years there has been a particular interest in the extent to
which films can be said to “do philosophy” or “philosophize” (Wartenberg
2007). On the other hand, there has been very little work on the extent to
which comics can do philosophy. Jeff McLaughlin’s two edited collections,
Comics as Philosophy (2005) and Graphic Novels as Philosophy (2018), pro-
vide plenty of examples of authors considering philosophical issues raised in
various comics (or illustrating various philosophical issues by reference to
comics), but do not seriously focus on investigating the capacity of comics
themselves to do philosophy. But, as suggested above, McCloud’s work
makes this latter issue salient.
One question one might ask is whether a comic can be a work of philosophy.
Although we know of no examples, this seems possible. Philosophical works are
167
embedded in a distinctive institutional framework and are related to a specific

tradition or set of traditions. Comics, in one important sense, comprise
a representational medium which allows for a wide range of possibilities. There
is nothing—or at least nothing other than contingent norms that could be
changed or violated—that precludes using that medium to produce something
within the institutional framework of philosophy. As McCloud puts it: “No
schools of art are banished by our definition, no philosophies, no movements, no
ways of seeing are out of bounds!” Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening (2015) was ori-
ginally submitted as a dissertation for his PhD in education, and we see nothing
that would keep a PhD in philosophy from being written in comics form. We
don’t, however, advise trying this if you are aiming for a job and tenure in phil-
osophy! (It is not obvious whether Unflattening itself is a counterexample to the
no comics can be works of philosophy thesis. This depends, in large part, on how
one construes the institution of philosophy. But at a minimum, it suggests that
counterexamples are possible.)
That being said, McCloud’s work does not seem to be a full-fledged work
of philosophy—it just doesn’t seem to be embedded in the right sort of insti-
tutional context or to be part of the relevant tradition. But this is not the end
of the interesting questions about the work’s relationship to philosophy. Per-
haps the most interesting question in this vicinity has to do with whether
comics can make a significant independent philosophical contribution that
relies on comics’ distinctive artistic capacities. Formulating the question this
way enables us to put aside cases where a comic may be used to convey some
previously established philosophical arguments or theses, as is done through-
out Logicomix (2009), or hypothetical cases in which a philosophical lecture
or essay is simply presented in comics form, perhaps by representing the
author(s) speaking or writing it. You might imagine a Harvey Pekar-style
strip which represents the two authors of this paper reciting it out loud: such
an exercise—interesting as it might be—would not seem to utilize comics’
distinctive artistic capacities to make its philosophical arguments.
Let’s focus briefly on counterexamples. McCloud’s work contains a number
of them, and they are used in the service of what seems to be a very traditional
philosophical project—an attempt at providing a definition of comics, that is
an account of what comics essentially are. So, for example, animated film is
presented as a counterexample to the provisional definition of comics as
“sequential visual art” (7) and words are presented as a counterexample to
a revised definition of comics as “juxtaposed static images in deliberate
sequence” (8). Perhaps more intriguingly, McCloud pursues the standard
philosophical tactic of explaining away apparent counterexamples. As men-
tioned above, this is often done by arguing that a proposed counterexample is
not, in fact, a counterexample because it is misdescribed. This is precisely how
McCloud handles the case of single-panel “comics” such as The Family Circus
—he argues that they “derive part of their visual vocabulary from comics” but
are properly seen as cartoons rather than comics (20–21).
168
Furthermore, McCloud’s use of counterexamples in the development of

his arguments is independent of any prior philosophical work. That is,
Understanding Comics does not simply illustrate or popularize some pre-
existing philosophical arguments. And McCloud’s theories are certainly sig-
nificant—they have been the object of sustained philosophical discussion.
The question, then, is whether Understanding Comics uses comics’ dis-
tinctive capacities to make its significant and independent philosophical
contributions. And, of course, this means that determining comics’ distinct-
ive capacities becomes pressing. When philosophers discuss the analogous
issue about film, they talk about such things as “montage or editing, camera
movements and selective focus within a shot, and correlations between the
soundtrack and moving image” (Livingston 2006, 12). But many of those
features can be found outside of the art of film (consider videogames). So it
does not seem that “distinctive” could really mean “exclusive.” Perhaps,
then, the corresponding capacities and features in comics we should attend
to include things which are important—but not exclusive—to the art of
comics such as correlations between written text and image, panel layout,
closure, emanata, and the representation of motion by still images. If this is
right, then it is plausible that McCloud’s work does use comics’ distinctive
capacities to make its philosophical points.
We’ll return to this issue in the next sample analysis of the work.
Analysis 2: Understanding Comics as Metanarrative

Viewed as a text, one of the most striking aspects of Understanding Comics
is that it is a metacomic. A metacomic (or reflexive, or self-referential, or
self-conscious, or self-aware, or narcissistic comic) is a comic that is, in one
way or another, about comics.
Before moving on to see how its status as a metacomic affects the way
that we analyze Understanding Comics as a narrative from the perspective of
philosophical aesthetics (as opposed to understanding it as a work of philo-
sophical aesthetics, our approach in the previous section), we need to clear up
an unfortunate bit of terminological confusion. Texts that are self-referential in
the sense loosely described above—including metacomics—are often grouped
under the general heading “metafiction.” For example, in perhaps the most
influential work on self-referential narrative generally, Patricia Waugh defines
the phenomenon in question as follows:
Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously

and systematically draw attention to its status as an artefact in order
to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.
In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such
writings … examine the fundamental structure of narrative fiction.
(1984, 2)
169
We should remember, however, that narrative works (and narrative artworks)

need not be fictional: ignoring comics, for the moment, many types of non-
fictional work, including documentaries, travel writing, and some journalism,
deserve aesthetic attention. Hence, comics need not be fictional in order
to be “meta” in the relevant sense, and we can assess non-fictional texts,
like Understanding Comics, using the same tools that we might apply to
a fictional metacomic.
A text can achieve metafictional effects via a number of (not necessarily
completely distinct) strategies, including (but certainly not limited to):
1. Having a plot that centers on the production, consumption, or collect-

ing of comics.
2. Having a character who is aware that she is a character in a comic.
3. Violating the standard conventions of comic storytelling.
4. Referencing other comics or other works.
5. Including characters from other fictions, or parodying or spoofing other
works.
6. Including the author as a character in the comic.
Understanding Comics is a metacomic par excellence, in that it mobilizes all

six of these strategies.
It is perhaps worth noting at this point that some authors, including Ole
Frahm (2000), Gardner (2011), and Michael Joseph (2012), have argued that
all comics are metacomics. Even if this were the case, and it is not clear
that it is (see Cook 2016, for discussion), there are very few comics that are
as uniformly and overtly self-referential as Understanding Comics.
One of the tasks of philosophical aesthetics is to provide an account of the
manner in which acts of imagining are generated by a text, whether fictional
or not (see Walton 1993 for a particularly influential account of how, exactly,
fictions prescribe particular imaginative acts). That is, what are the mechan-
isms by which a comic (or other work) “tells” us to make-believe, or imagine,
that certain things are true or false within the story-world of the fiction? One
aspect of comics that make them particularly interesting in this regard is that
comics are typically multimodal: their content is transmitted to the audience
via multiple communicative strategies or modes, in this case via both text and
images. Thus, borrowing some terminology of Chapter 6 of Understanding
Comics, a typical comic both tells us what we are meant to imagine via the
text in speech and thought balloons and in narration boxes, and shows us
what we are meant to imagine via the images included on the page, and this
dual nature can be metafictionally manipulated in various ways.
Metanarratives operate by interfering with the imaginative process in one
way or another, pushing us “outside” the world of the story and forcing us to
consider not only what we are being instructed to imagine, but how those
instructions are constructed and transmitted to us. In many metacomics,
170
including most metafictional comics, these effects are aimed at getting us to

appreciate the artificial, constructed nature of the story being told (or the arti-
ficial, constructed nature of storytelling more generally). See, for example,
Cook’s examination of the metafictional aspects of The Sensational She-Hulk
mentioned above. But in Understanding Comics, these methods play a very
different role.
We have already, in the previous section, made much of the fact that
Understanding Comics offers philosophical arguments: its purpose is to
examine and explain the ways that comics work. Throughout the comic
McCloud develops and defends a sophisticated, comprehensive account of
the way that comics tell stories (whether fictional or non-fictional).
McCloud could have delivered this information to the reader by writing an
illustration-free traditional prose textbook. But the fact that he instead
chose comics as the format of his work on comics theory affords him narra-
tive possibilities that would not be possible in an image-free book. The
reason is simple: McCloud is able to take advantage of the multimodality of
comics to both present an extended argument regarding how comics work,
and also present the evidence that he takes to support this argument—that
is (borrowing some terminology from Chapter 6 of Understanding Comics),
he shows us how comics work (via the artwork contained in the panels) and
tells us how they work (via the content of the speech balloons). Thus, the
multimodal character of comics allows McCloud (or his in-comic avatar) to
simultaneously argue for various claims about how comics work, and pro-
vide us with clear examples of the phenomena in question. Examining
a couple of examples will make the point clearer.
On pages 28 to 37 of Chapter 2, McCloud attempts to explain why
comics are so powerful by hypothesizing that the simplistic, cartoon images
typically used in comics allow for easier identification than more realistic
renderings. In other words, he argues that we find identifying with the char-
acters in comics easier than identifying with characters drawn in more real-
istic styles since we can “see ourselves” in the simplified drawings (36).
Now, we could sit back and do our philosophical aesthetics from the
armchair, examining the conceptual and logical underpinnings of this
particular argument. Assessing McCloud’s work as philosophy was the
topic of the previous section of the essay, however. Here, we care less
about whether the claims McCloud makes are correct, and care more
about the manner in which he makes those claims. And, viewed from
this perspective, what is interesting about this passage is that the metafic-
tional nature of McCloud’s comic provides us with unique, immediate
way of assessing his arguments that are lacking in most prose non-fiction
about visual art.
Throughout his extended examination of the role simplification plays
in whether, and to what extent, we identify with the characters in
comics, McCloud provides us with numerous drawings of characters in
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various styles ranging from the extremely realist to the maximally simpli-
fied (i.e. a simple smiley face). He even goes so far as to replace the car-
toon version of his own head with a simple smiley face (31), and with
a much more realistically drawn and shaded version (36). In short, these
pages do not merely present a philosophical argument regarding the way
that drawing style affects our interaction with a comic—they also consti-
tute a body of data by which we can assess that argument, looking at the
various drawing styles McCloud uses on these pages to decide for
ourselves.
Another example of this sort is provided by the entirety of Chapter 8. In
this very brief chapter, titled “A Word About Color,” McCloud makes
a number of points about the role that color plays in comics, and the differ-
ent effects that can be achieved via the inclusion, or not, of color. Strikingly,
the eight pages of this chapter are the only pages in the comic that are
printed in full color—the remainder of the comic is in black and white.
Including color on these pages allows McCloud to provide extremely useful
illustrations of a number of technical aspects of color, including the differ-
ence between RGB and CMYK. But the use of color, on these pages and
these pages only, serves to strikingly highlight the difference between the
color pages and the monochrome pages in the comic, demanding that we
compare the two and judge for ourselves whether McCloud is right about
the role that color plays in comics.
Thus, Understanding Comics uses the multimodal nature of the comics
form to present an account of how comics work that could not be presented
in any other format. Independently of whether or not McCloud’s account is
right, the way in which he presents his arguments produces a unique effect.
In both presenting his argument in words but also presenting the images in
the panel art, McCloud has produced a work of comics that is simultan-
eously an explanation of a phenomenon and the phenomenon itself. It is as
if one wrote a textbook on molecular chemistry where the reader could see
the molecules that make up the book and check to see if the claims in the
book were true. And, to return to the topic of the previous section, it seems
we have even more reason to say that McCloud does use comics’ distinctive
capacities to make his philosophical points. In a substantive and interesting
sense, then, Understanding Comics can be seen as an example of comics
“doing” philosophy.
Conclusion
Philosophical aestheticians working in the analytic tradition were slow to
attend to the art form of comics. The first book on the topic by an analytic
philosopher, and the earliest papers on comics in mainstream aesthetics
journals, were not published until the first decade of this century (Carrier
2000, Meskin 2007, Pratt 2009). There are a variety of reasons for this,
172
including the tendency of philosophers of art to focus on “high” art, and

the prejudice against comics in Anglo-American culture. Thankfully, there
is now an increasing amount of work in the area addressing topics such as
definition, authorship, adaptation, narrative, genre, and others (Meskin and
Cook 2012). But philosophers have only begun to explore the range of
interesting issues that comics raise.
Note
1 See also https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2017/07/21/100-philosophers-100-artworks-100-
words-66/
B. Batchelor, Bajac-Carter, Maja, Norma Jones, and Bob Batchelor (eds.) (2014), Her-
oinesof Comic Books and Literature: Portrayals in Popular Culture, Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Bramlett, Frank, Roy Cook, & Aaron Meskin (eds.) (2016), The Routledge Companion
to Comics, London: Routledge.
Carrier, David (2000), The Aesthetics of Comics, University Park, PA: Penn State University
Press.
Carrier, David (2012) “Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: The Comics Version,” In
Meskin and Cook (2012): 188–202.
Coffa, J. Alberto (1993), The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna
Circle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cook, Roy (2011), “Do Comics Require Pictures, or, Why Batman #663 Is a Comic”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69(3): 285–296.
Cook, Roy (2012), “I am Ink: The She-Hulk and Metacomics,” In White (2012): 57–70.
Cook, Roy (2014), “Jumping Rope Naked: John Byrne, Metafiction, and the Comics
Code,” In Bajac-Carter, Jones, & Batchelor (2014): 185–198.
Cook, Roy (2016), “Metacomics,” In Bramlett, Cook, & Meskin (2017): 257–266.
Cook, Roy (2015), “Metafictional Powers in the Postmodern Age: Jennifer Walters,
Canon, and the Nature of Superpowers,” In Darowski (2015): 136–155.
Darowski, Joseph (ed.) (2015), The Ages of the Incredible Hulk: Essays on the Green
Goliath in Changing Times, Jefferson NC: McFarland.
Doxiadis, Apostolos & Christos Papadimitriou (2009), Logicomix: An Epic Search For
Truth, New York: Bloomsbury.
Frahm, Ole (2000), “Weird Signs: Comics as a Means of Parody,” In Magnussen &
Christiansen (2000): 177–192.
Gardner, Jared (2011), “Storylines” SubStance 40(1): 53–69.
Gracia, Jorge (2001), “Borges ‘Pierre Menard’: Philosophy or Literature?” The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59(1): 45–57.
Joseph, Michael (2012), “Seeing the Visible Book: How Graphic Novels Resist
Reading” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37(4): 454–467.
Kivy, Peter (2008), Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
173
Levinson, Jerrold (2005), “Philosophical Aesthetics: An Overview,” In Levinson (2005b):

3–24.
Levinson, Jerrold (ed.) (2005b), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Livingston, Paisley (2006), “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy” The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 64(1): 11–18.
Magnussen, Anne & Hans-Christian Christiansen (eds.) (2000), Comics and Culture:
Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, Copenhagen: University of Copen-
hagen Press.
McCloud, Scott (1994), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: William
Morrow.
McCloud, Scott (2000), Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form, New York:
William Morrow.
McCloud, Scott (2006), Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and
Graphic Novels, New York: William Morrow.
McCloud, Scott (2015), The Sculptor, New York: First Second.
McLaughlin, Jeff (ed.) (2005), Comics as Philosophy, Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press.
McLaughlin, Jeff (ed.) (2017), Graphic Novels as Philosophy, Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press.
Meskin, Aaron (2007), “Defining Comics?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65
(1): 369–379.
Meskin, Aaron (2012), “The Ontology of Comics,” In Meskin and Cook (2012): 31–46.
Meskin, Aaron (2016), “Defining Comics,” In Bramlett, Cook, & Meskin (2017): 221–229.
Meskin, Aaron (2018), “Oishinbo and Food Aesthetics,” Manuscript submitted for
publication.
Meskin, Aaron, & Roy T Cook (eds.) (2012), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical
Approach, London: Wiley-Blackwell.
Plato (1894), The Republic, trans. by Benjamin Jowett, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pratt, Henry (2009), “Narrative in Comics” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67:
107–117.
Sousanis, Nick (2015), Unflattening, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Walton, Kendall (1993), Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Represen-
tational Arts, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Wartenberg, Thomas E. (2007), Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy, Oxford and
Wartenberg, Thomas E. (2012), “Wordy Pictures: Theorizing the Relationship between
Image and Text in Comics,” In Meskin and Cook (2012): 87–104.
Waugh, Patricia (1984), Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction,
London: Routledge.
White, Mark (2012), Avengers and Philosophy: Earth’s Mightiest Thinkers, London:
Wiley-Blackwell.
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13
BURKEAN D RAMATISTIC
A N ALY SIS
An Echo of Diversity: Dramatistic Analysis
of Comics
A. Cheree Carlson
Introduction
The dramatistic perspective of Kenneth Burke has been both praised and
made suspect for its applicability across multiple genres of communication
(Nichols 1963; Kimberling 1982; White and Brose 1982; Coupe 2013;
Duncan 2017). Burke himself was interested in all kinds of human symbol-
izing, including “mathematics, music, sculpture, painting, dance, architec-
tural styles, and so on” (Burke 1966, 28). He was also a notorious violator
of academic “class”; equally at home discussing great literature or a political
advertisement. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this iconoclasm, Burkean
concepts have gradually been adapted into a number of disciplines and
applied to all manner of texts (Foss, Waters, and Armada 2007; Overall
2011). Untied from purely verbal symbols, dramatism enables rhetorical
critics to examine a wide range of relationships between communication
and culture, identity, politics, and art.
Dramatism is also, at its core, a theory of persuasion. One of the central
elements of influence championed by Burke is the use of symbols to chal-
lenge preconceived notions and open the mind to new possibilities of
action. Comics have the same potential as every other medium to issue that
challenge and generate those possibilities. Dramatism can thus also expand
our understanding of comics as persuasive texts, which could eventually
help critics appreciate the possibilities of comics as “equipment for living”;
texts whose effects “should apply beyond literature to life in general” (Burke
1973, 256).
This chapter introduces dramatistic criticism of comics by demonstrating
the application of the Burkean concepts to a comics text. First, it will pro-
vide a broad overview of the basic premises of the theory, followed by an
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A. CHEREE CARLSON
introduction to some of the most popular critical tools derived from it.
These concepts will then be applied to Vision Quest (Mack 2015), the origin
story of Maya Lopez (aka Echo), a vigilante/superhero introduced in 1999
within the pages of Daredevil (Mack, Quesada, and Palmiotti 2015). Echo is
a mestiza (Native American Latina) with uncanny physical prowess. She
also has profound deafness. This analysis will utilize a Burkean perspective
to explore the strategies through which Mack transcended multiple cultural
differences to create a broader vision of the superhero narrative.

The core of Burke’s theory is the ontological claim that human beings are
human precisely because they create, and are created by, complex symbolic
structures that alter their perception of the world (Burke 1966, 15). Human
beings use symbols to construct interpretive frames that enable them to
derive meaning from the chaos of experience. These “more or less organized
system of meanings” serve as guides as to how new experiences should be
interpreted (Burke 1984a, 5). Frames also serve as shorthand for situations,
allowing us to efficiently assess situations and quickly draw from a set of
defined responses.
That efficiency comes at a cost. Burke warns us that “a way of seeing is
also a way of not seeing” (Burke 1984b, 49). A speaker or writer who organ-
izes symbolic cues to encourage specific interpretations perforce emphasizes
certain elements, making it more difficult to discover alternative conclu-
sions. These interpretive frames influence our attitudes toward the objects
described. Thus, the precise symbol used to describe an object can serve as
a marker for our attitude toward that object. Burke then makes the claim
that our attitude toward something will affect our actions in reference to it.
Hence, dramatism treats language as “symbolic action” (Burke 1966).
Burke created a taxonomy of frames based upon the author’s attitude
toward the present social structure. These include “acceptance,” “rejection,”
and a “transitional” frame that attempts to deal with times of social change.
The various expressions of those attitudes are further categorized according
to the overall shape of a particular frame. Audiences become familiar with
these forms through constant exposure and come to expect a narrative to
progress in similar ways. Burke labels these patterns with terms related to
major literary forms, such as tragic, comic, epic, etc. The specific frames
that are pertinent here will be discussed in the analysis.
Several other useful critical tools are derived from dramatistic theory.
Although they differ in practice, they fit together into a larger whole that
helps the critic unearth the underlying worldview that motivates the
speaker or writer. Then it is possible for the critic to discover how
a narrative reinforces or challenges prevailing attitudes to foster that
worldview.
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BURKEAN DRAMATISTIC ANALYSIS
Two elements used to analyze those persuasive tactics are the pentad
and bridging devices. Burke developed the pentad to serve as
a “grammar” from which a critic can build tools to examine all kinds of
rhetoric (1962). Just as the grammar of a language identifies parts
of speech and the rules of structure, the pentad identifies key elements of
a narrative and how they may fit together. All narratives are structured
around five key terms: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. Burke con-
siders these parts of a universal framework from which to examine the
relationship between a text and the expectations of its audience. The five
terms are not merely plot elements; rather they serve as a shorthand all
the possible ways to create emphasis upon an interpretation of reality.
The creator of a narrative must include all five elements in order to
create a well-rounded vision. But they may choose to emphasize certain
of these aspects and de-emphasize others. Depending upon the “recipe”
used two descriptions of the same events can encourage radically different
interpretations. For example, in presenting a villain to the reader,
a narrator might emphasize scene and agent by emphasizing the kind of
neighborhood they grew up in as an overwhelming influence upon their
adult character. The same story emphasizing act and agent would stress
the individual’s choices to imply that the villain “made” themself that
way. Each subtly encourages the audience to give or withhold sympathy
for the character. Burke refers to these many combinations as “ratios”
(Burke 1962, 3–20). Given the number of possible combinations (scene/
agent, scene/act, agent/act, etc.), specific ratio that is chosen provides
a valuable clue to the authors underlying motive.
Symbolic frames are usually composed of multiple elements that may not
be mutually exclusive. Gender, race, class, and ability interact with each
other, as well as a multitude of life experiences. If these differences remain
unaddressed this could prevent particular segments of the audience from
accepting the new attitude. Thus, Burke outlines an element to partially
overcome these differences. A bridging device “is a symbol that shares sub-
stantive elements of more than one social category, creating those ‘areas of
ambiguity’ from which one can transform meaning” (Burke 1984a, 224).
Bridging devices make use of the grey areas between social categories. These
points are potential levers for opening paths to alternate interpretations of
a narrative, which in turn might contribute to shifting attitudes. Speakers or
writers examine discussions of a symbolic element within narratives already
assimilated into the culture and find a common ground from which to
transform it into an element fitting a new narrative.

As noted earlier, dramatism has been fruitfully applied to texts ranging
from music (Overall 2011) to Mad Men (Soetaert and Rutten 2017). Almost
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A. CHEREE CARLSON
any instance of human symbolizing, in whatever medium, is fair game.

Comics is an especially promising medium because it draws up the tools
and techniques of several media, then combines and transforms them in
unique ways. The overlapping of textual genres creates a sort of critical dia-
lectic, fertile ground for discovering the underlying commonality of across
forms of human symbolizing.
Given that Burke champions the use of symbols to challenge precon-
ceived notions and open the mind to new possibilities of action, dramatism
is especially suited for questions about the persuasive aspects of a text.
What does a particular comic do, or not do, to create, reinforce, challenge,
or overturn an established frame of motivations? Dramatism seeks to
unearth what attitudes motivate a culture, in whatever medium they appear.
With that in mind, the critic should seek comics that engage in dialogue
with the larger cultural context.

The first obvious step is to read comics. The more familiar you are with
common narrative structures and symbolic conventions, the easier it becomes
to find texts that serve as significant examples of dramatistic principles. As
you read, note which symbolic elements appear to be emphasized. If the same
theme is reinforced in many different ways, it is likely to be important. Does
the construction of the panels mirror the progression of events? Are depictions
of characters surrounded by markers of innocence, piety, darkness, etc.? What
if the verbal symbols appear to contradict what occurs in an image? As you
progress, you should be able to determine which symbols “cluster” together,
which are central to the narrative, and which are set dressing.
The next step is to determine the pentadic balance of the narrative being
presented. While no narrative is complete without all five elements, there
will always be two or three that appear to control the rest. These patterns
will suggest the ratios of elements in the pentad. For example, there may be
a strong emphasis on the workings of fate, and the attendant minimizing of
human agency in the progression of events. The shape of the narrative will
suggest the motives that dictate this framing of events.
Although the process is fairly straightforward, there is one error that can
lead the analysis astray. The goal of Burke’s methodology is to examine the
motivating frame behind a narrative, emphasizing its persuasive nature.
Achieving this requires careful attention to the distinction between the tale
and the telling. Characters within the story will, of course, pursue goals
based upon their individual motives and the differences between characters’
views may provide tensions that move the story. The pentad can fruitfully
aid analysis of such meanings and metaphors within the story. The plot,
however, exists within the larger narrative frame that dictates how the story
is told. In order to understand the persuasive force of the narrative as
178
addressed to an audience the critic must take care to focus on the alignment
of pentad elements external to the plot.

In 1998, David Mack was approached by Joe Quesada, an editor at Marvel,
inviting him to write and draw a comic on any Marvel character he wished.
Mack was busy with his own successful independent series and did not
want such a responsibility. They settled on a compromise: Quesada wanted
a unique new villain for Daredevil. If Mack would write the script for this
character, Quesada would do the art (Mack 2003). Mack had grown up with
his Cherokee uncle’s Native American stories. Quesada was a second-
generation Cuban American. Together they created Maya Lopez, a mestiza
who could mimic any physical action – including any number of martial
arts tactics. She debuted in the pages of Daredevil in 1999.
Lopez departed from the traditional villain in two important ways. First,
she was born with profound deafness. As a result, she grew up paying close
attention to nonverbal cues, which likely contributed to her uncanny
abilities. Second, Lopez was not actually evil. Lied to about the death of her
father, she mistakenly believed that Daredevil had murdered him. Hence,
her search for vengeance was always balanced by her desire to return to
music and dance when it was all over. Her life is further complicated by
a romance with Matt Murdock, Daredevil’s secret identity. After several
heated battles Daredevil finally reveals his identity, revealing that he would
have been a child at the time of her father’s death. Lopez then wreaks her
vengeance on the real killer. Realizing that her entire life was based on a lie,
she leaves the city.
After the events in the Daredevil story, Quesada approached Mack again
about fleshing out the character.
He said that though I created her for our DD story, she’s now
a permanent part of the Marvel Universe, and eventually she’s
going to end up in future Marvel stories. So he said I should really
set the tone of the character by writing her story in her own series.
(Mack 2003)
Mack agreed this time to both writing and illustrating a limited series.
The result, Vision Quest, stretched the limits of diversity in comics by
deviating from superhero tradition in character, art, and plot. As
a celebration of cultural difference, it succeeded superbly. It is no easy task
to successfully blend the elements of three very different cultures into
a single character. Mack accomplished this balancing act. Vision Quest gar-
nered praise and admiration from all quarters. Echo has been lauded as
a compelling mestiza superhero (Aldama 2017, 52–53). The comic was
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A. CHEREE CARLSON
praised by Native Americans for its representation of their culture (Furey

2007), and an excerpt was included in an award-winning Indigenous
Comics anthology (Nicholson 2015). An influential scholar in literature for
deaf adolescents surveyed a number of comics that featured deaf characters,
and deemed it the only “realistic portrayal” up to that time, recommending
it as a catalyst to “foster an open dialogue for students regarding the simi-
larities and differences between Deaf and Hearing individuals” (Pajka-West
2009). Mack was also lauded for excellence in artistic presentation,
described as akin to “visual poetry” (Mack and Jenkins 2011).The response
from readers at the time, however, was sharply divided between admiration
and condemnation. This was at least partly due to the fact the “limited
series” was initially released within Daredevil, interrupting a “gripping cliff-
hanger” (Jenkins 2017, 67). The subsequent rerelease of a separate graphic
novel ameliorated that factor.
Vision Quest is an exemplar of a work transcending multiple differences
to create a new “vision” of a superhero narrative; one not framed tragically
around punishing evil. Instead, Mack’s narrative fits Burke’s very definition
of “comic”: a story of enlightenment and recognition of alternatives. Utiliz-
ing the full symbolic arsenal of comics, Mack demonstrates that Lopez’
quest echoes the experiences of us all.
Sample Analysis
Mack, David. 2003. Daredevil: Vision Quest. New York: Marvel (rpt 2015)
Vision Quest is both an origin story and a trajectory for the future. In the
former, Mack focuses on her childhood, with an emphasis on the experience
of deafness. The latter is pursued through a focus on Native American trad-
ition and history that culminates in Lopez’ own vision quest. These two cul-
tural factors made it inevitable that the work was going to diverge from the
traditional form of the superhero narrative.
These differences in Lopez’ character were minor, however, in compari-
son to Mack’s treatment of the overall form of the superhero comic. In tell-
ing the story of this mestiza, he abandons western linear storytelling in
favor of a circular narrative. Past and present continually intertwine. Events
repeat in slightly different ways so that profound changes take place almost
unnoticed. This pattern is echoed in the art of the comic. Mack eschews
traditional frames in favor of organized collage. Images flow down the page,
each one given meaning only in the context of the whole, creating a form
of visual metaphor. This style is typical of Mack (Mack and Jenkins 2011),
but readers encountering this style for the first time would find it discon-
certing, to say the least.
As discussed earlier, Burke claims that human beings naturally create
symbolic structures, or frames, that serve as guides to the interpretation of
180
situations. The traditional superhero narrative, repeated and codified, locked

readers into a single interpretive position. In order to appreciate Lopez’
journey, readers had to discover new paths. Mack was apparently aware of
this. Rather than simply abandon readers to struggle through, and possibly
abandon, his narrative, he took care to construct multiple points in the nar-
rative wherein the new forms shared common substance with the old. At
various points in the story, for example, Mack took pains to insert meta-
phors linking native values to western culture by demonstrating that they
often pursued similar social goals. These were bridging devices, inviting
readers to appreciate that there was more than one way to tell a story.
Because the story blends past and present on the page, repeating in
slowly progressing loops, details do not emerge in a tidy linear pattern.
Meaning is derived from the whole. For this analysis, I will present the nar-
rative elements with the understanding that none is complete until the end
of the comic.
The prime pentadic emphasis is made clear from the start. Vision Quest
opens with a full-page portrait of Lopez. Against a background of soft
watercolor drips, she is rendered solidly. Some drops scatter on her skin,
emphasizing her physical presence. Near the bottom is a small square image
of her as a child seated at a piano. It is rendered as a soft, sepia-toned
sketch; a color and style repeated nearly every time the narrative drifts into
her past. “My name is Maya Lopez … This is my story,” reads the legend
handwritten down the right side. The focus is set and emphasized. This
story focuses on agent. This is her story, told in the first person. In addition,
her nature as storyteller is immediately differentiated. Her story “doesn’t
happen in words. It happens in movements and memories. Shapes and feel-
ings.” That one page neatly encapsulates the core of the narrative to come.
Lopez is telling her own story, but she will tell it in an entirely different
mode of communication from the norm.
Lopez’ deafness, with all its limitations and opportunities, is only the first
complication in the establishment of her agency. Agency is the pentadic
element that deals with generating possibilities of actions that an actor can
take. Agency focuses our attention on the agent’s response to the material
(scenic) elements of a situation, emphasizing the power of human choice to
alter subsequent events. Mack employs agency as a shifting element in an
agent/agency ratio. As the story progresses, Lopez gains, shifts, and loses
agency in a circular pattern. Because she is born deaf, she is cut off from
the hearing world from the start. Forces from the medical “scene” quickly
classify this as a disability. This does not alter her father’s love and support
while she learns to function in her own fashion. As she grows she begins to
hone her skills at reading physical movements, learning “to decipher every
shade of expression” on her father’s face (Mack 2015, 9). Although she does
not speak, she draws pictures that convey messages, and she learns to read
lips. A path to control of her life opens. Her father’s decision to bring her
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A. CHEREE CARLSON
to “the rez” begins her journey to full agency. She is introduced to the
Chief, a respected elder. He teaches her Indian sign language to add to her
skills and tells her stories that give her a sense of place.
Unfortunately, the scenic elements that support agency are embedded
within a larger social structure. Doctors initially miss her disability, and
instead label her as “slow.” She is required to attend a special school where
every day she is treated as such. Another collage is dedicated to displaying
everything working against her (Mack 2015, 11). These things are presented
in the childish elements of her reality. A series of her simple drawings floats
behind. These hint at trouble: Daddy takes a gun to work, but he keeps it
a secret. He works for a Mr. Fisk, drawn so that readers will recognize him
as the Kingpin, a major Daredevil villain. All around are words spoken by
adults, words like “no” and “don’t” rendered as alphabet blocks in a further
display of the physicality of her world. She becomes aware that she has
been “labeled by a certain word I had come to recognize on people’s lips.”
That word is rendered in a crooked stack of blocks: “R-E-T-A-R-D.” And
yet, there in the page is also a fully rendered image of her father’s face, and
a raven feather floats down the side. Her father and her heritage are there
as a bulwark against the forces arrayed against her (Mack 2015, 11).
Lopez loses her tenuous sense of agency when her father is killed by
Kingpin. She is institutionalized, and only released when her talent for
mimicry is discovered. After a struggle she finds agency in performance art,
especially music. But Kingpin once again interferes, this time by lying to
her, claiming that it was Daredevil who killed her father. A new goal, ven-
geance, is achieved through study of martial arts videos. Echo the villain/
victim is born. Eventual discovery of the deceit shatters both her romance
and her sense of identity. The cycle starts again. Her first instinct is to
retreat to what worked for her in childhood – art. This cultivates a skill but
not a sense of identity. After such false starts, she remembers what her
father had told her about Vision Quests. At last she returns to “the rez.”
Thus, the narrative revolves around a shifting agent/agency ratio. Lopez
keeps trying new avenues in order to find the means by which to pursue
her goal – to discover and assert her individual identity. Each time she
makes progress fate intervenes. Her purpose is to find her purpose, and the
power to embody it.
Although a narrative will stress certain specific ratios, all five elements
are always present. Mack takes advantage of the precision with which he
defines agent/agency to apply other elements in obviously metaphoric ways.
For example, the scene is deliberately left ambiguous. There is a broadly
drawn line between urban/white/western and spiritual/native/indigenous set-
tings, but the narrative easily cycles between them. We have some clues.
Events of the past are perforce tied to Daredevil’s New York, but there is
no overt reference to it. When she returns to “the rez” she specifically states
that “it wasn’t a conventional reservation for a particular tribe,” but a loose
182
community composed of various Native Americans who would arrive, stay,

or depart depending upon their needs. Lopez’ return to her roots is not
a specific story about a specific tribal culture, rather it is about tradition
and the role of meditating upon a “higher power.” Many cultures share
such values. This ambiguity serves as one of several “bridging devices” used
to universalize her story.
The “bridging device” is a core concept in Burke’s theory of how sym-
bolic devices can address real social and economic differences. In its sim-
plest form, one finds discussions of a symbolic element within narratives
already assimilated into a culture and finds a common ground from which
to transform it into an element fitting a new narrative. “Bridging devices”
do not function “with reference to their face value alone” but through their
links to symbols that the audience already values (Burke 1984a, 224). Mack
utilized symbols and images that sought to transcend differences by linking
specific elements to more familiar audience experiences.
For example, one defining element of Lopez’ difference is her complete
deafness. Having been born with hearing loss, she had no concept of this as
a “disability” until she encountered society. Her struggle to understand her
place begins there. How does one convey that sense of dislocation to
a hearing audience? As Lopez relays her experiences at the “special school”
she is sent to, Mack creates a collage representing multiple avenues of com-
munication, tied together by one overarching metaphor: the familiar game
of Scrabble (Figure 13.1). The central image is of an unhappy child trapped
Figure 13.1 Daredevil: Vision Quest pg. 38 (2003, rpt 2015), David Mack © Marvel
183
A. CHEREE CARLSON
in a box, that child drawn as a pencil sketch, fading into the background.
The box itself, on the other hand, is a solid structure built of Scrabble
tiles. Lopez has mentioned earlier that, for her, communication resembles
a game of Scrabble filled with blank tiles. Here we are shown the concrete
effect of that metaphor: a child completely overshadowed by words.
Among the blank tiles are those that spell out, “I piece the world together
as the pieces are given to me.” These images serve as a powerful bridge
between the deaf world and the hearing. The player’s frustration at not
having quite the correct tiles to make a play, at seeing tiles that don’t
seem to mean anything – these are mirrors of what Lopez faces in a much
higher-stakes game. She has a goal, but the blank tiles give her no agency
to pursue it. As the tiles begin to fill, her options expand, building the rest
of the structure that identifies her with the hearing world. Marching across
the blank tiles are diagrams of the alphabet in sign language: “I learn to
sign.” Sign language is a familiar concept to the hearing, a visible marker
of deafness. It is likely still a foreign language but at least a recognized
one. Lopez has joined a new community, one outside the box, yet still
inside the wall. Finally, one last set of symbols appears on the page: “I
learn to speak.” The sentence begins inside the box, framed in a tile
square, and then filters through the wall, where it becomes “normal” letter-
ing. The final transformation of symbols to the dominant manner of pre-
senting words bring Lopez and the reader together as one. The bridging
devices that serve the audience are also serving her. She now has the
agency to escape the boundaries erected by hearing society. Her break-
through also gives emotional unity between the barriers and frustrations
she experienced and the everyday frustrations of the audience. This
humanizes the mysterious Echo, a process continued in the more recogniz-
able trauma of losing her father to violence, and the all too common pain
of discovering that much of her identity was based on a lie.
The cognitive gap between the hearing and deaf worlds is only one
hurdle that Mack recognizes. Vision Quest also diverges from the norms
of superhero comics. The majority of superhero narratives arise from
what Burke terms the “tragic frame” (Burke 1984a). This frame is prem-
ised upon acceptance that the current social structure is sound and that
any dissatisfaction with its norms is the result of “evil” forces. The tragic
narrative proceeds by projecting the evil onto a scapegoat, which is then
symbolically purged. Superhero narratives enact that process in its most
literal form. Villains disrupt the social order. Heroes rise in defense, con-
front the evil head-on, and defeat it by capturing or killing its physical
embodiment.
Vision Quest is barely concerned with “evil” at all. It is deeply psycho-
logical and focused primarily on Lopez’ internal struggle. There is very little
overt physical action and she does no killing. The only villain to be defeated
lies in her own head. It most resembles Burke’s “comic frame” (Burke
184
1984a, 166). Comic, in this case, is not necessarily funny, but it is always
pointed. It openly acknowledges that no social order is perfect, and that
people can be mistaken in the strategies they construct to rule their lives.
Shortcomings in society are usually errors; not intentional and certainly not
evil. The comic narrative allows an audience to observe the results of those
errors from a safe distance, thereby allowing them to re-examine their own
assumptions. People can get wrong-headed, but after the mistakes are cor-
rected, all will be well. Although the process through which a character
comes to this realization can be extremely painful, no one has to be per-
manently destroyed. Lopez has no interest in destroying evil, if only because
she is too busy freeing herself from mental chains forged in response to
external circumstances.
Mack’s tactic here is to generalize her internal struggle to the familiar
experiences of comic readers. Thus, he attempts to make her story literally
an “echo” of traditional narratives. He does this by first building links
between her cultural traditions and superhero traditions, then by focusing
the story through a specific narrative familiar to most readers. Finally, the
two traditions merge into a vision that frees Echo – and reminds readers
that both themes are always present in one way or another.
The preparation for this pivotal moment begins almost immediately. One
of the first attempts the young Lopez makes to communicate with others is
drawing pictures (Mack 2015, 8). As her skills develop, she discovers, and
comes to love, comics; especially superhero comics. The comics enhance her
appreciation of tribal tales, as “characters in the legends remind me of
super Heroes [sic]” (Mack 2015, 16). Even “the word balloons in the comics
make [her] think of smoke signals.” When she learns that her father is
a storyteller, she desires someday to tell stories, but she will “learn to speak
in pictures” (Mack 2015, 17).
The twin themes of art and narrative that run through the story make
a notable turn toward Native American traditions when Lopez returns to
“the rez” for her vision quest. As the Chief describes the legends surround-
ing the vision quest, shamanic figures, animals, and artifacts fill the back-
ground, infused with earth tones, punctuated by images of Lopez’ face as
she fasts and enters the wilderness. Anticipation builds as she waits for
a visit from a spirit guide who, if she is worthy, will bless her with “super-
natural power best suited for the quester’s needs and mission in life” (Mack
2015, 67). She is visited by a number of animals, each important, but none
is her guide. Finally, she looks ahead and sees two dogs fighting viciously,
with no sign of victory on either side.
At this pivotal moment, the story flips, plunging readers into a very trad-
itional comics narrative, held at its center by a powerful symbol that
invokes instant recognition. In a flash of lightning stands the shadowed
figure of a muscular male. His face is hidden. In the instant of visibility it
looks as though he has horns. That issue ends there, delaying full revelation,
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A. CHEREE CARLSON
but in case there is any lingering doubt as to what the figure is, the cover of
the next one makes it crystal clear. The same shadowed figure is depicted,
lightened enough to make out human features and wicked-looking blades
emerging from his knuckles. Lopez’ spirit animal is apparently a wolverine.
Another lightning flash confirms it – standing before her is Logan, arguably
one of the most recognizable figures in the Marvel Universe.
This is the point at which the comic most resembles a typical narrative.
A panicked Lopez attacks the shadow, and a fight ensues. The pages pro-
gressively fill with bright colors, culminating in a full-page image of Logan
with blades fully extended. Then, just as quickly, things flip again. What
began as a tragically framed battle between Lopez and her personal demons
ends when she realizes that she has made a mistake. This is not an enemy.
The fight ends, and the two come together to discuss their common
ground. We are brought back to the comic frame, where open-mindedness
and forgiveness operates.
Logan is a nearly perfect bridging device. In addition to appearing in many
superhero comics, most notably the X-Men and New Avengers, he shares sev-
eral experiences with Lopez. He, too, was cast into his role as a result of decep-
tive forces. His struggle with identity is a central theme of his story. Finally, he
has also met the Chief and was sent on a vision quest to find his purpose.
The most important interaction in the narrative is also the quietest. Each
of the characters tells the other a story. Lopez tells Logan the Biblical tale of
Jacob wrestling angels while he responds with a story about two dogs fighting
he heard from the Chief. Lopez recognizes it as one of her father’s. At its core
is a metaphor for the internal struggle between animal hatred born of fear,
and humane respect for both self and others. Its moral is essentially comic.
Both participants learned “the dog that wins is the one [you] feed the most”
(Mack 2015, 98). Lopez realizes that her people’s stories have much to offer
in feeding the humane dog. She returns knowing that her purpose is to be
a storyteller; an echo of her cultural heritage. Echo returns, to apply her phys-
ical talents as performance artist rather than a fighter. The story comes full
circle as a final series of images repeats the first, with a focus on Lopez as
a powerful agent who will tell us a story. This time she wears her costume
between open stage curtains, and a new caption states that her “story is called
Echo,” representing acceptance of her new role (Mack 2015, 112).
The narrative of Vision Quest demonstrates that Mack himself is working
within a frame of acceptance, specifically what Burke terms the “comic.” As
noted earlier, frames allow us to efficiently assess situations and then draw
from a set of defined responses. An acceptance frame arises from the prem-
ise that these assessments are fundamentally sound. Mack clearly loves
comics and the heroic tradition. Lopez’ character emerges from a childhood
love for art as a form of storytelling that continues unabated. That her
spirit guide is Logan places comics at the center of her personal epiphany.
At the same time, Mack challenges a perceived flaw in the tradition: its
186
narrow, tragic view of the world. He counters the traditional superhero

motive of punishing evil through violent confrontation with a comic per-
spective emphasizing human imperfection, reminding us that there are add-
itional non-violent ways to address conflict. His goal is to broaden the
audience’s awareness of these alternatives.
He achieves this by bringing together those two narrative traditions, as
representative characters from each acknowledge the simultaneous power of
both frames. Logan is a well-known tragic character, and even he benefits
greatly from encountering new stories. The result is Mack’s appeal for
open-mindedness and respect for diverse narrative traditions based upon
their underlying common values. This perspective is one that Burke himself
encouraged in all literature. To him, the comic is “mankind’s only hope”
for achieving peaceful attitude change. The tragic is not only “too eager to
help out with the holocaust,” but also “too pretentious to allow for the
proper recognition of our animality” (Burke 1973, fn20). Mack demon-
strated that comics, too, must feed both dogs.
Aldama, Frederick Luis. 2017. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press.
Burke, Kenneth. 1962. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California Press.
———. 1966. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: U of California Press.
———. 1973. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: U of California Press.
———. 1984a. Attitudes Toward History. Berkeley: U of California Press.
———. 1984b. Permanence and Change. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California Press.
Coupe, Laurence. 2013. Kenneth Burke: From Myth to Ecology. Anderson, SC: Parlor
Press.
Duncan, Randy. 2017. “Comics and Rhetoric.” The Routledge Companion to Comics,
edited by Frank Bramlett, Roy Cook and Aaron Meskin. New York: Taylor and
Francis. 406–414.
Foss, Sonja K., William J. C. Waters, and Bernard J. Armada. 2007. “Toward a Theory
of Agentic Orientation: Rhetoric and Agency in Run Lola Run.” Communication
Theory 17: 205–230.
Furey, Emmett 2007. “Native Americans in Comics.” [Interviews]. CBR.com. Last
Modified January 29. Accessed July 23. www.cbr.com/native-americans-in-comics/.
Jenkins, Henry. 2017. “Man without Fear: “David Mack, Daredevil, and the ‘Bounds of
Difference’ in Superhero Comics.” Make Ours Marvel Media Convergence and
a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. Austin: University of Texas Press. 66–104.
Kimberling, C. Ronald. 1982. Kenneth Burke’s Dramatism and Popular Arts. Bowling
Green: Ohio Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Mack, David. 2003. “Interview with Kuljit Mithra.” Accessed June 23. www.man
withoutfear.com/daredevil-interviews/Mack.
———. 2015. Daredevil: Echo – Vision Quest. New York: Marvel Reprint, 2015. 2003.
Mack, David, and Henry Jenkins. 2011. “Comics as Poetry: An Interview with David
Mack.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 56 (4): 669–695.
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Mack, David, Joe Quesada, and Jimmy Palmiotti. 2015. Daredevil: Parts of a Hole.
New York: Marvel Comics.
Nichols, Marie Hochmuth. 1963. “Kenneth Burke: Rhetorical and Critical Theory.”
Rhetoric and Criticism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 79–93.
Nicholson, Hope, ed. 2015. Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection. Vol. 1.
Toronto: AH Comics, Inc.
Overall, Joe. 2011. “Piano and Pen: Music as Kenneth Burke’s Secular Conversion.”
Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41: 439–454.
Pajka-West, Sharon. 2009. “Understanding Diversity in Comics: A Look at Marvel
Comics’ Echo- Multilingual, Biracial and Deaf.” National Council of Teachers of
English Annual Convention, Philadelphia, PA, November 20.
Soetaert, Ronald, and Kris Rutten. 2017. “Rhetoric, Narrative, and Management:
Learning from Mad Men.” Journal of Organizational Change Management 30 (3):
323–333.
White, Hayden, and Margaret Brose, eds. 1982. Representing Kenneth Burke. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Part III
REL A T I O NS HI PS
14
AD A P TATIO N
From Mason & Dixon by Pynchon to Miller &
Pynchon by Maurer
David Coughlan
Introduction
In the Marvel Comics Universe, the Skrulls are an alien race of shape-
shifters, capable of taking on the forms and appearances of others. They can
adapt or transform in order to imitate someone or something else, to pro-
duce another version of it, to replicate it. Imagine coming face-to-face with
a Skrull copy of yourself, another someone who introduced themselves with
your name. Imagine recognizing yourself in someone else. But even if they
looked like you on the surface, could they capture every aspect of what you
are, your personality, your behavior, or what might be termed your spirit?
Could this adapted form be a true and faithful representation of what you
are, or would something always be missing? Or maybe your double would
possess something that you don’t, some specific characteristic or ability
resulting from the essential “Skrull-ness” still running through their green
blood? These are some of the questions raised by this chapter, in which
a comic book plays the part of the Skrull; this Skrull is reproducing a novel,
and the subject is adaptation.
Adaptations are everywhere in literature, even if we don’t always recog-
nize them as adaptations or record their original sources. Even if we do,
studying an adaptation doesn’t have to mean studying it as an adaptation.
In fact, despite the long history of adaptations, the academic field of adapta-
tion studies is still taking shape, with the journal Adaptation and the Inter-
national Association of Adaptation Studies both established as recently as
2008 (Allen 2011, 204). One of the main drivers within the field has been
the study of film adaptations of literary works, with George Bluestone’s
1957 work Novels into Film cited as an important early example, but studies
of adaptations have been slow to produce what could be called a theory of
adaptation; as recently as 2003, Thomas Leitch was lamenting that “adapta-
tion theory has […] never been undertaken with conviction and theoretical
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DAVID COUGHLAN
rigor” (149). What follows, therefore, will be far from a final or definitive
take on comic book adaptations, but drawing on the work of literary critics
Gérard Genette and Linda Hutcheon, it will offer an approach to analyzing
an adaptation in comics form that is structured around a series of questions:
What is (an) adaptation? Who is adapting and why? How is the adaptation
received by audiences? And where and when does the adaptation appear?

When asking “What is adaptation?” our first assumption is that adaptation
is a form of hypertextuality, where an original source text (called the hypo-
text) is transformed or imitated by a later text (the hypertext). Adaptation
therefore always involves at least two texts. The hypotext is not like Madrox
the Multiple Man, creating copies that are ultimately reducible to the ori-
ginal one; adaptation requires both the source text and its Skrull. Hypertex-
tuality, says Genette (1997), is “any relationship uniting a text B […] to an
earlier text A […], upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of
commentary” (5).
These terms—hypertextuality, hypotext, hypertext—were coined by Gen-
ette in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997), originally pub-
lished in French in 1982. For Genette, hypertextuality is one of five linked
and often overlapping forms of what he calls transtextuality, which refers to
“all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with
other texts.” The other four forms are: metatextuality, which describes the
relationship between commentary or criticism on a text and the text itself;
paratextuality, defined as all those elements at the threshold of the text that
present it to us as a book or other artifact, including the book’s cover and
title, internal elements such as forewords or chapter headings, or even exter-
nal elements such as advertising material; intertextuality, which for Genette
means the more or less explicit presence of one text in another, through
quotations, allusions, or plagiarism; and architextuality, by which Genette
means “the entire set of general or transcendent categories—types of dis-
course, modes of enunciation, literary genres—from which emerges each
singular text” (Genette 1997, 1).1
All the above terms for different forms of X-textualities can appear
rather off-putting, but Genette’s approach has its advantages. First, it allows
him to resist the large-scale application of his concept of hypertextuality.
Genette acknowledges that “there is no literary work that does not evoke
(to some extent and according to how it is read) some other literary work,
and in that sense all works are hypertextual,” but he argues that this univer-
sal application of the concept would make it both unworkable and too cen-
tered on the reader.2 Second, he prefers to reserve the term intertextuality
for small-scale, “local, fugitive, and partial echoes of any other work.”3
Accordingly, Genette deliberately limits hypertextuality to those cases where
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ADAPTATION
“the shift from hypotext to hypertext is both massive (an entire work
B deriving from an entire work A) and more or less officially stated” (Gen-
ette 1997, 9).4 As a result, the assumption that adaptation is a form of
hypertextuality means it must be clear that the later text derives from the
earlier text and that text B could not exist without text A.5
The second assumption is that the hypertext is a transformation of the
hypotext. Thinking of adaptation as an act of transformation draws atten-
tion to the way in which, as Hutcheon (2006) points out, “we use the word
adaptation to refer to both a product and a process of creation and recep-
tion” (xiv).
Importantly, Genette makes sure to distinguish between a simple, direct
transformation and a more complex, indirect transformation that he labels
imitation. He describes the imitative transformation as more complex
because “in order to imitate a text, it is inevitably necessary to acquire at
least a partial mastery of it, a mastery of that specific quality which one has
chosen to imitate” (Genette 1997, 6). To put it very crudely: in a simple
transformation, the hypertext tells the same story as the hypotext but in
a different way; in a complex transformation, the hypertext tells a different
story but in a similar way. For Genette, the “mood” of a transformation
determines the nature of the resulting work: a playful imitation is
a pastiche; a satirical imitation is a caricature; a serious imitation is
a forgery; a playful transformation is a parody; a satirical transformation is
a travesty; and a serious transformation is a transposition, which “is without
any doubt the most important of all hypertextual practices” (28, 212). This
analysis makes it clear that, in Genette’s schema, although all adaptations
are hypertexts, not all hypertexts are adaptations: an imitation is not an
adaptation because it does not share (elements of) its hypotext’s content.
Only simple, direct transformations (parodies, travesties, and transpositions)
are adaptations.
“Transformation” means that familiar content takes a new form or new
content is delivered in a familiar way; “transposition” means that elements
of a familiar story are placed in a different context. Transposition requires
us to think about what is (un)altered in the transfer from hypotext to
hypertext, or what we can expect to stay the same and what might surprise
us by being (pleasingly?) different. For Genette, transpositional practices are
in principle either formal or thematic, and they are listed below in order of
progression from the properly formal to the properly thematic:
• Translations: shifting the text from one language to another;

• Transformations of the form of language: changing prose into poetry
(versification) or poetry into prose (prosification);
• Quantitative transformations: making a text shorter (reduction) or
longer (augmentation);
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DAVID COUGHLAN
• Transmodalization: changing the mode of presentation of a hypotext

from narrative to dramatic (dramatization) or from dramatic to narra-
tive (narrativization);
• Semantic transformations: these take in changes to the world in which
a story takes place (diegetic transpositions) and changes to the events
and actions in that story (pragmatic transpositions), including changes
to the causes of those events and the characters’ motives for those
actions (transmotivation);
• Transvaluation: pragmatic changes can in turn produce a positive
revaluation or a negative devaluation of characters in terms of their
roles in the value system of the hypertext as compared to that of the
hypotext. Genette (1997) argues that transvaluation is the characteristic
of serious transformation “which is perhaps its most significant expres-
sion, and toward which all others often converge” (335).
For Hutcheon (2006), the process of transposition can involve a change of

medium, genre, frame, or context, or it can involve even “a shift in ontology
from the real to the fictional, from a historical account or biography to
a fictionalized narrative” (7–8). These shifts might seem to be of a different
order to Genette’s, but they are clearly linked. Diegetic transpositions,
which can reframe a story by, for example, updating or relocating it, are
often done in anticipation of the contemporary context within which the
adaptation will be received. The same can hold for transvaluation, since
“value systems […] are context-dependent” (142).
When considering transmodalization above, it is important to note that
Genette’s modes of presentation would seem to accord with Hutcheon’s
“modes of engagement,” since she argues that we engage with stories by tell-
ing them (narrative), by showing them (dramatic), or, she adds, by interacting
with them (Hutcheon 2006, 22). Genette points out that transmodalization
doesn’t have to see a total shift from one mode of presentation to another;
a change can occur within the mode of presentation itself, so that a dramatic
adaptation of another drama can “show” things differently, for instance. Fur-
thermore, Genette (1997) notes that the possibility of “showing” differently is
available to narrative too (by including more dialogue, for example, affecting
“the proportion of direct to indirect discourse, or of ‘showing’ to ‘telling’”
[287]). Drama and narrative are mixed modes, therefore, and either mode of
presentation can employ any mode of engagement.
Considering translation above, we can usefully conceive of it in broader
terms: “transcoding” means translating or rewriting the hypotext in the lan-
guage of the hypertextual context, where “language” here encompasses all the
forms and means of expression and representation of a context that is not
only linguistic and modal but also material and cultural. Such transcoding
necessarily involves the redeployment in the new context of the possibilities
of showing, telling, and interacting.
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ADAPTATION
Transcoding also occurs between media: “In many cases, because adapta-
tions are to a different medium, they are re-mediations, that is, specifically
translations in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign
system (for example, words) to another (for example, images)” (Hutcheon
2006, 16). The panel, page, stage, or screen can combine showing, telling,
and interacting in their own ways, as can paintings, radio plays, songs,
theme parks, websites, art installations, games, and other forms of media.
“Transmediation” is the term given to the move from the medium of the
hypotext to that of the hypertext, and understanding it can mean paying
attention not only to the output of the various print, broadcast, electronic,
digital, interactive, plastic, performance, and other media but also to their
modes of production, distribution, and consumption and to attendant insti-
tutions and industries.
Some critics argue that each medium has its own formal and material
specificity and that, as a result, certain kinds of communication are natural
to some media and alien to others. Medium specificity has long been
debated in adaptation studies. Countering it, Leitch (2003) argues that what
are perceived as characteristic features are not essential to media but are
“functions of their historical moments” (153). Hutcheon (2006), however,
suggests that:
each mode, like each medium, has its own specificity, if not its
own essence. In other words, no one mode [or medium] is inher-
ently good at doing one thing and not another; but each has at its
disposal different means of expression […] and so can aim at and
achieve certain things better than others.
(24)6
Specificity can also be used to argue for or against the “[v]iability of cross-
media adaptations” (Pratt 2017, 231), the implication being that a hypertext
in a “showing” medium could never successfully adapt a hypotext in
a “telling” medium. What does this mean for the medium of comics? On the
surface, the comic book has a lot in common with other forms of books:
issue, volume, or book covers; the use of text; (the appearance of) ink on
pages; and interaction involving turning or (for electronic works) scrolling
pages. But when a book comes face-to-face with its comic book adaptation,
will it see itself as if in a mirror or will there be only a family resemblance?
Henry John Pratt identifies eight medium-specific reasons (eight forms of
Skrull-ness) against the viability of adaptations into and out of comics:
• “Comics are drawn” (232);

• Literature-to-comic adaptations reduce length and detail;
• The relative production costs of different media;
• “[C]omics admit of distinctive metafictional effects” (232);
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DAVID COUGHLAN
• “Different media require different kinds of imagining” (233);

• Comics use word balloons;
• The “fundamental units of comics (pages and panels) are spatially
juxtaposed, whereas the fundamental units of film (frames and shots)
are temporally juxtaposed” (233);
• “[P]anels are organized not only sequentially, but also in tabular fashion”
(234).
Despite their medium-specific differences, Pratt concludes that, as a “sequence

of pictures” (236), comics are more closely related to films than books, making
comics-to-film and film-to-comics adaptations potentially more successful. He
stresses throughout, however, that medium specificity remains controversial,
even as Hutcheon (2006) warns against unthinkingly accepting “the customary
theoretical generalizations about the specificity of media” (38).
Of course, the issue of viability also assumes that a hypertext’s intention
should be to preserve the medium-specific characteristics of its hypotext as
far as possible. The assumption that the hypertext should remain faithful to
the hypotext was once common. “For a long time,” explains Hutcheon
(2006), “‘fidelity criticism,’ as it came to be known, was the critical ortho-
doxy in adaptation studies” (6–7). But this chapter’s third and final assump-
tion is that faithfulness is not the aim of adaptation. “Because adaptation is
a form of repetition without replication, change is inevitable” (Hutcheon
2006, xvi), and transformation, as we have seen, is necessary, which means
that absolute faithfulness is impossible and, in truth, usually unsought:
“fidelity itself, even as a goal, is the exception to the norm of variously
unfaithful adaptations” (Leitch 2009, 127). As Leitch (2003) observes, “the
source texts will always be better at being themselves” (161), so the adapta-
tion must delight in (the challenge of) being an adaptation, and the reader
must take delight in what is familiar and in what surprises:
The beauty of the hypertext always does consist in such a relation

[to the hypotext], which it legitimately wishes to be apparent […];
a new function is superimposed upon and interwoven with an
older structure, and the dissonance between these two concurrent
elements imparts its flavor to the resulting whole.
(Genette 1997, 398)

Although the focus in this chapter is on comic book adaptations, it is worth
pointing out that Genette’s various X-textualities also lend themselves in inter-
esting ways to an analysis of other aspects of the comics industry. In turn,
comics provide different scenarios within which to test Genette’s schema. For
example, the unusual serial nature of comic book production, where one
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ADAPTATION
character’s story can be written by a succession of different authors, might be

expected to elude Genette’s study of hypertextuality, but actually, it seems pos-
sible to equate this practice with the form of serious imitation that he terms
continuation. A continuation (closely related to the sequel) seeks to complete
or prolong what has been left unfinished by another writer, and it involves
a form of faithful imitation where, “above all, the hypertext must constantly
remain continuous with its hypotext […] while observing the congruity of
places, chronological sequence, character consistency, etc.” (Genette 1997, 162).
Genette contrasts these faithful continuations with unfaithful, even murderous
efforts that aim “to displace and therefore to erase” (202) the continued work.
He terms as supplements these later works that substitute themselves for what
has gone before and which have a long tradition in a comics industry that
embraces the commercial attractions of “hitting the crisis button,” so to speak,
and of rewriting a character’s or even an entire comic book universe’s history.
More obviously, Genette’s work lends itself to the study of comic book adap-
tations. This includes all comic books that are derived from earlier works,
whether those works be novels or short stories, poems, plays or musicals, other
comic books, films, computer games, theme park rides, and so on. Similarly,
Genette’s work applies to adaptations of comic books, whether those are film
adaptations, novelizations, videogame versions, and so on again. In this chapter,
the focus is on comic book adaptations of literary works. Appropriate artifacts
for analysis in this context include the numerous series of comics adapting classic
or canonical works of literature, such as the Classics Illustrated series, which pub-
lished 169 issues from 1941 to 1971, beginning with The Three Musketeers, and
which was revived in 1990 for another 29 issues; Marvel Classics Comics, which
published 36 issues between 1976 and 1978; and Marvel Illustrated and Classical
Comics, both of which have been publishing graphic novel adaptations since
2007. To these can be added works including Paul Karasik and David Mazzuc-
chelli’s 1994 adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Bob Callahan and Scott
Gillis’s 1995 version of Barry Gifford’s Perdita Durango, Posy Simmonds’s
Gemma Bovery (1999) as an adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Peter
Kuper’s 2003 adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gareth Hinds’s
2007 Beowulf, a work such as Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Robert Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics from 2009,
the last of which simultaneously transforms “high” hypotexts such as Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot by masterfully imitating “low” hypotexts including Davis’s Garfield, a Bob
Kane-drawn Batman comic, and Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head respectively.7

It is Hutcheon who proposes that a useful procedure for analyzing an adap-
tation is to pose a series of questions: What? Who? Why? How? Where?
When?
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DAVID COUGHLAN
When we’re asking “What?” questions, we’re thinking about form and
content and, in each case, about what changes and what stays the same.
We’re asking about transpositional practices, therefore, including transla-
tion, transmodalization, and transcoding. Content will undergo sematic
transformations and transvaluation, which will affect the meaning of the
hypotext, but recognizable elements will necessarily survive, whether in the
form of the same or similar story, world, characters, events, motives, points
of view, voice, tone, themes, imagery, and so on, because for “an adaptation
to be experienced as an adaptation, recognition of the story has to be pos-
sible” (Hutcheon 2006, 167). Think also about what causes change. What
changes by necessity (as a result of transmediation, for example) and what
is changed by choice? What, if any, is the guiding principle behind deliber-
ate changes?
When we’re asking “Who?” and “Why?” questions, we’re asking “Who is
the adapter?” (often a complicated question when it comes to films, for
example) and “Why adapt?” Asking “Who?” reminds us that “as a process
of creation, the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation
and then (re-)creation” and involves “the temperament and talent” and the
intentions and motivations of the adapter (Hutcheon 2006, 8, 84). The
answer to “Why?” might find expression in what Genette calls the “mood”
of the transformation: playful, satirical, or serious. And as Hutcheon out-
lines, reasons for adapting and for adaptations can also include economic,
educational, or moral motivations; legal constraints; a desire for increased
cultural capital; and/or personal and political motives, including “social or
cultural critique” (94).
Asking “How?” means looking at how an adaptation is received by an
audience. What Hutcheon (2006) terms “knowing” (120) audiences will be
familiar with either the hypotext or the hypertext before they encounter the
other, but an “unknowing” audience will not. Wondering what pleasure is
to be derived by a knowing audience from an experience of “adaptations as
adaptations” (114), Hutcheon suggests that it lies in the way in which “[t]
hematic and narrative persistence combines with material variation” (4).
“Genre and media ‘literacy’” (126) will shape the knowing audience’s
expectations of transcoded and transmediated adaptations, which on their
part might offer new forms of engagement or immersive experience.
Asking “Where?” and “When?” means thinking about context, because
an “adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context—a
time and a place, a society and a culture [and a medium]; it does not exist
in a vacuum” (Hutcheon 2006, 142), and therefore it is neither created nor
received in a vacuum. Transcultural adaptations travel from one culture to
another, which can involve a transposition of language, place, or period and
can “often mean changes in racial and gender politics” (147). Such adapta-
tion gears the work for life in a new world and often gives it new meaning.
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The sample adaptation that this chapter analyses is Leopold Maurer’s 2009
graphic novel Miller & Pynchon, which is an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s
1997 novel Mason & Dixon. The adaptation saw the English of the American
author’s novel transposed into the German of the Austrian artist’s comic,
before an English translation of the adaptation followed in 2012. Pynchon’s
historical novel tells (in an often fantastic way) the story of Charles Mason
(1728–1786), an astronomer, and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779), a surveyor,
who together drew the demarcation line between Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Delaware, and (now) West Virginia that still bears their name: the Mason–
Dixon Line. Pynchon’s novel is in part also an adaptation, of The Journal of
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, which Mason kept from 1763 to 1768
(so, the journal [text A] is the novel’s hypotext and the novel [text B] is the
hypotext of the comic [text C]).8 Pynchon’s novel, however, extends from
1760 to 1786 (excluding flashbacks) to cover earlier and later events, espe-
cially the 1761 Transit of Venus observation which the two undertook in
Cape Town, South Africa, and the 1769 Transit of Venus, which Mason and
Dixon observed separately, in Ireland and Norway respectively.
The paratext of Maurer’s work gives a good sense of what makes it an
interesting adaptation to analyze. The title, mirroring the form of Pynchon’s
title and including Pynchon’s name, signals that it is an adaptation, but
although it is a transposition (a serious transformation) in Genette’s terms,
the altered names signal that this is a hypertext that will not hesitate to play
with its hypotext. In fact, Pynchon (1998) notes that Dixon is a couple of
inches taller than Mason, “often causing future strangers to remember them
as Dixon and Mason” (16), which more closely reflects Maurer’s title
because his Miller corresponds to Dixon and his Pynchon to Mason.
Except, his Pynchon is the taller of the two.
Sample Analysis
Maurer, Leopold. 2012. Miller & Pynchon. Translated by Helen Macfarlane.
London: SelfMadeHero.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1998. Mason & Dixon. London: Vintage.
Who is adapting Mason & Dixon, and why are they adapting it? According to
another paratextual element, the “About the Author” blurb, Maurer studied
Painting and Graphic Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna before
becoming a freelance artist in 1998, so we can assume he had both artistic
and economic reasons for undertaking the adaptation. However, the work
speaks to a more personal motive also since, as Tore Rye Andersen (2009)
notes in his review of the German edition, “Miller & Pynchon is an extended
and elaborate homage to Mason & Dixon” (254), a tribute to Pynchon’s work.
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DAVID COUGHLAN
What is being adapted? Simply put, a 773-page novel is being trans-

formed into a 174-page graphic novel in twenty chapters with six panels per
page in three rows of two. In terms of quantitative transformation, there-
fore, there is an obvious reduction. The bare bones of the story (and many
fantastical elements) survive—Mason/Pynchon and Dixon/Miller measure
a line, “cut a forest aisle through the wood” (Maurer 2012, 64), and observe
a Transit of Venus—but large parts of the novel are simply excised. There is
no framing narrative in which the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke recounts the
story during a snowy advent, and the second Transit of Venus is removed
and replaced by what was the first, South African observation (thereby
doing away with the novel’s distinctive “sandwich” structure).
Other parts of the story appear in greatly reduced forms: Mason and
Dixon’s traumatic experiences on the British ship Seahorse emerge as
a conversation about seahorses in Maurer’s opening chapter; a period spent
by Mason and Dixon on the island of St. Helena (where, 54 years later, the
empire-building Napoleon would be exiled) is reflected in the name of the
character Pynchon’s wife, Helene; and Mason & Dixon’s remarkable mech-
anical Duck appears in only one panel on page 16 of Maurer’s work.
Semantic transformations include: the novel’s “giant Golem, or Jewish
Automaton, taller than the most ancient of the trees” (Pynchon 1998, 485)
becomes a giant Helene, waving from the woods (Maurer 2012, 19); Fang,
Mason & Dixon’s talking Learnèd English Dog, becomes Hoffmann, Miller
& Pynchon’s equally eloquent “sewer crocodile with an excellent education”
(61); the displayed “Ear of Robt Jenkin, Esq.” (Pynchon 1998, 176) becomes
the disembodied “Ear of Saint Aithalas” (Maurer 2012, 107), discovered
now in “The Subterranean Cathedral” (Pynchon 1998, 498); and in
a notable pragmatic transposition, whereas Mason meets his wife Rebekah
when she saves him from an out-of-control giant cheese “at the annual
cheese-rolling at the parish church in Randwick” (167) and loses her in
childbirth, Pynchon loses his wife when she is “run over by a giant cheese”
(Maurer 2012, 78) at a cheese festival in a Dutch town—both, however, are
repeatedly visited by the ghost of the dead wife whom they mourn.
Significantly, some elements are augmented by Maurer. The background
violence in Pynchon’s novel (1998), heard in “a rifle-shot from a stretch of
woods, lengthily crackling tree to tree” (257), moves to the foreground in
Maurer’s work, where guns feature in chapters 9, 15, and 19 especially. And
the possibility that “Dixon has become a Werewolf” (491; see also 143, 548,
559–61) transforms in the comic into Miller’s actual lycanthropy. Dixon’s
friend Ludowick (237) then provides the model for Miller’s son, who
changes from wolf to human only when the full moon is out, leaving father
and son always unable to talk to each other, because when one is a man,
the other is a wolf, and vice versa.
Transvaluation is seen in the treatment of children in the texts. In
Maurer’s version, Pynchon cannot “desert his Family” (Pynchon 1998, 758),
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ADAPTATION
as Mason does upon the death of his wife, because he has no children. And
in the novel, Dixon is as much “a flirtatious Bastard” (755) as Miller is in
the comic, but despite being “never one for Duty” (754), he spends his last
years with his two daughters and their mother. Miller, however, after dis-
covering he has a child, returns to his old ways and doesn’t attend to his
son until it is too late.
Of course, as a literature-to-comic adaptation, some would argue that
Miller & Pynchon represents an unviable transmediation. Maurer seems to
comment directly on apparent medium-specific limitations: the first panel
shows Pynchon standing in the middle, facing out, holding one end of
a measuring tape which is stretched between him and an unseen Miller and,
by extension, reader; in the second panel, the measuring tape runs between
Miller in the bottom-left-hand corner and Pynchon in the top-right—
Maurer is literally and visually taking the measure of the comic book panel.
Repeatedly, a vertical measuring rod is presented parallel to the panel’s
frame or even forms a partial frame in some of the few panels without one
(Maurer 2012, 18, 25, 132; see Figure 14.1). The comic book line, therefore,
becomes linked to the line that Miller and Pynchon (and Mason and
Dixon) “draw”; in the first panel without a frame, Miller and Pynchon are
instructed, “Do tell us how one gets the job of drawing a line” (14).
Maurer (2012) proceeds to deploy a series of highly structured images of
lines, crosses, and circles, most obviously introduced by the sight of the
measuring rod through the scope (like a rifle’s) of a surveyor’s instrument
(23; see Figure 14.1). These also include the image of Helene riding a comet
passing in front of the moon, with her hair and its tail trailing (37);9 the
sun seen through the bars of a prison (47); the arc and resulting ripples of
a leap into water (158); and the concentric circles and line that are the
reverberating “sound” and trajectory of a gunshot (156, 166). All of these
represent a very deliberate transcoding. Mason & Dixon projects
a subjunctive east–west Mason–Dixon Line that crosses the Native Ameri-
cans’ north–south “Great Warrior Path” (Pynchon 1998, 646); and that
symbolically significant “Cross cut and beaten into the Wilderness” (650)
links with a range of crosses, circles, and mandalas throughout Pynchon’s
work. This is the powerful code that Maurer translates. In the second panel
in Figure 14.1, it is as if Maurer were adapting Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
(1973) instead and “what he was really drawing was the A4 rocket, seen
from below” (Pynchon 1995, 624). As Genette (1992) could put it, Maurer’s
text “spins its web only by hooking it here and there onto that network of
[Pynchon’s] architexture” (83).
These symbols continue in the (wavy) lines and circles of the sperm cells
and egg in the images that serve as inter-titles for chapters 10, 11, and 12,
and which suggest that when we consider lines in Miller & Pynchon, we
must consider also life-lines, lineage, and the relations between characters.
In this light, the line of the measuring tape between Pynchon and the
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DAVID COUGHLAN
Figure 14.1 Miller & Pynchon p. 25, panels 4 and 6 (2012), Leopold Maurer © Self
Made Hero
reader/Miller in the first panel becomes almost an umbilical cord, and this
thinking might also inform our reading of the images of the sperm-like
Venus approaching and then transiting the great disc of the egg Sun. As
Venus moves onto the face of the Sun, closely recalling the image of the
comet and the moon, Helene again appears to Pynchon to accuse him of
making her “a prisoner of [his] imagination” (Maurer 2012, 155) because he
wants to “dream on” (156), not move on. When dwarfed Venus is centered
on the Sun, Hoffmann sits in the palm of his huge father’s hand and learns
he is to inherit his father’s position as “crocodile president” (162). And
when Miller’s son dies at the end in his arms, the image of the planet
moving past the Sun is also the image of the bullet that kills him.
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ADAPTATION
How was Miller & Pynchon received? For Andersen (2009), Maurer “has
created a subdued, touching and subtle story of two men adrift,” and he
notes, “Most of the [Austrian and German] reviews were resoundingly posi-
tive, but interestingly they often failed to notice, or at least to mention, any
sort of connection to Mason & Dixon” (257). Clearly, the comic works even
for an unknowing audience. And yet, once the hypertext’s absent, hypotex-
tual “father” is recognized, a whole family tree of intertextual relations
emerges, because the comic doesn’t adapt just Mason & Dixon, it also
alludes to several other Pynchon novels. In fact, many of the details must
seem incongruous without this intertextual context. The appearance of
a banana in the second chapter of the comic alludes to the Banana Breakfast
in the second episode of Gravity’s Rainbow; Hoffmann alludes to the sewer
alligators in Pynchon’s V. (1963); and in Chapter 11, when Maurer’s Pyn-
chon falls into a “gigantic animal footprint,” perhaps left by Hoffmann’s
father (Pynchon 1991, 142), it recalls an incident in Pynchon’s Vineland
(1990).10
Asking “Where?” and “When?” means recognizing that this is a transcultural
adaptation and that Maurer makes significant diegetic transpositions in anticipa-
tion of the comic’s European context of reception. Mason & Dixon is a late twen-
tieth-century novel written in eighteenth-century style, which is riddled with
anachronisms; meanwhile, “Miller & Pynchon is set in our present, but the pro-
tagonists proceed as though it was set in the past” (Andersen 2009, 255). Maurer
also does away with the specifically American setting of Pynchon’s novel; in fact,
it would be hard to place the majority of events in the comic. This unavoidably
impacts on the novel’s political commentary; after all, the Mason–Dixon Line
would come one day to divide states that had abolished and still practiced slav-
ery. However, it is hardly incidental that the two places that are identified in
Maurer’s text are a Dutch town and South Africa; it is in Cape Town, then
a Dutch colony, that Mason and Dixon first witness the horrors of slavery. It is
possible, therefore, that the comic is engaging with the legacy of European
imperialism through the South African experiences of the three characters: Pyn-
chon doesn’t want the dream of an empire (of Helene) to end; Hoffman is
required to assume the unwanted burden of his father’s empire; and the violence
of empire robs Dixon’s son of his future.
In the end, it is as if the guiding principle behind Maurer’s adaptation
is adaptation itself. This is a graphic novel about adapting to the loss of
a loved one. It is about adapting to the discovery of a son. It is about
adapting to a new world. Perhaps it is a hypertext that is even about its
own status as an adaptation or, in its concern with scale, about its own
relation to the hypotext it adapts, the giant cheese that might run it over.
Or perhaps most telling is the story of a mongrel wolf-boy who trans-
forms to look like his father and yet never looks like him. Or perhaps we
should think of Miller & Pynchon simply as the first observed Transit of
Mason & Dixon.
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DAVID COUGHLAN
Notes
1 Genette (1997) acknowledges that his definition of intertextuality is narrower
than others, whose understanding of intertextuality is closer to his idea of trans-
textuality (2).
2 Compare this to Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier’s observation that adaptation,
too, “as a concept can expand or contract. Writ large, adaptation includes
almost any act of alteration performed upon specific cultural works of the past”
(qtd. in Hutcheon 2006, 9).
3 Julie Sanders (2006) also argues that adaptation “constitutes a more sustained
engagement with a single text or source than the more glancing act of allusion
or quotation” (4), and Hutcheon (2006) agrees that “allusions to and brief
echoes of other works would not qualify” as adaptations (9).
4 For Hutcheon (2006), similarly, adaptations are “deliberate, announced, and
extended revisitations of prior works” (xiv).
5 The relationship between texts A and B becomes more complicated when we realize
that hypertexts can be “transformations and/or imitations of previous works (whether
singular or multiple),” giving us texts A1 and A2; also, “[h]ypertexts, as is well known,
generate hypertexts,” giving us texts A, B, and C (Genette 1997, 381, 373).
6 Genette (1997), too, holds to “the irreducible specificity […] of every art” (384).
7 All or most of these are very usefully discussed in Versaci (2007, 182–212). Versaci
importantly notes of the lists of adaptations that “there are no serious challenges to
the traditional Western canon” (208).
8 Excerpts of The Journal are reproduced in Clerc (2000, 153–229).
9 In Pynchon’s novel (1998), Mason “prays to see [Rebekah’s] Face in the new
Comet” (725; see also 187–88).
10 See also Andersen (2009, 254), who adds that “sometimes Miller & Pynchon
does seem to be constructed of nothing but allusions, not only to Pynchon, but
also to other figures from literature and art history. […] The truth is, however,
that Maurer’s book functions surprisingly well on its own terms” (256).
Allen, Graham. 2011. Intertextuality. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Andersen, Tore Rye. 2009. “Measuring the World Anew.” Review of Miller & Pynchon,
by Leopold Maurer. Pynchon Notes 56–57 (Spring-Fall): 253–258. https://doi.org/
10.16995/pn.20.
Clerc, Charles. 2000. Mason & Dixon & Pynchon. Lanham, MD: University Press of
America.
Genette, Gérard. 1992. The Architext: An Introduction. Translated by Jane E. Lewin.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by
Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Leitch, Thomas. 2003. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism
45, no. 2 (Spring): 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2004.0001.
Leitch, Thomas. 2009. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind
to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Maurer, Leopold. 2012. Miller & Pynchon. Translated by Helen Macfarlane. London:
SelfMadeHero.
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Pratt, Henry John. 2017. “Comics and Adaptation.” In The Routledge Companion to
Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin, 230–238.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1991. Vineland. London: Minerva.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1995. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Vintage.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1998. Mason & Dixon. London: Vintage.
Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge.
Versaci, Rocco. 2007. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature.
New York: Continuum.
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15
T R A N SM E D IA STO R YT ELLI NG
Hyperdiegesis, Narrative Braiding, and Memory in
Star Wars Comics
William Proctor
Introduction
Since at least the turn of the twentieth century, the comic book medium
has grown in dialogue alongside other media forms, both old and new,
underscored by what is commonly described as adaptation. In basic terms,
adaptation refers to a process whereby stories are lifted from one medium
and replanted in another. Of course, the process is more complicated than
that as different media each bring different creative requirements and, as
a result, adaptation is never simply about reproducing a story in exactly the
same way—although it is about reproduction, to some degree. Put simply,
adaptation refers to the retelling of a story in a new media location. For
example, each installment of Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter film series—from
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hal-
lows—is an adaptation of a novel written by J.K. Rowling, each “retelling”
the same story in the process from book to film. The caveat here is that
such a retelling also involves revising narrative elements, and even editing
or reframing scenes from the “source” text to better fit the “target” medium.
Variation as well as repetition is a key factor to consider, as adaptation the-
orist Linda Hutcheon notes (2006).
The contemporary landscape is brimming with adaptations of all sorts,
but perhaps the most common example in the twenty-first century are the
bevvy of film and TV series based on comic books, many of them produced
by the “big two” superhero publishers, Marvel and DC, as film scholar Ter-
ence McSweeney argues: “We are living in the age of the superhero and we
cannot deny it” (Sweeney 2018, 1). This is complicated further by the fact
that superhero adaptations rarely pluck stories in their entirety from comics
but, rather, borrow from a broader expanse of material, remixing elements
from popular series—often fan favorites, such as Marvel’s Civil War, the
film of which only bears a cursory resemblance to the comic book original
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TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING
by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven (2007)—while simultaneously creating

new stories, arcs and narrative trajectories. In this light, processes of adapta-
tion should not be viewed so reductively as “reproduction” or “recycling,”
or with more pejorative terms like “cannibalization” or “rip-off.” Adaptation
is not a new phenomenon, but has been a key driver in the production—
and indeed reproduction—of cultural forms and texts for centuries.
The principle of adaptation becomes even more complex, manifold and con-
ceptually slippery once we look at the multifarious ways in which stories evolve
across platforms, not through reproduction or retelling, but through extension.
How, then, might we best describe a story that begins in one medium and travels
across platforms in order to continue, as with a traditional serial, rather than
retell a story? Media scholar Henry Jenkins inaugurated the concept of “transme-
dia storytelling” to address what he saw, rightly or wrongly, as a series of shifts
unfolding across contemporary media. For Jenkins, transmedia storytelling can
be differentiated from adaptation in the following way:
Transmedia Storytelling represents a process where integral elements of

a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels
for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment
experience […] Basically, an adaptation takes the same story from one
medium and retells it in another. An extension seeks to add something
to the existing story as it moves from one medium to another.
(2011)
In Convergence Culture (2006), Jenkins uses the Wachowskis’ popular film

series The Matrix as a case study to develop this idea of transmedia storytelling.
The imaginary world of The Matrix includes a massively successful film trilogy,
beginning with the eponymous 1999 film; continuing with second installment
The Matrix Reloaded; and concluding with The Matrix Revolutions (both
released in 2003). More than this, however, is the way in which the Wachowski
siblings designed an expansive narrative that spanned multiple media, each entry
furnishing dedicated audiences with additional information that could poten-
tially enhance the entertainment experience by suturing multiple stories into
a transmedia storytelling “hyperdiegesis,” a term coined by fan and media
scholar Matt Hills to describe “the creation of a vast and detailed space …
which … appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and exten-
sion” (2002, 137). Each installment, episode or “micro-narrative”, as narratolo-
gist Marie-Laure Ryan (1992, 373) calls them, can be woven together into
“narrative braids” (Wolf 2012, 199) that bind and “thicken” the “macro-
structure” (Ryan 1992, 373), fortifying the image of an expansive, cohesive and
coherent imaginary world.
Aside from the three films, there is also an animated anthology film, The
Animatrix, which provided viewers with nine short films, each crafted by
leading animators from Asia and the United States, and providing new
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WILLIAM PROCTOR
backstories and narrative augmentations that collaboratively build the archi-

tecture of the hyperdiegesis with depth, structure and mythological under-
pinnings. In the two-part short, “The Second Renaissance,” for instance,
viewers learn about the origins and back-story of the Matrix program itself.
Likewise, in the comic book story, “Bits and Pieces of Information,” written
by the Wachochowski siblings with art by Geof Darrow (2003), the robot
B116ER is introduced and provides important links with “The Second
Renaissance”, portraying the technologized character prior to narrative
events that transpire in the short. Here, B116ER functions as a “continuity
anchor,” extending the hyperdiegesis further via associations and braids
between texts across media.
Unlike classic linear storytelling, then, each micro-narrative may be pro-
duced “out-of-sync,” thus asking audiences to cognitively re-arrange the bits
and pieces into a logical order. The Matrix demands that comprehension
can only be fully obtained if audiences restructure the “bits and pieces”
from a non-linear sprawl into linear, hyperdiegetic memory and “have it all
add up to one compelling whole” (Jenkins 2006, 103).
The same can be said of the video game Enter The Matrix, wherein play-
ers become participatory agents in the narrative, hence providing an immer-
sive environment in which events in the game are intrinsically connected to
the films so that the game becomes, in essence, “another Matrix movie”
(Jenkins 2006, 104). The Wachowskis also wrote and directed an hour of
new footage that could not be accessed if one did not play the game, which
also signifies the way in which these augmented narratives are always also
industrialized components. In other words, in order to fully experience the
hyperdiegesis as the sum total of multiple moving parts, one is encouraged
to purchase each of the disparate elements and spin a whirlpool of profit
potential for the Warner Bros. studio. Drawing upon Wolf’s concept of nar-
rative braiding (2012), Matthew Freeman (2014) terms this process “com-
modity braiding,” which provides an industrialized perspective on the
commercial mechanisms that interlink various sub-story elements.
In many ways, The Matrix hyperdiegesis functions like a puzzle, with
fans engaged as puzzle-solvers and code-breakers. Jenkins refers to con-
sumers such as these as “informational hunters and gatherers, taking pleas-
ure in tracking down character backgrounds and plot points and making
connections between different texts within the same franchise” (Jenkins
2006, 133). From this perspective, then, transmedia storytelling becomes not
only an expansive storytelling model spread across and within a transmedia
hyperdiegesis, but also a ludic narrative—a game. And with the widespread
domestication of internet technologies, fans can now pool their resources
and, as hunters and gatherers, conduct collaborative labor so that they can
form a “collective intelligence” (Jenkins 2006, 97) in online territories by
working together, cracking the codes spread across various transmedia loca-
tions in order to answer the riddle: what is The Matrix?
208
The filmmakers plant clues that won’t make sense until we play the
computer game. They draw on the back-story revealed through
a series of animated shorts, which need to be downloaded off the Web
or watched off a separate DVD. Fans raced, dazed and confused, from
the theatres to plug into Internet discussion lists, where every detail
would be dissected and every possible interpretation debated.
(Jenkins 2006, 96)
The problem with such a lavishly designed imaginary world, with the
puzzles, codes and transmedia expressions all coalescing hyperdiegetically,
is that more casual viewers may be deterred from buying theatre tickets if
the cinematic experience requires additional labor to fully comprehend the
narrative. “For the casual consumer,” argues Jenkins, “The Matrix asked
too much. For the hard-core fan, it provided too little” (2006, 131). The
balance that media producers need to aim for to address different levels of
consumptive activity is more difficult to manage than traditional storytell-
ing techniques, and critics often complained that The Matrix expected far
too much of general audiences (themselves included). The Wachowskis
might well have tapped into fan audiences’ desire for active engagement,
but that desire might not trigger a participatory impulse in audiences that
simply want to attend the theatre and watch an entertaining film, without
having to perform extra-curricular explorations. So, then, the Wachowski’s
grand world-building was not so much a triumph for transmedia enter-
tainment in the digital age as, rather, a spectacular experiment that was
hit-and-miss, depending upon the activities and proclivities of different
types of audiences.

Perhaps the most fundamental assumption to consider relating to the con-
cept of transmedia storytelling is that each micro-narrative is developed to
form part of a cohesive hyperdiegetic macro-structure. What this means is
that the various narratives spread across media platforms should contribute
to the broader story canvas and that they have been designed with consist-
ency in mind. That said, with longer-running serial worlds, such as Star
Trek and Star Wars for example, new micro-narratives are produced on
a frequent basis, often by multiple authors (writers, artists, directors, editors
etc.), which means ultimately that this idea of internal coherence being
designed from inception is largely erroneous, contra Jenkins. In this sense,
Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling has been criticized as utopian and overtly
prescriptive by Matt Hills (2017), who counter-argued that imaginary
worlds are, more often than not, discontinuous and dissonant creations.
Creators working on these vast serial worlds are often supplied with
what is known as a “story bible,” which provides key information regarding
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character, story, genre and environment, so that authors can follow such
a narrative blueprint to maintain consistency between micro-narratives. Yet
as more information is added to a world over time it is more likely than
not to lead to “continuity snarls,” meaning that inconsistencies may arise
between stories that supposedly co-exist within the same narrative system.
As Wolf explains (2012, 378), the “likelihood of inconsistencies occurring
increases as a world grows in complexity.” A study of transmedia storytell-
ing should not only fixate on narrative coherence but also moments of rup-
ture and incoherence.
A second related assumption of transmedia storytelling is that which fans
and media producers understand as “continuity” and “canon.” Continuity
refers to texts that co-exist within the same narrative universe and the way
in which connections are established between texts hyperdiegetically. As we
have already seen from Jenkins’ study of The Matrix, connections are sub-
stantiated through the relationship between different texts and different
media via narrative braiding and continuity anchors, whereby threads begin
in one medium and are continued in another.
“Canonicity,” or “canon,” is closely related to the principle of continuity.
Canon is one of the ways that imaginary worlds are organized in relation to
what constitutes “fact” within such worlds. That is, canon dictates and gov-
erns which texts are “in continuity”—or, as the case may be, “out of con-
tinuity”—at any given time. If we think of this in terms of “memory,” as
Colin B. Harvey emphasizes (2015), then a transmedia storytelling hyper-
diegesis should coherently “remember” other texts within the structure, with
non-canonical narratives being reduced to a state of “non-memory.” This
concept of remembering is key to transmedia storytelling strategies in much
the same way as it is in traditional serialization that unfolds intramedially.
Although fans might construct their own particular version of what
constitutes canon, the concept usually refers to a set of guidelines and
reading protocols orchestrated by media producers to organize and struc-
ture hyperdiegetic memory. However, continuity and canon are often fluid
concepts. Simply out, what is canonical today may not be so tomorrow.
As film and media scholar Will Brooker puts it (2012, 158), “canon is not
absolute gospel. Metaphorically its ideal medium is not stone tablets but
Wikipedia.” Researchers should understand that continuity and canon are
massively important for fans and one of the central pleasures of exploring
imaginary worlds. It may therefore be important to also examine the activ-
ities of fan audiences.
A third assumption is that transmedia storytelling is about multiple
platforms rather than a single medium. Although this book focuses on
comics, any study of transmedia storytelling would necessarily include
analysis of a range of media in order to demonstrate the key concepts of
narrative braiding, memory and the hyperdiegetic mechanics of transme-
dia storytelling.
210

Choosing a representative sample from the pantheon of Star Wars Expanded
Universe (EU) comics published over four decades might certainly seem to be
a daunting task, complicated even further by a hierarchical canon comprised of
“levels” of legitimacy and importance. This was initially designed as a set of read-
ing protocols for fan readers to fully understand the principles of canonicity in
the Star Wars universe; or, in other words, what constituted storyworld “fact.”
Thus, G-Canon—the “G” standing for “George,” as in George Lucas—was
marked as the apotheosis of the Star Wars canon, the highest tier that was under-
stood literally as continuity “gospel.” There has been plenty of debate among Star
Wars fans over the years regarding what comics (and other transmedia expres-
sions) should be permitted into G-Canon (see Brooker 2002 for an analysis of
these debates). However, Lucas maintained that Star Wars EU comics were not
a part of G-Canon but occupied a lower tier in the hierarchy, and were thus not
as legitimate or authentic. The several levels of canonicity were as follows:
George or G-Canon: the most recent versions of films Episode I–VI, the
scripts, movie novelizations, radio plays, and Lucas’s statements
TV or T-Canon: the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated TV series
Continuity or C-Canon: the Expanded Universe of comics, novels and
so forth.
Secondary or S-Canon: Role-Playing Games (RPGs) such as Star Wars:
Galaxies
Non or N-Canon: “What if?” stories such as Star Wars Infinities
This system, however, demonstrated that the Star Wars universe was not
canonically unified but chaotic, a site of contention for many fans who insisted
that the money that they spent on purchasing EU material meant that the stories
should “count” as legitimate Star Wars. For our purposes, the Star Wars hyper-
diegesis would not easily fit in with Jenkins’ concept of transmedia storytelling.
For if Lucas ended up creating a new story that contradicted the EU, then the
latter would be superseded, and thus rendered illegitimate.
This would all change following the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney. On April 24,
2015, it was announced that the old canon system would no longer function as
a guiding principle but would be replaced by a new, non-hierarchical order. As
announced on starwars.com, “all aspects of Star Wars storytelling moving for-
ward will be connected.” In doing so the EU was mostly relegated to the non-
canonical “Legends” banner, while new transmedia satellites, especially novels
and comics, would be coherently unified in the new Disney canon. This repre-
sented a “shift in the transmedia economy of Star Wars” (Proctor and Freeman
2017); that is, from a hierarchical, tiered system of quasi-canonicity to an
authentic, and official, transmedia storytelling model. Put differently, transme-
dia storytelling should be viewed as canonical storytelling told across media.
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For researchers, then, selecting appropriate artifacts for analysis is less

daunting than it used to be, although it needs to be recognized that there are
several comic series being published on a weekly basis. As with many vast
narratives, the Star Wars hyperdiegesis is not complete but, rather,
is underpinned by new, regular augmentations. The most appropriate strategy
for selecting materials for analysis would usually include a representative
sample that cuts across multiple series and mini-series. However, it is more
important for our purposes to focus on a complete chapter or arc, beginning
with the eponymous Star Wars comic, which functions as the central spine or
“mothership,” in order to avoid sampling bias. Like the majority of main-
stream comics, Star Wars comics are compiled into what are known as “trade
paperbacks,” which collect single issues—or “floppies”—into a chronological
compendium. The mini-series, Darth Vader, which we shall analyze below, is
told in parallel with the first volume of the mothership series, so rather than
cast one’s net far and wide with a representative sample, it would be more
useful to read in order of publication, especially when the narratives are situ-
ated in the same time period. A good rule of thumb is to start at the begin-
ning (which may or may not be “the beginning” in narrative terms) and then
move across different series, mini-series and “one-shots” in as orderly
a manner as possible. A rigorous examination of transmedia storytelling
regarding comics demands that one reads as much as possible to fully under-
stand the finer contours of the hyperdiegesis.
It is important that researchers understand that one should not hunt for
“proof” of transmedia storytelling, but to discover and fully explore the vari-
ous narrative mechanics at work, some of which might very well contradict
transmedia storytelling concepts. It could very well be that canonical trans-
media storytelling includes continuity snarls as much as non-canonical
texts. Rigorous and robust research will need to consider not only the way
in which transmedia storytelling functions successfully, but also to tease out
inconsistencies in a final analysis.
It may be tempting to think one should analyze every single comic in the
hyperdiegesis—and in principle that would certainly be inherently valuable—
but it is largely dependent upon whether this is possible or even necessary.
Researchers should be cautious about drawing in too many examples as this
can easily lead one to write descriptively rather than with analytic depth and
rigor. It is better to fully immerse oneself in an arc or two, and then build on
top of that gradually. Indeed, it would be quite easy to become lost within
a transmedia sprawl, especially if one is not expert enough in the parameters
of the storyworld. However, it is arguably less likely that researchers would
engage with a subject that has no meaning for them outside scholarship.
Many academics are fans—or “aca-fans”—of the subjects that they study.
Finally, analyzing Star Wars comics as they work in conjunction with
other media would require the researcher to possess a good, working know-
ledge of the hyperdiegesis in both transmedia and cinematic “mothership”
212
terms. Although this may seem paradoxical for a book centered on critical
approaches to comics, one cannot study transmedia storytelling through the
comic book medium on its own.

The principles of hyperdiegesis, narrative braiding and memory are key con-
cepts for an analysis of transmedia storytelling. Rather than discrete concepts,
however, each of these intermingles and overlaps with each other like a Venn
diagram, with the central conceit of serial memory being instrumental. Thus,
hyperdiegesis refers to the world itself and the internal, narrative processes
that provide the illusion of coherence. Narrative braiding is the way in which
“micro-narratives” provide connective tissue across the hyperdiegesis through
the use of “continuity anchors”; that is, intertextual references that function to
connect—to braid—different media satellites into a hyperdiegetic unity. Using
these concepts as a methodological framework means that researchers need to
pay particular attention to the way that memory operates between and across
media platforms. It is crucial that an analysis also contains those elements that
contravene notions of coherence and stability, such as continuity snarls and
narrative paradoxes. Remember: it is better to discover through analysis than
to look for ways to prove what one already thinks they know. As with serial-
ization in general, examples of transmedia storytelling will almost certainly
involve moments of rupture and contradiction between media expressions. As
difficult as it is, one should aim to remain as objective as possible, especially if
a fan of that which they study.

In the sample analysis that follows, I center on the Darth Vader mini-series,
written by Kieron Gillen with art by Salvador Larrocca, looking at the way
in which the comic establishes narrative braids between various Star Wars
films through the use of continuity anchors, thus further expanding and
developing hyperdiegetic memory. The comic also provides new perspec-
tives and background information for avid fans to explore that are not con-
tained in the film series, but these elements may also introduce unstable
factors into the hyperdiegesis, as we shall see.
Sample Analysis
Gillen, Kieron and Salvador Larroca. 2014. Darth Vader. New York: Marvel.
The first step is to determine precisely where the Darth Vader mini-series fits
within hyperdiegetic memory (traditionally called a “timeline”). How can we
obtain this information? Luckily for researchers, each of the Star Wars comics
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produced during the new Disney-era includes, like the films themselves, an
opening crawl that precedes the story, setting the scene by providing readers
with a “temporal anchor,” which functions to acclimate readers as to where
precisely in the timeline the story is situated. In Darth Vader #1, the crawl
begins by providing such an anchor attached to the denouement of the first
Star Wars film—retitled Episode IV: A New Hope in 1981—where the Empire’s
intergalactic space station, the Death Star, was destroyed by “Rebel spaceships,
striking from a hidden base on the moon of Yavin” (see Figure 15.1). As we
can see, even before the narrative told in the comic begins proper, this opening
gambit not only provides essential information for readers to know precisely
where they are in the timeline, but also establishes narrative braids and con-
tinuity anchors with multiple films.
Firstly, the crawl emphasizes that the Vader comic is situated after the
destruction of the Death Star in Episode IV: A New Hope (ANH) and prior
to events in Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (ESB), thus functioning as
an intraquel, “a narrative sequence element which fills in a narrative gap
within an already existing narrative sequence” (Wolf 2012, 378). More than
this, however, is the way that texts produced many years after both ANH
and ESB were created establishes continuity through various narrative braid-
ing/anchoring strategies, thus demonstrating that canon is often built retro-
actively rather than designed with foresight and purpose (as per Jenkins’
model). It is only in the anthology film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story that
we learn about the “unforeseen design flaw” that led to the Death Star’s
ruin, a flaw that was inserted deliberately by Galen Erso, the father of Rogue
One’s protagonist, Jyn Erso. Further, referencing Vader’s “painful volcanic
rebirth on volcanic Mustafar” activates the third installment of the much-
maligned prequel trilogy, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (RoTS), notably
the climactic lightsaber duel between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan
Kenobi. Thus, the opening crawl in Darth Vader #1 manages to braid the
comic mini-series with multiple canonical films, beginning to ultimately
contribute to the construction of hyperdiegetic memory in transmedia story-
telling terms. And that’s just the first page!
As the comic’s title implies, Darth Vader is the protagonist of the story,
which centers on what transpires after the destruction of the Death Star,
providing new insights and perspectives into Vader’s relationship with his
dark mentor, Emperor Palpatine. As the comic exploits a temporal gap
between ANH and ESB, readers gain knowledge not provided in the pri-
mary cinematic text: ANH concludes with Vader’s ship spinning out of con-
trol before he stabilizes his vessel and flees the scene of destruction, roundly
defeated by the rebel assault but still alive to fight another day. As the next
installment (ESB) opens with Vader searching the galaxy for the rebel’s new
secret base—which he eventually locates on the ice planet, Hoth—whatever
occurred between events told in the films becomes the focal point of the
comic series.
214
Figure 15.1 The opening crawl in Darth Vader #1 (2014), Kieron Gillan and Salvador
Larrocca © Marvel
The imagery depicted in Vader’s introductory pages will be immediately

familiar to Star Wars fans, opening as it does in Jabba the Hutt’s palace on
the desert planet of Tatooine (which is also where much of the first act of
ANH takes place). In fact, this would be so intimately familiar that the cre-
ators do not think to provide a text-caption to instruct readers where they
are located in the hyperdiegesis. Moreover, the scene also acts as a kind of
mirroring device by reflecting the opening of Return of the Jedi (RotJ) when
Luke Skywalker calmly saunters into Jabba’s palace and uses a “Jedi Mind
Trick” to control Bib Fortuna so he can be guided into the central chamber.
While Luke discovers that the same trick does not work on Jabba—“your
mind powers will not work on me, boy”—comic readers may be surprised
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to learn that the same cannot be said of Vader. “Do not even think to try
to perform a mind trick,” mocks the slug-like creature. “They do not work
on the great Jabba.” But the mistake that Jabba makes in the comic is in
believing Vader is much like a Jedi. As Vader uses the Force to choke
a surprised Jabba, he explains: “You called me a Jedi. You know nothing.
Mind tricks are not of the Dark Side. We prefer Force.”
This notion of mirroring is a narrative device employed in the film series
by George Lucas. For example, the scene where Anakin Skywalker loses his
hand in a lightsaber duel with Count Dooku in Episode II: Attack of the
Clones mirrors the scene in ESB wherein Vader does the same to Luke. By
the same token, establishing imagery via comic book mise-en-scène by
closely knitting it with the film series works to imbue the comic with
a degree of authenticity, a relationship that constructs narrative braids
between texts across media platforms. At the same time, this also allows the
creators to thread associations across media while simultaneously upending
readers’ expectations by showing that Jabba is not immune to Vader’s
power, thus establishing a distinction between Jedi and Sith.
After the Jabba scene, we flashback to “one day earlier” at The Imperial
Palace on Coruscant, and it is here that readers learn about the central
premise of the Vader comic series which, in a nutshell, focuses on Emperor
Palpatine blaming his apprentice for the destruction of the Death Star by
rebel forces. The first panel shows Vader on his knees with Emperor Palpa-
tine asking him to explain “what has happened now,” and Vader begins to
recount events that occurred on the planet Cymoon, the location of a rebel
raid lead by the recognizable Han Solo, Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker.
A panel shows the three characters confronting an Imperial officer, but this
does not provide a narrative braid with the film series—instead, the events
on Cymoon are depicted in the mainline “sister” comic, simply titled Star
Wars, which sutures different comic series into the broader hyperdiegesis
and, by extension, the multiple narrative relationships established between
comic and film series. This leads to a kind of transmedia braiding that
enacts canonical memory. That said, although both the Star Wars and
Darth Vader comics each “remember” these transmedia events, such as the
rebel raid on Cymoon, the same cannot be said of the film series. Consider-
ing that the original trilogy was completed in 1983—while taking into
account Lucas’ various digital tinkerings in recent years—the new canonical
comics may introduce back-story elements within available gaps but these
elements cannot be sutured back into the film series. Palpatine’s use of the
word “now,” displayed as it is in bold type, introduces the notion that
Vader is being squarely blamed not only for the ruin of the Death Star, but
for other hitherto unknown events that fans can only learn about should
they consult the comics to complete the hyperdiegesis. The construction of
the Death Star had taken twenty years, Palpatine explains, but now “all that
planning is now a layer of dust orbiting around Yavin.” The Emperor
216
agrees that “Tarkin, Motti and the others share the blame,” but Vader, as
Palpatine points his finger with indignation, “is the only one still living to
suffer my anger. You, an isolated survivor of the greatest military disaster in
all my Empire’s history? Oh, you are truly the chosen one, Vader. Chosen
to be the one responsible.” In doing so, the Vader comic re-focalizes what
audiences have learned from the original trilogy by demonstrating that the
relationship between Sith Master and Apprentice is much more fraught
than represented in the film series, and foreshadows the climactic battle
between Vader, Luke and Palpatine in RoTJ.
As we can see from this brief analysis, the way in which the Vader comic
series aims to establish links with the film series operates to construct
a grand transmedia storytelling hyperdiegesis. As stated, the fact that the
comics have been created retroactively means that Star Wars canon, as
organized and dictated by the Lucasfilm Story Group, is not quite as cohe-
sive as mandated; nor that the relationship between film, comic, TV and so
on is as hyperdiegetically egalitarian as the producers would have fans
believe. The film installments remain resolutely primary, with the various
comic series exploiting gaps and threads left dangling. It is also worth
noting that gaps of this kind quite often become the source for fannish pro-
duction, such as fan fiction and the like. Producerly models of gap-filling
potentially steal away fan-generated explorations.
Conclusion
In many ways, the Disney-era of Star Wars comics is focused on plugging
gaps between cinematic installments by extending and augmenting hyper-
diegesis through what I have termed elsewhere as “ontological thickening”
(Proctor 2018), whereby repetitive associations between texts enforce, and
reinforce, the image of an imaginary world as vastly populated. In short, the
more repetitive associations thrown out between texts, especially associ-
ations that establish narrative braids with the primary cinematic text, help
concretize the world. More than this, however, is the way that substantial
gaps in the hyperdiegesis provide creators with an opportunity to explore
the interstices between film installments to produce transmedia storytelling
expressions. It is as if Disney–Lucasfilm–Marvel is answering the question:
what happened between ANH and ESB?
For researchers, it may be worth creating an intramedial cartography, or
transmedia storytelling map, to more fully illustrate the way in which the
hyperdiegesis is being officially designed and deployed. As more and more
canonical Star Wars micro-narratives are produced each month, the situation
becomes intensely complicated and complex, demanding that researchers stay
attuned to how the hyperdiegesis progresses and is maintained on a regular
basis. In Vader, for example, new character Doctor Aphra has been introduced,
spawning a separate, but interconnected, eponymous comic series. But Aphra
217
Figure 15.2 Vader learns that Luke Skywalker is his son in Darth Vader #6 (2014),
Kieron Gillan and Salvador Larrocca © Marvel
is not—cannot—be remembered in the film series unless the Disney-era of Star

Wars involves further revising the primary cinematic text to populate the
already existing hyperdiegesis with characters or events inaugurated in other
media locations. This is, however, very unlikely. Hence, it becomes essential to
understand that transmedia memory may flow in one direction—the comics
“remembering” the films—but not the other way around—that is, the films
“remembering” the comics. In Vader #6, for instance, readers can witness the
character struggling with repressed memories emerging centered on events in
the prequel film, RoTS. In a mostly “silent” sequence of images, we see Vader
standing alone on the bridge of an Imperial starship, remembering Padmé
Amidala, Anakin Skywalker’s betrothed, her corpse lying in a funeral pod;
Vader pursuing Luke’s X-Wing in the Death Star trenches from ANH; Luke
wielding Anakin’s lightsaber in Star Wars #1; and the final panel of Vader
coming to realize that Luke is not only a rebel with Force-powers, but his
son (see Figure 15.2). Thus, the Darth Vader comic series purports to aug-
ment the primary cinematic text for ardent fans—Jenkins’ “hunters and
gatherers”—to learn how the prequel and original trilogies come to be
enjoined more cohesively through new memory engrams. It is not in ESB
that Vader learns that Skywalker is his offspring, but, instead, in the comic
series, a fact that he hides from the Emperor. Whether or not Star Wars
fans accept the comic book extension as truly canonical is, however,
another thing entirely.
Brooker, Will. 2002. Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans.
London: Continuum.
Brooker, Will. 2012. Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman.
London: IB Taurus.
Freeman, Matthew. 2014. “Advertising the Yellow Brick Road: Historicizing the Indus-
trial Emergence of Transmedia Storytelling.” International Journal of Communica-
tion 8: 2362–2381.
Gillen, Kieron and Salvador Larroca. 2014. Darth Vader. New York: Marvel.
Harvey, Colin. 2015. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Sci-
ence Fiction Storyworlds. London: Palgrave.
Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge.
Hills, Matt. 2017. “Traversing the ‘Whoniverse’: Doctor Who’s Hyperdiegesis and
Transmedia Discontinuity/Diachrony.” In Worldbuilding: Transmedia, Fans, Indus-
try, edited by Marta Boni, 343–361. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. Oxon: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2011. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-
Fan. July 30, 2011. Accessed July, 2011. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_
transmedia_further_re.html
Miller, Mark and Steve McNiven. 2007. Civil War. New York: Marvel.
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Proctor, William. 2018. “Trans-Worldbuilding in the Stephen King Multiverse.” In

Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth, edited by Matthew Freeman and
William Proctor, 101–121. London: Routledge.
Proctor, William and Matthew Freeman. 2017. “The Transmedia Economy of Star
Wars.” In Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Anthology, edited by Mark
J.P. Wolf, 221–244. London: Routledge.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1992. “The Modes of Narrativity and Their Visual Metaphors,”
Style 26.3: 368–387.
Sweeney, Terence. 2018. Avengers Assemble! Critical Perspectives on the Marvel Cine-
matic Universe. London: Wallflower Press.
Wolf, Mark J.P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Sub-
creation. London: Routledge.
Suggested Reading
Freeman, Matthew. 2016. Historicizing Transmedia Storytelling: Early-Twentieth Cen-
tury Transmedia Storyworlds. London: Routledge.
Freeman, Matthew and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato, eds. 2018. The Routledge Com-
panion to Transmedia Studies. London: Routledge.
Pearson, Roberta and Anthony N. Smith, eds. 2014. Storytelling in the Media Conver-
gence Age. London: Palgrave.
Phillips, Andrew. 2012. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. New York:
McGraw-Hill Education.
Wolf, Mark J.P, ed. 2017. The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds. London:
Routledge.
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16
PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIP
A N ALY SIS
“Like Losing a Friend”: Fans’ Emotional Distress
After the Loss of a Parasocial Relationship
Randy Duncan
Introduction
One comic book reader quit buying the Fantastic Four after Reed Richards began
acting in ways he considered totally out of character (such as imprisoning people
without due process) because, as he put it, “I was no longer able to read about
‘my’ character.” His response was to a survey the author administered as part of
the research for a conference presentation on how longtime comic book readers
relate to fictional characters. Within the survey the same respondent went on to
say, “I didn’t like the idea of giving up on the characters who had been with me
so long” (Duncan 2013). Another reader, who has followed the adventures of the
X-Men for 45 years, wrote “I felt some sadness, like losing a friend” about Cyc-
lops behaving in ways contrary to what the reader expected from and admired
about the character. He added “this kind of writing just hurts” (Duncan 2013).
How is it that fictional characters can elicit such emotions in mature readers?
Behm-Morawitz and Pennell (2013) claim that “the appeal of the super-
hero can partly be explained by the phenomenon of fans getting to know
superhero characters in ways that are similar to how they form attachments
to friends, neighbors, and loved ones,” and “as fans get to know superheroes
they can develop feelings of similarity, empathy, idolization, and loyalty” that
constitute a parasocial relationship. The concept of parasocial relationships
can provide the theoretical foundation on which to build a methodology for
studying reader interaction with serialized comic books, particularly main-
stream superhero comics that have featured the same characters for decades.

A parasocial relationship is a perceived relationship with a media personality
or fictional character that fulfills some attachment needs (Cohen 2004) and is
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fundamentally equivalent to a real-life relationship (Derrick, Gabriel and

Hugenberg 2009). Some researchers have speculated that each media technol-
ogy evokes different degrees of involvement (Sood and Rogers 2000) and cre-
ates a particular quality of parasocial relationship (Cohen 2004).
Cohen (1999) identifies four types of what he calls user-figure relation-
ships: Parasocial Relationship, Identification, Wishful Identification, and
Affinity. Yet, because Cohen’s “types” are not mutually exclusive (someone
can simultaneously experience more than one of these attitudes or behaviors
in regards to a particular media figure or fictional character), they are per-
haps best understood not as distinct types of relationships, but rather as
components of a parasocial relationship. Tian and Hoffner (2010) recast
what Cohen called “parasocial relationship” as “parasocial interaction”
(defined below) and make an argument for the addition of influence and
perceived similarity as components of the overall parasocial relationship.
A researcher looking for the possible existence of a parasocial relation-
ship between a reader and a fictional character might consider the compo-
nents of Affinity, Perceived Similarity, Empathy, Wishful Identification,
Parasocial Interaction, and Influence.
A reader with an Affinity for a character desires periodic encounters with
media featuring the character. Following the adventures of the character is
considered an important activity.
When a reader has Perceived Similarity with a character they are thinking
that they are like the character in particular ways. It is possible to perceive
a similarity with a fictional character in terms of life experience, beliefs and
attitudes, personality, and behavioral tendencies (Cohen 2006). For example,
one survey respondent wrote, “I think I share some of Captain America’s
ability to lead and motivate … I have been known to give a Cap-style
speech to my teams from time to time” (Duncan 2013).
Identification as defined by Cohen means the reader can understand the
character’s point of view and empathize with the character’s emotions.
Thus, for our purposes, this component will be referred to as Empathy.
Such empathy is usually considered a temporary phenomenon, taking place
while viewing or reading (Cohen 2001 2006). However, the experience
might be recalled later if the reader is discussing the character. One reader
said of Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four, “I identify with his geeki-
ness, his tinkering, and his absent-mindedness and distraction regarding the
more mundane practicalities of life and relationships” (Duncan 2013).
In the context of a parasocial relationship, Wishful Identification with
a character is not a desire for good looks, wealth, or power the character might
possess, but a desire to emulate admirable aspects of the character’s personality
or behavior (Hoffner 1996; Hoffner and Buchanan 2005). One respondent wrote:
“Captain America’s perseverance and strategic thinking are traits that I wouldn’t
mind having. I hesitate to say I ‘admire’ him, as he is a fictional character, but he
does display traits I’d like to improve in myself” (Duncan 2013).
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PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIP ANALYSIS
Experiencing a Parasocial Interaction might simply mean the reader feels

comfortable with the character, in much the same way they would with
a good friend (Rubin and Perse 1987). One respondent wrote of Tim Drake
(Robin), “I felt like I grew up with him” (Duncan 2013). A reader might
make a vocalization directed to the character. For instance, someone might
pause in their reading to actually say out loud, “Oh, come on, Kitty, don’t
be naïve. You know you can’t trust him.” These feelings of familiarity and
comfort are generally considered to extend beyond the reading experience.
They are reflected in the nicknames (Babs, Cap, Spidey, etc.) longtime
comic book readers use when they refer to the characters in conversation.
Actively modifying aspects of one’s beliefs and attitudes, personality, or
behavioral tendencies to be more like the character is evidence that the
character has a strong Influence on one’s identity (Klimmt, Hartman and
Schramm 2006; Sood and Rogers 2000). Someone buying merchandise
related to a character is possibly an indication of a parasocial relationship
that extends beyond mediated encounters with the character. It is a much
stronger indication of an influential parasocial relationship when someone
incorporates images of or associated with the character (e.g., personalized
license plates, screen names, avatars, Facebook profile pictures) into her or
his publically shared personal identity. In some instances the influence can
be much more direct and constitutive: One respondent felt Constantine
(from the Hellblazer comic book), along with other characters, was at the
nexus of his construction of identity: “Constantine played some part in the
long, slow process of becoming an independent adult” (Duncan 2013).
According to Hartmann, Schramm and Klimmt (2004) each of these
components is likely to have cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions.
That is, how a reader might think about a character (cognitive dimension),
the emotional reaction a reader might have to stories featuring the character
(affective dimension), and how a reader’s own attitudes and actions might
be patterned after or otherwise influenced by how the character behaves in
stories (behavioral dimension).
These components and dimensions of a parasocial relationship are most
likely to manifest in readers of long-running comic strips, comic books, or
web comics that feature recurring characters and devote a substantial por-
tion of the narrative to interpersonal interactions (love, friendship, betrayal,
jealously, rivalry, etc.) that create discernable and fairly consistent personal-
ity traits and behavioral tendencies for the main characters.
Appropriate Subjects/Phenomena for Analysis

Most of the well-known superhero characters have been appearing in at least
one monthly comic book for more than fifty years. Archie Andrews and his
pals in Riverdale have appeared in multiple comic book titles for nearly eighty
years. There have been well-developed characters in long-running alternative
223
RANDY DUNCAN
comic books (e.g., Maggie in Love & Rockets and Francine in Strangers in Para-
dise). Real people have presented slices of their lives in multiple issues of their
memoir comics (e.g., Harvey Pekar in American Splendor and Joe Matt in Peep-
show; although wishful identification with Joe seems unlikely). The Mary
Worth soap opera-style comic strip has been running in newspapers for more
than eighty years, and generations of readers have no doubt developed paraso-
cial relationships with Mary or other characters who appear regularly in the
strip.
While it is possible to do an interesting comparative parasocial analysis,
such as the different ways in which fans connect with the various protagon-
ists in the Paper Girls series, applications of this method will usually exam-
ine the relationship fans have with one particular character. However, the
focus of parasocial relationship analysis is not the characters themselves, but
rather readers’ reactions to those characters. The data you will collect and
analyze are statements by habitual readers of long-running comic book or
comic strips that feature recurring characters. The following Procedures sec-
tion will provide suggestions about the type of data you should collect and
where you might find it.

In order to conduct a parasocial relationship analysis (PRA) you need to
locate a substantial number of reader statements about a particular comic-
book or comic-strip character. These might be statements about the charac-
ter in general, or, more likely, statements about a particular milestone or
major change in the fictional life of the character. It is possible to conduct
a PRA of a single person’s relationship with a particular character, if, for
example, that person has written a blog or book about the character, but it
is more likely that you will sample statements from many different readers.
The types of statements that indicate a parasocial relationship with
a character are usually made in discourse with other fans. There are
a number of ways you might gather these statements.
You might engage in unobtrusive observation or participant observation
in environments such as a comic book convention or a comic book store.
This method might not be very fruitful; you could listen for hours and never
hear any conversation about the object of your study. At a convention you
could attend a panel related to the topic, but it is likely you are going to hear
far more promotional hype from the editors, writers, and artists on the panel
than you will hear discussion from the fans in the audience.
In either of the aforementioned environments you could initiate conver-
sations on the topic you wish to study (let’s say, Doctor Doom assuming
the role of Iron Man), but you would have to minimize your own contribu-
tion to the subsequent discussion so as not to skew the data by directing
the discussion, even unintentionally, along the paths of your preconceived
224
notions on the topic. Under the best of circumstances it would require mul-
tiple observations to gather a sufficient amount of data. Anyone pursuing
this method of data gathering might want to consult Jeffrey Brown’s ethnog-
raphy chapter in Critical Approaches to Comics (2012) for further advice
about how to effectively and ethically conduct field studies.
Another option is to conduct focus groups. You have to find comic book
fans who have followed a character for an extended period of time (prefer-
ably years) and convince them to participate in a 60- to 90-minute discus-
sion. Focus group research can be frustrating because seemingly enthusiastic
volunteers do not always show up at the appointed time and place. How-
ever, when they do work focus groups can produce rich data because, as the
name implies, the group can be focused on precisely the topic about which
you wish to gather data. Fully explaining the focus group methodology is
beyond the scope of this chapter, but here is one useful tip – create a focus
group guide, a list of open-ended questions that will stimulate conversation
about the character at the center of your study. These should be questions
that do not suggest a particular answer or even a path to arriving at an
answer. You should list the questions in a logical order, but once in the
actual focus group you should adapt the order in which you ask the ques-
tions to the flow of the discussion and possibly craft new questions to
follow up on ideas you had anticipated. Should the participants start to
stray from the topic at hand, a skillful researcher can, without influencing
the content of the discussion, gently steer the discussion back to the topic
by utilizing another of the open-ended questions prepared in advance.
Focus groups work best with five to seven participants. Unless you conduct
multiple focus groups you will have a limited data set.
When you deal directly with human subjects you need to be mindful of
following ethical research procedures. The subjects must participate in the
research voluntarily, having given their consent after being informed about
the nature and uses of the research. Your primary concern should be that
your research does no physical or emotional harm to the people involved.
To conduct human subject research within an educational setting you will
have to have a research proposal reviewed and approved by the Institutional
Review Board at your college or university.
Many thousands of fans have shared their feelings about characters in let-
ters sent to comic book publishers for possible inclusion in the letter columns
that often appeared at the back of comic books. However, the letters that are
actually published are not a very representative sample. They tend to skew
toward positive comments because they have been selected, and in some
cases written, by the publisher’s editorial staff. Access to these letter columns
is also an issue. Older comic books can be expensive to purchase, and when
comics books are reprinted the letter columns are usually excluded.
For easier access to a large data set it is best to look online. The digital com-
munication environment of the twenty-first century is a boon to parasocial
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RANDY DUNCAN
relationship research. For most popular culture genres, products, and even
topics you can find sites – fan forums, discussion boards, discussion lists,
response sections following articles, social media apps – on which there are
focused discussions. At least the discussions are initially focused; many threads
disintegrate into tangential discussions or, depending on the nature of the site,
personal attacks.
Within popular fan forums, such as those hosted on the Comic Book
Resources site, you can find threads discussing a particular character. For
instance, within a thread starter titled “Aquaman Appreciation” you will
almost certainly find posts in which readers explain why they like Aquaman.
However, it is called a “thread starter” and by the fiftieth post fans might be
discussing Black Manta or even Namor the Sub-Mariner.
If you do not find an existing thread about the character relevant to your
research you can start a new thread and post a question or comment that
gets a discussion started. However, once multiple other people are posting
you should stop making posts so that you do not unduly influence the dis-
cussion and taint your data. On some sites you will have to create an
account in order to fully access and participate in the forums, but there is
usually no cost involved.
Whichever method you use to gather the data, it is important to keep in
mind that the data you are looking for is statements indicating what readers
think about the character and/or events in the character’s storyline (cogni-
tive dimension), how they respond emotionally to the character and/or
events in the character’s storyline (affective dimension), or ways in which
engagement with the character has influenced the reader’s values, attitudes,
or actions (behavioral dimension). Each of the statements, whether cogni-
tive, affective, or behavioral in nature, can be categorized into one or more
of the six components of a parasocial relationship.
Once you have gathered the corpus of data (the statements about the
character) underline, highlight, or otherwise note the words, phrases, or
sentences that indicate affection, admiration, identification, or imitation of
the comic book character. Then consider how each of these words, phrases,
or sentences can best be categorized as an expression of one or more of the
six components of a parasocial relationship.
Keep a checklist of the six components handy. You might even want to
devise a coding sheet on which you can record words and phrases within the
appropriate categories.
Often multiple components can be expressed in a single sentence. For
example, the sentence, “I think I am more willing to stand up for my beliefs
because over the years I have loved watching Ms. Fierce face any odds to
defend her principles” expresses both an Affinity for the character (years of
reading and loving her adventures) and an Influence on the fan’s own atti-
tudes and actions.
226
While the focus of parasocial relationship analysis is on reactions to

characters rather than the characters themselves, it is a good idea for the
researcher to have a familiarity with the character by reading quite a few of
the comics in which the character appears. Reader statements in letter col-
umns or on internet forums can be difficult to fully comprehend without
some context because the posters assume anyone reading the statement will
be familiar with the comics being discussed. Statements from fans will be
easier to understand and categorize if you have some background know-
ledge. When you write an analysis of a parasocial relationship you will need
to include some of this background on the character in order to give your
readers the context they need to understand fans’ reactions to the character
in general or to particular actions taken by the character.
Now, more than ever, people can experience superhero characters in vari-
ous mediums (film, television, games, etc.). However, the term “reader” has
been used in this chapter because this is a book of methods for studying
comics. The methodology set forth in this chapter is specifically for the study
of statements by people who are regular comic book readers and for whom
the core parasocial relationship with the fictional character comes from read-
ing comic books. However, these comic book readers will almost certainly
have encountered popular characters in other mediums and all of those
encounters can influence the parasocial relationship with the character. An
alternative to the term “reader” is to use the term “fan,” especially if the data
is gathered from forums or physical locations populated by avid fans.
A parasocial relationship analysis might examine a broad array of data
from a long span of time to answer a question such as “Why is character
X so popular?” The focus might be much more narrow and concerned with
how longtime fans are affected by a particular event in the character’s
ongoing narrative or a major revision of the character. An event that elicits
intense fan reaction will usually be life-altering (e.g., a paralyzed character
regaining use of her legs) or perceived as extremely out of character (e.g.,
Daredevil proclaiming himself the kingpin of Hell’s Kitchen). Mainstream
superhero comic books are notorious for retroactively changing characters’
histories, and sometimes even personalities, with reboots and other forms of
revision to their fictional universes. However, only substantial changes are
likely to create fan reaction that will be fruitful for study. For example,
when a recent (rather complicated) revision of the Superman mythos trans-
formed the independent, career-focused, and childless reporter Lois Lane
into a stay-at-home mom working on a novel many fans of the character
had strong reactions.
It is certainly possible to conduct a complex PRA that takes into account
fans’ various transmedia encounters with characters, and perhaps even to com-
pare and contrast the nature of the parasocial relationships developed within
various mediums. As stated earlier, it is also possible to study parasocial rela-
tionship with a group or characters or to compare the nature of relationships
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RANDY DUNCAN
fans have with different sorts of characters. However, for your first application
of PRA you should undertake a study that is, like the sample analysis below,
fairly modest in scope. This sample analysis focuses on a single medium, comic
books, and fan reaction to a specific event in a character’s fictional life.
Sample Analysis
Fan reaction to Simone, Gail (w) and Ardian Syaf (a). Batgirl vol. 4, no. 1,
New York: DC Comics, 2011.
This study focuses on indications of parasocial relationships with the Bar-

bara Gordon as Oracle character in fan reactions to Barbara Gordon giving
up her role as Oracle and becoming Batgirl again. These reactions are best
understood within the context of the character’s history.
Barbara Gordon, the second character in the DC universe to use the Batgirl
sobriquet, was created in 1967 as a character to add to the Batman television
series, and possibly spin off into her own show (Daniels 2004, 113). In her
1967 debut in Detective Comics # 359, Barbara Gordon, daughter of Police
Commissioner James Gordon, creates a Batman-inspired costume for
a masquerade ball. On the way to the ball she has to (at least she thought she
had to) use her judo skills to prevent the supervillain Killer Moth from kidnap-
ping Bruce Wayne. Finding her life empty and humdrum after her adventure
as Batgirl, Barbara decides to be a librarian by day and a costumed crime
fighter by night.
It would be decades before Batgirl would get her own title, but she
appeared in a back-up feature in Detective Comics, had numerous team-ups
with other heroes in various DC titles, and, in the late 1970s, regularly
appeared, either solo or teamed with Robin, in the anthology title Batman
Family. Batgirl seldom appeared in the 1980s, and in the one-shot Batgirl
Special in 1988 Barbara retires her Batgirl identity. It seems that DC wanted
to raise Barbara Gordon’s profile before her appearance in Batman: The
Killing Joke, released soon after Batgirl Special (Sue 2011). In Killing Joke,
the Joker shoots Barbara, severing her spine, as part of his plan to torment
and break her father. Barbara is paralyzed from the waist down.
Less than a year later, Barbara Gordon appeared as the mysterious wheel-
chair-bound Oracle in Suicide Squad # 23. In subsequent appearances
Oracle has an eidetic memory and the world’s most powerful computer
system, thanks to a grant from the Wayne Foundation. She has also been
trained in unconventional hand-to-hand combat tactics by martial artist
Richard Dragon. Oracle used her abilities and resources to provide informa-
tion and support for many superheroes. In the early 1990s Oracle made
guest appearances in a number of DC titles. The Birds of Prey title that
launched in 1996 originally featured an Oracle and Black Canary partner-
ship, but soon there was a team of superheroes led by Oracle.
228
For twenty years Barbara Gordon as Oracle played a vital role in the
events of the DC Universe. Then, in 2011, DC Comics revised many of its
characters and relaunched all of its titles. In one of the new titles, Batgirl
#1, it is revealed that through neural implant surgery and physical rehabili-
tation, Barbara Gordon has regained the use of her legs. She abandons her
Oracle role and once more takes on the mantle of Batgirl.
The fan reaction was robust and mixed. Some fans were delighted to see
the return of the classic Batgirl. However, an op-ed writer on Newsarama
represented the views of many other fans when she opined that “giving
Oracle back the use of her legs to bring her back to her iconic role is
a travesty” (Pantozzi 2011). The intense response to Barbara Gordon’s
transformation from Oracle to Batgirl indicated that some fans might have
developed a parasocial relationship with the Oracle character.
The purpose of this study was to determine if such relationships existed,
and, if they did, to explore the nature of the relationships. The data exam-
ined for the research was statements about Barbara Gordon as Oracle
posted online in fan site forums or as reader comments following an article
or blog post.
The specific sources of the statements were: the threads “Four Biggest
Ways DC’s New 52 Changed Batgirl” (2011) and “Should Barbara Gordon
Walk Again” (2010) on the discussion forum at comicvine.gamespot.com;
the thread “Was The Way Barbara Gordon Became Oracle Off-Putting To
Some People” (2014) on the discussion forum at Comic Book Resources
(community.cbr.com); the thread “DC Comics Cancels ‘Batgirl’ Joker Vari-
ant Cover” on the discussion forum at forum.dvdtalk.com; reactions to the
“Batgirl to Oracle: The Barbara Gordon Podcast” (2011) on the message
board at www.spidermancrawlspace.com; comments in response to the art-
icle “Reader’s Guide to the New DC Universe: Batgirl” by Tim Callahan,
July 11, 2011 on Tor.com; comments in response to the article “The Long
and Terrible History Of DC Comics Mistreating Batgirl” by James Whit-
brook, March 31, 2015 on www.io9.gizmodo.com; comments in response to
the article “Batgirl vs. Oracle: The Erasure of DC’s One Superhero with
a Disability” by Jessica Sirkin, October 19, 2015 on www.themarysue.com.
Although this research involved reading hundreds of posts, there appear
to be, based on user names, only 41 distinct fans who made relevant posts.
The number of fans could be slightly less than 41 because, while some fans
seem to be posting on more than one forum under the same user name,
other fans might create unique user names for each forum.
Many of the fans posting on the selected forums clearly dislike Barbara Gor-
don’s transformation from Oracle back to Batgirl. Two fans express “loss,” one
writes “broke my heart,” three use the word “sad,” and one describes the reac-
tion as “mourning.” Other fans are fiercer in their response – two use the word
“hate” and one reports feeling “incredibly bitter.” That these fans are so pas-
sionate in expressing their loss of the character from the pages of DC comic
229
RANDY DUNCAN
books is evidence that reading encounters with Oracle are an important activity
for them [Affinity]. Some of these fans also seem to the miss the sense of famil-
iarity [Parasocial Interaction] they had with Barbara Gordon in the Oracle role.
One fan writes, about Barbara resuming the Batgirl role, “She seems more like
Stephanie Brown [another Batgirl] than the Oracle we are used to.” Another
sign of the familiarity is that eight out of the 41 fans routinely refer to the char-
acter by the nickname Babs.
Not only do many of the fans indicate a familiarity with the events of
her [fictional] life, but some of them also seem to know how Barbara
Gordon thinks and what she feels [Empathy]. Fans express empathy with
the trauma she suffered (“It’s obviously something that still affects her”), the
challenges she faced (“a lot of the real issues people with that limited mobil-
ity face”), and how she dealt with them (“never seemed to succumb to self
pity”). One fan, after describing a scene in which Barbara/Oracle “missed
the little things like turning the hot water tap on with her toes”, showed
empathy in writing “it struck a chord with me” and “it tears her apart
inside because she can’t do it.” The same fan adds, “One of those tiny bits
of every day [sic] life we all take for granted” [Perceived Similarity]. One
disabled fan writes, “she gave me someone to relate to, even if indirectly.”
Only a couple of the fans self-identify as disabled. In the vast majority of the
statements fans are not identifying with Barbara Gordon because of her disabil-
ity, but admiring how she responded to the disability [Wishful Identification].
While “overcoming disabilities” has become an annoying (or worse) trope to
disability advocates it is pervasive in the media (Garland-Thomson 2005,
1568). Oracle fans show no hesitation in expressing admiration for how
Barbara dealt with having her spine severed. Even the disabled fan quoted
in the previous paragraph describes Barbara Gordon as “someone who had
difficulties and trauma to overcome, but didn’t let it so much as slow her
down.” Others refer to “her triumphant ascension to rise above her disabil-
ity” and that she “is a fighter who overcame circumstances that were
beyond her control.”
One fan opines that Barbara “didn’t need to be fixed” and that “she was
still kicking ass and, IMO, doing it in a much more interesting way.” This
is a common theme in the posts, with statements such as “Barbara Gordon
didn’t become interesting until she became Oracle,” “as Oracle, Barbara
Gordon was the most interesting character in the Bat Family,” and “a super-
hero whose realm is information is so much more interesting than one
whose realm is punching.” It seems that part of the strength of the relation-
ship with Barbara Gordon as Oracle is that fans consider her to be a unique
character rather than just another costumed superhero.
Fans also express a great deal of admiration for her emotional strength
and willpower: “I like her because she is strong. She proves that ‘handi-
capped’ does not have to stop you from being a hero”; “Barbara’s disability
230
did indeed forge a strength in her that wasn’t exactly visible before”; “She
refuses to stop. No matter what”; “a strong person disabled or not.”
While there were no overt statements about modifying attitudes or
behavior due to reading comic books featuring Oracle [Influence], many of
the statements of admiration implied that fans were inspired by Oracle’s
example. In fact, one fan refers to Oracle’s story arc as “very positive and
inspiring.”
Examining comic book fan comments through the lens of parasocial rela-
tionship theory reveals that some fans of the character Barbara Gordon
developed a strong relationship with the character during the period she
was partially paralyzed and operating as Oracle. Comments displayed
a number of the elements of liking and connection associated with human
friendship, Fans indicated they desired regular contact with Oracle, they
understood her, and they respected, even admired her.
What is clear is that most of these fans had enjoyed spending time with
the Oracle character and miss her now that she is gone. Studies have shown
that when longtime viewers of television shows no longer have access to
a beloved character (the show is cancelled or the character is written out of
the show) the “emotional distress closely mirrors that of a real breakup”
(Lather and Moyer-Guse 2011, 199). This is consistent with past research
that indicates parasocial relationships involve the same “psychological mech-
anisms that shape social relationships” and “are functionally equivalent to
social relationships” with real people (Cohen 2004, 188, 200).
While super-powered battles can be exciting and well-designed superhero
costumes are aesthetically pleasing, it seems that for many readers the pri-
mary appeal of superhero comic books is not the fight scenes nor the color-
ful costumes, but rather a relationship with the “person” in the costume.
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17
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Incorporating Comic Books into Historical Analysis:
Historiographical Cross-Reference and
Wonder Woman
Adam Sherif
Introduction
Drawing on some key cornerstones of historical source evaluation, this
chapter presents a methodology for the use of comic books by historians
interested in expanding the canon of potential evidence available to them.
Before being able to integrate a source into an argument or case study, it
must first be shown to be the bearer of verifiable historical content. And
because our image of the past is cumulative, the result of deriving meaning
from sources relative to one another, harnessing the historical knowledge
already collected in the historiography is the easiest means of conducting
this confirmation process. After breaking down the theoretical tenets of this
methodology, and its processes, this chapter will present a demonstration,
akin to a scientific controlled experiment, drawing out and categorising the
historical content contained in the first year of published Wonder Woman
stories, 1941–1942.
If it needs explicit justification, the drive to incorporate comics into the
canon of historical evidence comes directly out of the mandates of the crit-
ical enquiries of New Cultural History. Pioneered in the theoretical explor-
ations of the likes of Peter Burke and Ludmilla Jordanova, and applied
practically in the case study work of Natalie Zemon Davis amongst others,
New Cultural History was a radical postmodernist trend that developed
through the 1980s and altered the historiographical landscape with lasting
effect. Re-invigorating the discipline, and driving beyond the traditional
confines of historical enquiry, this school of thought pushed towards dem-
ocratisation in all aspects of historical practice. And crucial to development
of fresh subject areas was a reconsideration of the nature of historical evi-
dence. In pursuit of more complicated, more nuanced and more meaningful
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ADAM SHERIF
historical truths, historians gradually began to look to more unconventional

as-yet-overlooked sources. Considering comic books as historical evidence is
an effort to continue expanding the horizons of the discipline, and the pro-
cesses of their incorporation may furthermore lead to the development of
further areas of study.

Central to the task of the historian are the processes of the selection and
evaluation of sources. No individual document is ever assumed to be either
reliable or useful by default, but, instead, must always be tested as seriously
and rigorously as possible. Sources are apt to challenge the historian in
numerous ways and at times they may find their evidence offers up more
problems than solutions. The question of authorship, of course, is typically
a key concern. Discussing the origins and intentions of a source, for
example, Elton outlines the binary that “what survives from the past was
put together either by someone who wished it to survive, or by someone
who had a purpose to serve in which the prospect of the historian’s interest
played no part” (Elton 1967, 101). In both cases, the author retains signifi-
cance, necessarily a mediator of the past. In analysis of any source brought
into existence as the product of the human mind, subjectivity is an innately
crucial element for consideration. An appropriate authority on this front as
it forms a central component in his relativistic approach to the writing of
history, Carr puts it that information on the past, historical content, is
never pure or absolute precisely because it has always been “refracted
through the mind of the recorder” (Carr 1961, 16). And so seriously did
Collingwood stress the subjective nature of sources that he famously
declared “all history is the history of thought” (Collingwood 1946, 317), in
the sense that access to the past is granted solely through the subjective
consciousness of the authorities the historian elects to consult. Ultimately,
subjectivity determines that even the most stringently crafted source striving
towards objectivity must be interrogated and ultimately recognised as
a work of narrative.
Relevant to the evaluation of sources and the question of record, his-
toriographical theories of narrativity emphasise the processes by which
accounts are made, and the structures therein. Central here are such con-
cerns as the mediation of the present, and the uniquely fluctuating binary
and interplay of deliberate artifice and subconscious pervasion. The render-
ing of coherent narrative, such as the multi-panel sequential narrative of the
comic book, must invariably entail a degree of mediation of various present
paradigms, in terms of both structure and content. Authors and artists are
in some measure necessarily bound, in their selection and utilisation of
structural narrative strategies, by the social, intellectual and cultural frame-
works which comprise their present surrounding reality. As an example, in
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HISTORIOGRAPHY
order to create a coherent account of continuous events, whether in a story

or record, authors must typically adhere to the deployment of one or more
narrative agents, most commonly human beings, to effect change. In the use
of such agents, authors must, whether to perpetuate or reject, draw from
the established frameworks of their surrounding present. Historians of
antiquity, as a case, operated within cultural confines in which it was typic-
ally presupposed that men of considerable rank were the most reliable and
likely of agents. This is often reflected or visibly adopted in the content of
their accounts. The work of Suetonius on the lives of the Roman Caesars
casts him, for the most part, as a subscriber to such a perspective (Suetonius
AD121). In the pages of Sensation Comics in the 1940s, similarly, Colonel
Steve Trevor is a narrative device, an agent whose crash-landing arrival on
Paradise Island brings about progression within the story space as the
Amazon community learns of the global war transpiring. And so, an officer
of the US Air Force sets in motion the events which will lead Princess
Diana to leave her isolated homeland and take up the mantle of Wonder
Woman, in support of the Allied war effort (All Star Comics #8 1941).
Whether the decision to utilise Trevor as a principal agent in this way was
taken consciously or was the result of external influence and subconscious
bias, William Moulton Marston, as the writer, has nevertheless here medi-
ated one of many potential emplotment strategies, and determined its con-
tent through reference to the established paradigms of his surrounding
present.
It remains important to underscore that the mediation of the present, for
both structure and content, in the rendering of narrative is rarely a uniform
or predictable process. The dynamic interaction of the deliberate and the
subconscious is a permanent concern in the analysis of any work. So
although narratives are works of active construction, the process is carried
out by the subjective individual consciousness and therefore subject also to
the pervasion of the subconscious and the external. In attempting to inte-
grate new documentation into the palette of historical evidence, the task is
to illuminate where the real, or then-present, is reasonably discernible in
the narrative and then to verify it. Understanding both subjectivity and nar-
rativity as central concerns in assessing a potential source, the crux of the
matter is then to consider the original context of the source, and the posi-
tionality of its author.
Because a work of narrative is constructed and its construction can only
be rendered, its processes mediated, by an individual subjective conscious-
ness, it follows, then, that the position of the author at the time of writing
must be a prime concern for analysts of any potential source. Denoting the
precise spatial and temporal confines from which an author writes, from
which a creator produces, contextual positionality is an indispensable elem-
ent in the recovery of the real within any given document. Consideration of
the origin and purpose of a work is a customary and critical cornerstone of
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ADAM SHERIF
source analysis. But while it might not prove entirely viable fully to recon-
struct the precise conditions of production, what matters to the historian
interested in uncovering verifiable historical content is that they are discov-
erable to an extent which might make permissible a measured and thor-
oughly researched interrogation of the work. Without an understanding of
the location of the author at the time of writing, the historian is unable to
examine the work in its proper context. And crucially, because the render-
ing of narrative invariably entails a subjective action including the medi-
ation of the surrounding present, whether mediated consciously or
subconsciously, contextual positionality, to use the language of post-
structuralism, leaves a trace.
The trace is effectively expressed in the idea that “each element appearing
on the scene of presence is related to something other than itself” (Derrida
1982, 13). No intelligible presence or apparent singularity is, on analysis,
genuinely autonomous. The concept of nationalism, for example, can only
be truly understood when taken in the context of a wider spectrum of polit-
ical positions from which nationalism differs. By its very definition, the
term includes traces of the values aligned to those other positions it rejects,
traces of what it is not. In this way, nationalism is both a reflection and
a record of numerous other concepts with which it maintains indispensable,
enduring relationships. As Derrida succinctly affirms, “one is but the other
different and deferred” (Derrida 1982, 13). In semiotic terms, in order to
carry meaning, any single sign or signifier must contain reference to
another, lost presence. The trace, then, is the necessary retention of this
loss, its mark. So, because subjectivity is operative in the rendering of narra-
tive, some mark of the position of the subject at the time of writing is
essentially inevitable in the resultant work. In short, just as the individual is
not a freestanding entity, defined or realised in isolation, nor can any work,
as selfsame, be devoid of relation to the conditions of its origin. The “inevit-
able trace of the other that resides in the selfsame” (Belsey 2003, 24) ensures
that a source must contain, implicitly or explicitly, identifiably or irretriev-
ably, some record, singular or multiple reflections of the circumstances and
context of its creation. In the case of a work that is not an explicit record
or conventional source, the embedded trace, where identifiable and verifi-
able, is a mark of the real. Recovering this mark, recovering this trace is
what allows for the transition from mere product of the past to useful docu-
ment of history.
A trace in a work might equally reflect a minor, insubstantive detail of
the real, or at best, for the historian, it may record a real event. An espe-
cially common example of the trace as discernible in historiographical writ-
ing itself can be found in the use of inappropriate organising concepts.
Anachronistic use of particular nation-states for the provision of coherent
narratives is commonplace. A History of Germany, 1815–1945 by William
Carr deploys “Germany” in varying measure, prior to its political formation
236
HISTORIOGRAPHY
in 1871 (Carr 1969). Armed with the contextual information that Carr was
writing in the late 1960s, it becomes possible to determine traces both of
the post-1871 context in which Germany was a recognised political nation
and also of a pre-1949 environment before the formalisation of the separate
states of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic
Republic. And the choice to utilise the united “Germany” is an active deci-
sion to reject the context of the surrounding present. Similarly, considering
the other resident in the selfsame, the fictional setting of the first Wonder
Woman stories contains an obvious contextual record. The matriarchal soci-
ety of Paradise Island which Marston and Peter present as the homeland for
Princess Diana and her fellow Amazons, first depicted in All Star Comics
#8, is distinctive and notably innovative within the framework of contem-
porary mainstream comics publishing. Its repudiation of, and therefore rela-
tion to, the conventional Western patriarchy of the United States of the
1940s is unquestionable. Contextual information, in this case the date and
location of publication, allows for the drawing out of this trace of contem-
porary American society present in the work.
All coherent, narrativised writing, then, whether accounting for present
or past or whether indeed constructing deliberate fantasy, is mediated by
the author and from a distinct and inescapable contextual positionality, and
therefore subject to external influences and conditions. These influences
may overtly announce themselves or remain impenetrably hidden. They
might be channelled actively or infiltrate the work pervasively. In order to
render a comic book a serious source for the historian, the influence and
refracted record of the surrounding real present (now historical) must be
brought forth and verified. In order to assess to what extent the inexorable
“real world” has filtered into the comic book, the historian must first deter-
mine a clear sense of the contextual positionality at work, before then con-
ducting an investigation of the content at hand. Potential historical content
is then checked against established knowledge via a consultation with the
historiography, or subject area literature.

Put simply, once armed with an understanding of the contextual positional-
ity at work in a source, the historian can then examine the content pre-
sented before checking it against the historiography: source analysis,
followed by a process of cross-reference and corroboration.
This approach comes out of a consideration of the deferential nature of
truth and historical meaning. Much like the notion of the trace, described
above, historical meaning emerges not in any single source, but in the rela-
tionships between sources as established by the historian. As Collingwood
states, “the criterion of historical truth cannot be the fact that a statement is
made by an authority” (Collingwood 1935, 9). Interpolation between the
237
ADAM SHERIF
statements of authorities, or sources, an act which is necessarily subjective

and, for its use of the a priori imagination, imaginative and even creative, is
central in determining historical meaning. “Our authorities tell us that on
one day Caesar was in Rome and on a later day in Gaul; they tell us noth-
ing about his journey from one place to the other, but we interpolate this
with a perfectly good conscience” (Collingwood 1935, 12). Addressing
a single, isolated piece of evidence, meaning is deferred, destined to arrive
only when a plurality of documentation is introduced, when the historian is
able to interpolate between them and either corroborate or reject the con-
tent on offer. Consulting the historiography is a means of indirect access to
other evidence already examined and deployed by historians. In this way,
the comic books can be tried against the wealth of other primary sources
already heretofore accepted and validated as useful evidence by historians.
The concerted reading of sources is naturally arduous, but the vigilant
historian can be active in anticipating certain kinds of historical content.
A logical starting point is to consider factuality. A comic book can be
affirmed as a factual record when the historian is able to confirm by cross-
referencing with the historiography that clear historical facts have been
accurately logged within the narrative of the comic. In short, the first port
of call is to look for real events, dates and actors. Factuality is not the only
permissible recorded content, however. A work might well contain some
degree of truth in the more unquantifiable sense of metaphorical aptness.
As a concept, this more rounded, metaphorical kind of truth comes from
the discourse of narrative theory. Because sources are works of narrative,
they are constructed fictions which means they have the potential to be true
in a metaphorical sense even if not in a literal sense, like a figure of speech
can be true. The fighter pilot sequences in Star Wars are not particularly
realistic, but with an understanding of some of the influences George Lucas
was drawing on, it is possible to determine in those sequences
a metaphorical aptness reflecting a trace of the aerial combat of the Second
World War. Metaphorical aptness can be asserted when the historian is able
to confirm “a similarity exists between two objects in the face of manifest
differences” (White 1973, 34), where those objects are the literal past and its
fictionalised presentation, and crucially where that similarity can be affirmed
as appropriate. Another element to look out for, neither fact nor metaphor,
is mentalités. A focal point of many of the landmark endeavours of New
Cultural History, l’histoire des mentalités takes serious account of questions
of opinion, attitudes, discourse and modes of thought. A sense of, say,
domestic attitudes towards US involvement in the Vietnam War in the pub-
lications of Marvel Comics at the time would undoubtedly constitute useful
historical content for the historian interested in the American zeitgeist of
the 1960s and 1970s. It’s true that “world views can not be chronicled in
the manner of political events, but they are no less ‘real’” (Darnton 1984,
23). Indeed, as serialised products which were originally sold on newsstands,
238
HISTORIOGRAPHY
comic books are perhaps quite obviously positioned as potential markers of

mentalités.
In addition to seeking out potential historical content, the historian will
also need to reflect on what kinds of records the comics in question consti-
tute. If a comic captures a singular moment for which there is clear prece-
dent in the historiography, it might be confirmed as a momentary record.
A series which tracks or chronicles a reflection of the real in its pages
through multiple issues might be a dynamic or sustained record with
a useful degree of verisimilitude. Some works set out to present historical
content overtly, as with works of biography or reportage, while others may
only contain implicit traces of the real which require careful decoding on
the part of the historian. These are just a few examples of co-relative cat-
egorisations the historian can apply. And in addition to categorising the
type of record in question, there is also scope to consider how the historical
content has been recorded, whether in the form of dialogue, captioning, the
storytelling of artwork, or in background detail. Again, these are only
a small selection of the ways comics can communicate. Finally, there may
be relationships and patterns to how certain kinds of content are recorded
and presented.
The dual processes of close reading and cross-reference require an
adequate familiarity with the particular subject area, as well as an active and
investigative curiosity on the part of the historian. The strangest detail
might well be corroborated somewhere in the historiography.
Sample Analysis
Moulton, Charles and H.G. Peter. 1941. In All Star Comics #8. New York:
All-American Publications. December 1941–January 1942.
Moulton, Charles and H.G. Peter. 1942. In Sensation Comics #1. New York:
All-American Publications. January 1942.
All-American Publications. February 1942.
All-American Publications. May 1942.
All-American Publications. June 1942.
All-American Publications. September 1942.
Moulton, Charles and H.G. Peter. 1942. In Sensation Comics #10.
New York: All-American Publications. October 1942.
Moulton, Charles and H.G. Peter. 1942. In Sensation Comics #11.
New York: All-American Publications. November 1942.
Moulton, Charles and H.G. Peter. 1942. In Wonder Woman #1. New York:
All-American Publications. Summer 1942.
239
ADAM SHERIF
To illustrate this methodology in action, what follows is an examination of

the first full year of published Wonder Woman adventures by William
Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter, appearing across the titles All Star
Comics, Sensation Comics and Wonder Woman in 1941–1942.1 A fantastical
series centred on the more-than-human Amazon princess, Diana, who gives
up her heritage, the isolated bliss of her native Paradise Island and her
“right to eternal life” (All Star Comics #8, 1941), to pursue US officer Steve
Trevor and interact with the wider “man-made” (Sensation Comics #1,
1942) world, these Wonder Woman stories are nevertheless quite evidently
set, in terms of their broader narrative, at the time in which they were
being written, drawn and published. While the verisimilitude of the Second
World War in the books lends itself to a degree of categorisation, the book
also retains a dynamic as writer and artist appear to keep abreast of, and
make select use of contemporary developments. The world war serves as
context and the impact of the war within the US drives narrative, with the
creative team most assuredly marking change over time.
The wider, or world war, then, is used from the outset as backdrop, an
immediate means of grounding the comic in the present-day real world, or
a near version of it. The opening caption of the Wonder Woman feature in
All Star Comics #8 locates the action “in a world torn by the hatreds and
wars of men” (All Star Comics #8, 1941). By the time Marston, under the
pen name of Charles Moulton, turned in his first comic book script, in Feb-
ruary 1941, the war in Europe had been raging and rapidly proliferating for
just over a year and a half (Daniels 2000, 23). The coincidence of the release
of the book, December 1941, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in
the same month, must have played a role in cementing the contextual
framework of the strip. The opening captions in the Wonder Woman strips
in the pages of Sensation Comics, in which the Amazon was lead feature,
continued to reference the very real “war”, “destruction”, “conquest”,
“aggression” and “hatreds” of the day (Sensation Comics #2, 1942).
Within the individual stories presented in Sensation Comics, however,
the world war is not an especially prominent feature. Where it comes to the
fore, however, it does, for the most part, align coherently with the narrative
of actual events. As an example, in the inaugural issue of the quarterly solo
series, Mint Candy, a soldier at a US Army camp in Texas, laments that
there is “not enough excitement to keep a guy awake” (Wonder Woman #1,
1942). At this time, the USA was still practising predominantly air and
naval warfare. Later, a drugged Mint also gives up a “dynamite” piece of
intelligence to a Japanese agent, revealing that “the Fifth Division is ordered
to Alaska with fast transport and long-range bombers. Japan will be invaded
from our Alaskan bases!” (Wonder Woman #1, 1942). Marston was
undoubtedly exercising a good degree of licence with this military design
but the mention of Alaska does tie the narrative to the events of the preced-
ing months. Through April and May, Japanese forces had expanded their
240
HISTORIOGRAPHY
aggression in the Pacific, making landings at Tulagi and Corregidor, before

finally vanquishing resistance in the Philippines on May 5. Dutch Harbor in
Alaska was soon drawn into the war, attacked alongside the invasion of the
Aleutian Islands in the first few days of June.2 Wonder Woman #1 hit
stands in July so it is difficult to know whether Marston might, in fact, have
heard news of the bombing of the Alaskan base before the book went to
print. In any case, his allusion to the Pacific shows an awareness and
engagement with the wider war and its infiltration of the narrative of the
comic book. Established historiographical knowledge illuminates
a generalised record of the conflict with some specific, decodable geograph-
ical detail. Furthermore, the comment on excitement by a soldier of the US
Army is an example of mentalité as it certainly picks up on the mood of
anti-isolationist, or interventionist currents within the US at the time.3 This
kind and degree of verisimilitude, however, is altogether a much stronger
feature in relation to internal or domestic conflict within the USA.
The home front and intelligence war waged against spies, saboteurs and
invaders generally serves to constitute the immediate plots of individual
Wonder Woman episodes. Importantly though, despite their fictional super-
hero title character, these stories put forth by the creative team cannot be
dismissed as fanciful, extraordinary tales. The majority of the Sensation
Comics features from 1942 are grounded and plausible and, furthermore,
sustain a remarkable degree of verisimilitude which often drives the narra-
tive in each story. This can be seen in a number of cases, cross-referencing
the events of the comics with the chronologies and accounts assembled in
the historiography. In the fifth issue of Sensation Comics, released in May,
naval warfare is at the fore as Diana and Steve Trevor attend the launch of
the latest US Navy submarine, the Octopus. On the deployment of his
masterwork, proud inventor, Dr. Sands, passionately decrees that “she’ll
strike back at the enemies of democracy!” (Sensation Comics #5, 1942).
Unbeknownst to our heroes, however, the menace of a German U-boat,
“the strange undersea craft of the enemies of democracy” (Sensation Comics
#5, 1942), is on hand, preparing to derail proceedings. The following
month, in issue #6 too, in a story entitled “Summons To Paradise”, US
intelligence Colonel Darnell finds his transatlantic crossing to England inter-
rupted by a Nazi submarine (Sensation Comics #6). The successive use of
the U-boat here points towards some influence of contemporary develop-
ments. The words of Dr. Sands, however, are the crux. That his craft is set
to “strike back” against German naval forces bears the mark of real-world
events along the east coast of the United States. German U-boat offensives
against the USA began in mid-January 1942, following US entry to the war
in December. Further, in April, a policy of coastal “dim-outs” went into
effect over a fifteen-mile strip of the eastern seaboard, such was the con-
tinued impact of the night-time German raids.4 That the US Navy, in the
pages of Sensation Comics, is taking measures specifically to retaliate
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ADAM SHERIF
demonstrates that the comic was sustaining a narrative in line with the
course of the war. These stories are responsive, a dynamic record with iden-
tifiable traces of the real-world events of the war.
A further and perhaps the most prominent example of the sustaining of
a dynamic verisimilitude and record in reference to the war in the US is the
choice of villain. Over the course of this first year of stories, the “enemy
agents” with whom Diana comes into contact are shifting, and can be
argued to be derived from contemporary events. The ubiquitous enemy fea-
turing in the first seven months of comics is singularly the German
“Gestapo” or “Nazi agent”, conducting acts of espionage or sabotage. This
foe generally matched the political climes of the USA at the time where
government-sponsored campaigns cautioned citizens and encouraged vigi-
lance in regard to the “Nazi menace”. There were also cases in which fears
of the prospect of NS operatives acting within the borders of the country
were validated. In March, for example, three Nazi operatives were captured
in New York and sentenced to a sum total of 117 years in prison. In June,
two teams of saboteurs were landed at Long Island and Jacksonville, Florida
by U-boat. They were captured and, after trial, executed.5 Wonder Woman
#1, though, released in July, marked the first direct address of the collective
enemy, with the second feature of the issue referring in its opening captions
to the “cool, calm villainy of Axis plans” (Wonder Woman #1, 1942). From
here on, Diana and Steve find their nemeses expanded, encompassing Ger-
mans, the occasional Italian and the Japanese. The latter prove the most
interesting though and certainly rival, if not overtake their German counter-
parts as the central foil to the heroes. In Sensation Comics #9, readers are
introduced to Colonel Togo Ku, “Chief of Japanese spies in America” (Sen-
sation Comics #9). In the tenth issue, Wonder Woman pursues a band of
German and Japanese agents scheming underground, beneath the streets of
New York (Sensation Comics #10, 1942). With the new villains, old tools are
transferred. The parodic accents and speech patterns bequeathed to German
operatives are now mirrored in portrayals of the Pacific enemy. With the
introduction of the Japanese, however, what noticeably differs is the wholly
unsubtle use of racist slurs which begin to flow through the book. Protagon-
ists and peripheral characters alike now utter such vile and offensive terms
as “Japs”, “Nips” and “slant-eyed mugs” in reference to the new
antagonists.6 The most intriguing example of the attention being paid to the
Japanese comes in the ret-conning of a significant detail in the origin story
of Wonder Woman, first told in All Star Comics #8. Where originally the
crash-landing of Steve Trevor on Paradise Island was the result of his
exhausting pursuit of a Nazi agent, Wonder Woman #1 offers up a Japanese
pilot as the cause of the aerial disaster (Wonder Woman #1, 1942).
This general shifting of focus to the Asian enemy undoubtedly reflects,
in some measure, the intensification of the war in the Pacific, as noted
above. D-Day was still a distant prospect at the time, and so the war
242
HISTORIOGRAPHY
with Japan was the focal point for US military efforts. What possibly
accounts for the decidedly aggressive racism which begins to permeate
the book, and the quite sudden change of principal villain, is the overdue
enacting of a certain domestic federal policy. On the 19th of February,
President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order no. 9066, an act which,
along with its companion, Order no. 9102 in March, has drawn consider-
able historiographical scrutiny and debate.7 Essentially instituting forced
relocation, the former introduced the principle of “military areas” from
which, in the words of General DeWitt, Commanding General of the
Western Defense Command, “Japanese and other subversive persons”
(DeWitt 1978, 34) could be excluded, or removed. The latter established
the War Relocation Authority to deal with those forcibly evacuated. It
was not until April, however, that the first Japanese-Americans began
being interned at inland camps. It seems likely that this watershed in
domestic US politics, the serious formalisation of an internal enemy,
served as clearance, or impetus even, for the new course taken by Mar-
ston and Peter. In this way, the comics are again a record of mentalité,
in addition to tracking the changing emphasis of US military engagement
in the war.
The Wonder Woman stories of 1942 lend themselves to categorical ana-
lysis and those elements discussed here are the most prominent, thematic-
ally, which emerge from an open reading of the books with a broad view to
the assessment of possible historical content. The contextual record of the
war, the shifting focus on enemies of the US and accompanying documenta-
tion of mentalité and domestic politics are not the only discernible historical
aspects of the books, but they recur strongly and can be readily decoded
with keen use of the historiography.
Conclusion
This control demonstration represents something of an ad fontes approach,
going directly to the sources without the imposition of a specific framing
question in mind, allowing for themes and patterns to emerge organically,
as well as for the consideration of the types of record found in the pages of
these early Wonder Woman stories. With an understanding of subjectivity,
narrativity and the contextual positionality at work in a potential source,
this methodology of close reading and cross-reference with the historiog-
raphy can also be taken forwards into further avenues. The imposition of
a specific discursive framework and the introduction of a targeted research
question will enable the historian to consider comics in a more precise con-
text, to ask what these under-utilised sources can contribute to specific
areas of historiographical discussion.8 Finally, the incorporation of comics
into established areas of discourse may also lead to entirely new possibilities
for the adventurous historian.
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ADAM SHERIF
Notes
1 Specifically, the issues consulted are the first twelve of Sensation Comics along
with the fabled “first appearance” in All Star Comics #8 and the summer special
Wonder Woman #1.
2 For an overview of the conflict in the Pacific, see D. van der Vat, The Pacific
Campaign: The U.S.-Japanese Naval War 1941–1945, Simon & Schuster, 1991. For
a more in-depth narrative, a decent example can be found in J. Costello, The
Pacific War, William Morrow, 1982.
3 For reasonably comprehensive recent discussions, see L. Olson, Those Angry
Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fights Over World War II, 1939–1941,
Random House Inc, 2013 and S. Dunn, 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindberg, Hitler – the
Election amid the Storm, Yale University Press, 2013.
4 For discussion of the US home front, good surveys are found in A. Winkler,
Home Front, U.S.A.: America During World War II, Harlan Davidson, 1986 and
also in J. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front, Ivan R. Dee,
1996.
5 Though not an academic text, an accessible narrative account of some of these
events appears in H. Ardman, World War II: German Saboteurs Invade America
in 1942, in World War II Magazine, February 1997. There is also a piece available
to read on the website of the FBI at www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases
/nazi-saboteurs.
6 For examples, see Wonder Woman #1, Sensation Comics #10 and Sensation
Comics #11, All-American Publications, November 1942.
7 For an idea of the scope and polarity of these debates, see G. Robinson, By Order of
the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, Harvard University
Press, 2001 and the assuredly controversial and highly problematic M. Malkin, In
Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War
on Terror, Regnery Publishing, 2004.
8 For examples of the application of this methodology to specific areas of study see
J. Chapman, A. Hoyles, A. Kerr and A. Sherif, Comics and the World Wars:
A Cultural Record, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015 and J. Chapman, D. Ellin and
A. Sherif, Comics, The Holocaust and Hiroshima, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015.
Ardman, Harvey. 1997. “World War II: German Saboteurs Invade America in 1942”.
World War II Magazine, February 1997.
Belsey, Catherine. 2003. “From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism?” In Interrogat-
ing Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Practice, edited by Paul Bowman,
pp. 19–29. London: Pluto Press.
Carr, Edwin. 1961. What is History? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carr, William. 1969. A History of Germany, 1815–1945. London: St. Martin’s Press.
Chapman, Jane, Dan Ellin, and Adam Sherif. 2015. Comics, The Holocaust and Hiro-
shima. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Chapman, Jane, Anna Hoyles, Andrew Kerr, and Adam Sherif. 2015. Comics and the
World Wars: A Cultural Record. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Collingwood, Robin. 1935. The Historical Imagination. An Inaugural Lecture Delivered
Before the University of Oxford on 28 October 1935. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Collingwood, Robin. 1946. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
244
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Costello, John. 1982. The Pacific War. New York: William Morrow.
Daniels, Les. 2000. Wonder Woman: The Complete History. London: Titan Books.
Darnton, Robert. 1984. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History. New York: Basic Books.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “Différance” (first published 1968). In Margins of Philosophy,
translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
DeWitt, John. 1978. “Evacuation of Japanese and Other Subversive Persons from the
Pacific Coast, February 14, 1942”. In Final Report, Japanese Evacuation from the West
Coast 1942, edited by United Stated Department of War. New York: Arno Press.
Dunn, Susan. 2013. 1940: FDR, Wilkie, Lindberg, Hitler – The Election Amid the
Storm. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Elton, Geoffrey. 1967. The Practice of History. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
FBI. n.d. “Nazi Saboteurs and George Dasch”. Accessed March 2019. www.fbi.gov/
history/famous-cases/nazi-saboteurs-and-george-dasch
Jeffries, John. 1996. Wartime America: The World War II Home Front. Chicago: Ivan
R. Dee.
Malkin, Michelle. 2004. In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in
World War II and the War on Terror. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.
Moulton, Charles and H.G. Peter. 1941. In All Star Comics #8. New York: All-American
Publications. December 1941–January 1942.
Moulton, Charles and H.G. Peter. 1942. In Sensation Comics #1. New York: All-American
Publications. January 1942.
Publications. February 1942.
Publications. May 1942.
Publications. June 1942.
Publications. September 1942.
All-American Publications. October 1942.
All-American Publications. November 1942.
Moulton, Charles and H.G. Peter. 1942. In Wonder Woman #1. New York:
All-American Publications. Summer 1942.
Olson, Lynne. 2013. Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fights
Over World War II, 1939–1941. New York: Random House.
Robinson, Greg. 2001. By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese
Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Suetonius, AD 121. De Vita Caesarum.
Van Der Vat, Dan. 1991. The Pacific Campaign: The U.S.-Japanese Naval War
1941–1945. New York: Simon & Schuster.
White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Winkler, Allan. 1986. Home Front, U.S.A.: America during World War II. Wheeling:
Harlan Davidson.
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18
BAKHTINIAN DIALOGICS
Comics Dialogics: Seeing Voices in The Vision
Daniel Pinti
Introduction
Even the most casual reader of comics will recognize it to be a hybrid
medium that typically (though not always) incorporates both words and
pictures, and seasoned comics scholars are often focused on understanding
and analyzing what we might call this “formal” hybridity. Charles Hatfield
(2005), for instance, discusses the “heterogeneous form” of comics, how
they are “always characterized by a plurality of messages … involving the
co-presence and interaction of various codes” (36). Similarly, Thierry
Groensteen’s (2010) narratological approach to comics begins with his rec-
ognition of comics’ “polysemiotic nature,” how “it combines text and image
in varying proportions” (1). Such hybridization involves boundary crossings
both within the comics text and on the part of the comics reader, each
engaged not merely in a movement back and forth between word and
image, but in a destabilization of that commonplace dichotomy: in comics,
words are consciously viewed, and images are necessarily read. Moreover, as
Scott McCloud (1993) and others have demonstrated, the juxtaposition of
panels in immediate sequence and the layout of panels across the comics
page invites—indeed, requires—an actively participative reader who, by
virtue of the gutter, must effect narrative closure and become a sort of cre-
ative “accomplice,” in McCloud’s word, with the writer/artist (36). These
characteristics of comics discourse and comics reading position the medium
as ideal for a “dialogic” critical approach, one informed by the work of Rus-
sian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Since
his work first began to appear in English in 1968, with the publication of
Rabelais and His World, and especially with the posthumous publication in
the 1980s of his most important writings (especially the essays collected in
The Dialogic Imagination), Bakhtin has become one of the most widely
influential thinkers in literary and cultural studies. “Dialogue” is his over-
arching critical metaphor, and for Bakhtin, cultural expressions, literary or
246
otherwise, are best approached as both outcomes and manifestations of

manifold dialogic relationships.
Despite a career that coincided with the great proliferation of comics
in the United States and Europe during the twentieth century, Bakhtin
never wrote a word about comics. Such silence is perhaps surprising and
certainly regrettable: a thinker with an abiding interest in popular and
hybrid modes of cultural expression, and the leading theorist of dialogic
discourse, Bakhtin might well have produced profound insights on the
medium. Indeed, bringing Bakhtin into dialogue with comics and comics
scholarship demands no great theoretical contortions. We might point to
Thierry Smolderen’s (2014) comments in his excellent survey of the his-
torical roots of the sequential art form that would come to be called
“comics.” Writing about the “readable images” produced by the eight-
eenth-century English printmaker William Hogarth, Smolderen comments
on their “polygraphic” content, by which he means the many different
styles of drawing and writing they often integrate (3, 9). He goes on to
apply this “polygraphic” concept to comics, suggesting its pervasiveness
throughout comics’ history, up to and especially in the work of contem-
porary graphic novelists, whose work connects to “the linguistically hybrid
form of the novel, which Mikhail Bakhtin explored in his many books and
essays” (9, emphasis added). Smolderen’s subsequent analyses are not,
properly speaking, Bakhtinian, but his comments are profoundly encour-
aging for the use of Bakhtin in Comics Studies. In part because of the
historically hybrid nature of comics, a Bakhtinian approach offers rich
possibilities for comics scholars to draw on his ideas for deeper under-
standings and new readings of comics from all eras, texts which include
multiple kinds of “writing” (i.e., are “polygraphic”), or, to switch to
a Bakhtinian register, multiple kinds of “voices” (i.e., are “polyphonic”).

In the vast and varied realm of human expression, the fundamental “unit”
of analysis for Bakhtin is the utterance—the expressive act which, in what-
ever form it takes, is to be understood as always embodied, thoroughly
social, and inherently dialogic. This last quality stems first from the utter-
ance always being a response to some previous utterance, which it shapes
and by which it itself is shaped, and second from it being necessarily hetero-
glossic (the product of different and even competing discourses and discur-
sive forces) and, in literature, at least potentially polyphonic (multiply
voiced). Thus, every utterance—whether as short as a comic strip or as long
as a graphic novel—exists as a site for multiple voices and discourses to be
“heard” simultaneously. In those utterances that tend toward being, or
attempt to be, “monologic,” this multiplicity of voices is suppressed or
denied, pushed aside by a single, authorial/authoritative voice. Indeed,
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DANIEL PINTI
Bakhtin thinks such utterances to be contrary to the prevailingly, laudably

dialogic spirit of the utterance and of language itself. In Bakhtin’s words
from perhaps his most widely influential essay, “Discourse in the Novel”
(1983),
The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at

a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment,
cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads,
woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object
of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in
social dialogue.
(276)
From the Bakhtinian perspective, then, regarding comics, one begins with
the assumption that every comics text is properly understood as an “active
participant in social dialogue” wherein multiple voices are simultaneously
visible, mutually responsive, and always in shifting relation to one another
as well as to other (likewise dialogic) texts beyond the given text’s own
borders.
It is important to stress that this emphasis on “voice,” an aural metaphor
frequently used by Bakhtin, should not be taken narrowly. Indeed, one finds
in Bakhtin’s body of work a tendency to “visualize voice,” “spatialize time,”
and “temporalize space,” so that, for one Bakhtinian scholar, “the truly rad-
ical nature of his work may lie precisely in the rejection of such neat cat-
egorical binaries” (Erdinast-Vulcan 2013, 81)—categorical binaries which, as
I have already implied, the medium of comics itself in many ways alter-
nately challenges, undermines, explores, and exploits. In other words, the
prevalence of Bakhtin’s critical metaphors in line with orality/aurality need
not discourage their application to a visual medium. In fact, a Bakhtinian
comics scholarship can draw reassurance and inspiration from the excellent
work already done using Bakhtin’s concepts to explicate works in other
visual media, particularly film (see Flanagan 2009; Stam 1992). In any case,
these closely related concepts of dialogue, heteroglossia, and polyphony are
not the only Bakhtinian ideas of potential interest to comics scholars. Of
the others, perhaps the two richest are the chronotope and carnival.
The chronotope is Bakhtin’s critical concept for perceiving and charting
the intersection of time and space in narrative. Although Bakhtin implies that
it is intrinsic to all cultural forms, his focus is “the literary artistic chrono-
tope,” in which “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully
thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh,
becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to
the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 1983, 84). The notion of
making time visible by combining visual cues related to both time and space
could not be more readily applicable to the sequential art that is comics. Both
248
Scott McCloud and Will Eisner—to name only two theorists, who also
happen to be comics creators—have indirectly suggested as much. McCloud
reminds us how the comics panel itself is an icon that connects time and
space (1993, 98–99), while Eisner writes of how paneling is the means by
which comics convey time (2008, 26). A few scholars have begun to explore
Bakhtin’s specific interest in the intersection of time and space in narrative
and how it might be connected to comics (e.g., Packard 2015). In short, Bakh-
tin’s notion of the chronotope opens up new possibilities for analyzing the
intersection of time and space on the comics page. Moreover, as Bakhtin
(1983) writes, “It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that
defines genre and generic distinctions,” so that beyond its potential applica-
tion to formalist concerns in comics, the concept has great potential for use in
studying genre fictions in comics form, which, from superheroes and horror
to memoir and biography, enjoy such a prominent place in the history of the
medium (84–85). One intriguing direction for chronotopic analyses is the fre-
quent genre “mash-ups” one finds in comics, wherein a self-conscious com-
bination of generic conventions might be approached by paying attention to
their distinctive spatio-temporal markers. For example, in Paul Dini’s (2017)
superhero narrative cum trauma memoir, Dark Night: A True Batman Story,
Dini, who is the writer of Batman: The Animated Series, creates (with artist
Eduardo Risso) a comic that tells the story of Dini coping after surviving
a brutal mugging partly in terms of his own fantastic visions of Batman and
the hero’s various villains. The story utilizes chronotopes that cross different
kinds of narratives—the workplace/workspace and the urban street/alleyway,
for instance. It’s just the sort of genre-combining text for which Bakhtin’s
chronotope is an ideal heuristic tool.
As for carnival, it is Bakhtin’s critical metaphor for all in a given cul-
ture that is unofficial, parodic, open, and anti-authoritarian in a given
culture. Originating in the unofficial festivals and popular culture of
medieval Europe, the spirit of carnival finds its way into literature as
a countervailing impulse to official discourses, truth-claims, and represen-
tations of the world. While a chronotopic analysis might focus on place/
space and its connection to narrative or generic time (Bakhtin might
speak, for instance, of the “chronotope of the castle” in gothic fiction),
an analysis drawing on carnival or the carnivalesque would key on either
bodies in comics as symbolic (and potentially subversive) entities and/or
the popular, parodic, marginalized, even transgressive nature of comics
generally or of particular comics texts. Carnival and the “carnivalesque”
are perhaps the most easily appropriable of Bakhtin’s ideas. For two,
very different examples of their application to comics, one might see my
own analysis of the Image Comics series, Saga, or Joseph Michael Som-
mers’ wonderfully nuanced reading of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: The
Crooked Man (Pinti 2018; Sommers 2012).
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DANIEL PINTI

A Bakhtinian approach to comics offers new ways to conceptualize and
understand fundamental aspects of the medium itself, including its hybrid
nature, its necessary but endlessly malleable intersections of (narrative) time
and space (on the page), its ability to incorporate multiple voices and dis-
courses, its tendency toward self-referentiality and metafictionality, and its
frequently collaborative process of creation. All of these phenomena (as well
as others), either intrinsic to or frequently found in the medium, are there-
fore suitable subjects for analysis in a Bakhtinian reading of a given comics
text. One might identify and explicate dialogic relationships between words
and images in a panel or among panels on a page; between various iter-
ations of a given character in a serial comic, wherein later versions are read
as dialogic responses to earlier ones; between “high” and “low” cultures and
discourses, when considering, say, the rewriting of classic literature in
comics form; or between versions of the self in comics memoirs. This list of
possibilities is, to be sure, only partial. It should be stressed, too, that
a Bakhtinian analysis, one seeking to delineate any sort of dialogic relation-
ship, is more than merely comparative, and, moreover, despite its necessar-
ily formal concerns, it should be more than merely formal. Bakhtin always
connects the dialogic nature of language to wider social or cultural relations
and contexts. So, for instance, one can recognize and explore a dialogic
(and carnivalizing) relationship between a three-panel comic strip by Beaton
(2011), “Cameo,” and Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth, which
“Cameo” references, but it would be insufficient merely to observe (however
accurately) that Beaton renders Shakespeare’s tragic king as a cartoon, or
even that she humorously juxtaposes three characters from two different
plays (Lear, the Fool, and Lady Macbeth) (114; see Figure 18.1). Rather, one
would want to recognize that the comic both puts two Shakespearean plays
in dialogue with one another and functions as its own dialogic response to
Shakespeare and his cultural status, thereby opening up a kind of dialogue
around the question of what connections might be found among the dis-
courses of madness and foolishness in Shakespeare (which become intri-
guingly gendered through Beaton’s conflation of King Lear and Macbeth)
and those of parody and nonsense in Beaton’s comic. In three panels.

One of the ironies of employing Bakhtin’s theoretical ideas in literary or cul-
tural analysis is that they invite—indeed, all but demand—a type of reading he
himself does not regularly perform. Bakhtin is often given to, and he has been
criticized for, sweeping generalizations about long narratives and even whole
genres, like, for example, his characterization of “epic”—the entire genre, in all
its variety, across times and cultures!—as “monologic,” in contrast and, indeed,
250
Figure 18.1 Hark! A Vagrant (2011). Kate Beaton. © Drawn and Quarterly
opposition to the inherently dialogic genre of the novel. And that tendency
toward generalization has been replicated in some Bakhtinian readings of lit-
erature as well as in some applications of Bakhtin to comics (e.g., Hudson
2010). But if one takes Bakhtin’s generalizations seriously, they should lead the
reader away from that very practice. For instance, when Bakhtin, in Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984), claims dialogue to be “an almost universal phe-
nomenon, permeating all human speech and all relationships and manifest-
ations of human life, everything that has meaning and significance,” it is
certainly a grand generality. But delineating how that phenomenon is mani-
fested in a given text, a given anything that “has meaning and significance,”
requires analysis at once detailed and open-ended, recognizing dialogic rela-
tions to be multiple, pervasive, fluid, and always leading to further dialogue. In
short, Bakhtinian reading is close reading, but not closed reading. If one follows
his insights, it leads into thickets. If emulating his criticism, one re-describes
the outline of the forest without ever quite getting to a tree.
Consequently, the first step in any Bakhtinian analysis would be to
decide which kind of dialogic relationship(s) one wants to focus on in
a comic, and which Bakhtinian concept or concepts are most appropriately
employed. For example, in my own work on the space opera series Saga
(2012), I began with an interest in the sheer variety of bodies imagined and
created by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples, and the differ-
ent ways in which those bodies disrupt the social order of that storyworld.
Accordingly, while concepts such as “dialogue” are not inapplicable to or
absent from my analysis, the primary Bakhtinian concepts of carnival and
of what Bakhtin terms the “grotesque” body, as delineated in his book Rabe-
lais and His World, provide its foundational hermeneutic. An entirely differ-
ent Bakhtinian reading of Saga might begin with the genre of science fiction
and, more specifically, the space opera, and draw on Bakhtin’s concepts of
speech genres and chronotope to illuminate the distinct ways in which the
series participates in, critiques, or extends the genre itself.
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DANIEL PINTI
A second step is to look for connections between the Bakhtinian concept

and the specifics of the narrative in question, specifics that are often of
a thematic or generic nature and ultimately to be grounded in socio-
historical realities. If one were paying close attention to the polyphonic
dimensions of a comics text, for instance, one would identify the kinds of
voices or discourses one “hears,” delineate how they relate to one another
(Is one dominant over, superior to, dismissive of others? Does one compli-
cate or undercut or ironize another? Etc.). One would also want to show
where the different voices, as it were, “are coming from”—that is, what dis-
courses (artistic, generic, professional, political, etc.) they are drawn from
and are contributing to. This is not merely, or even necessarily, identifying
and tracing allusions, but rather a matter of noting how the text interweaves
different styles, discourses, “voices” at different points. Finally, it would be
important at least to suggest how the interaction of these voices and dis-
courses in the text reflects or refracts wider societal relations, conflicts, or
concerns.
Beyond these initial steps, the procedures for analysis share much in
common with other approaches to comics—especially, as implied above,
formal ones like those of Groensteen, McCloud, and others, which is not to
ignore the profound differences among such approaches—complementing
without duplicating them. As much as possible, careful attention should be
paid to matters such as encapsulation (the breakdown of a narrative into
discrete moments for depiction), panel composition, page layout, and so
forth—and the dialogic relations thereof—as one ought to do in comics
scholarship, while not ignoring broader narrative, generic, and thematic
questions and concerns. Often, I would add, Bakhtin is most powerfully
used when yoked to other critical/theoretical approaches: historicist criti-
cism, gender studies, disability studies, and so forth. One way or another,
a Bakhtinian reading should be a close reading, yet ultimately suggest how
the text in question functions as, to revisit the same words from Bakhtin yet
again, “an active participant in social dialogue.” It should, as Bakhtin him-
self was very much concerned to do, never be satisfied with merely an
abstract formalism that isolates the comics texts from contexts, but rather
insist on reading voices as living utterances participating in embodied social
relations.

The text chosen for analysis is part of the twelve-issue Marvel Comics series
The Vision (originally published 2015–2016), written by Tom King and
drawn by Gabriel Hernandez Walta. One of Marvel’s most critically-
acclaimed recent series, The Vision garnered praise not only on comics-
focused websites but also in wide-reaching venues like The New Yorker
(Cantwell 2018). The setup for the story is that The Vision, the synthezoid
252
superhero who is a member of the Avengers, has created a synthezoid nuclear

family for himself: a wife (Virginia) and two high school-aged children (Vin
and Viv). Eventually, and gruesomely, they even get a dog. They’ve moved to
the suburbs of Washington, as Vision has taken a job in the White House as
an unofficial presidential advisor. Vision’s goal, and that of his family, is to
have a “normal” human life, and in many ways the story is about their
doomed pursuit of that hazily defined and ultimately unachievable goal. The
series includes a number of verbal and visual allusions to other texts, genres,
and discourses, and thus is a particularly good candidate for a Bakhtinian
reading, so much so that, due to space constraints, what follows cannot be
a thorough analysis of the entire series. Rather, the opening three pages of the
series will be read primarily using the Bakhtinian concepts of polyphony and
dialogue, in order to suggest something of the flexibility the comes with using
Bakhtin to read comics as well as the variety of interpretations it can help
produce. These pages are chosen first because they offer ample opportunity
for close Bakhtinian analysis, and also because they readily allow that focused
analysis to point to some of the broader themes taken up later in the series.
Sample Analysis
King, Tom and Gabriel Hernandez Walta. 2018. The Vision. New York:
Marvel Comics.
A Bakhtinian reading of The Vision might begin by taking note of the title of the
first issue, “Visions of the Future,” which appears on the issue’s third page,
a splash page that depicts the uncanny image of the blank-eyed Vision family
smiling and welcoming their neighbors into their home. Because the page is
focalized from the point of view of the neighbors at the Visions’ door, it is as if
the reader is being welcomed into this familiar-yet-strange world. The title relies
on a heavily dialogized use of the word “vision” and of the phrase “vision of the
future.” It invokes the name of the hero and his family who are the main charac-
ters, to be sure, but because the word “vision” has other denotations (beyond
that of a superhero’s name) and, with them, varied connotations, it invites
a polyphonic reading. As Bakhtin (1983) has it, an “artist elevates the social het-
eroglossia surrounding objects into an image that has finished contours, an
image completely shot through with dialogized overtones; he [sic] creates artistic-
ally calculated nuances on all the fundamental voices and tones of the heteroglos-
sia” (279). A “vision” may be at once insubstantial and powerful, and a “vision of
the future” at once a guiding idea and an idle act of imagination. Likewise,
Vision himself, one of whose powers is the ability to alter his molecular mass so
as to pass through solid objects or have the same pass through him, complicates
insubstantiality and power, and his personal “vision of the future”—of a happy
nuclear family at once integrated into yet superior to his surrounding suburban
community—both guides his actions and is doomed to be unrealized.
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DANIEL PINTI
Of course, the fact that “vision” is plural in the title suggests from the
start there are multiple and perhaps conflicting ideas at work about what
the future will or ought to hold, not least because now there are, in fact,
multiple Visions in addition to the once-singular superhero. Moreover,
a “vision of the future” may also be a previewed experience of privileged
knowledge. Indeed, as the story continues, the reader eventually comes to
find that the voice of the recitant (Thierry Groensteen’s term for what
might be termed the narrator in traditional prose), a voice that will not
infrequently reference events that will come or might come to happen in
the future, is the voice of Agatha Harkness, witch and mentor of the Scarlet
Witch (Vision’s first wife and a major character herself later in the story).
The reader will eventually discover that the story she is narrating came to
her in a revelation provided by the proper consumption of a petal from the
time-bending “everbloom” plant found on Mount Wundagore. In other
words, the story of the Visions includes at many points literal “visions of
the future.”
Before the splash page just discussed, the opening two pages of The
Vision exhibit multiple “voices” (verbal and pictorial): to again pick up
Groensteen’s terminology, a recitant providing a voice-over narration, and
a “monstrator” showing the story in the form of representational drawings
and dialogue balloons. Word and image are in dialogue with one another,
as will be discussed below. Approaching the comic from a Bakhtinian per-
spective, however, encourages us to heed more carefully the polyphonic
nuances within each form of narration, and to delineate the dialogic rela-
tions among them. For the sake of this sample analysis, we might consider
how the recitant’s narration begins the story:
In late September, with the leaves just beginning to hint at the fall
to come, the Visions of Virginia moved into their house at 616
Hickory Branch Lane, Arlington, VA, 21301. The Visions’ house
was located in Cherrydale, a pleasant neighborhood about 15 miles
west of Washington, D.C. Most of the Visions’ neighbors worked
downtown, and they talked often about the traffic on 66 or Lee
Highway. On the weekends they tended to stay in Virginia, though
they often lamented that they should go into the city. The
museums are so nice, and the kids would have a great time. Very
few of them were from the area originally. Most had moved to
D.C. after college and worked for Congress or the President. They
made nothing, and they lived off nothing. But that was unimport-
ant. They were young, and they wanted to save the world. Eventu-
ally, they met someone and fell in love and had children. With
bills to pay, they left their small government jobs; they became
lobbyists and lawyers and managers. They moved out to the sub-
urbs for the schools. They made the compromises that are
254
necessary to raise a family. Behold George and Nora. At that time,

George worked as a mortgage broker. He enjoyed hot wings, but
he always ordered them too spicy for his own taste. Nora worked
in H.R. at a K-street law firm. She read more than anyone she
knew. But she only read digitally.
The style of narration here, characterized by a kind of flat matter-of-fact-

ness, sounds at first akin to the rather monologized discourse of nonfiction
reporting (the subject matter notwithstanding). The narration, however,
becomes polyphonic and therefore dialogized at two distinct points. The
first is the double-voiced sentence, “The museums are so nice, and the kids
would have a great time.” As free indirect discourse, it incorporates the
voices of both the recitant and the Visions’ “generic” neighbors simultan-
eously. One hears two voices complementary yet in tension—a recitant
describing a setting objectively, from the outside, as it were, and the neigh-
bors responding to being in that setting subjectively, from the inside. The
tension between the “objective” and all that such a stance may imply—facti-
city, inalterability, inevitability—and the “subjective” and all it implies—
emotionalness, malleability, open-endedness—will run as a through-line in
the comic, as Vision and his family struggle with individual desires and
seemingly pre-ordained destinies. Moreover, in the same sentence we hear
two distinct perspectives on the same subject, namely the relationship
between suburbanites and the city. The voice of the vague residents of
Arlington unironically laments their children’s isolation from the city’s
attractions, while the recitant’s implicit “quoting” them ironically undercuts
the sentiment with the voice of a non-resident that has just matter-of-factly
noted that these suburbanites migrated (fled?) to their new locale by choice.
Together in dialogue, the voices nicely balance critique of and sympathy for
those who, like the Visions themselves, are engaged in making “the com-
promises that are necessary to raise a family.”
The second, very different dialogizing moment comes when the first of
the Visions’ neighbors is introduced: “Behold George and Nora” (Figure
18.2). Before analyzing that moment, one might backtrack and briefly note
a different sort of dialogic relationship in the comic’s first pages, that
between the recitant and the monstrator. As the recitant conveys a subtly
dialogized but seemingly generic story of middle-class urban influx and
flight, the monstrator portrays a sequence of scenes from this “typical”
Arlington neighborhood—well-kept lawns, large houses, cheery residents,
and, among them, the bizarrely floating mailbox in front of the Visions’
abode at 616 Hickory Branch Lane. The voice of the recitant, in other
words, gives the reader largely bland reportage, while the “voice” of the
monstrator responds with surreality: the comic will be a dialogic vision, so
to speak, simultaneously of the ordinary and extraordinary, the mundane
and the fantastic, as is that full-page image of the Visions on page three,
255
Figure 18.2 The Vision (2018), Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta. © Marvel
already mentioned. It is precisely that sort of “double-voicedness” that is

manifested in the line, “Behold George and Nora.” The word “Behold” itself
is, to adopt Bakhtin’s phrase, “shot through” with overtones of the mythic,
of the biblical, of the mode of the fantastic; it is part of the discourse of the
wondrous, the miraculous, indeed, the visionary. Placed in a panel next to
a white, middle-aged suburban couple bringing a pan of cookies to new
neighbors—a couple engaged in a somewhat snarky disagreement about
how best to welcome the weird new resident “robots” (as George terms
them)—the text “dialogizes” their seemingly stereotypical normalcy. Their
very ordinariness becomes something of a “fairy tale,” and the realm of
“fairy tale” invades the everyday.
Yet there are further, and still more pertinent, dialogic overtones to be
heard, should one recall the very first appearance of The Vision, on the
cover of Avengers #57, published in 1968 (Figure 18.3). This gigantic
figure bathed in an ominous red light and mystical cloud dwarfs the
superheroes at his feet, conveys impassive dominance. And the jagged
block lettering that reads, “Behold … The Vision!” announces this new
character whose status in 1968—hero or villain—is ambiguous. In King’s
Vision series, the sentence “Behold George and Nora” cannot but echo
Figure 18.3 Behold the Vision from cover of Avengers #57 (1968), John Buscema.
© Marvel
257
DANIEL PINTI
that first appearance of the series’ titular hero, but “echo” is neither
a helpful nor a particularly Bakhtinian critical metaphor, since reflexive
repetition is not really what is at issue. Neither is this to be dismissed as
an “Easter egg” or reduced to an allusion. Rather, in one direction, the
sentence dialogizes the words on the cover of the first appearance of The
Vision, so that the “monologic” commanding announcement from the ori-
ginal now exists polyphonically with the gentle introduction of these
modest suburbanites, and George and Nora, conversely, cannot but be per-
ceived as somehow more enigmatic and fantastical than they might other-
wise seem to be. And because the “hyper-familiar” George and Nora are
rendered strange by their being associated with The Vision in his original
appearance, the present-day Vision of this comic, who bears a nearly fifty-
year history since that Avengers appearance, becomes defamiliarized, cer-
tainly for the long-time Avengers reader, made strange again by re-voicing
his original strangeness and ambiguity.
The polyphony here is arguably even more complex. Verbally, the reci-
tant’s comments about George and Nora that continue immediately after
their introduction function dialogically.
At that time, George worked as a mortgage broker. He enjoyed hot

wings, but he always ordered them too spicy for his own taste.
Nora worked in H.R. at a K-street law firm. She read more than
anyone she knew. But she only read digitally.
The story would initially seem to juxtapose the mundane, “organic”

George and Nora with the futuristic, “artificial” Visions. But George and
Nora have their own artificialities, and they are curiously reminiscent—
albeit ironically in their very insignificance—of the Visions’, and of their
consequences. The Vision is a synthezoid, an amalgamation of the human
and the technological, and Nora, who reads a great deal, but “only … digi-
tally,” lives her own kind of technological integration. Also, because he is
a synthezoid, the question of The Vision’s freedom of choice is not infre-
quently raised in stories about him, as it is in the King Walta series, and
George, with his self-inflected pain from his repeatedly ordered too-spicy
hot wings, exhibits his own sort of robotic incapacity for free choice. In
short, George and Nora are depicted through dialogized discourse as both
“natural” and “artificial,” in a way that problematizes if not deconstructs
that very dichotomy, and resonates with themes played out in the rest of
the series. Consequently, what may seem to be arbitrary and innocuous
details voiced about the habits of this typical couple are doubly voiced as
comments on one of the series’ core thematic questions: in what sense, if
any, are the Visions human, and where do we draw the lines between
human and machine?
258
Conclusion
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts have been incorporated into various
fields in both the humanities and the social sciences, and Comics Studies is
no exception. In our field, however, the usefulness of Bakhtin has only just
begun to be explored and appreciated. Initial forays into detailed Bakhtinian
reading of comics (e.g., Meneses 2008; Sommers 2012) are quite promising,
and the ways in which certain Bakhtinian ideas complement and extend
recurring critical issues in Comics Studies, so that Bakhtin’s terms offhand-
edly find their way into important and innovative non-Bakhtinian works of
comics scholarship (e.g., Bukatman 2016; Grennan 2017), should only fur-
ther the sense that Bakhtin offers as-yet-untapped resources for comics
scholarship. Increasingly careful and persistent use of Bakhtin in Comics
Studies may well help comics scholars connect comics to other discourses
and other contexts in new ways, and, indeed, help us all see voices in
comics texts that otherwise might have remained hidden.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helène Iswolsky. Bloo-
mington: Indiana University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1983. The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist.
Translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and Translated by
Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Beaton, Kate. 2011. Hark! A Vagrant. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly.
Bukatman, Scott. 2016. Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
Cantwell, David. 2018. “The Wisdom of ‘The Vision,’ A Superhero Story about Family
and Fitting In.” The New Yorker. March 22. www.newyorker.com/books/page-
turner/the-wisdom-of-the-vision-a-superhero-story-about-family-and-fitting-in
Dini, Paul and Eduardo Risso. 2017. Dark Night: A True Batman Story. Burbank: DC
Comics.
Eisner, Will. 2008. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the
Legendary Cartoonist. New York: Norton.
Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. 2013. Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the
Question of the Subject. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Flanagan, Martin. 2009. Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Holly-
wood Film. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan.
Grennan, Simon. 2017. A Theory of Narrative Drawing. New York: Palgrave-
Macmillan.
Groensteen, Thierry. 2010. “The Monstrator, the Recitant, and the Shadow of the
Narrator.” European Comic Art 3 (1): 2–21.
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Hudson, Rick. 2010. “The Derelict Fairground: A Bakhtinian Analysis of the Graphic
Novel Medium.” CEA Critic 72 (3): 35–49.
King, Tom and Gabriel Hernandez Walta. 2018. The Vision. New York: Marvel
Comics.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins.
Meneses, Juan. 2008. “A Bakhtinian Approach to Two Graphic Novels: The Individual
in Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Chester Brown’s Louis Riel.” International Journal of
Comic Art 10 (2): 598–620.
Packard, Stephan. 2015. “Closing the Open Signification: Forms of Transmedial Story-
worlds and Chronotopoi in Comics.” Storyworlds 7 (2): 55–74.
Pinti, Daniel. 2018. “Bodies in Saga.” ImageText 10 (1). http://imagetext.english.ufl.
edu/archives/v10_1/pinti/
Smolderen, Thierry. 2014. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Windsor
McCay. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Sommers, Joseph Michael. 2012. “Crooked Appalachia: The Laughter of the Melun-
geon Witches in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: The Crooked Man.” In Comics and the
U.S. South, edited by Brannon Costello and Qiana J. Whitted, 214–241. Jackson:
Stam, Robert. 1992. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Vaughan, Brian K. and Fiona Staples. 2012. Saga. Portland: Image Comics.
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19
SCIENTIFIC HUMANITIES
The Scientific Origins of Wonder Woman
Matthew J. Brown
Introduction
Science plays an important role in contemporary cultures around the world.
That is, both the results and the methods of scientific inquiry, as well as its
applications, are not only influenced by the culture in which it is produced,
but they also have an outsized influence on that culture. Some scientists
become important cultural figures—for example, Marie Curie, Charles
Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking,
Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, just to name
a few. Scientific results and the ideas of scientists are accorded a special
authority by most people, most of the time. Even those who doubt specific
claims, for example, about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, or about the
reality of climate change, typically have a lot of trust in the authority of sci-
ence on other issues. Technology, today inextricably linked with scientific
knowledge, in some ways plays an even more central role. Some of us with
a more romantic bent may bemoan the situation, but it remains an undeni-
able fact of contemporary society.
Playing such an important role in culture, it is no surprise that science
informs and makes important connections with other cultural products: art,
literature, film, television, and, of course, comics. Scientists become key
characters in narratives, and scientific research or its results become major
plot points. In more subtle ways, scientific knowledge about a variety of
subjects—biology, psychology, astronomy, engineering—becomes part of the
context of background beliefs informing the creators of art, literature, and
other media. And while science and technology have not always had the
cultural authority or omnipresence that they have today, the interaction and
interplay of science and culture are long-standing historical phenomena.
Many scholars in the humanities shy away from scientific topics; this is
one side of the so-called “two cultures” split identified by C.P. Snow (1959).
Whatever the general problems with the split of the sciences and the
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MATTHEW J. BROWN
humanities, lack of familiarity or comfort with the sciences limits the kinds
of interpretation that humanities scholars can make of the relevant texts
and artifacts. Insofar as the sciences inform the construction, content, or
reception of the relevant texts, aspects of the text will be hidden from those
who feel averse to and have little familiarity with science. An exception to
this science-aversion are the areas of the humanities that themselves take
science as their subject matter, including the history, philosophy, and liter-
ary and cultural studies of science, or broadly the humanistic side of the
interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). A related
interdisciplinary field is referred to as “literature and science studies” and it
includes literary scholars analyzing science, scientific humanities analyses of
literature, and much more besides (Gossin 2002). Other exceptions are on
the rise (for example, the area of digital humanities).
Serious research and writing in the humanities requires that we go beyond
the surface-level meaning of texts, art objects, and cultural artifacts, beyond
descriptions of, for instance, plot, style, and characterization; we require crit-
ical approaches to provide tools for research and interpretation that allow us
to move beyond that superficial level. The aim of this book is to provide
a survey of such critical approaches for the interdisciplinary field of Comics
Studies. Scientific humanities is such a critical approach for interpretations
that are only possible across the two cultures divide. It is a species of context-
ual approach whereby the text is situated in a critical context provided by
science. This chapter explain the scientific humanities approach and apply it
to golden-age Wonder Woman comics.

The first underlying assumption of scientific humanities, already canvassed
above, is that science provides an important context for interpreting many
narratives, not only didactic popular presentations of science, but a variety
of fictional and nonfictional narratives. There are several ways that an
understanding of science scaffolds such interpretive work. First, science is
part of the background of the production of certain texts. In some cases,
stories are written by scientists who themselves have a scientific agenda in
mind; this is of course true of didactic works, but not only those—the
sample analysis in this chapter focuses on a text produced by a scientist
with a very specific scientific agenda. The goal of the text is not science edu-
cation; rather, science forms the background of a comprehensive project of
education and social reform that the comic attempts to enact.
Second, scientists, scientific techniques, or scientific research can be part of
the narrative’s content. Obviously, it helps to know something about scientists
or the scientific process to understand such narratives. What’s more, we can
make comparisons in the other direction: reading and interpreting the text can
help us think about the scientific context. Reading Mary Shelley’s description
262
in Frankenstein of Victor’s obsessive attempt to complete the Creature helps us

think about real-world examples where scientists focus only on the technical
allure of their research, without sufficient attention to what the consequences
of that research might be. Similar connections, with interesting twists, can be
found in various other portrayals of “mad scientists,” such as Batman’s enemy
Mr. Freeze, or Dr. Josephine Baker in Victor LaValle’s Destroyer.
Even when science or scientists are not explicitly part of the narrative’s
content, science may still provide a valuable interpretive framework by sup-
plying important information about topics that might be central to that
text, such as the environment, consciousness, economics, or society. Even
when the author does not explicitly reference science, understanding the
nature of such phenomena and the background scientific beliefs at the time
about these phenomena can help unpack the meaning of the text.
It is important to recognize that either popular or expert understandings
of science are relevant, and indeed, these understandings are always in dia-
logue where science forms part of the interpretive context for a cultural
text. Creators might be scientists or have scientific training, or they may do
copious research about science in the process of creating the work. In such
cases, it is important to draw on expert scientific knowledge. When their
own scientific work is not well known or is idiosyncratic, one may have to
do significant interpretive work on their scientific works. On the other
hand, creators might have no expert understanding of science, and may rely
on general education, background cultural beliefs about science, and previ-
ous representations of science in popular culture. Likewise, whenever or
insofar as we think about audience reception of such texts, we need to
know about the popular understanding that is relevant. Work in public
understanding of science or science communication becomes relevant here.
Another core assumption is that science itself is a sociocultural process
and product. Science is not a set of timeless, apersonal truths. It is the
product of socially, historically, and culturally situated human beings working
individually and in groups. It relies not on pure rationality but on particular
sociocultural practices of inquiry, on socially constructed concepts, on meta-
phors and analogies, on messy heuristics, and on human values. It involves
competition and “political” struggles between individuals and groups. Typic-
ally, this is not “politics” as in liberals and conservatives, but as in “office pol-
itics.” Sometimes, though, the larger political context informs scientific
controversies, as with climate science or stem cell research. Science not only
contributes to the larger society and culture, but it draws on and is influenced
by them. This does not mean that we do not take science seriously. To say
that science is a sociocultural process and product is not to deny that it pro-
duces knowledge or discovers truth, only to say that it does so from a human
point of view.
The popular understanding of science and scientists, and their represen-
tation in art, literature, film, and pop culture, are thus doubly sociocultural
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MATTHEW J. BROWN
products. First, it is itself a reflection of the sociocultural products of

science. Second, it is read through a variety of sociocultural lenses, interests,
fashions, etc. This pushes us to interrogate social, historical, cultural, and
evaluative factors at two levels—of the broader culture, and of the scientists
themselves or scientific process itself.

The type of artifacts to which a scientific humanities approach can be
applied is potentially quite broad. For any work of literary, artistic, or cul-
tural production, we can ask whether new details can be revealed by reading
it in some scientific context. Because scientific knowledge touches every
element of our natural and social worlds, that question is in principle open
for any work. In practice, however, a scientific humanities approach is usu-
ally more revealing as a critical approach when the link between the work
and the scientific context is much closer. Sometimes this can be difficult to
determine without either significant background in the sciences (or the his-
tory or philosophy thereof), or without some background biographical
information about the creator of the work. Scientific humanities scholars
themselves often have background or interests that predispose them to see
the scientific context.
Within the field of Comics Studies, appropriate artifacts for scientific
humanities include comics texts that involve representations of scientists or
the scientific process, have content that relates to areas of scientific know-
ledge, or are authored by scientists or those engaged in some way with sci-
ence. This includes didactic/educational works about science, such as the
work of Jay Hosler (Clan Apis, Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth) and
Jim Ottaviani (Two-Fisted Science, Feynman, Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and
Thunder Lizards), whether by scientists, educators, or others. It includes less
didactic, fictional works by scientists (such as Wonder Woman’s creator
William Moulton Marston) or known science enthusiasts (like H.G. Wells),
as well as critics of or commentators on science. It also includes texts where
scientists are the protagonist, antagonist, or significant side characters (con-
sider characters such as Dr. Manhattan, Hugo Strange, and Reed Richards),
or where scientific research forms an important part of the story (as it does
in Frankenstein or Jonathan Hickman’s The Manhattan Projects).
Some, but by no means all, relevant texts will be in the science fiction
genre, but not all texts in that genre will be appropriate for this approach.
On the one hand, nonfiction, realistic fiction, memoir, and most any genre
can fit in one or more of the categories above. On the other hand, there is
much “science fiction” literature which portrays future worlds using different,
futuristic technologies as tools, but where science or engineering, scientists,
and technologists play no role in the narrative; where the futuristic elements
serve purely ethical, political, or entertainment purposes; and where setting
264
those narratives or elements against a background of science or engineering

would not reveal anything new.

Scientific humanities as a critical approach draws on work in and the tools of
the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (including history,
philosophy, and the social, literary, and cultural studies of science, as well as
science communication) to read texts against a scientific background. The
approach is inherently contextual: placing some aspect of the text against
a relevant scientific background to see what new details and connections are
thrown into relief. How the text itself is approached, and what counts as “rele-
vant” information from science, science studies, or the public understanding of
science will depend in large part on the particular text. One might focus on
broad themes from the text or instead engage in close reading. Typically, this
approach focuses on the thematic and narrative elements of a comics text. In
tandem with reading the text, one must draw on the scientific context via
history of science, rhetorical analyses of science, or contemporary science and
its social or philosophical analysis, or, in cases where the creator is a scientist,
biographical sources about the creator as a working scientist may be necessary.
An analysis that focused more on the visual elements of certain comics might
instead read them in the context of the history or practices of scientific dia-
grams, medical illustration, or cartography.
One way this might go involves drawing on the history of science from
when the text was produced. For example, Jessica Murphy provides a reading
of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in the context of early modern medical
thought at the time it was written. Her reading concerns a particular passage
from Book III where the character of the princess Britomart is described as
a “sicke virgin” and the nurse Glauce attempts to cure her (Murphy 2010).
Murphy argues against the interpretation of Britomart as “lovesick,” because
lovesickness was considered a malady with symptoms quite different from
Britomart’s. Murphy shows that a recognized disease of the time known as
“greensickness” better fits Britomart’s case, comparing Spenser’s poem to
both historical medical sources and contemporary histories of early modern
medicine. Because Murphy approaches the medical discussion of greensick-
ness (a “disease of virgins”) from a feminist or critical gender and sexuality
studies lens, she is able to provide a more nuanced reading of issues of
gender in the interpretation of The Faerie Queene than are contemporary
readers who are unaware of the relevant scientific-medical context.
In another kind of case, one might draw on contemporary science and
its philosophical analysis in critically analyzing texts. For example, Pamela
Gossin, in discussing the ecological and environmentalist themes in the
manga and animation of Hayao Miyazaki, brings in the mutual dialogue
between ecology and environmental science, environmental history, and
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MATTHEW J. BROWN
environmental philosophy (Gossin 2015). This allows Gossin to understand

not only the environmental influences on Miyazaki, such as Clive Ponting’s
A Green History of the World, but also to uncover a complex ecophilosophy
being worked out in Miyazaki’s comics and films.
In some cases, where the science itself is complicated or not well known,
a scientific humanities approach may involve a relatively long digression
through an analysis of the science itself before returning to the text it helps
us analyze. In other cases, where the science is more simple or familiar or
where existing scholarly analyses of the science are more easily available,
such thorough explanations may not be necessary.
Types of Questions for Analysis

What types of questions might this critical approach answer? One question
that seems relevant, and indeed sometimes sparks an interest in taking
a scientific humanities approach, is the question of how accurate the science
in a text is. This could be understood historically, relative to the science at
the time the text was written, or relative to the current state of scientific
knowledge. One can of course ask whether the radioactive spider bite in
Spider-Man’s origin story is scientifically accurate, or whether it reflected the
understanding of biology and radiation current in 1962. Perhaps, in a more
sophisticated way, we could ask if the laboratory tinkerings of a Doctor Will
Magnus or a Victor Von Doom accurately represent how scientific research
is done. But focusing on these questions turns out to be less significant than
it might seem. At best, they can be stepping stones to drawing out other,
more revealing questions about the text; in some cases, it leads to
a dismissive attitude toward the “inaccurate” text. Questions about scientific
accuracy are not the kind of questions that a scientific humanities approach
should focus on exclusively or for their own sake.
What sort of questions should we ask when we’re reading a comics text
(or any other text) within a scientific context? Recall that cultural represen-
tations of science are a doubly sociocultural product; the science itself is the
product of time, place, and culture, and the choice to represent it in
a popular, artistic, or literary medium is likewise a sociocultural act with
specific aims and values. There are thus many questions that are apropos of
a scientific humanities reading, such as: Assuming a base level of scientific
literacy of the time, what implicit details of the narrative can we uncover?
What does the representation of science or scientists in the text tell us
about what the author understands or believes about science, what they
hope for or fear about science, or more generally, how they value science?
What does it tell us about the audience’s understanding of or beliefs about
science? How does science inform the creator’s goals? To answer some of
these questions, along the way, we may have to make judgments of similar-
ity or fit between information about science and the comics text itself. But
266
these are instrumental to answering more significant questions, not the goal
of the critical approach.

This chapter will look at the early Wonder Woman comics authored by
the experimental psychologist William Moulton Marston, and influenced
by his partners Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, themselves psycholo-
gists in their own right. It turns out this is a particularly appropriate
choice for using a scientific humanities approach. Marston once described
Wonder Woman as “psychological propaganda.” It follows that we should
understand the content of Marston’s psychological ideas in order to
understand the comics he produced to advocate for those ideas. I will thus
read the Wonder Woman comics in light of an analysis of his psycho-
logical theories and experiments. Doing so leads to a quite significant
reinterpretation of the dialogue, narratives, and imagery of the early
Wonder Woman comics. This is an example of the interpretive possibilities
revealed by the critical approach of scientific humanities. In particular,
I will focus on three stories from Wonder Woman volume 1: “The Secret
of Baroness Von Gunther” (Wonder Woman #3, February 1943), “The
Rubber Barons” (#4, May 1943), and “Battle for Womanhood” (#5,
July 1943), all written by William Moulton Marston and drawn by H.G.
Peter. As published in the original issues, the separate stories, of which
there were usually four of five per issue, were untitled. Titles were added
in more recent collections. These stories can be found in the Wonder
Woman Archives or Wonder Woman Chronicles collections (vols. 2 and 3)
or Wonder Woman: The Golden Age Omnibus, vol. 1.
In order to provide the appropriate scientific context, one must also bring
in sources to set that context. In general this could involve primary sources
from the scientific literature or archives, works from the history, philosophy,
sociology, or cultural studies of science, biographical sources, or science
communication research about the public understanding of science. For my
analysis, I have drawn on Marston’s psychological writings, particularly The
Emotions of Normal People (1928), as well as secondary biographical sources
on Marston himself, such as the work of Bunn (1997), Daniels (2000), and
Lepore (2014).
Sample Analysis
Marston, William Moulton and Harry G. Peter. 1943a. “The Secret of Baroness
Von Gunther.” Wonder Woman vol. 1 #3 (February). New York: All-
American Publications.
Marston, William Moulton and Harry G. Peter. 1943b. “The Rubber Barons.”
Wonder Woman vol. 1 #4 (May). New York: All-American Publications.
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MATTHEW J. BROWN
Marston, William Moulton and Harry G. Peter. 1943c. “Battle for Woman-
hood.” Wonder Woman vol. 1 #5 (July). New York: All-American
Publications.
Marston, William Moulton. 1928. Emotions of Normal People. International
Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. New York:
Harcourt Brace & Company.
In the panel from Wonder Woman #4 (Figure 19.1), we see two minor char-
acters, Elva Dove and Ivar Torgson, engaged in a rather bizarre scene. Prior
to this scene, Elva was caught by Diana Prince (Wonder Woman’s alter ego,
working as a secretary to Steve Trevor) stealing secret documents related to
rubber production. Elva works for the crooked rubber producer, Torgson,
with whom she is also in love, though he treats her badly. Wonder Woman
saves Elva from Torgson’s wrath and recruits her to help reform Torgson.
She shows Elva “an X-ray photograph of Torgson’s subconscious,” where he
appears as a wealthy king and Elva as his chained slave. Wonder Woman
proposes to “cure” Ivar by making him think of Elva as his queen rather
Figure 19.1 “The Rubber Barons,” Wonder Woman #4 (1943), p. 9, William Moulton
Marston and Harry G. Peter. © DC Comics
268
than his slave, dresses Elva to fit the part, in a costume rendered by the
artist H.G. Peter as a green fur-lined two-piece with a kind of crown. Elva
controls Ivar with the help of Wonder Woman’s Magic Lasso, which in its
original form does not compel the person it binds merely to tell the truth,
but compels them to submit to the wishes of the person that binds them.
Wonder Woman promises that Ivar will love submission, that Elva will
soon be able to control him without the lasso, and that after three days of
this role-reversal, Ivar should be reformed of his evil ways.
We see in this panel that Peter has rendered Ivar as a square-jawed, hyper-
masculine brute. It is no surprise that he resists “feminine control.” But Elva
replies, as she has learned from Wonder Woman, that “Learning to submit is
the final test of manhood.” And shortly after this, Ivar finds indeed that he
enjoys the feeling of submission and no longer has any desire to resist. Elva’s
lack of commitment ends up spoiling the experiment, and further hijinks ensue
before Wonder Woman saves the day and reforms Torgson.
What is going on in this strange story? It brings together a number of
common themes from the early Wonder Woman comics: women suffering or
led to evil by the domination of a cruel husband or boyfriend, prevalence of
bondage imagery, and a focus on reforming criminals rather than punishing
them. But is the way these themes are tied together in this bizarre story
merely a reflection of the kinky mind of its creators? I will argue that it is
something more.
As mentioned above, Marston once described Wonder Woman as “psy-
chological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule
the world” (from a letter to early comics historian Colton Waugh, quoted in
Walowit (1974, 42)). Marston was an experimental psychologist, as well as
a lawyer, with his bachelor’s, PhD, and law degree from Harvard. He was
trained by the noted psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, the student of Wilhelm
Wundt who William James had brought to Harvard to take over the psych-
ology laboratory. His specialities were in the psychology of emotions, decep-
tion, relationships, personality types, and the nature of consciousness; he also
dabbled in clinical psychology. He published a variety of journal articles on
these topics, as well as two academic books—The Emotions of Normal People
(1928), in some ways his culminating work of psychology, and Integrative
Psychology (1931), a general textbook co-authored with his wife Elizabeth
Holloway Marston1 and C. Daly King. Many of the strange elements of
Marston’s Wonder Woman comics are reflected in some way in his psycho-
logical writings.
In the opening chapter of The Emotions of Normal People, Marston makes
a striking claim: “I submit that the backbone of literature has been transplanted
intact into psychology, where it has proved pitifully inadequate” (1928, 3–4).
This quotation captures his central idea that psychology needed to radically
break from our commonsense psychological concepts, such as the emotional
language of romantic poetry and literature. It is not a critique of literature
269
MATTHEW J. BROWN
per se, but a call for a scientific psychology not beholden to pre-scientific ideas.
His approach not only clears the ground for setting a genuine scientific basis of
psychology (based in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychological
experiments and observations), but it also serves an ethical-political purpose,
eliminating potential status quo biases from a quite value-laden subject matter,
human emotions and psycho-emotional health (Brown 2016).
According to Marston, emotions are constituted by the integration of signals
in the motor pathways of the brain and nervous system. In particular, they are
integrations of signals that derive from the self and from a stimulus. When self
and stimulus are aligned, the emotion feels pleasant; when they are antagonis-
tic, unpleasant. “Normal emotions” (as opposed to abnormal, i.e., unhealthy)
tend toward promoting the pleasant and reducing or making transitory
unpleasant emotions arising from antagonistic stimuli. The basic emotions,
Marston argued on evolutionary grounds, must be normal emotions, as they
promote the functioning of the organism. Emotions can also differ on whether
the stimulus or the self signal is stronger. It is on the poles of these two distinc-
tions (allied vs. antagonistic, stronger self or stimulus) that Marston defined his
“basic emotions”:
• Dominance (antagonistic, stronger self)

• Compliance (antagonistic, stronger stimulus)
• Submission (allied, stronger stimulus)
• Inducement (allied, stronger self)
More complex emotions (both normal and abnormal) were formed from
either combinations or sequences of these basic emotions. The basic emotions
also formed the basis of personality types and relationship styles. (The per-
sonality types scheme survives today as the DISC personality or behavior
assessment tool used by business leadership types, where three of the four
terms have been slightly renamed: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and
Conscientiousness. It is used as a competitor or complement to the Myers-
Briggs test.) While there is far too much going on here to discuss in detail in
this analysis, there are several aspects of Marston’s theory of the emotions,
his picture of psycho-emotional health, and the consequences he draws for
society that are directly relevant to understanding the story of “The Rubber
Barons” and other common themes from the Wonder Woman comics.
First, the nature of submission on Marston’s account has several surpris-
ing features. Recall the account of pleasant and unpleasant emotions in
Marston’s theory: alliance-based emotions like submission are pleasant, and
indeed, says Marston, “Under no possible conditions can true submission
be unpleasant” (Marston 1928, 243). Many have looked at the terminology
of “domination” and “submission” in Marston’s Wonder Woman and
assumed commonsensical definitions of those terms which make them com-
plementary (one person dominates, the other person submits) and in which
270
submission can be understood as a kind of self-denial or even masochistic

role. But on Marston’s account, the complement of dominance is compli-
ance (one complies with a stronger dominator), while the complement of
submission is inducement (one person induces another to submit). One can
only truly submit to a “loving authority” who has one’s own interests at
heart, such as a wise teacher.
Inducement and submission form the basis of the group of “love” emotions.
By contrast, dominance and compliance form the basis of the “appetite” emo-
tions. For Marston, a healthy psyche is one where the love emotions predomin-
ate, and the appetite emotions serve or are “adapted” to the love emotions: “The
normal relationship consists of complete adaptation of appetite to love. Any life
which is both successful and happy must adapt its successes to its happiness”
(Marston 1928, 381). This idea follows from what we have already said about
normal emotions. Because appetite emotions contain conflict and unpleasant-
ness, it follows that the well-adjusted person will use such emotions only when
an antagonistic stimulus (whether an external threat or an internal stimulus,
such as hunger) is present, and will tend to remove the antagonism. Someone
who is persistently engaged in appetite emotions like dominance, competition,
anger, or fear is thus in an abnormal or unhealthy mental state.
The primary complex love emotions are passion (or passive love) and
captivation (or active love). In the former, submission is primary, while in
the latter, inducement is primary. In terms of loving interpersonal relations,
one partner will be more of a captivator, while the other will be more pas-
sionate (passive, submissive). In a relationship, the partner who is stronger
with captivation emotion is also called a “love leader.” Love is key to emo-
tional health, and loving relationships are key to experiencing love, so every
healthy person will be or will have a love leader. What’s more, a society,
just like a person, must adapt appetite to love in order for the individuals
within it to lead healthy lives. As such, our social and political leaders
should also be love leaders rather than dominators.
Finally, Marston held a peculiar view that there are significant sex differ-
ences in one’s capacity for captivation emotion, and specifically that women
were much more capable of inducement and captivation than men, and
thus that only women were suitable candidates for love leaders. He based
his argument on behavioral observations and surveys of women, as well as
background physiological and hormonal information, such as it was. His
view that only women could be love leaders, along with the view that
healthy society required love leadership, led him to propose a social pro-
gram of “Emotional Re-Education” in the concluding chapter of Emotions
of Normal People. This program included both recognizable feminist goals
(educational equity and self-sufficiency for women) and more radical claims
(the inherent superiority of women, a call for a future matriarchal utopia).
Fifteen years later, the psychologist was now a comic book writer, crafting
the narrative of “The Rubber Barons” and various other stories. Against the
271
MATTHEW J. BROWN
background of Marston’s scientific views, many details of the story become

clearer; in a sense, Wonder Woman has become a means of “emotional re-
education” (showing, after all, that Marston was not opposed to making use
of the true “backbone of literature”). Ivar Torgson represents the abnormal
state of being driven by appetite, by competition, hunger for wealth, etc.
Torgson rejects and mocks Elva’s professions of love early in the story. He
leads a life of crime that ends up hurting him, those who love him, and his
country. Wonder Woman wants Elva to help her reform Ivar by realigning
his emotional life to be well-adjusted, that is, governed by love rather than
appetite. She sets up Elva as a love leader for Torgson, and it seems that she
would have succeeded if she were more committed and better trained.
The evils of male domination are a common theme in Wonder Woman
comics. In “Battle for Womanhood,” Wonder Woman rescues Marva from her
husband Doctor Psycho, who has put her in a trance and used her as a source
for his supernatural powers. In the final panel of the story, Marva sits despond-
ently in what appears to be a darkened room. She complains to Wonder
Woman, “Submitting to a cruel husband’s domination has ruined my life”
(Marston and Peter 1943c, 16A) Here the terminology is a little sloppy, for
Marva never truly submitted, as one cannot submit to domination; instead she
was hypnotized, forced to marry Psycho against her will, and then entranced
and exploited. Male domination always leads to bad ends in Wonder Woman,
whether the dominator be a villain like Doctor Psycho or even the well-
meaning Steve Trevor. When Marva asks Wonder Woman, “But what can
a weak girl do?” Wonder Woman answers with elements of her program of
emotional re-education, “Get strong! Earn your own living …” That is, don’t
depend on dominant men for your safety or sustenance.
Bondage imagery is extremely prevalent in early Wonder Woman comics.
Tim Hanley discovered that fully 27 percent of panels from the first ten
issues of Wonder Woman involved some form of bondage (Hanley 2014,
46). This prevalence has led to some significant criticism of Marston’s work.
Bryan Dietrich describes Marston’s Wonder Woman as “the strangest set of
Freudian images comics had ever endured” (2006).2 Bradford Wright, in
Comic Book Nation, his comprehensive history of the American comic book
industry, says about Marston’s Wonder Woman:
On the other hand, there was a lot in these stories to suggest that
Wonder Woman was not so much a pitch to ambitious girls as an
object for male sexual fantasies and fetishes. The stories were rife
with suggestive sadomasochistic images like bondage, masters and
slaves, and men groveling at the feet of women.
(2001, 21)
These criticisms seem to me based in a unfortunately superficial engagement

with Marston’s body of work, in part because the scientific context of the
272
work is left out. I see the bondage imagery as largely involved in demon-
strating a crucial distinction in Marston’s theory between (often unhealthy)
compliance to a stronger dominator and the pleasure of submission to
a love leader. We often see Wonder Woman and the other Amazons or the
Holliday Girls tying each other up for fun, but we also see the unfortunate
results of women allowing themselves to be bound by men or by evil women.
In “The Secret of Baroness Von Gunther,” Wonder Woman thinks to herself,
“The bad thing for them is submitting to a master or an evil mistress” (Marston
and Peter 1943a, 7C). There are no good masters for Marston, though there are
good mistresses (love leaders). Teaching the distinction between true submis-
sion and problematic compliance is a preoccupation of the comics that
becomes quite clear when read in the appropriate context.
A final caveat: Marston’s scientific work does not reflect our current sci-
entific understanding of the emotions, mental health, sex and gender differ-
ences, or human relationships. It is in many ways a highly idiosyncratic
episode in the history of science, though it does have some contemporary
resonances. But scientific humanities is not looking for scientific accuracy in
the texts that analyzes. Rather, it is looking for interesting and revealing con-
nections, which may simply help us understand puzzling features of popular or
significant texts, or which may provide important insights into in influence of
science over culture, society, and human values. Between Marston’s scientific
and comics work, there are many such interesting connections.
Notes
1 Marston lived together with his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, as well as his
one-time student and research assistant, Olive Byrne, also known as Olive Rich-
ards. Elizabeth and Olive were trained psychologists in their own right, and they
made significant contributions to the scientific work published under Marston’s
name. It might be better, in fact, to refer to the authors of most of the scientific
work as “Holloway, Byrne, and Marston,” but I will follow conventional attribution
in the main text. Holloway and Byrne also inspired, but probably contributed less
directly to, aspects of Wonder Woman. Different but quite controversial interpret-
ations of their relationship are provided by the historian Jill Lepore (2014) and the
independent comics scholar Noah Berlatsky (2015).
2 The prevalence of Freudian interpretations of Wonder Woman, including Fredric
Wertham’s attack, should be read in the context of the many anti-Freudian argu-
ments in Marston’s own psychological writings. See Brown (2016, 11–15).
For further examples of the scientific humanities approach in various media, besides
those mentioned above, see (Rhodes 2000; Gossin 2007; Littlefield 2011; Rosen 2015).
Berlatsky, Noah. 2015. Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter
Comics, 1941–1948. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
273
MATTHEW J. BROWN
Brown, Matthew J. 2016. “Love Slaves and Wonder Women: Values and Popular Cul-
ture in the Psychology of William Moulton Marston.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly
2 (1): Article 1.
Bunn, Geoffrey C. 1997. “The Lie Detector, Wonder Woman and Liberty: The Life
and Work of William Moulton Marston.” History of the Human Sciences 10 (1): 91.
Daniels, Les. 2000. Wonder Woman: The Complete History. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle
Books.
Dietrich, Bryan D. 2006. “Queen of Pentacles: Archetyping Wonder Woman.”
Extrapolation 47 (2). University of Texas at Brownsville: 207–36.
Gossin, Pamela. 2002. Encyclopedia of Literature and Science. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press.
———. 2007. Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in
the Post-Darwinian World. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.
———. 2015. “Animated Nature: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Empathy in Miyazaki Hayao’s
Ecophilosophy.” Mechademia 10. University of Minnesota Press: 209–34.
Hanley, Tim. 2014. Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s
Most Famous Heroine. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Lepore, Jill. 2014. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Littlefield, Melissa M. 2011. The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Marston, William Moulton. 1928. Emotions of Normal People. International Library of
Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. New York: Harcourt Brace &
Company.
Marston, William Moulton, C. Daly King, and Elizabeth Holloway Marston. 1931.
Integrative Psychology: A Study of Unit Response. International Library of Psych-
ology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.
Murphy, Jessica C. 2010. “‘Of the Sicke Virgin’: Britomart, Greensickness, and the
Man in the Mirror.” Spenser Studies 25: 109–27.
Rhodes, Molly. 2000. “Wonder Woman and Her Disciplinary Powers: The Queer
Intersection of Scientific Authority and Mass Culture.” In Doing Science + Culture,
edited by Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek, 95–118. New York: Routledge.
Rosen, Mark. 2015. The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Snow, C. P. 1959. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. The Rede Lecture,
1959. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Walowit, Karen M. 1974. “Wonder Woman: Enigmatic Heroine of American Popular
Culture.” PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
Wright, Bradford W. 2001. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture
in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
274
INDEX
ableism 61, 64 Antigone 57

aca-fans 212 Anyabwile, Dawud 80–81, 83–4
Ackebo, Lena 150–153 Aoka 44
adaptation 191–205, 206–207, 250; appetite 271–272; see also dominance;
faithfulness (fidelity) 196–197; see also compliance
hypertextuality Apprentice, The 17
Adichie, Chimanda Ngozi 34n1 Aquaman 226
Adorno, Theodor 8–11 Archie 54, 223
Adventures in Depression 64 architextuality 192, 201; see also
Adventures of Tintin, The 27–28, 30, 32 hypertextuality
aesthetic properties 162 Armada, Bernard J. 175
affinity 222, 226, 230; see also parasocial art style 109, 111, 137, 141, 166, 172
relationships Ashcroft, Bill 24
Africa 21–22 Atwood, Margaret 89
Afrikaner 28, 31 audience 198, 209–210, 217; see also fans;
Agatha Harkness 254 parasocial relationships
Ahrens, Jörn 75 Auster, Paul 197
Alaniz, José 64 Austin, Terry 94
Alcide Nikopol 93 author/authorship see creator
Alice in Wonderland 127, 130 authorial intention 93
Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s through the authority 261; loving authority 271
Looking Glass 64 autobiographical pact 135
All–Star Comics 235, 237, 239–240, 242, autobiographical persona 137
244n1 autographer 136, 139
Alternate Comics 77–78, 80 autographics 120–121, 123, 134–143
Amazons 235, 237, 240, 273 avatar 135–136
America Chavez (Miss America) 63 Avengers 12, 16, 41, 43, 252, 258
American Flagg! 89 Avengers 53, 89, 257–258
American Revolution 13 Ayo 42–43, 45
American Splendor 150, 224 Azzarello, Brian 94
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 62
analytic philosophy 160–173
Andersen, Tore Rye 199, 203, 204n10 Bad Feminist 38
Aneka 41–45 Bainbridge, Jason 79
ANIA 80 Bakhtin, Mikhail 246–253, 257, 259
Animatrix, The 207–208 Bakhtinian dialogics see dialogics
Anotonio Valor see Brotherman Balzer, Jens 78
275
INDEX
bande dessinée 28 Bressler, Charles E. 106–107, 117

Banks, Tyra 41 bridging devices 177, 181, 183–186
Barbara Gordon 228–231 Brontë, Charlotte 23
Barnes, Ernie 84 Brooker, Will 210
Barnet, Sylvan 105 Brooks, Cleanth 105–107
Bateman, John 147 Brose, Margaret 175
Batgirl 228–230 Brosh, Allie 64
Batman 164, 197 Brotherman 80, 82–85
Batman 7, 11–17, 48, 77, 79, 81, 83, 88, Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline 80–85
228, 263; see also Bruce Wayne Brown, Rembert 46n3
Batman Family 228 Bruce Wayne 7, 15–17, 228
Batman: The Animated Series 249 Bruner, Jerome 126
Batman: The Killing Joke 228 Building Stories 67
Batwoman 52 built environment 65
Beaton, Kate 250 Burke, Peter 233
Beavis and Butthead 197 Buster Brown 76
Bechdel, Alison 48–9, 64, 134 Butler, Judith 50
Beckett, Samuel 197 Byrne, John 94, 165
Behm-Morawitz, Elizabeth 221 Byrne, Olive 267, 273n1
Beowulf 197
Bernhard, Thomas 30–31 Callahan, Bob 197
Between the World and Me 37 Campbell, Naomi 41
Big City 80–83 canon 210–212, 214, 216–217, 219
Bila, Enki 93 capitalism 7–9, 11, 13–14, 26, 79, 93–94
Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary capitalist imperialism 10
64 Captain America 222
biographical criticism 106 Captain Haddock 28
Birds of Prey 228 caricature 193
Bitch Planet 89, 93 carnival 248–249, 251; see also dialogics
Bitterkomix 27 Carr, William 234, 236–237
Black Lightning 80 Carrier, David 165, 172
Black Manta 226 carrington, andré 45
Black Panther 12, 17n2, 38, 41–45, 46n3, Cavallaro, Mike 91
56, 63, 76–77, 84 central tension 111, 114, 116
Black Panther 37, 42, 45 Césaire, Aimé 23
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense 77 characters 24, 39–40, 197–198, 201, 210;
Black Panther: World of Wakanda 37–38, see also parasocial relationships
40, 42–45, 46n2, 46n3 Charretier, Elsa 52, 55, 58
blaxploitation 77 Checchetto, Marcco 94
Blondie 10–11 chiaroscuro 109
Bluestone, George 191 Chieftain Diya 44
bodies 251 chronotope 248–249, 251; see also
bondage 268–269, 272–273 dialogics
Boney, Alex 76 Chute, Hillary 48, 78, 136
Botes, Conrad 27 City of Glass 197
Box, Matthew 94 Civil War 206–207
Boyle, M. Christine 79 Claremont, Chris 94
Bradbury, Ray 89 class 7–8
braiding: narrative 207–208, 210, Classical Comics 197
213–214, 216–217; commodity 208 Classics Illustrated 197
Brave New World 89 clear line style 30, 33
276
INDEX
Clinton, George 84 critical utopia 90–91, 100–101

close reading 105–111, 123, 239, 243, cross-referencing 237, 239, 241, 243; see
251–252, 265 also historiography
closure 112, 127–128, 148, 166, 246 Crumb, Robert 134, 150
Coates, Ta–Nehisi 37, 41–42, 45 Cruse, Howard 48–49
Coetzee, J. M. 23 cultural studies 8, 262, 265
Coffa, Alberto J. 161 Cyclops 221
Cohen, Jonathan 222 Czerwiec, MK 64
Cohn, Neil 147–148
Collingwood, Robin 234, 237 Dagwood Bumstead 10–11
Collins, Suzanne 91 Dahl, Ken 64
colonialism 20, 22–24, 28–29, 31, 33 Daredevil 179
color 140–141, 172 Daredevil 63, 179, 182, 227; see also Mat-
color palette 26 thew Murdock
Comic Book Geographies 75 Dark Knight Returns, The 16–17, 89
Comic Book Nation 76 Dark Night: A True Batman Story 249
Comic Book Resources (website) 226 Darrow, Geof 208
comic frame 184–187 Darth Vader 212–219
comic strips 78, 223–224 Davis, Jim 197
Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, Davis, Natalie Zemon 233
1890–1945 75 DC Comics 10, 12, 79–80, 94, 206, 228
Comics and the City 75 de Lauretis, Teresa 50
comics studies 1–2 Decelerate Blue 91
compliance 270–271, 273 Depression Part Two 64
composition 110 Derrida, Jacques 236
Condie, Ally 91 Destroyer 263
Congo 20, 30 Detective Comics 15, 52, 228
Constantine 223 diagrams 265
consumers 208–209 dialogics 246–260; dialogic relationships
contextual approaches 262 250
contextual positionality 235–237, 243 dialogue/dialog 145–146, 148, 151–157,
Continental philosophy 161 248, 251, 253–255; see also dialogics
continuation see serial Diana Prince 241–242, 268; see also
continuity 52–53, 57, 59, 208, 211, 214; Princess Diana; Wonder Woman
continuity anchors 210, 213–214; diegesis 165, 194
continuity snarls 210, 212–213; see also Dietrich, Bryan 272
hyperdiegesis Difficult Women 40
conversation analysis 146, 148–158 Dini, Paul 249
Cook, Roy T. 163–165, 170–173 disability 228–231
Council of Elders 95–98, 101 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 62
counterexamples 163–164, 167, 169 disability studies 8, 61–73, 252;
counter-hegemonic 8 individual model of disability
counter-storytelling 39–40, 45 studies 62
Coupe, Laurence 175 DISC personality assessment 270
Couser, G. Thomas 62–63 Discipline and Punish 79
creator 209, 234–237, 261 Disney 10, 214, 217
Critical Approaches to Comics 1–2 Dittmer, Jason 78
critical geography 75–85 Divergent 91
critical race studies 62 Dixon, Chuck 56–57
critical race theory 8, 37–46, 50 Doctor Doom 56; see also Victor Von
critical theory 1–2, 7–9 Doom
277
INDEX
Doctor Octopus 56 Fantastic Four 41, 221–222

Doctor Psycho 272 fantasy 39
Doctor Strange 63 Fawaz, Ramzi 51, 64
dominance 269–273; male domination as femininity 269
a problem 272–273 feminism 8, 50–51, 58, 62, 271
dominant ideology 8, 11 Fies, Brian 64
Dora Milaje 41–45 Fischlin, Daniel 204n2
Dorfman, Ariel 10 Fisher, Bud 134
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 197 Flash 7
Dr. Manhattan 264 Flaubert 197
drama 194 Flies on the Ceiling 108–118
dramatism 175–187 focus group methods 225
dreams 120; dream process 119 Foe 23
Duncan, Randy 147, 175 Folami 43–45
Dyehouse, Jeremiah 121 forgery 193
dystopia 89, 90–92, 100 formal analysis 246, 249–250, 252
Fortier, Mark 204n2
Ebony White 76 Foss, Sonja K. 175
ecology 265 Foucault, Michel 50, 79
ecophilosophy 266 Fox News 14
Edelman, Lee 50–51 Frahm, Ole 170
Eisner, Will 76, 146, 249 frames see panels
El Refaie, Elisabeth 134–136 frames: interpretive frames 176
Elliott, Anthony 122 Frankenstein 263–264
Ellis, Warren 93 Frankfurt School 2, 8–10
Elton, Geoffrey 234 Fransman, Karrie 67–73
Emma Frost 12 Freeman, Matthew 208
emotion 269–273 Freud, Sigmund 9, 119–120, 272, 273n2
emotional re–education 271–272 Frosh, Stephen 122
emotional truth 135, 143 Fucking Sofo 150–155
Emotions of Normal People 267, 269 Fun Home 48, 64
empathy 221–222, 230 Furey, Emmett 180
Empire Writes Back, The 23–24
encapsulation 252 G.I.R.L. 57
Enns, Anthony 78 Gabriel, David 46n1
environmentalism 265–266 Gardner, Jared 26, 136, 170
equipment for living 175 Gardner, Rod 148
Europe 27 Garfield 197
eutopia 90–91, 100 Gay Comix 48
evolution 270 Gay, Roxanne 37, 40, 42–45
experiencing I 135 Gemma Bovary 197
experimental philosophy 162 gender 50; gender roles 269, 271, 273
external traveler 92 gender studies 252
Extinction 30–31 Gender Trouble 50
Genette, Gérard 192–194, 196–199, 201,
factuality 238 204n1, 204n6
Fahrenheit 451 89 genre 192, 198, 210, 249–253, 264
Falcon 84 genre theory 23, 26, 34
fandom 59 geographic imagination 78–79
fans 208–213, 219, 221; fan–fiction 217; Gerbner, George 39
see also parasocial relationships Ghost in the Shell 93
278
INDEX
Gibbons, Christina 147 historical evidence 233–239

Giffen, Keith 94 historicism 252
Gifford, Barry 197 historiography 24, 34, 233–245
Gillen, Kieron 213 history 262, 265–266, 273
Gillis, Scott 197 History of Sexuality 50
globalization 25 Hogarth, William 247
Gloeckner, Phoege 137 Holliday Girls 273
gollywog 31–33, 34n1, 34n2 Holloway, Elizabeth see Marston, Eliza-
Gordon, Ian 75 beth Holloway
Gossin, Pamela 262, 265–266 Holocaust 139–140
Gotham City 76–77, 80–81 homosexuality 50
Grace, Sina 48 Horkheimer, Max 8–11
graphic memoirs 63–64 Hosler, Jay 264
Green Arrow 12, 14 House that Groaned, The 67–72
Green Lantern 16 Hudlin, Reginald 41
Green, Justin 64, 134, 137 Huffington Post 40
Green, Katie 66 Hugo Strange 264
grid 110; gridding 26 Hulk 14, 55–56, 63
Groensteen, Thierry 78, 147, 150, human subjects research 225
155–156, 246, 252, 254 humanities 261–262
Gruenwald, Mark 88, 94 Hunger Games 91
Hutcheon, Linda 192, 194–198, 204n3–4,
Håkansson, Gabrielle 151 206
Halberstam, J. Jack 49 Huxley, Aldous 89, 92
Hall, Donald 49 hybridity 246–247, 250
Handmaiden’s Tale, The 89 Hyperbole and a Half 64
Hank Pym 53, 55, 58 hyperdiegesis 207–213, 215–217, 219;
Hanley, Tim 272 hyperdiegetic memory 208, 210,
Hardt, Michael 24 213–214, 216, 219; see also continuity
Harlem 80 Hyperion 88–89
Harry Potter (series) 206 hypermasculinity 38
Harvey, Colin B. 210 hypertextuality 192–199, 203, 204n5;
Harvey, Robert C. 3 imitation 193, 197; mood 193, 198;
Harvey, Yona 46n2 transformation 193–194, 196, 198–200;
Hatfield, Charles 78, 80, 107, 137, 246 see also adaptation
Hawkins, Matt 94–96, 99–100 hypotext see hypertextuality
health: psycho–emotional 270–273 Hythloday, Rachael 90
hegemony 8, 10–13
Hellblazer 223 Iceman 48
Hellboy: The Crooked Man 249 ICv2 46n1
Hergé 20, 22, 27, 30, 32 identification 65, 67, 171, 222; wishful
Hernandez, Jaime 108–118 identification 222, 230; see also paraso-
heteroglossia 247–248, 253; see also cial relationships
dialogics identity 122; identity construction
heteronormativity 8, 38, 49 120–121, 123
heterosexuality 24, 50 ideology 7–11, 13
Heuet, Stéphane 165 Ienco, Raffaele 94–96, 98–100
Highmore, Ben 150 Illuminati 56
Hills, Matt 207, 209 Image Comics 94, 249
Hinds, Garreth 197 imagery 201–202, 215–216, 265, 267,
historical criticism 106 272–273
279
INDEX
imitation see hypertextuality Kirby, Jack 41, 76, 137

imperialism 203 Kivy, Peter 163–164
individualism 7, 9, 11–16; Klaw 41
pseudo–individualism 9, 15–16; Kominsky-Crumb, Aline 134
rugged individualism 13 Kunka, Andrew 134, 138–143
inducement 270–271 Kunzle, David 146
Industrial Revolution 13 Kuper, Peter 197
influence 222–223, 226, 231; see also Kwaymullina, Ambelin 91
parasocial relationships
intermediality 22 Larkin, Ilana 132
interpolation 237–238 Larroca, Salvador 213
intersectionality 37–40, 72 Lauter, Paul 106
intertextuality 22, 192, 203, 204n1, LaValle, Victor 263
213; see also hypertextuality layout 26, 110
interviewing methods 224–225 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,
intraquel 214 The 197
Iron Man 7, 12–17, 53, 56, 63; see also Leavitt, Sarah 64
Tony Stark Lee, Stan 7, 79–80, 137
ironic authentication 137 Lefebvre, Henri 79
Irredeemable 89 Lefèvre, Pascal 147
Leitch, Thomas 191–192, 195–196
James Gordon (Commissioner) 228 Lejeune, Philip 135
James, William 269 Lemire, Jeff 94
Jane Eyre 23 Lepore, Jill 90
Janet van Dyne 58 Lesedi 44
Japan 27 letter columns 225, 227
Japanese–American internment 243 Letting It Go 138–143
Jefferson, Gail 148 Levinson, Jerrold 163
Jenkins, Henry 180, 207–209, 211, Lighter than my Shadow 66
214, 219 line style 26
Jobs, Steve 15–17 linguistic analysis 147
Jordanova, Ludmilla 233 Linton, Simi 61
Joseph, Michael 170 literary canon 105–106
Judge Dredd 89, 93 literary studies 23
Judge, Mike 197 literature 191
Jungle Action 41 literature and science studies 262, 265
Jurgens, Dan 94 Little Black Sambo 76
Justice League 16 Livingston, Paisley 169
Justice League 7 Lloyd, Overton 84
Logan 186–187
Kafka, Franz 197 Logicomix 168
Kane, Bob 197 Lois Lane 84
Kannemeyer, Anton 20–22, 27–31, 33–34 Lorde, Audre 44–45
Karasik, Paul 197 love 271–272; see also inducement;
Katin, Mirian 134 submission
Kellerman, Martin 146, 150–151 Love and Rockets 108, 224
Kimberling, C. Ronald 175 love leader 271, 273
King Features Syndicate 10 Love, Heather 50
King, Tom 252, 257 Lucas, George 211, 216, 238
Kingdom Come 17 Lucasfilm 211, 217
Kingpin 181 Luke Cage 77
280
INDEX
Luke Cage: Hero for Hire 80 media 195–196, 198, 206–207, 210–213,
Lund, Martin 77 216, 221–222; platforms 207, 209–210,
Lynch, David 34n1 213, 216; producers 210
Lynn, Steven 106 media industries 8–10, 13
media studies 10, 23
Mack, David 179–187 medical model see disability studies
Magic Lasso 269 medicine 265
Magnussan, Anne 147 memory 130–131; see also hyperdiegesis
Major Motoko Kusanagi 93 mental health see health
Making Comics 167 mentalités 238–229, 241, 243
Mark, Karl 9 Mephisto 42
Marlowe, Christopher 197 Meskin, Aaron 163–165, 172–173
Marston, Elizabeth Holloway 267, 269, mestiza 176, 179–180
273n1 metafiction 250; metafictional 165;
Marston, William Moulton 59, 235, 237, metacomic 160, 169–171
239–241, 243, 267–272, 273n1, 273n2 metaphor 238
Martinez, Alitha E. 46n2 metatextuality 192; see also
Marvel Classics Comics 197 hypertextuality
Marvel Comics 10, 12, 37, 40, 46n1, 53, 56, Meteling, Arno 75
58, 79, 82, 88, 94, 191, 206, 238, 252 Metropolis 76, 80
Marvel Illustrated 197 micro-narrative 207–210, 213, 217
Marvel Universe 11, 52–53, 56–57, Midnight Angel 42, 45
59, 63 Mignola, Mike 249
Marx, Karl 2, 9 Mihăilescu, Dana 141
Marxism 8 Milestone Media 81
Marxist analysis 8 Millar, Mark 94, 207
Mary Worth 224 Miller & Pynchon 199–203, 204n10
masculinist 11 mise-en-scene 216
masculinity 13, 24, 269 Miss America see America Chavez
Mason & Dixon 199–203, 204n9 Mister Fantastic 56; see also Reed
Masterpiece Comics 197 Richards
Matched 91 Mistress Zola 42–45
Matrix, The (series) 207–209 Miyazaki, Hayao 265–266
Mattelart, Armand 10 Mobil, Francesco 94
Matthew Murdock 179; see also Mockingbird 56
Daredevil Modernism 76
Maurer, Leopold 199–203, 204n10 Mom’s Cancer 64
Maus 137, 139 Monica Rappaccini 54–57
Maya Lopez 176, 179–187 Monsters 64
Mayhew Bergman, Megan 40 monstrator 254–255
Mazzucchelli, David 197 mood see hypertextuality
McCloud, Scott 75, 107–108, 112, 120, Moon Girl 56
127–128, 145–146, 148, 160, 165–172, Moon Knight 14
246, 249, 252 Moore, Alan 197
McDaniels, Darryl 84 More, Thomas 90
McGregor, Don 41 Morrison, Toni 38, 45
McKay, Winsor 134 motifs 141
McLaughlin, Jeff 167 Moulton, Charles 239–240; see also Mar-
McNiven, Steve 94, 207 ston, William Moulton
McSweeney, Terence 206 Mr. Freeze 263
Mechanism 94 Ms. Marvel 53–54, 63
281
INDEX
multimodal 170–172 Outcault, Richard F. 75–76

Multiple Man (Madrox) 192 Overall, Joe 175, 177
multiverse 27
Munch, Edward 34n1 Pacifiers 96, 100
Muñoz, Jose 50–51, 57 page layout 252
Münsterberg, Hugo 269 Pajka-West, Sharon 180
Murphy, Jessica 265 panel transitions 112, 145–146, 148,
Musk, Elon 13–14 157
Mwangi, Evan 24–25 panels 201, 252
Paper Girls 224
Nadia Pym 53–59 Pappa in Afrika 20–22, 27–30, 34
Nakia 41–42, 45 Pappa in Doubt 22, 27–30, 32–34
Nama, Adilifu 80 Paradise 38
Namor the Sub–Mariner 44, 226 Paradise Island 235, 237, 240
narrating I 121, 126, 135 parasocial relationships 221–232;
narration 254–255 parasocial interaction 222–223, 230
narrative 194, 198, 210, 234–237, paratextuality 192, 199; see also
241–243, 246, 249, 252, 261–263, 265, hypertextuality
267; narrative pattern 112; narrative Parliament Funkadelic 84
agents 235; narrative strategies 234 parody 193, 250
narrator 254 participant observation 224
nationalism 236 pastiche 193
naturalism (philosophy) 162 patriarchy 8, 237
negative utopia see dystopia Peepshow 224
Negri, Antonio 24 Pekar, Harvey 150, 224
neuroscience 270 Pennell, Hillary 221
New 52 (DC Comics) 229 pentad 177, 181–182; pentadic ratios 182
New 52, The Future’s End 94 perceived similarity 222, 230; see also
New Criticism 105–118 parasocial relationships
New Cultural History 233, 238 perceptual filters 2
New York City 79–80, 82 Perdita Durango 197
Nichols, Marie Hockmuth 175 perspective 112
Nicholson, Hope 180 Peter, H.G. 59, 237, 239–240, 243, 267, 269
Nietzsche, Friedrich 94 Petrovic, Paul 52
Nighthawk 88–89 Philadelphia 83
Nikopol Trilogy, The 93 philosophical aesthetics 160–173
Nineteen Eighty-Four 89 philosophy 262, 265–266
Nsala 30–31 picture plane 166
Pixar 15
O’Neill, Kevin 197 Plato 163
Obama, Barack 90 Playing in the Deck: Whiteness in the
objectivity 234, 255 Literary Imagination 38
Okoye 41 Poletti, Anna 135–136
Old Man Hawkeye 94 political economy 10
Old Man Logan 94 polygraphy 247
online sources 225–227 polyphony 247–248, 252–255, 258; see
ontology 162; ontological thickening 217 also dialogics
Oracle 228–231 Poor Lil Mose 76
Orientalism 23 postcolonial 20–34
Orwell, George 89, 92 Postcolonial Comics 27
Ottaviani, Jim 264 postmodernism 233
282
INDEX
poststructuralism 236 risk of representation 136

power 8, 11, 13, 41, 49, 51, 77 Robbins, Trina 49
Power Princess 88 Robin 15–16, 48
Pratt, Henry 172 Rocky 146, 150–151, 155–157
Pratt, John 195–196 Roosevelt, Franklin 243, 244n3, 244n7
Priest, Christopher 41, 45 Roth, Veronica 91
Princess Diana 235, 237, 240; see also Rowling, J.K. 206
Diana Prince; Wonder Woman Rushdie, Salman 24
privacy 14–16 Russell, Vanessa 33
Professor Charles Xavier 63 Ruti, Mari 57
progressive ideology 2 Rutledge, Gregory 39
propaganda 267, 269 Rutten, Kris 177
prototext 26 Ryan, Marie–Laure 207
psychoanalytic 51; psychoanalytic
criticism 119–132 Sabin, Roger 107
psychology 267, 269–273 Sacco, Joe 33
public understanding of science 263, Sacks, Ethan 94
265–266 Sacks, Harvey 148
punishment 269 sadomasochism 272
Pynchon, Thomas 199–203, 204n9 Saga 249, 251
Sanders, Julie 204n3
Queen Divine Justice 42 Sarceni, Marco 147
queer 40 Sargent, Lyman Tower 89–90, 93, 101n1
Queer Art of Failure, The 49 satire 193
Queer theory 8, 48–59, 62 Satrapi, Marjane 134
Quesada, Joe 80 Scarlet Witch 254
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 148
racism 76–77, 242–243 Schneider, Greice 150
Ramonda 43–44 science 261–265, 273; Science and
Ransom, John Crowe 105 Technology Studies (STS) 262, 265;
Rapp, Adam 91 science communication 263, 265
readers see audience fans science fiction 39, 251, 264; see also genre
real life I 135 scientific humanities 261–274
realist turn (philosophy) 162 Scott, Dariek 51
recitant 254–255, 258; see also narrator secret identity 15
Red Room 53, 57 Sedgwick, Eve 51
Reed Richards 221–222, 264; see also Seductress 82
Mister Fantastic semiotics 236
reform 269 Sensation Comics 235, 239–242, 244n1,
Reinventing Comics 167 244n6
relativism 234 Sensational She-Hulk, The 165, 171
research ethics 225 sequel 197
Responsive Artificial Intelligence serial 196–197, 207, 210, 213; seriality
Network Archetypes (RAINA) 95–97 26, 34
retcon 229 sex differences 271, 273
retrospective narrator 135 Shakespeare, William 23, 250
rhetorical analysis 265 Shelley, Mary 262–263
Rhys, Jean 23 Sheringham, Michael 130
Richard Dragon 228 S.H.I.E.L.D. 56
Richard, Olive see Byrne, Olive Shirow, Masamune 93
Richardson, Afua 46n2 Shuri 42–44
283
INDEX
Siebers, Tobin 61–63 storyworld 211–212, 217, 251; see also

Sikoryak, Robert 197 diegesis, hyperdiegesis
Simmonds, Posy 197 Strangers in Paradise 224
Simon, Joe 76 structures/systems of power 8–11
Simone, Gail 228 subconscious 235
Sims, David J.A. see Anyabwile, Dawud subjectivity 234–236, 243, 255
Sims, Guy A. 80–81, 83–84 submission 269–273
Singer, Marc 38 Suicide Slum 80
Skold, Markus 151 Suicide Squad 228
Skrulls 191, 195 Super Black 80
slavery 203 superhero 206, 221, 223, 231, 249
Small, David 124–132 superhero comics 121, 165
Smolderen, Thierry 247 superhero genre 11–12, 14, 30, 33, 38,
Snow, C.P. 261 41, 53–54, 58, 63–64, 67, 75–79,
social construction theory see social 81, 84, 88, 94
model of disability studies superhero narrative 180–181, 184
social model of disability studies 62–63 Superman 11, 14, 17, 32, 53–54, 79, 84,
Society, The 95–98, 100 88, 94
sociocultural production 263–264, surveillance 17
266 Swedish comic strips 146–158
Socrates 163 symbolic annihilation 39
Soetaert, Ronald 177 Symmetry 94–96, 99–101, 101n2
Sommers, Joseph Michael 249 System Optimizer for Longevity (SOL)
Sontag, Susan 126 95, 97, 100–101
source analysis 236–237; see also
historiography Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS
Sousanis, Nick 168 Care Unit 371 64
South Africa 27–29, 34n2 Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My
speech balloons 146, 150–151, Mother and Me 64
154–156 Tarbox, Gwen 26, 33
Spenser, Edmund 265 Tardi, Jacques 33
Spicer, Jakki 126 T’Chaka 43
Spider Jerusalem 93 Telgemeier, Raina 134
Spider-Man 13, 32, 266 Tempest, A 23
Spiegelman, Art 33, 134, 137, 139 Tempest, The 23
Spirit, The 76 temporal anchor 214; see also continuity
Spurgeon, Tom 151 Tetu 41
Squadron Supreme 88, 94 text and picture interrelation 123, 137, 166
Squadron Supreme 88–89 textual analysis 12
Squier, Susan Merrill 63 Thanos 41, 44
Staples, Fiona 251 theme 252, 258, 265
Star Trek 209 Thing, The 64
Star Wars 209, 212–219, 238; comics Thor 53, 63
211–219; Expanded Universe 211; Tim Drake (Robin) 223
Legends 211 Time 7
Stephanie Brown 230 timeline see hyperdiegesis
Steve Trevor 235, 240–242, 268, 272 Tintin 22, 28–30, 33
Stitches 119, 124–132 Tintin in the Congo 20
Storm 42 Tokyo Ghost 89, 93
story bible 209–210 Tony Stark 15–16; see also Iron Man
story see narrative Top Cow Productions 94
284
INDEX
totalitarianism 9 Victor Von Doom 266; see also Doctor

trace 236–239, 242 Doom
trade paperback 212 Vieira, Fátima 89–90, 101
transcoding 194–195, 198, 201; see also Vietnam War 238
hypertextuality vigilantism 16
transformation see hypertextuality Vineland 203
translation 193–194 Vision Quest 176, 179–187
transmedia 3, 206–220; transmediation Vision, the 252–258
195, 198, 201 Vision, The 252–258
Transmetropolitan 93 visual metaphor 180
transmodalization 194, 198; see also visual motif 110
hypertextuality visual pathography 120, 124–125
transposition 193–194, 198–199, 203; see voiceprint 26, 34
also hypertextuality
transtextuality 192, 204n1; see also Wachowskis, The 207–209
hypertextuality Waiting for Godot 197
transvaluation 194, 198, 200–201; see also Wakanda 41, 44, 77
hypertextuality Wall Street Journal 17
Traps, Yevgeniya 141 Walrath, Dana 64
trauma 120–121, 124, 140–141, 184; Walta, Gabriel Hernandez 252
traumatic memory 128; traumatic Walton, Kendall 170
incident 131; trauma theory 136; Ware, Chris 67
trauma studies 136; traumatic Warner Bros. 208
experience 140 Warren, Robert Penn 105
travesty 193 Wartenberg, Thomas E. 165, 167
Trump, Donald 17 Washington Post 17
two cultures (science and humanities) Watchmen 89
261–262 Waters, William J. C. 175
Waugh, Colton 269
underground comix 134 Waugh, Patricia 169
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art We 89
75, 145, 160, 165–172 We Are on Our Own 138–143
Unflattening 168 wealthy industrialist/CEO/capitalist
Union of Physically Impaired Against 13–17
Segregation (UPIAS) 61–62 webcomics 223
Unstoppable Wasp, The 52–54, 58–59 Wellek, Rene 106
Uricchio, William 77 Wertham, Frederic 49, 273n2
Utopia 90 white nationalism 97
utopianism 88–101 White, Hayden 175
utterance 247–248; see also dialogics whiteness 8, 24, 39–40, 76
Whitewash Jones 76
V for Vendetta 89, 93 Whitley, Justin 52, 55, 58
V. 203 Whitlock, Gillian 135–137
values 236, 263, 266, 270, 273 Wide Sargasso Sea 23
Varnums, Robin 147 Will Magnus 266
Vaughan, Brian K. 251 Williams Crenshaw, Kimbele 37–38
Venzia, Tony 151 Williams, Ian 66
verisimilitude 239–242; see also Williams III, J. H. 52
historiography Wings, Mary 49
Versaci, Rocco 204n7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 161
vibranium 41 Wolf, Mark J.P. 208
285
INDEX
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew 94 Wright, Elizabeth 119, 122

Wolverine 63 writing back 22–25, 27, 34
Wonder Woman 14, 17, 48, 88, 233, 235, Wundt, Wilhelm 269
237, 239–243, 264, 267–269, 272–273;
see also Diana Prince, Princess Diana X-Men 42, 221
Wonder Woman 59, 239–242, 244n1, X-Men 89, 94
244n6, 262, 267–270, 272, 273n1 Yellow Kid 75
Woolf, Virginia 58 Young Allies 76
World War II 235, 238, 240–243, 244n2,
244n5, 244n7
world-building 209 Zamyatin, Yevgeny 89
Wright, Bradford 76, 272 Zenzi 41
286

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In this comprehensive textbook, editors Matthew J. Brown, Randy Duncan,

Matthew J. Brown, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Values in Medicine,

Randy Duncan, Ph.D., is Professor of Communication and Director of the

Matthew J. Smith, Ph.D., is Interim Dean in the College of Humanities and

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Randy Duncan dedicates this book to Tommy Cash because,

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4 Queer Theory: Queer Comics Queering Continuity: The

5 Disability Studies: Disrupting Representation, Representing

6 Critical Geography: Brotherman and Big City: A

7 Utopianism: The Utopia Conundrum in Matt Hawkins and

9 Psychoanalytic Criticism: Visual Pathography as a Means of

10 Autographics: Autographics and Miriam Katin’s We Are on

11 Linguistics: Comics Conversations as Data in Swedish

12 Philosophical Aesthetics: Comics and/as Philosophical

13 Burkean Dramatistic Analysis: An Echo of Diversity:

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16 Parasocial Relationship Analysis: “Like Losing a Friend”:

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19 Scientiﬁc Humanities: The Scientiﬁc Origins of

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Beto. “Flies on the Ceiling,” Love and Rockets Book 9, p. 11 (1991)

11.1 CA notation system for transcription 149

Kristy Beers Fägersten, Ph.D. is Professor of English linguistics at Söder-

David Coughlan, Ph.D. is Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick,

graphic medium, comics, literature, and translation, and working as

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Figure 2.2 The cover of Pappa in Doubt (2015). © Anton Kannemeyer

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