Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives

Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives
Handbooks of
English and American Studies
Edited by
Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf
Advisory Board
Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise,
Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller †,
Martin Puchner, Oliver Scheiding
Volume 11
Handbook of
Comics and
Graphic Narratives
Edited by
Sebastian Domsch, Dan Hassler-Forest
and Dirk Vanderbeke
ISBN 978-3-11-044661-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-044696-8
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-044683-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021930936
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Typesetting: Meta Systems Publishing & Printservices GmbH, Wustermark
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Editors’ Preface
This De Gruyter handbook series has been designed to offer students and research-
ers a compact means of orientation in their study of Anglophone literary texts. Each
volume – involving a particular historical or theoretical focus – introduces readers
to current concepts and methodologies, as well as academic debates by combining
theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring. It is this bridging between ab-
stract survey and concrete analysis which is the central aim and defining feature of
this series, bringing together general literary history and concrete interpretation,
theory and text. At a time when students of English and American literary studies
have to deal with an overwhelming amount of highly specialized research literature,
as well as cope with the demands of the new BA and MA programs, such a hand-
book series is indispensable. Nevertheless, this series is not exclusively targeted to
the needs of BA and MA students, but also caters to the requirements of scholars
who wish to keep up with the current state of various fields within their discipline.
Individual volumes in the De Gruyter Handbook series will typically provide:
– knowledge of relevant literary periods, genres, and historical developments;
– knowledge of representative authors and works of those periods;
– knowledge of cultural and historical contexts;
– knowledge about the adaptation of literary texts through other media;
– knowledge of relevant literary and cultural theories;
– examples of how historical and theoretical information weaves fruitfully into
interpretations of literary texts.
Internationally renowned colleagues have agreed to collaborate on this series and

take on the editorship of individual volumes. Thanks to the expertise of the volume
editors responsible for the concept and structure of their volumes, as well as for the
selection of suitable authors, HEAS not only summarizes the current state of knowl-
edge in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, but also offers new
insights and recent research results on the most current topics, thus launching new
academic debates.
We would like to thank all colleagues collaborating in this project as well as
Dr. Ulrike Krauss at De Gruyter without whose unflagging support this series would
not have taken off.
Martin Middeke
Gabriele Rippl
Hubert Zapf
June 2021
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-201
vi Editors’ Preface
Already published
VOL 1 Gabriele Rippl (ed.): Handbook of Intermediality

VOL 2 Hubert Zapf (ed.): Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
VOL 3 Julia Straub (ed.): Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies
VOL 4 Timo Müller (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth
and Twenty-First Centuries
VOL 5 Christoph Reinfandt (ed.) Handbook of the English Novel of the
Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
VOL 6 Ralf Haekel (ed.): Handbook of British Romanticism
VOL 7 Christine Gerhardt (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel of the
Nineteenth Century
VOL 9 Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (eds.): Handbook of the
English Novel, 1830–1900
VOL 10 Ingo Berensmeyer (ed.): Handbook of English Renaissance Literature
VOL 12 Barbara Schaff (ed.): Handbook of British Travel Writing
VOL 13 Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl (eds.): Handbook
of Anglophone World Literatures
Forthcoming volumes
Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr and Jan Stievermann (eds.): Handbook of American
Romanticism
Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter (eds.): Handbook of British Literature and Culture of
the First World War
Erik Redling and Oliver Scheiding (eds.): Handbook of the American Short Story
Sabine Sielke (ed.): Handbook of American Poetry
Katrin Berndt and Alessa Johns (eds.): Handbook of the British Novel in the Long
Eighteenth Century
Contents
Editors’ Preface V
Sebastian Domsch, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Dan Hassler-Forest

Comics Studies: Survey of the Field 1
Part I: Systematic Aspects
Sebastian Domsch
1 Comics Terminology and Definitions 11
Dirk Vanderbeke
2 History, Formats, Genres 35
Rik Spanjers
3 Text-Image Relations 81
Jan-Noël Thon
4 Comics Narratology 99
Daniel Stein and Lukas Etter

5 Seriality 121
Juliane Blank
6 Adaptation 141
Part II: Contexts and Themes
Stephan Packard
7 Politics 167
Dan Hassler-Forest
8 World-Building 181
Astrid Böger
9 Life Writing 201
viii Contents
Anna Oleszczuk
10 Gender 219
Kay Sohini
11 Queerness 231
Heike Elisabeth Jüngst

12 Science Comics 247
Sandra Heinen
13 Postcolonial Perspectives 265
Marie Vanderbeke
14 DocuComics in the Classroom 289
15 Superheroes 311
Dan Hassler-Forest
15.1 Historical Overview 311
Matt Yockey
15.2 The Golden Age: Batman 317
Matt Boyd Smith

15.3 The Silver Age: Nick Fury 331
William Proctor
15.4 The Dark Age: Superheroes in the 1980s 343
Part III: Close Readings
Christina Meyer
16 Richard F. Outcault: The Yellow Kid 361
Corey Creekmur
17 George Herriman: Krazy Kat 379
Sebastian Domsch
18 Winsor McCay: Little Nemo in Slumberland 387
Contents ix
Eric Hoffman
19 Dave Sim: Cerebus 405
Martin Lund
20 Will Eisner: A Contract with God 431
Dawn Stobbart
21 Raymond Briggs: When the Wind Blows 451
Joanne Pettitt
22 Art Spiegelman: Maus 467
Nicola Glaubitz
23 Robert Crumb 481
Monika Pietrzak-Franger
24 Alan Moore: From Hell 499
Evan Hayles Gledhill

25 Neil Gaiman: The Sandman 513
Erin La Cour
26 Alison Bechdel: Dykes to Watch Out For 529
Gerry Canavan
27 Chris Ware: Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest Kid on Earth 545
Erik Grayson
28 Daniel Clowes: Ghost World 561
Luisa Menzel
29 Martin Rowson: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 573
Harriet Earle
30 Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis 589
Oliver Moisich
31 Grant Morrison: Flex Mentallo 601
Index of Subjects 619
Index of Names 629
List of Contributors 635

Sebastian Domsch, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Dan Hassler-Forest
Comics Studies: Survey of the Field
Whether one refers to them as sequential art, graphic narrative or graphic novels,
comics have long been an important part of our culture. The medium’s range of
expression contains all forms, genres and modes – from high to low, from serial
children’s entertainment to complex works of art. This has led to a burgeoning inter-
est in comics as a subject for scholarly analysis, and comics studies has by now
established itself as a major branch of scholarship. This handbook combines a sys-
tematic investigation of the subject with an overview of the field’s central contexts
and themes and a broad selection of close readings of seminal or exemplary works
and authors. Most of the things that traditionally can be found in the introductions
of Handbooks and Companions are covered in great depth and detail in the collec-
tion’s first two chapters: general questions surrounding form and definitions of
comics are tackled by Sebastian Domsch in the first chapter (↗1 Comics Terminolo-
gy and Definitions); in the second chapter, Dirk Vanderbeke offers a survey of the
history of Anglophone comics, and in doing so also looks at the formats as well as
genres that have emerged over time (↗2 History, Formats, Genres). The one issue
that is not covered systematically in the following chapters is comics studies itself.
And while the multiplicity of approaches and the wealth of subjects that are being
discussed in this handbook do provide an implicit state of the art of comics studies,
it might prove helpful for the student of the form to have an outline of the discipline
of its study, if only in the form of a very brief overview.
As little as a decade ago, claims that comics studies did not yet exist or had not
formed properly were still commonly made (Fram 2002, 201; Schüwer 2008, 12; for
a dissenting opinion, see Heer and Worcester 2009, xi). But from the mid-2000s
onwards, comics studies has become one of the most prolific fields of inquiry across
a variety of disciplines. Literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history
and aesthetics have all contributed to research into a cultural phenomenon that
had previously been neglected if not vilified in the Anglophone world. While visual
narratives were embraced in other cultural environments – e. g. the French bandes
dessinées or the Japanese manga – the obvious popularity of early comics raised
suspicion rather than academic interest, and scholarly attention to what French
critics have long referred to as the “ninth art” emerged very slowly.
At the very beginning of comics studies, we find two diametrically different
approaches. A few rather solitary explorations into the artistic and sociological sig-
nificance of the early funnies and comic strips in the 1920s, e. g. by Gilbert Seldes
in The Seven Lively Arts (1924), were followed by research into the educational and
didactic potential of comics in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1944, The Journal of Educa-
tional Sociology published a special issue on “The Comics as an Educational Medi-
um” with a seminal article by W. W. D. Sones, “The Comics as Instructional Method.”
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-001
2 Sebastian Domsch, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Dan Hassler-Forest
He states that an overwhelming majority of juveniles reads comics and then sug-
gests “that instruction must begin in the on-going activities and concerns of the
learner and that its effectiveness depends on the efficiency of the form of communi-
cation that is employed” (Sones 1944, 233). In consequence, “a technical analysis
of this communication device in relation to instruction and learning” (236) is re-
quired, i. e. research into the artistic and narrative elements that constitute comics.
But comics were not only relevant for school, and Sones also points out that “the
widest current educational use of the picture or cartoon continuity is in military
instruction” (235) – the legendary comics artist Will Eisner famously created educa-
tional comic strips and manuals for the army when he was drafted in World War II
and continued to do so over the next decades.
In contrast to such favorable views, critical voices increasingly dominated the
discussion. Seldes may well have anticipated future trouble when he wrote about
the subversive potential of comic strips that they showed
so little respect for law, order, the rights of property, the sanctity of money, the romance of
marriage, and all the other foundations of American life, that if they were put into fiction the
Society for the Suppression of Everything would hale them incontinently to court and our
morals would be saved again. (1924, 224)
This is precisely what happened after full scale assaults in the 1940s and 1950s with
the introduction of the Comics Code Authority and an enforced infantilization of
mainstream comics. And while Frederic Wertham’s now-infamous 1954 attack on
comics, Seduction of the Innocent, is also arguably one of the first major works of
comics scholarship, the repressions it triggered resulted in a climate in which only
a few scholars felt the urge to engage the perceived resistance to comics and to turn
comics into a subject for broader academic study. “As a medium, comics are older
than film, television, and video games, and yet there has been resistance from with-
in the academy to the serious study and analysis of this medium” (Ndalianis 2011,
113, see also Heer and Worcester 2009, xii). Comics criticism therefore emerged pri-
marily outside the academic institutions.
The next discernible phase of an appreciative form of comics studies originated
within the comics scene itself, coming as it did from fans working in collaboration
with creators. Heer and Worcester have called this type of comics criticism “impro-
vised and impressionistic” (2009, xii). This includes works like Robert Warshow’s
look at the work of George Herriman in “Woofed with Dreams” (1946), but especially
books such as Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965), Les Daniels’ Com-
ix: A History of Comic Books in America (1971), and Trina Robbins and Catherine
Yronwode’s Women and the Comics (1985).
Within academia, comics studies first took shape as a kind of clandestine opera-
tion – Round and Murray even refer to comics scholars as “smugglers” (2010, 4)
with their tentative explorations into popular literature and commercial literary cul-
ture. The canon wars which started in the 1960s and questioned the hitherto strict
distinction between high and low culture contributed to a revaluation of genre lit-
erature and film; the cultural turn, from strictly literary to cultural studies, also
raised the respectability of research into popular media and genres over the follow-
ing decades. Moreover, underground comix began to address explicitly mature audi-
ences and turned to topics that were of concern in contemporary cultural and politi-
cal upheavals. As a result, comics in the late 1960s and early 1970s again attracted
some scholarly and critical interest. This academic interest was possibly bolstered
by the Boomer generation’s affinity for pop-cultural forms, which was further
strengthened by the meteoric rise of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies
and the humanities’ new focus on working-class culture.
While comics studies were still engaged in an uphill fight against institutional
disdain in Anglophone countries and Germany, things looked less bleak elsewhere.
Already in 1962, Umberto Eco published his seminal article “Il Mito di Superman e
la Dissoluzione del Tempo” (“The Myth of Superman and the Dissolution of Time” –
the second part of the title was dropped in the English translation), and the bande
dessinée had been an accepted art form for a long time in the Franco-Belgian
world – Francis Lacassin was appointed first professor in the history and aesthetics
of comics at the Sorbonne in 1971 (Christiansen and Magnussen 2000, 12). Unsur-
prisingly, the dominant perspective on comics was then chiefly based in a structur-
alist approach. In America, academic work on comics was possible in principle, and
Sol Davidson earned his doctorate with a dissertation on comics as early as 1959,
but academic publications on comics would not start proliferating until the 1970s
(Eklund 2002, 209).
As in the case of other emerging scholarly fields in the humanities, comics stud-
ies for the longest time felt the need to look at its object of research through an
evaluative lens, often setting out to prove that comics meet some undisclosed artis-
tic standard. As late as 2011, a survey of comics studies yielded the claim that “al-
most every critic producing work on comics still feels the need to apologise for his
or her interest in a medium that was reviled by the so-called ‘cultured classes’ for
the longest time” (Ecke 2011, 71). This may well have detrimental effects, and comics
studies must be aware that a persistent search for legitimization may have influ-
enced, colored, and even distorted the objectives and results of previous investiga-
tions, and continue to do so even now.
As early research was predominantly conducted by literary scholars, they ap-
proached comics as a literary genre, and this view can still be found in some recent
studies and reviews. In 2008, Hillary Chute published an article, “Comics as Litera-
ture? Reading Graphic Narrative,” in which she obviously questions the subsump-
tion of comics under the umbrella of literature, but nevertheless comes to the con-
clusion that “[c]ritical approaches to literature, as they are starting to do, need to
direct more sustained attention to this developing form” (462). Alternatively, comics
were perceived as the junior sibling of film or, in an article from 1984, as a precur-
sor of television (Dunger et. al., passim). The two approaches could, of course, be
merged, and for quite some time, comics were also discussed as a hybrid form,
localized midway between literature and film. But eventually it became clear that
while comics may employ images and text, the cognitive demands resulting from
this juxtaposition and its inherent sequentiality do not simply combine those of
reading and watching, but offer a fundamentally different experience. From a didac-
tic perspective, Dietger Pforte emphasized the necessity as early as 1984 to focus on
the specific features of comics and to transfer them from their traditional homes in
philology and art to a new interdisciplinary field ‘aesthetics’ (11). In the same vein,
Ndalianis claims that
[d]espite the ease with which their stories, characters, and style can be translated into other
media, comics retain a style, an approach to narrative and “reading,” and a history that is
medium-specific. This fact has been one of the driving forces behind the rise of Comics Studies
over the past two decades. (2011, 115)
In consequence, it is questionable whether comics studies can succeed if it remains

a ‘side project’ of another discipline. It is, therefore, imperative to establish comics
studies as an independent discipline, unfettered by the confines, frameworks, objec-
tives, and interests of other fields of research, and indeed, “[r]ecent scholarship on
comics has helped demarcate what is distinctive to comics as against other express-
ive media” (Heer and Worcester 2009, xiv).
Much more interesting than the often apologetic attempts at explaining (and
implicitly legitimizing) comics in terms of other media such as literature or film are
therefore the numerous theoretical endeavors to develop something like a comic
book poetics, to do the medium and its specificity justice. These as well first came
from writers who were also creators, most notably Will Eisner, who led the way in
his books Comics and Sequential Art (1985) and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Nar-
rative (1996), and Scott McCloud with his now-ubiquitous introduction to the medi-
um Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993). Though Eisner’s role as the ‘in-
ventor’ of graphic novels has been questioned (↗20 Will Eisner, A Contract with
God) and McCloud’s book has come under a lot of criticism for its imprecision and
inherent biases (see e. g. Ecke 2011), the latter has also become an unavoidable ref-
erence in comics scholarship, particularly in the teaching of comics.
But whatever their shortcomings, these works opened up a discourse that was
much less focused on either justifying comics or explaining them in terms of other
media, but on understanding their medium-specific forms on their own terms. And
they have been followed by further systematic investigations into the nature of com-
ics, such as Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007), “[o]ne of the most
impressive recent efforts to develop a foundational text for comics studies” (Ecke
2011, 76). In addition, the last two decades have seen attempts at engaging system-
atically and exhaustively with more specific aspects within the phenomenon of
comics, often drawing on a range of disciplines. One such aspect would be narratol-
ogy, where Martin Schüwer’s magisterial Wie Comics erzählen: Grundriss einer inter-
medialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur (2008) would have been considered
an international standard, if it had not been published only in German (↗4 Comics
Narratology).
Another aspect is what might be called comics aesthetics, with a particular fo-
cus on the level of visual presentation. Simon Grennan’s A Theory of Narrative Draw-
ing (2017) is an attempt to bridge the narratological and aesthetic frameworks. The
increased attention that the visual level receives in more recent comics studies is a
notable development. The strong focus on comics as text and narrative can of course
be easily explained by the origin of comics studies in literary studies, but even early
theorists like McCloud, who came from a background in comics creation, had a
relative blind spot when it came to the image itself. A similar bias was identified by
Ecke for Groensteen’s study (2011, 79).
As Brian Boyd has pointed out, pictorial narratives appeal to our dominant
sense, i. e. vision, to our linguistic capacities, and to our inherent pleasure in story-
telling (2010, 98), and they have done so for a very long time. Throughout human
history, images have been one of the most important ways to preserve and transmit
information (↗2 History, Formats, Genres). In pre-literate times, public spaces were
filled with all possible forms of visual stimuli, ranging from statues and pictures to
frescoes, murals, tapestries, wood carvings, stained glass windows, block books and
broadsheets, and quite a lot of those images were organized into narrative or in-
formative sequences. And while the rise of literacy shifted the focus from the image
to the written word, photography, film, television and the new media have main-
tained their immense audiences’ interest in visual stories. In addition, sequential
pictures are still employed in the transfer of useful or necessary information, and
manuals such as IKEA’s comics-like assembly instructions allow for accessible dis-
tribution across the world. The pictorial turn that is recognizable in most recent
comics scholarship is therefore an important step for a fully formed academic disci-
pline to emerge.
Such a discipline and its institutionalization of course also include teaching. In
1973, Will Eisner began teaching classes on comics at the School of Visual Arts in
New York, which later became the basis for his influential instructional books. As
pointed out above, however, comic scholars were usually affiliated with literary,
media, or film studies; so they were – and still are – mostly located in the respective
departments, and classes on comics are frequently integrated into their programs.
Over the last decade, things have changed at least a bit, and a few chairs for
Comics Studies were created, though the places where one can major in this disci-
pline are still few and far apart. In 2015, Benoît Peeters, longtime collaborator with
François Schuiten on the famed graphic novel series The Obscure Cities, was ap-
pointed first Professor of Graphic Fiction and Comic Art in Great Britain at Lancaster
University, and at the University of Dundee, the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies
with Chris Murray as its director has offered the first degree programs for Master of
Letters and Master of Design in Comics Studies since 2011 and 2016, respectively. In
America, Donald Ault created a degree program in 2011 at the University of Florida
with “Comics and Visual Rhetoric” tracks for MA and PhD students, the first of its
kind in America. And in 2015, Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening, a PhD thesis in comic
format, was published by Harvard University Press. In Germany, a list of seminars
on comics is collected and published by ComFor, the society for comics research
(e. g. at http://www.comicgesellschaft.de/2017/09/25/comic-lehrveranstaltungen-im-
wintersemester-201718/.)
Following the overall format of the handbook series, this volume is organized
into three main parts; the chapters on “Systematic Aspects” focus on general theo-
retical issues, those of “Contexts and Themes” discuss more specific features and
topics as well as some of the most important genres, and finally there is a collection
of “Close Readings” of single works, authors, and series within their respective his-
torical, cultural, and artistic environments. Of course, these close readings cannot
cover the immense variety of genres, styles, modes, and formats that make up comics
history. Moreover, the selection is predominantly focused on works published since
comics began to address mature audiences in the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury. While the close readings include a number of now-canonical comic books, the
section also includes a selection of lesser-known but equally important comic book
texts by momentous authors.
Since superhero comics have occupied such an exceptional part of comics histo-
ry, the chapter on this topic departs from the regular structure of most volumes in
the handbook series. This “super-chapter” is a hybrid between chapters that explore
broader issues and the close readings of individual comics. It combines three differ-
ent close readings by three contributors that highlight the different eras of superhe-
ro comics, introduced by a historical overview of the significance of the superhero
theme in Anglophone comics.
The selection of close readings in part III, although chronologically arranged,
should not be confused with an implicit history of comics. They are rather to be
understood as a non-representative journey through the wealth of this incredible
art form, highlighting some of its manifold manifestations across the past two cen-
turies and into a promising future.
Bibliography
1 Works Cited
Brian Boyd, “On the Origin of Comics: New York Double-Take.” Evolutionary Review 1.1 (2010): 97–
111.
Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature. Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2 (March 2008): 452–
465.
Ditschke, Stephan, Katerina Kroucheva and Daniel Stein. Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie
Eines Populärkulturellen Mediums. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009.
Dunger, Hella, Jochen Heyermann, Friedrich Knilli, Erwin Reiss and Karin Reiss. “Comic –
Vorschule des Fernsehens.” Comics im ästhetischen Unterricht. Ed. Dietger Pforte. Frankfurt:
Athenäum Fischer. 172–247.
Ecke, Jochen. “Comics Studies’ Identity Crisis: A Meta-Theoretical Survey.” ZAA 59.1 (2011): 71–
84.
Eco, Umberto: “Il mito di Superman e la dissoluzione del tempo.” In: Enrico Castelli (ed):
Demitizzazione e immagine, Padua: Cedam 1962. 137–143.
Eklund, Christopher. “Comics Studies.” Modern North American Criticism and Theory: A Critical
Guide. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 207–213.
Frahm Ole: “Weird Signs: Zur parodistischen Ästhetik der Comics.” Ästhetik des Comic.
Ed. Michael Hein, Michael Hüners, Torsten Michaelsen. Berlin: Schmidt, 2002. 201–217.
Heer, Jeet, and Kent Worcester, ed. A Comics Studies Reader. University Press of Mississippi,
2009.
Pforte, Dietger. “Plädoyer für die Behandlung von Comics im ästhetischen Unterricht.” Comics im
ästhetischen Unterricht. Ed. Dietger Pforte. Frankfurt: Athenäum Fischer, 1984. 9–13.
Magnussen, Anne and Hans-Christian Christiansen, ed. Comics and Culture. Analytical and
Theoretical Approaches to Comics, Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press, 2000.
Ndalianis, Angela. “Why Comics Studies?” Cinema Journal 50.3 (2011): 113–117.
Round, Julia, and Chris Murray. “Introduction.” Studies in Comics 1.1 (2010): 3–5.
Schüwer, Martin. Wie Comics Erzählen: Grundriss Einer Intermedialen Erzähltheorie Der
Grafischen Literatur. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008.
Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. New York: Harper, 1924.
Sones, W.W.D. “The Comics as Instructional Method.” The Journal of Educational Sociology, 18.4
(1944): 232–240.
2 Further Reading
Daniels, Les. Comix: A History of Comic Books in America. New York: Bonanza Books, 1971.
Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art. Tamarac: Poorhouse Press, 2006.
Feiffer, Jules. The Great Comic Book Heroes. New York: Bonanza Books, 1965.
Goggin, Joyce, and Dan Hassler-Forest. “Out of the Gutter: Reading Comics and Graphic
Novels.”The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form.
Ed. Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 1–4.
Grennan, Simon. A Theory of Narrative Drawing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Heer, Jeet, and Kent Worcester. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Horrocks, Dylan. “Inventing Comics: Scott McCloud’s Definition of Comics.”
<http://www.hicksville.co.nz/Inventing%20Comics.htm> (October 15, 2010).
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins Publishers,
2017.
Robbins, Trina and Catherine Yronwode. Women and the Comics. New York: Eclipse Books, 1985.
Schüwer, Martin. Wie Comics Erzählen: Grundriss Einer Intermedialen Erzähltheorie Der
Grafischen Literatur. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008.
Part I: Systematic Aspects
Sebastian Domsch
1 Comics Terminology and Definitions
Abstract: This chapter introduces readers to some of the major terms used in refer-
ring to the many-faceted phenomenon of comics. In doing so, it also approaches
different attempts at defining what comics are, and at delineating what is properly
regarded as a comic and what is not. Thus, taxonomically oriented categorizations
in the Aristotelean tradition are juxtaposed to an identificatory practice that is based
on prototype theory. The general understanding used here is that comics are most
properly described as a medium, but that entails a further differentiation into a
semiotic approach to what constitutes the medial form of comics, a broadened per-
spective that takes in technical and economic aspects that shape the media ecology
of comics, and an approach to comics as a cultural practice.
Key Terms: Comics, definition, prototype theory, medium, sequentiality, form, cul-
tural practice
1 Introduction
When dealing critically with comics, it still seems necessary and worthwhile to ex-
plain a few of the basic terms, and sometimes also to distinguish them from each
other. Particularly those readers who are relatively new to the subject can be con-
fused by different terms that are being used: Are comics identical to comic books or
comic strips? Are they maybe only series of cartoons? And what exactly is a graphic
novel? Are comics something other than manga, and is comix merely a typo? We
will see how all of these terms have their use in identifying or emphasizing aspects
of the many-sided phenomenon that is comics – but in order to get there, we need
to ask a few fundamental questions and try to determine whether all of these as-
pects in fact do have some kind of common ground, a core that we can use to define
comics. Is there a way of knowing what a comic is (in distinction to other arts or
forms of expression), and if not, can we at least determine how readers decide that
what they are encountering is a comic?
Let’s start with the fundamental question: What is a comic? First of all, the
answer depends on what your purpose is. If you want to define core characteristics
as clearly as possible and be able to distinguish comics from other phenomena in
terms of how they work as an art form, the best approach is by delving into their
medial form. If you are interested in the way that people are “doing comics” –
creating, producing and disseminating, but also reading, understanding and evalu-
ating them – you will focus on the artistic techniques as well as the delivery technol-
ogies involved in it. If you are interested in comics as a discursive and actually
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-002
12 Sebastian Domsch
occurring phenomenon – the way that people refer to something as a comic, or

discuss comics “as if they were a thing,” and the things that most people mean
when they say “comics” – you will rather focus on aspects of genre and cultural
practice. None of these individual approaches can answer the question exhaustive-
ly, but together they cover the range of the phenomenon, and seeing their differen-
ces will help understand some of the paradoxes in talking about something that is
an art form, a medium, and a cultural as well as an industrial practice.
Indeed, looking at comics criticism, we can immediately see that scholars em-
ploy a variety of terms to illustrate what comics are. According to comics artist Will
Eisner, who was not only one of the pioneers of popularizing the notion of graphic
novels (↗20 Will Eisner, A Contract with God) but also one of the first to theorize
comics, “Sequential Art” is “a discernible discipline” (Eisner 2006 [1985], 5), where-
as David Carrier in The Aesthetics of Comics calls comics an “artistic genre” and
compares them “to other forms of visual art” (Carrier 2000, 1). Jared Gardner in
Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling talks about
“the various forms and mediums in which comics have operated” (Gardner 2012, x),
and for Julia Abel and Christian Klein comics are an “Intermedium,” as well as
being an art form with medial dependencies (“mediale Abhängigkeiten,” Abel and
Klein 2016, 57), whereas Dietrich Grünewald prefers to talk about the “Prinzip Bild-
geschichte” (2010, 11), and Karin Kukkonen reminds us that comics are also fre-
quently referred to as a “visual language” (Kukkonen 2013, 5). A discipline, an art
form, a genre, a medium, a principle or a language – and the fact that many of
these terms are often used synonymously or in combination does not help make
things clearer.
As Scott McCloud rightly says, in order to gain an abstract understanding of
what comics are, one needs to distinguish first between form and content (5). For
the evaluation of comics as a medium, this distinction is very important, which
means disregarding for the moment aspects such as genre (superhero, crime, auto-
biography), style (black and white, ligne clair, watercolors), mode (humorous, sad
etc.), name associations (the Funnies), relations to reality (fantastic, fictional-real-
ist, non-fictional), but also forms of publication or specific writers and artists. In-
deed, one thing that stands in the way of a clear understanding of comics as a
medial form is the prominence that genre has played in the perception of comics
throughout their history, or rather, since their institutionalization. As Dirk Vander-
beke argues (↗2 History, Formats, Genres), there is a pre-history of comics as a
medium that is as long as human art. But for the longest time comics were not
recognized as a medium in its own rights (back then one would have called it an
‘art’), and the medial contexts and cultural practices that they formed were either
not recognized as distinct (as in stained glass windows or book illuminations) or
ignored by scholarship for their supposed aesthetic inferiority (as in broadsheet il-
lustrations). Comics only become visible as ‘something distinct’ through their use
of a specific delivery technology – newspaper printing in colour – and their dissemi-
nation within a specific publication context – the ‘funny pages’ of the newspapers.
But when they did, they were fully identified with the genre in which they happened
to be created. This genre was influenced by both the technology used and the publi-
cation context, resulting in extremely short narratives with varying or recurring
characters – something that can be served very well by comical narratives. Thus,
comics ‘came out’ as being comical, and the name has stuck ever since (in the early
20th century, it was usual to refer to newspaper comics as ‘the funnies,’ the Sunday
funnies, or the funny papers), with comics’ most iconic character being Mickey
Mouse, an anthropomorphic funny animal. The next step in the evolution of comics
emphasized this connection to genre even further: when comics emancipated them-
selves from the newspaper and became immensely popular in separately published
‘comic books,’ they did so through the use of longer narratives that relied less on
comedy and more on suspense. But because of the logic of the market, this develop-
ment was soon dominated by a new and surprisingly narrow generic focus: stories
about heroes with superhuman abilities. Even though the late 1940s and 1950s saw
the dominance of superhero narratives give way to other genres, they were revived
to tremendous success in the 1960s, and to this day, many casual readers (or non-
readers) in Anglophone countries or those that were most strongly influenced by
the Anglophone market will identify comics with superhero stories.
Disregarding content-oriented aspects like genre, the term most commonly used
when referring to comics is medium, from the curators of a comics exhibition in 1971
(“Comics are indeed a completely independent medium, with its own methods of
representation, rules, and demands on the recipient’s abilities” (my translation,
Brück 1971, X) to most recent introductions to the subject (“The basic definition of
comics I work with here is that comics are a medium that communicates through
images, words, and sequence” (Kukkonen 2013, 4)). But defining comics as a medi-
um provides no easy solution to the terminological and definitional problems, as it
simply shifts the burden of definition from “comics” to “medium.” Part of the confu-
sion about defining comics as medium, or to talk about them along the lines of
mediality, are already inherited, because “medium” itself is a highly ambiguous
term that has been used in widely different ways. In order not to get bogged down
by too much media theory or even philosophy, we will resort to focus on one at-
tempt at definition that is highly functional for our purpose. According to Mary-
Laure Ryan, there are two distinct understandings of medium, first as channel or
system of communication, information, or entertainment, and second as material
or technical means of artistic expression.
The first definition presents a medium as a particular technology or cultural
institution for the transmission of information. Media of this type include TV, radio,
the Internet, the gramophone, the telephone – all distinct types of technologies –
as well as cultural channels, such as books and newspapers. In this conception of
medium, ready-made messages are encoded in a particular way, sent over the chan-
nel, and decoded on the other end. TV can, for instance, transmit films as well as
14 Sebastian Domsch
live broadcasts, news as well as recordings of theatrical performances. Before they

are encoded in the mode specific to the medium in sense 1, some of these messages
are realized through a medium in sense 2. A painting must be done in oil before it
can be digitized and sent over the Internet. A musical composition must be per-
formed on instruments in order to be recorded and played on a gramophone. A
medium in sense 1 thus involves the translation of objects supported by media in
sense 2 into a secondary code. (Ryan 2004, 16)
In Avatars of Story, Ryan further develops the distinction between different ways
of looking at media, claiming that there are “three possible approaches to media:
semiotic, material/technological, and cultural” (Ryan 2006, 18). This is similar to
Kukkonen’s approach: “A medium is constituted in three ways: (i) it is a mode of
communication, (ii) it relies on a particular set of technologies, and (iii) it is an-
chored in society through a number of institutions” (Kukkonen 2013, 4). Ryan fur-
ther explains the differences:
The semiotic approach looks at the codes and sensory channels that support various media. It
tends to distinguish three broad media families: verbal, visual, and aural. […] Left by itself, the
semiotic approach yields only broad families. To bring further refinement to media theory, we
must ask about the raw materials (such as clay for pottery, stone for sculpture, the human body
for dance, or the human vocal apparatus for music) and the technologies that support the
various semiotic types. […] The third important dimension of media is their cultural use. This
dimension is not entirely predictable from semiotic type and technological support. In fact,
some ways of disseminating information are regarded as distinct media from a cultural point
of view, despite their lack of a distinct semiotic or technological identity. (Ryan 2006, 18–23)
We will follow this differentiation here and focus first on a semiotic approach to
what constitutes the medial form of comics, and then broaden the perspective to
take in technical and economic aspects that shape the media ecology of comics,
before finally approaching comics as a cultural practice.
2 How Many Mice Do You See? Medial Form

Before delving into the details, we should probably ask ourselves again, for clarity’s
sake: What do we want to achieve when we look at comics ‘as a medium’? Most
critics who have taken issue with attempts by McCloud and others to arrive at a
definition that is based on medial form have focused on the success (or rather, the
failure) of such definitions to clearly identify something as “a comic” or to clearly
exclude something as “not a comic.” The implied ideal here is that of a clear taxono-
my, a categorization following the Aristotelian tradition that relies strongly on nec-
essary and sufficient conditions, even though these are not always spelled out clear-
ly. We will see later how such attempts must necessarily fall short by completely
negating or at least ignoring the “cultural use”-aspect of media. Such aspects can
be accounted for much better when one uses alternative methods of categorization,
such as the notion of “family resemblances” proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, or

prototype theory as developed by cognitive sciences.
Still, Aristotelean attempts at finding the differentiae specificae of comics do
have their use, even if they turn out to run counter to a more intuitive cultural
practice. In fact, they might be most productive when they make us question re-
ceived or traditional categorizations of objects as comics or not-comics. It would
seem that, as Holbo writes, “[r]ealizing a few things that weren’t classed as ‘comics’
work like comics is eye opening” (Holbo 2012, 5). “Work[s] like comics” here seems
to indicate that some objects, in order to be properly understood and appreciated,
need to be processed exactly like comics. It is in this sense that a flip book “works
like” a film. Thus we can be perfectly fine with the discomfort that many scholars
have with saying that something like the Bayeux Tapestry or Trajan’s column is a
comic – because for them being a comic is not only defined by a collection of semi-
otic properties, but also the use of specific techniques and cultural practices; but
we would still insist that these artefacts work like comics (i. e. need to be read like
comics). In order to understand that the column is not a depiction of some 60 differ-
ent Trajans existing simultaneously in time, for example, one needs to apply the
concept of sequentiality.
Thus prepared and cautioned, we can proceed and attempt to pinpoint those
aspects (or combinations of aspects) that differentiate comics absolutely from other
media. In doing so, we can indeed try to distinguish between necessary and suffi-
cient conditions in good old Aristotelian fashion, as well as those which are neither.
On the one hand, as is immediately apparent, the existence of an image is one such
necessary condition (“The image is obligatory and therefore constitutive for the
principle of image-story,” my translation, Grünewald 2010, 20), but it is not a suffi-
cient condition. On the other hand, a narratively focused interdependent relation-
ship between an image level and a textual level might be a sufficient condition, but
not a necessary one. Carrier has claimed that the speech balloon is one of the essen-
tial qualities, though in the understanding developed here, it is neither a necessary
nor a sufficient condition, as is his third essential quality, “the book-size scale”
(Carrier 2000, 74). The only attribute that is both necessary and sufficient is sequen-
tiality.
For starters, the existence of an image is necessary for something to work as
comics, though Kukkonen has raised some doubts about even this condition: “Do
we need images? After all, the speech bubble is perhaps the most iconic element of
the comics form, and comics which use just speech bubbles are possible” (Kukko-
nen 2013, 5). But it seems that speech bubbles, in order to work as comics for a
recipient, would still need to be contained at least within a visual space / plane.
Even if it is not a visible panel with borders, some kind of framing must be perceived
or implied. In this case, the panel or mentally framed visual space would be empty,
but by reading it as a comic, the recipient has decided that what she sees is not “no
images” but rather “empty images,” which is not the same thing. Without pictorali-
16 Sebastian Domsch
ty, or imageness, the recipient will simply not decide that the perceived needs to be
processed like a comic.
Another necessary condition that has been proposed is that comics images must
be static (Grünewald 2010, 20). But while it is intuitively clear that such a condition
is needed to differentiate comics from media like film, and while a truly overwhelm-
ing majority of the examples that can be found will meet that condition, it is also a
potential example for the fuzziness of media boundaries, especially when they are
based on the delivery technologies available at the moment. Digital publication for
example has made it possible to “slightly animate” comics imagery and thereby
move them further towards animation, without completely arriving there. This
shows that clear and stable boundaries between media are really discursive projec-
tions that help us make some degree of sense of things at any given historical mo-
ment.
In the preliminary ‘general instructions’ for his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan:
The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), Chris Ware employs a test in order to determine
whether the reader is actually able to mentally process comics correctly. He presents
two panels from his earlier series Quimby the Mouse to test the reader’s abilities to
properly read a comic book sequence.
It is this question, as well as the potential answers to it, that lead directly to the
heart of how comics are to be processed differently from any other medium, by
highlighting an aspect that has come to be called sequentiality. All attempts at a
functional definition of comics have referred to sequentiality, including McCloud,
who defines comics as “[j]uxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate se-
quence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in
the viewer” (McCloud 1994, 9). In a similar way, Hayman and Pratt propose that: “x
is a comic if x is a sequence of discrete, juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narra-
tive, either in their own right or when combined with text” (Hayman and Pratt 2005,
423). But what such definitions still do not provide is a clear understanding of the
specifics of that sequence in comics. The deliberate sequence that McCloud calls for
could well be an arrangement of several images of a square in different colors, with
the intention of conveying information about the Pantone colour scale to its view-
ers. Since that would not satisfy most people’s understanding of a comic, there must
be an additional condition to the sequence that turns it into the kind of sequentiality
that is limited to comics.
An attempt to formulate the essence of comics sequentiality could look like this:
At least two visual depictions that are understood by the recipient to represent el-
ements from the same (story)world, albeit at different points in time. The most obvi-
ous case is when both representations are understood to be of the same element
(Ware’s two images of a mouse and cat which are understood to be representations
of just one mouse and one cat), but it also works if different elements are represen-
ted. Think of one image of a frog near a lake, one image of a foot stepping on a
branch, and one image of ripples in the water’s surface. To process this as a comics
sequence (in the sense of turning it into a narrative: the frog was disturbed by the
cracking branch and jumped into the water) necessarily presupposes that all the
elements partake of the same world, otherwise the frog could not have heard the
crack. Creating such a narrative sequence and the storyworld in which it unfolds is
a basic cognitive ability that is sometimes even tested in elementary school tests.
The passage of time mentioned in the definition is necessary for its applicability
to comics sequentiality, although there is no prescription about how much (or how
little) time needs to pass from one image to the next. McCloud has famously system-
atized the different forms of panel-to-panel transition in ways that are also relevant
to this temporal dimension. Moment-to-Moment transitions depict, as their name
implies, the shortest spans within a sequence, a change that might well last only
fractions of a second. Action-to-Action transitions usually use more diegetic time to
unfold, though they still emphasize a continuity of action and vision that usually
restricts their extent. This is further extended in Subject-to-Subject transitions
(while still concentrating on a continuously unfolding scene), whereas Scene-to-
Scene transitions have no restrictions at all concerning the amount of time that
passes from one panel to the next. In any case, all of these transitions clearly incor-
porate the passage of time into their structure. The case is somewhat less clear with
McCloud’s next category, which he calls Aspect-to-Aspect transitions, and which
“bypasses time for the most part and sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a
place, idea or mood” (McCloud 1994, 72). But even though time is not of the essence
in this transition, it is nevertheless present in that it depicts a wandering gaze, a
shift from aspect to aspect that might happen (like the moment-to-moment transi-
tion) within fractions of a second, but that still has a temporal extension. A de-
piction of several objects or aspects of the same space that is either absolutely si-
multaneous or has no discernible temporal dimension cannot be called comics
sequentiality, and two or more such images cannot satisfy the necessary condition
for being a comic. An example would be an exhibition catalogue or an exposé of a
house with images of the different rooms. This does not mean that simultaneity
does not exist in comics, only that excerpting a series of simultaneous images from
a comic would mean that these images lose the medium specificity of being a comic
(a similar effect to excerpting most single images, or isolated instances of text).
Whatever else contributes to an artefact being a comic (and there are many
other elements, as we will see), if the artefact does not contain a single instance of
what is here called comics sequentiality, it is certainly not a comic. Sequentiality
(in the sense defined here) is a necessary condition for something being appropri-
ately called a comic. The other claim, that sequentiality is also a sufficient condi-
tion, is certainly less universally accepted. We will investigate the reservations
about treating everything that shows comics sequentiality as an appropriate exam-
ple of comics when we look at questions of media ecology and categorization ac-
cording to prototype theory. But referring back to what has already been discussed,
we can claim that sequentiality is a sufficient condition for an artefact to work like
a comic, to necessitate a specific way of mental processing that is unique to comics.
18 Sebastian Domsch
In his provocative deconstruction of attempts at comics definitions, Aaron Me-

skin asks: “What about the successive frames on a film reel?” (Meskin 2007, 371)
And indeed, the definition presented here would force us to admit that this case
would constitute a comic, a point that McCloud has already conceded (“[Y]ou might
say that before it’s projected, film is just a very very very very slow comic!” McCloud
1994, 8). But not only would it then be a very extreme version of a comic (taking
what McCloud has called moment-to-moment transitions to their absolute extreme),
in order for us to even perceive the artefact in the way that Meskin wants us to, we
need to completely overturn the rules that are attached to it as to its use. A reel of
film was ‘supposed to’ be watched by having it run through a projector, which will
make the discreteness of the images imperceptible. It is easily conceivable how such
a disregard would also transform other media. A film reel works like film only under
the condition that it is presented technologically correctly, but if presented in the
deliberately perverse way of forcing the viewer to carefully regard one frame after
the other, it does start to work like a comic. On the other hand, we are ‘supposed
to’ read an artefact like the Bayeux Tapestry in a specific way – taking it in in parts
from left to right, switching between the images and the text as we go along – that
is conducive to comics sequentiality.
In contrast to critical claims that definitions according to medial form are too
inclusive (to the point where ‘anything could be a comic’), they can actually be very
helpful in distinguishing comics from other phenomena, and other ways of creating
(similar) meaning. This is of course a rather theoretical or academic perspective on
comics. As our look at prototype theory will show, few people actually find it diffi-
cult to recognize comics when they see them, but media scholars have long been
interested in differentiations like the following (and before there were media schol-
ars, comics were indeed “invisible” as a distinct theorized art form). One thing that
follows from the way that sequentiality is described here, is that it is based on a
sequence of at least two visual representations. Holbo uses the argument that
“[m]athematically, you can have a sequence of none, the so-called ‘null sequence’“
(2012, 5) to argue against the necessity of sequentiality, which seems to be rather a
sophist’s argument. To insist on at least two images is important to differentiate
from the obvious fact that single images can also imply temporality, and can be in
themselves narrative.
As Grünewald has stated, not every narrative image constitutes a comic, but all
images in comics are narrative (2010, 12). The potential for temporality in static,
spatial media such as painting and sculpture has occupied thinkers at least since
Lessing’s seminal Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (1766).
This is not the place to get into a detailed discussion of Lessing’s analysis, but the
main point for us is that Lessing claims that static media cannot represent move-
ment, temporality or events, they can only imply them (1836, 27). The artist William
Hogarth in his sequential series of images liked to include objects in most of his
more raucous scenes that had just been tipped over and are in the moment of falling
down. This is an extremely obvious implication of temporality, and any viewer

would immediately add an additional image in her mind of what will happen to the
object, forming a micro-narrative that leads into the future as well as the past by
speculating about possible causes and effects. Still, we can’t properly be said to see
the movement, we still have to imagine it.
To some degree, many images imply narratives in this way, and can therefore
be classified “narrative images.” They can do this in an iconic way (the Hogarth
example of an object arrested mid-movement), in an indexical way (an image of the
snow with tracks, indicating that someone must have walked there), or a symbolic
way (the image of Christ on the cross implying the whole narrative of his life). More-
over, comics have indeed shown a sometimes excessive fondness for this kind of
implied temporality – such as the motion lines that for many are one of the most
recognizable elements of comics, or the fact that superhero comics artists have de-
veloped their own conventions about the perfect “pregnant moment” (Lessing 1836,
28) of representing a punch in the face. And yet, the fact that an image implies
temporality and narrative does not mean that it necessarily needs to be processed
like a comic. And the difference is that while the “narrative image” implies tempo-
rality/narrative, the comics sequence explicitly represents it. In the “narrative im-
age,” temporality is only a mental construction that the recipient adds to the already
complete reception of the visual impression. But in comics, temporality is encoded
into the sequence and is enacted by processing the sequence, a difference that is
not recognized by Grünewald in his book from 2000, which claims that the “narra-
tive image” and comics cannot be clearly differentiated (12).
What should be clear by now is that one of the innovations of comics as a
medial form is that, through sequentiality, they hybridize the spatiality of visual
media with the temporality of media like language or film, because the sequence
can only be processed in time (not at once like a single image), but not only do its
discrete units, the panels, work spatially, the sequence is also presented spatially.
McCloud had introduced the notion of “juxtaposed” images, and he did so as an
indication of the spatial presentation of the sequence. Another indication of the
spatial discreteness of the images that form the comics sequence is the notion of
the “gutter” – in most cases, the space that is left empty between the various panel
borders on a page.
It is important to note, however, that the gutter in this definition of the medial
form of comics is first and most importantly a mental attitude, and less a visually
distinct concrete element of the presentation. Of course, when literal gutters are
present – as they are in the vast majority of cases – they become one of the most
immediately recognizable elements of comics. As with poetry, you can usually iden-
tify something as a comic by merely glancing at the page, without being able to
read the text (or in our case recognize what is in the images). But the condition of
sequentiality is fulfilled as soon as a recipient assumes that two visual elements are
both spatially related or continuous (in the sense of existing within the same space)
20 Sebastian Domsch
and not temporally simultaneous (not existing/being depicted in the same moment
in time), but presented as a discrete sequence. When recipients do this, it does not
matter if, once pressed, they are unable to put their finger on a visible gutter and
indicate where one image starts and the other ends, as in the tradition that Kunzle
calls “single-setting narratives” and traces from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth
century (Kunzle 1973, 4). Images can be very tricky and vexing this way, the most
problematic image being maybe the (seemingly) single panel with two or more
speech balloons. If the balloons need to be read as a sequence, such images, I would
argue, are really several panels stacked onto each other, so that the gutter becomes
truly invisible. McCloud calls this “One panel, operating as several panels”
(McCloud 1994, 97) and clarifies by simply drawing in the invisible panel borders.
This is why Holbo’s rhetorical question “Why not admit, as well, that a single panel
can have implied gutters, side to side?” (Holbo 2012, 5) is not a counter-argument
to the claim that sequentiality demands two visual representations, because by as-
suming that the gutters are implied in the image, we are automatically granting
sequentiality to the image, which we now understand as the same situation present-
ed twice, but distinguished by time.
In comics, temporality is encoded in the artefact through the sequence, i. e. the
representation of multiple points in time within the same storyworld. It does not
need to be added by the recipient on the basis of a suspicion that it is implied by
an image. But – and this is where comics differ from continuously temporal visual
media like film – it is also not completely represented. Whereas movement is pre-
dominantly continuous in film, it is discontinuous in comics. The discreteness of
the images (spatial in terms of presentation, temporal in terms of representation)
means that there are constantly gaps that need to be filled by the recipient. McCloud
calls the mental process of filling in the gaps “closure” and claims that “what’s
between the panels is the only element of comics that is not duplicated in any other
medium” (McCloud 1994, 13; see also Grünewald 2010, 18 and 24).
But is sequentiality identical to narrative? Are comics necessarily narrative?
Would it therefore be sufficient to talk about ‘graphic narrative’? Similar to the use
of the term medium to help and define comics, the use of narrative runs the risk of
getting bogged down in delineating precisely what constitutes narrative. Again, this
isn’t the place to repeat this debate, but it is certainly helpful to our purposes to
note here that there are two schools of looking at narrative, which we can roughly
and imprecisely characterize as ‘classical’ and ‘post-classical.’ The main difference
is that while classical views tend to approach narrative as a distinct phenomenon,
with a distinct form (or forms) and characteristics, post-classical views emphasize
the nature of narrative as a ubiquitous and unavoidable mental process of meaning-
making. Connecting this to comics, it should be clear that sequentiality makes all
comics narrative in a post-classical sense, at least in the sense that the mental pro-
cess of closure is nothing but a narrativization of the separate elements of the se-
quence – we understand them by turning them into narrative, into one or several
stories. Meskin denies that this is necessarily the case:
[N]onnarrative comics certainly look to be possible. For it seems easy to imagine a nonnarra-
tive sequence of spatially juxtaposed pictures that we would classify as a comic. What is cru-
cial is that there is some significant connection between the panels of the putative comic. But
this connection need not be narrative – it could, for example, be thematic or character based
(Meskin 2007, 372).
But unless better examples are provided, it is difficult to think of an acceptable

connection that would not lead to some form of narrativization. Even in a manual,
such as an Ikea building instruction, the viewer makes sense of what he sees by
imagining the act of building, and therefore by creating micronarratives. In this and
in many other cases, such as the comic adaptation of the 9/11 report, narrative is
not the main concern but only a means to an end, but it is present. A purely non-
narrative sequence connected by theme would probably be something like a juxta-
position of paintings on the subject of sailing arranged in chronological order, or
images of different sail boats by one artist arranged according to size – none of
which anyone would accept as a comic. In these cases, we do not activate the men-
tal process of comics sequentiality, because we do not feel that we are presented
with elements from the same storyworld.
All of that does not invalidate the claim that comics do not necessarily need to
be formal narratives in a classical sense – in the sense of conventionalized genres
of storytelling like novels, novellas, short stories or autobiographies. Characteristi-
cally, Meskin also states that he is “suspicious” of what he calls “weaker versions of
narrative” (Meskin 2007, 377), i. e. post-classical ones. And indeed, to simply equate
comics with narrative (in the sense of comics = graphic storytelling) would be an
unnecessary limitation of what comics can be, as is implied for example when Hill-
ary Chute and Marianne DeKoven define graphic narrative “as narrative work in the
medium of comics” (Chute and DeKoven 2006, 767), or when Daniel Stein and Jan
Thon lament that “the terms ‘comic’ and ‘graphic narrative’ are frequently used
synonymously. Such usage, however, marginalizes salient historical, formal, and
cultural differences” (Stein and Thon 2013, 5). We can certainly say that ‘comics are
a medium of narrative,’ just like prose, film, or stained glass windows can be, and
we can say that the most common mental activity of processing comics works by
employing narrativity, but that the result need not be perceived as primarily a narra-
tive, or fall clearly into one of the formal narrative genres.
And what about fictionality? According to Mickwitz, “[c]omics have traditional-
ly been associated with, and generally expected to present, imagined worlds and
scenarios” (Mickwitz 2016, 13). But not only is this clearly related to the cultural
usage of comics’ mediality, and therefore more conventional than necessary, it is
also an association that has been challenged with increasing frequency by recent
comics artists and writers (↗9 Life Writing; ↗14 DocuComics in the Classroom;
↗12 Science Comics). The main argument for the necessary fictionality of comics is
built on the fact that comics predominantly use non-photographic means of repre-
sentation – mainly drawing. Again, one might differentiate between wide and nar-
22 Sebastian Domsch
row understandings of fictionality. The wide conception, developed by postmodern

and poststructuralist theorists, holds that fictionality is inevitable, since no repre-
sentation of actuality can be completely objective or neutral, but is necessarily a
construction and therefore in essence fiction. This definition is sometimes called
panfictionality. In contrast, more narrow definitions of fiction would rather focus
on the intended relation between the representation and what is represented. If the
representation is intended to be truthful and faithful to something that actually
exists, it would be understood to be non-fictional. Thus, we can see that first of all,
comics can very well be non-fictional in a narrower sense (see e. g. ↗12 Science
Comics, ↗13 DocuComics in the Classroom), but comics also almost inevitably em-
phasize the essential constructedness of all attempts at factual representations.
Comics can indeed be about the real world instead of ‘imagined worlds and scenari-
os,’ and when they are, they can be seen as a more self-aware type of factual dis-
course, while also teaching us something about the subjective nature of each ver-
sion of actuality.
Some critics have argued that the word-image combination is also a necessary
condition for comics. For Harvey, for example, “the essential characteristic of ‘com-
ics’ – the thing that distinguishes it from other kinds of pictorial narratives – is the
incorporation of verbal content” (Harvey 2001, 75–76). But this definition presup-
poses that not all “pictorial narratives” are comics. Carrier is more thorough in his
appraisal of words in comics, claiming that “the full integration of words into pic-
tures in the speech balloon creates a new art, which raises novel aesthetic problems.
The speech balloon is a defining element of the comic because it establishes a word/
image unity that distinguishes comics from pictures illustrating a text” (Carrier
2000, 4). Against this it should be repeated that sequentiality is what distinguishes
comics, and that a speech balloon is hardly sufficient. Occasional illustrations in
novels were very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they were
often captioned with an appropriate quotation from one of the characters. If we
were to take these words from below the image, place them above the character and
encircle them in a speech balloon, would that really turn the illustration into a
comic? As we have seen, the situation changes when several speech balloons are
depicted in one image, implying a passage of time and the existence of several
implied images or image stages. Examples for this can be already found in the fif-
teenth-century Canticum, a graphic adaptation of the Song of Songs with occasion-
ally numerous speech banners in one panel, or the 1682 broadside “A True Narrative
of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot.” But of course, such an example is not what Carri-
er is interested in, nor in creating the most rigorous definition, because his main
criteria are evaluative: “Comics in my view are essentially a composite art: when
they are successful, they have verbal and visual elements seamlessly combined”
(4). Hence, it would seem more appropriate to say that, according to someone like
Carrier, word-image combination (of a specific, “seamless” kind) seems to be neces-
sary for successful comics, although it seems highly problematic to leave the defini-
tion of comics up to the subjective evaluation of a scholar.
Most critics agree, however, that it would seem both counterintuitive and coun-
terproductive to exclude wordless graphic narratives from comics: “Do we need
words? Silent panels are not uncommon, even in mainstream comics, and there is
an entire genre, called ‘sans paroles,’ which can be described as comics without
words” (Kukkonen 2013, 5). But if word-image combinations are not a necessary
condition, are they a sufficient condition? The first answer would seem to be that
not all kinds of combinations qualify. Certainly, Harvey’s “incorporation of verbal
content” is much too imprecise to show what can be specific about the word-image
relations in comics. Most visual representations of the crucifixion incorporate the
letters I.N.R.I, without turning the pictures into comics. Even McCloud’s sevenfold
differentiation of word-image-relations is, as Rik Spanjers shows in this volume
(↗3 Text-Image Relations), analytically not very precise. But for our purposes here,
the lowest common denominator would be what McCloud calls an “interdependent”
relationship, “where images and text work together to co-constitute a meaning that
would not be achieved by either the images or texts separately” (McCloud 1994,
155). Even then we would ultimately need to qualify it in such a way that the mean-
ing that is constituted needs to be related to the meaning created by the comic’s
sequentiality. Otherwise, René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images might be
classified a comic. At the same time, there is no point in following Meskin’s claim
that “an illustrated children’s story book should not count as a comic merely by
virtue of the fact that the pictures are essential to grasping its narrative” (Meskin
2007, 373). In this case, Meskin seems to have described in the second part of his
sentence exactly one of the sufficient conditions for a comic, and the wish to ex-
clude these seems to be merely because it does not align with certain preconcep-
tions. The Very Hungry Caterpillar might occupy a very different place in the media
ecology than most comics, which is why nobody thinks about it as a comic. But
does that really mean it cannot be one, or at least needs to be processed like one?
The reticence that Meskin displays might be partly derived from the fact that
many children’s books use images merely as illustration. So maybe we should look
more closely at how illustration fits into discussions of the medial form of comics.
First of all, illustration does indeed have a connection between the textual and the
visual level, since an illustration is a visual rendering of something that was not
previously presented in a visual form (though the original object that is presented/
illustrated might be visual). The same is true for ekphrasis, which is basically the
opposite of illustration, namely the verbal description of something that is first ren-
dered in a visual form. But this relation is usually relatively weak in the sense that
both ekphrasis and illustration are additions to an object or a piece of art that is
already considered complete in itself (Rippl, Handbook of Intermediality, “Ekphra-
sis”). This means that their connection is in no way necessary: an illustration might
further your understanding of something described through language, which was
in principle already understandable in the first place. Many illustrated editions are
published without any involvement by the author, emphasizing the distinctness of
these spheres.
24 Sebastian Domsch
One further differentiation can help see the differences between illustration and
comics more clearly. As we said, illustration in general means rendering something
in visual form that in itself is already visual, for example when I talk or write about
trees and then include an illustration of a tree. In this case, neither my mentioning
of trees nor the illustration does contain a temporal dimension. But in other cases,
such a temporal dimension is indeed present, as when one says “he handed her a
rose” and then includes an image of a man holding out a rose to a woman. In this
case, what the image illustrates is an event in the narratological sense. We might
thus speak of something like “event illustration,” a category that would account
indeed primarily for those cases in which illustrations might be associated (or even
confused) with comics. And indeed, a book with numerous illustrations of a single
story, containing recurring versions of the same characters at different times within
the narrative sounds suspiciously like our definition of comics sequentiality. There
are certainly borderline cases (e. g. Posy Simmonds’ Gemma Bovery (1999) and sev-
eral works by Alan Moore, particularly the Black Dossier volume (2007) of the
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series), but I would argue that most would still
fall on the other side of the comics/not comics-divide. Though the interconnected-
ness of the images does suggest sequentiality, the gaps between the images usually
mean that the viewer would not be able to achieve closure with the images alone,
but needs to rely on the text for the connection (while the text can often easily be
understood without the images). This is brilliantly demonstrated by Walter Moers’
novel Wilde Reise durch die Nacht (2001), which takes illustrations by Gustav Doré
and uses them to tell a story that is completely different from the works that Doré
originally illustrated. It can also be found in the practice of Victorian magazines to
buy a number of cheap pictures wholesale and have authors “write up to cut” to
turn them into a narrative.
A final potential candidate for a necessary or sufficient condition should be
at least briefly discussed here: abstraction, or what McCloud refers to as “iconic
abstraction” and cartooning (McCloud 1994, 30). Comics certainly do seem to have
an affinity for abstraction, for reducing detail in visual representation. This might
have originally been born out of necessity, considering the conditions of creating
and producing comics in the first half of the century. With the explosion of interest
in comics, and the publishing formats that needed weekly or even daily provisions
of new material, artists were under pressure to produce quickly, and one way to do
this was to reduce the amount of detail that is being presented. But comics artists
soon developed different modes of abstraction into distinct and recognizable styles,
so that other art forms (like painting) could borrow from that style, and “look like”
comics. This is the case of Roy Lichtenstein who, even when he meticulously recre-
ates a panel from an actual comic, does not create a comic, but certainly does appro-
priate the style of comics. Looking at comics as a cultural practice shows that high
levels of abstraction have characterized it throughout its history to such an extent
that a highly abstracted drawing style is today often automatically associated with
comics even where the medial form clearly shows none of the essential conditions,
i. e. sequentiality or text-image-interdependence. Yet as long as one approaches
comics as a medial form, there is no reason at all to claim that they necessarily
contain a higher grade of abstraction than other visual art forms.
A specific drawing style and the heavy use of abstraction are also characteristics
that lead some people to equate comics with cartoons. The term in itself has a num-
ber of different meanings (for example it is often used to refer to “animated TV
series with antropomorphic animals”), deriving originally from the French carton
for cardboard, and designating sketches made for frescoes and tapestries that were
made on cardboard. In that sense, the connection to comics would lie in the original
technology of production – drawing – and in the quickness (some would say rough-
ness) of the approach to production. But while drawing tools were indeed most
commonly used by comics creators before the advent of digital tools, and the condi-
tions of production throughout most of comics history did not allow for more elabo-
rate and work-intensive methods of production, drawing is by no means necessarily
tied to comics.
When associating comics with cartoons, what people usually think of are hand-
drawn caricatures that are published in the context of another publication, e. g. a
newspaper or a journal. Satirical cartoons were prominent in the British satire mag-
azine Punch (est. 1841), which is also where the term was established in this mean-
ing, and some critics even derive their historicized notion of what comics are out of
the tradition that arises from Punch. Indeed, cartoons in this sense very much ‘look
like’ comics, or more precisely: like a panel taken out of a comic. And that is of
course already the main point of differentiation: cartoons usually feature a single
image, and while cartoons do tell micro-stories – mostly funny or satirical – in this
one image, they more often than not feature no sequentiality. They are almost al-
ways ‘narrative images,’ implying temporality through various means, but not es-
sentially working like comics (though of course, any cartoonist can decide to em-
ploy sequentiality): “As a form, comics differs from the cartoon, since cartoons are
single-panel images. While both forms often involve a similar visual-verbal punch,
comics, usually unfolding over multiple frames, carries a different narrative push
than a cartoon does” (Chute 2008, 454).
This chapter has looked at systematic and theoretical attempts at legitimizing
statements like the last, with the tacit assumption that there is such a thing as the
media form of comics, or even that comics are an ontological thing and not merely
a relation or an attitude of perception. But as we have seen, borders between nice
distinctions become fuzzier the closer one looks, categorizations can run counter to
intuition, and their normative power is finally derived not from clever reasoning,
but from broad consensus.
26 Sebastian Domsch
3 The Birth of Comics: Medial Ecology

So far, we have concentrated purely on questions of media and form, on the way
that comics function as a medium of generating meaning. While such an approach
is the closest we can get to any clear lines of distinction in determining the essential
components of comics, it certainly does not encapsulate in full our impression,
when encountering an artifact, of what we might call ‘comicness.’ This term is used
here in the sense of the degree to which we accept that an artefact that we encounter
actually is a comic, similar to the way that narratologists talk about the narrativity
of an artifact. Judging alone by media form, for example, has the effect that aesthet-
ic phenomena and artifacts are being called “comic” which are not only far outside
of the temporal scope of the cultural practice that gave the form its name (comics),
but also differ widely in media technology. But whether one follows the conditions
as claimed in this article or not, everyone would probably agree that the degree of
comicness of an issue of Amazing Spider-Man is higher than that of the Bayeux
Tapestry.
This notion of comicness, of a quality or set of qualities in an object that makes
an observer more or less inclined to intuitively categorize it as a comic, can be tied
to a method or theory of categorization different from the Aristotelean taxonomic
system and usually discussed as prototype theory. Instead of looking for necessary
and sufficient conditions in order to provide a definition based on the existence or
non-existence of such conditions, prototype theory proposes that a category con-
sists of elements that are evaluated according to how prototypical they are for that
category. Categories have ‘best examples,’ although these are not fixed but influ-
enced by social, educational and psychological factors. Instead of a binary distinc-
tion, in which something either is or is not part of a category, prototype theory
allows for gradation and therefore more accurately maps the phenomenon that most
people are able to correctly categorize most objects while not necessarily being able
to enumerate the conditions for membership within the categories. Originally devel-
oped by cognitive scientists like Eleanor H. Rosch (1973, 1978, 1983), prototype theo-
ry was further developed by linguists like George Lakoff (1987), and it is very helpful
in understanding both the reservations against analytical definitions of comics and
the way that comics categorization is actually made by both producers and consum-
ers of comics. For most people, an issue of Spider-Man is simply a much more proto-
typical example of a comic than an Aztec codex, or a political cartoon.
The factors that influence why certain specimens would be judged more or less
prototypical are numerous and they go far beyond the aspects we have so far fo-
cused on. For our attempts at definition, we have reduced the idea of a medium to
its pure form, but of course the term medium contains many more dimensions,
which contribute in important ways to notions and impressions of comicness. And
indeed, many of the terms that are very frequently used in reference to comics and
that can sometimes cause confusion, like comic strips, comic books, or comix, di-
rectly reflect those other dimensions.
Thus, we next need to consider the media ecology of comics, the (interrelated)
technical and economic constraints and affordances that surround the production,
dissemination and reception of comics. “Comics is a creative and expansive form
that has always been constrained – unlike, say, the artist’s book, which has a paral-
lel history in the twentieth century – by formats dictated by commercial enterprise”
(Chute 2008, 454). We are thereby departing the realm of necessary or sufficient
conditions; this part of the ontology of comics is marked by contingency and tech-
nologically driven change. There is not just one way in which comics can be creat-
ed, printed, published, disseminated, or perceived, and all of these differences can
have their influence on how the notion of a comic is constructed. Of course, this
introductory chapter is not the place to analyse or even list all of these differences.
The focus will be therefore on the way in which media ecology and cultural practice
influence the way we think about comics and about what a comic is. Definitions
and broader understandings of comics have always developed alongside changing
cultural, technological, and industrial practices, another reason why approaching
comics as if there were one single “essence” to them seems misguided.
For the longest time, everyone involved in discussing comics would probably
have agreed on one thing about them: comics are drawn. Although, looking closer,
we can see that the most common process for industrially produced comics actually
consists of two parts: the penciller draws the original image, and the inker then
reinforces the outlines with a brush or a pen (throughout the early history of comic
books, printing technology had difficulties reproducing the original drawing). In
the simplest cases, this is done in black and white. Depending on the advancement
of the technology involved as well as economic considerations, a smaller or larger
spectrum of colour can be added. Contemporary comics, particularly those pub-
lished in book format, can also now reproduce any style in which the original imag-
es were created, so that artists can theoretically use any technique they want to,
from drawing to water colors, oil painting, or complex collage techniques like those
used by Dave McKean.
It seems that the means of creation have never really been used in attempts at
naming or defining comics or their sub-forms. Different kinds of comics like under-
ground comix or manga have developed distinctive artistic styles that are associated
with them (although they are in no way restricted to them), but the styles are not
used as primary markers of distinction. One exception would be the admittedly bor-
derline case of the “photo love story,” that is a sequentially told visual narrative that
uses photographic images (Rippl, Handbook of Intermediality, 11 The Photographic
Novel). Much more commonly used to differentiate further among comics on the
one hand, and to establish a more defensible notion of comicness on the other, are
the means of production and distribution. This is what many of the terms that are
used to alternatively refer to comics are related to, such as comic strips, comic
books, or graphic novels.
The term comic strips originally referred to the so-called “daily strips” and the
“Sunday pages.” These were originally published within the context of daily news-
28 Sebastian Domsch
papers (strips) or Sunday issues of newspapers (Sunday Pages), and often they were
later collected into printed editions. Such strips of course fulfill all the medial re-
quirements of comics, and in addition they are characterized by extremely short
“narrative arcs” (often limited to three panels within one strip), with continuity
being established mainly through recurring characters, character constellations, or
motifs, and less through specific and prolonged narrative events (although such
cases, of course, also exist, see e. g. Gasoline Alley). In the more prototypical exam-
ples, there is a concentration on the punch line instead of large-scale narrative mo-
mentum, which might be conveyed textually or visually. Comic strips were also –
significantly – the earliest form in which comics successfully entered the publishing
world, being established in the last years of the nineteenth century (↗2 History,
Formats, Genres). Thus, for generations they established the frame through which
readers saw and thought of comics, most likely the reason why they are sometimes
still erroneously seen as synonymous with comics.
Historically speaking, the next publication format that was established on the
market for comics was the comic book, another term that has been used carelessly
as a synonym for comics. In contrast to what the term would imply, comic books
were originally rather stapled together like magazines and not bound like books.
Also, other than regular books, they were being distributed through newsstands
and not through the book market or specialized stores. But while comic strips and
comic books have, relatively speaking, clearly defined formal and structural el-
ements, the same cannot be said for the term graphic novel. The term is interesting
in that it is frequently lamented by comics practitioners and theoreticians, while
becoming ever more firmly established in the actual public discourse on comics.
Even though the term was successfully adopted by marketing concerns and is
fraught with internal inconsistencies, it seems to have filled a terminological need
within the broader phenomenon of comics that, as it continues to develop, also
continues to necessitate further internal differentiations.
Many critics have pointed to the difficulty of stating exactly what designates a
graphic novel, but the communicative intention seems to be mainly to point out
that it differs from the comic book, acting mainly as an anti-comic-book sign. Where
comic books are seen as serialized and infinite, graphic novels are finite and pub-
lished in a complete form. Where comic books are sold at newsstands like newspa-
pers (meaning that only the most recent issue is available for purchase), graphic
novels are sold in book shops or specialty shops, and they can be ordered through
back catalogues. Where, at least in the US, comic books were published mostly by
large publishing houses like DC and Marvel, but also Entertainment Comics, Archie
Comics and Disney, graphic novels are also published by alternative publishers,
even sometimes non-comics publishers. And finally, where comic books are often
believed to contain fantasy geared towards children and adolescents, graphic nov-
els contain realist fiction and address mainly adults. At least, one suspects, that
this is the implication behind the moniker (see Sabin 1993, 165), inaccurate as it is.
Of course, anyone who knows a little bit about comics will immediately see that
there are numerous exceptions to any of the distinctions just sketched. A graphic
novel may well be a part of an ongoing series of superhero stories published by DC,
and a comic book might be designed as a limited run of a closed storyline of the
highest sophistication. In addition, graphic novels do not need to be novels. In fact,
the book that is thought to have popularized the term, Will Eisner’s A Contract with
God (for historical background, ↗20 Will Eisner, A Contract with God) is actually
made up of a collection of short stories. Autobiographies, journalism, travel writing
and a history of the universe have been called graphic novels. The TV series The
Walking Dead is identified in the opening credits as ‘based on the series of graphic
novels,’ which are actually an infinite series of ongoing serialized monthly comic
book issues. Nevertheless, the term proves its heuristic – and commercial – value
by being constantly used. One might say that the fact that people use graphic novel
as if they knew what the term meant proves that it is working.
Looking at comics through the perspective of media ecology (the technical and
economical affordances and limitations that have shaped the development of com-
ics) serves two purposes: It shows how the core of formal features that can be tenta-
tively identified as specific to comics will assume a vast variety of shapes, influ-
enced by a broad range of factors from printing technology to market structures.
And it also shows how those differentiated forms accrue additional characteristics,
and that these might not be necessary or sufficient in the sense of medial condi-
tions, but that they nevertheless become constitutive of those forms being identified
and thought of as comics (or subtypes of comics). In order to clearly identify wheth-
er the Bayeux Tapestry works like a comic, one has to do a close reading, noticing
how characters reappear throughout the narrative or the subtle contradiction be-
tween the text stating that an oath is being sworn and the visual depiction showing
a hand gesture that seems to nullify the same oath – but none of those activities
are necessary to know that a comic strip in the ‘funny pages’ of a newspaper, or a
superhero comic book is a comic. Their comicness is constituted by many more
elements than pure sequentiality, and these elements are important for a non-reduc-
tive account of what comics are.
4 Comics as Cultural Practice

Comics are not a Platonic ideal but an ongoing cultural phenomenon, in the sense
of being created, produced, distributed, read, debated, glorified or reviled. In short,
they are a cultural practice, and as such they even go far beyond the purely techni-
cal aspects that were briefly discussed in the second part of this chapter. At one
point in her consideration of comics as literature, Chute asks “[b]ut what is the
comics form – its properties, purviews, abilities?” And she answers her own ques-
tion in this way: “Even comics aficionados might say, as Justice Potter Stewart did
30 Sebastian Domsch
of pornography, that one simply knows it when one sees it” (Chute 2008, 454). This
notion is much less of an argumentative cop-out than might seem; it implicitly em-
phasizes the idea that comics (or pornography) are predominantly a cultural prac-
tice, and therefore something that is done involving a complex set of socially con-
structed norms, expectations, rules and conventions.
Two frequently used terms that combine aspects of media ecology with those of
cultural usage are comix and manga. Both are characterized by varied but often
distinct features concerning their means of creation, production and dissemination,
as well as distinct cultural attitudes in their production and reception. Of the two,
comix is by now largely a historical term, related to a distinct phase in American
comics history roughly between 1968 and 1975 and used to distinguish a specific set
of works from the established mainstream comics of their times in a number of
respects (↗2 History, Formats, Genres). As a critical reaction to the dominance on
the comics market by publishers like Marvel, DC, or Archie Comics, comix publica-
tions were created by independent artists with small publishing companies or were
self-published, with authors and artists remaining copyright holders. Since produc-
tions had to be cheap, color was rarely used, but the black and white style very
quickly became aesthetically distinct, particularly through the stylistic distancing
from the idealized beauty depicted in the large companies’ “house styles” and a
new focus on political, social, and aesthetic subversion of cultural norms. In addi-
tion to these differences in media ecology, comix was also part of an American sub-
culture quite different from the readers of mainstream comics. There was a close
connection to the countercultures of hippies and punks in their themes and topics,
but also the beginning of autobiographical comics.
Like comix, manga are distinct within the broad realm of comics through differ-
ences of media ecology and cultural practice. But where comix was a regionally
and historically confined phenomenon that soon merged into other forms, manga
designates something that is much broader, more diverse, and permanent. On the
one hand, manga originally was merely a term that referred to comics that are creat-
ed and produced in Japan. But there are so many differences, as well as a develop-
mental history widely independent of that of other national comics cultures, that
some critics even see manga as completely distinct from comics, and today, manga
are also produced outside of Japan. To see them as distinct from comics would
certainly be inaccurate in purely formal terms, but indeed the differences in media
ecology (from the paper being used to the publishing cycles and the places you can
buy them), and especially in cultural practice, are considerable. As Beaty writes,
“[t]o speak of manga is not to speak of a ‘genre’ or even a ‘medium.’ It is to speak
of a cultural cycle – in fact, of several interrelated and overlapping cultural cycles”
(Beaty 2012, xi). Both creators and consumers of manga in its countries of origin
occupy very different positions within society than do their counterparts in western
countries, reading practices vary, as well as ways of talking about manga.
Defining comics purely through media form or even (to a lesser degree) through
media technology and ecology might seem to imply that one could largely ignore
the historical dimension of the phenomenon we call comics. But this is quickly ex-
posed as unsatisfactory once one includes cultural practice as a factor contributing
to the notion of comicness. Meskin is rightfully unsatisfied with “an ahistorical ac-
count of comics,” because it leaves the account “open to plausible counterexamples
from the prehistory of comics. This flaw is found in all other extant attempts to
define comics” (Meskin 2007, 369). Similarly, Abel writes that “the question of what
can be called a comic can only be answered in historic and context-dependent ways,
and therefore not in the form of a concrete definition” (my translation, Abel 2016,
57). Instead, Meskin offers a historically informed cultural practice approach:
Perhaps something is a comic just in case it is/was nonpassingly intended for regard-as-a-
comic (or something close to that). Presumably the Bayeaux Tapestry and those troublesome
pre-Columbian manuscripts were not so intended. (Meskin 2007, 375)
Rather curiously, such an approach excludes all those who establish a new art form
or genre in the first place. Like most art forms, comics gained their name (and the
notion that they are ‘a thing’ that one can intend to create) only after they already
started to exist. Therefore, in Meskin’s account, the founders of comics paradoxical-
ly did not create comics, because they could not intend to create what did not exist
before they created it. But leaving such sophistry behind, it is true that while the
abstract characteristics of any artistic form exist from the beginning (in their ab-
stract form they could even be said to exist before the beginning), the (partial, grad-
ual) realization of the art form only happens over time.
This also means that we are moving even further away from a clear universality
in understanding what a comic is, by admitting that such conceptions are subject
to historical change. Such change is in many ways tied to technological change, but
it is also an indication of shifting evaluations, so that from merely establishing what
artefacts work like a comic, to singling those out that really are comics we are now
moving towards considerations of what counts as a ‘proper’ comic or prototypical
comic, that is, subjective evaluative statements.
The ‘intended audience’ of comics is one of the aspects that is tied to such
considerations and that has been perceived to have shifted historically. It is often
seen in connection to genre, although it is of course a separate aspect. Most comics
scholars until very recently felt the need to argue against the idea that comics are
for kids, the staying power of which might derive from the fact that it was the norm
in a formative historical phase. From the 1930s to the 1950s, when comic books sold
by the tens of millions in America, they indeed were marketed primarily towards
kids, although already then they were also read by GIs and other adults. One of the
innovations of comix was their decisive shift in reader orientation towards adults,
with higher price tags and adult-oriented content.
Meskin even asked whether audience orientation in general could not be a way
to find a working definition for comics. “Could it be that an object is a comic if and
only if it is an artifact created to be presented to a particular artworld public (name-
32 Sebastian Domsch
ly, the comics public)?” (Meskin 2007, 375). Of course, this would again exclude (like
Meskin’s historical argument) those that create their audience. Following such a
definition has led to the famous disruption of the commonly held opinion of what
constitutes art by Marcel Duchamp. But there is also an important point here that
what is regarded as a comic and what not within a specific community or society
ultimately rests in the eye of the beholder.
5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited
Abel, Julia, and Christian Klein. Comics und Graphic Novels: Eine Einführung. Stuttgart:
J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2016.
Beaty, Bart, and Stephen Weiner. Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Manga. Ipswich, MA: Salem
Press, 2013.
Brück, Axel. “Zur Theorie der Comics.” Sex & Horror in den Comics. Ausstellungskatalog
ipHamburger Kunsthaus 23. 6.–25. 7. 1971 (1971): x–xv.
Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2000.
Chute, Hillary L., and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” MFS Modern Fiction
Studies 52.4 (2006): 767–782.
Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2 (2008): 452–465.
Eisner, Will. Comics & sequential art. Paramus, NJ: Poorhouse Press, 2006, © 1985.
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the history of twenty-first-century storytelling. Stanford,
Calif. Stanford Univ. Press, 2012.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. 1st ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Grünewald, Dietrich. Comics. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000.
Grünewald, Dietrich. Struktur und Geschichte der Comics: Beiträge zur Comicforschung. 1st ed.
Bochum: Bachmann, 2010.
Heffernan, James A. W. “Ekphrasis: Theory.” Handbook of Intermediality. Ed. Gabriele Rippl.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015.
Harvey, Robert C. “Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image: The Emergence of the Modern
Magazine Gag Cartoon Reveals the Vital Blend.” The Language of Comics: Word and Image.
Eds. Varnum, Robin, and Christina T. Gibbons. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 75–96.
Hatfield, Charles. “Defining Comics in the Classroom; or, the Pros and Cons of Unfixability.”
Teaching the Graphic Novel. Ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick. New York: The Modern Language
Association of America, 2009. 19–27.
Hayman, Greg, and Henry John Pratt. “What Are Comics?” A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts. Ed.
David Goldblatt and Lee Brown. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc., 2005. 419–
424.
Holbo, John. “Redefining Comics.” The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach. Eds. Aaron
Meskin and Roy T. Cook. [1st ed.]. Chichester, West Sussex, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012. 3–31.
Kukkonen, Karin. Studying Comics and Graphic Novels. West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2013.
Kunzle, David. History of the Comic Strip, vol. 1, The Early Comic Strip. Narrative Strips and
Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450–1825. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1973.
Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon, Or The Limits of Poetry and Painting. London: J. Ridgway,
1836.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
Meskin, Aaron, and Roy T. Cook, eds. The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach. [1st ed.].
Chichester, West Sussex, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Print. New directions in
aesthetics 12.
Meskin, Aaron. “Defining Comics?” JAAC 65.4 (2007): 369–379.
Mickwitz, Nina. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan US, 2016. Print. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels.
Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. Jackson:
Rosch, E.H. “Natural Categories.” Cognitive Psychology 4 (1973): 328–350.
Rosch, E.H. “Principles of Categorization.” Cognition and Categorization. Eds. E. H. Rosch and
B. B. Lloyd. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1978. 27–48.
Rosch, E.H. “Prototype Classification and Logical Classification: The Two Systems” New Trends in
Conceptual Representation: Challenges to Piaget’s Theory? Ed. E. K. Scholnick. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983. 73–86.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2004.
Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1993.
Stein, Daniel, and Jan Thon, ed. From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory
and History of Graphic Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.
Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth. New York: Pantheon, 2000.
5.2 Further Reading

Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An introduction. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2015. Cambridge introductions to literature.
Johnson-Woods, Toni. Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. New York:
Continuum, 2010.
Petersen, Robert S. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives. Santa
Barbara: Praeger, 2011.
Tabachnick, Stephen Ely, editor. Teaching the Graphic Novel. New York: The Modern Language
Association of America, 2009. Options for Teaching, Volume 27.
Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge:
Da Capo Press, 2007.
Dirk Vanderbeke
2 History, Formats, Genres
Abstract: Following the definition of comics by Scott McCloud in Understanding
Comics as sequential art and thus as “[j]uxtaposed pictorial and other images in
deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic
response in the viewer” (1994, 9), it has almost become a tradition in comic studies
to present their evolution as a process that began early in human history and then
accompanied the development of civilization and culture to the present (e. g.
McCloud 1994, 1016; Chute 2010, 12; Petersen 2011, 220 and passim; Boyd 2010, 98;
Inge 2017, 9). This may appear as a belated legitimization of an art form that for a
long time was regarded as trivial and dismissible, if not downright trash and detri-
mental to the mental state of its often juvenile audience. There is, however, more
to the argument of a long and varied history of sequential arts than merely the
attempt of a cultural upstart to find some honourable pedigree among the tradition-
al and accepted forms of artistic expression. This chapter will outline this earlier
history of graphic narratives before it turns to the rise of comics and their develop-
ments since the 19th century. While the ‘pre-history’ of comics necessarily includes
examples from various countries and cultures, the account of comics proper will
focus on Anglophone developments; occasionally influential authors and works
from other countries will be mentioned, but it is simply impossible to offer a com-
prehensive history of world comics in the scope of this chapter.
The chapter shows an obvious imbalance in its use of images. This is the regret-
table result of copyright policies, and while libraries and museums are usually help-
ful and quite willing to permit reprints and to waive copyright fees, this does not
always apply to the publishers of comics and graphic novels.
Key Terms: Comics, history, genres, formats, distribution
1 Pictorial Narratives Before the Rise of Comics

Histories of the comics have often tried to fix a specific date to mark the beginning
of this medium, be it the first publication of Richard Outcault’s The Yellow Kid in
1895 (the collection of his works is subtitled: “A Centennial Celebration of the Kid
Who Started the Comics,” Blackbeard 1995), of Gilbert Dalziel’s Ally Sloper’s Half
Holiday in 1884 (Sabin 1996, 15), of Rodolphe Töpffer’s works in the first half of the
19th century (David Kunzle’s 2007 monograph is titled Father of the Comics Strip,
see also Inge 2017, 11), the birth of gag cartooning in the 18th century (Harvey 2009,
26) or of “the sequential comic as we know it […] in the illustrated magazines of the
late nineteenth century” (Gardner 2015, 241). Of course, the discussion is to some
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-003
36 Dirk Vanderbeke
extent based in nationalist pride, but also addresses the aesthetic elements that are
considered to be decisive or necessary features of the comic. Most of them are in-
cluded in Gardner’s list: “combinations of text and image, dialogue balloons, recur-
ring characters and ongoing serial narratives” (2015, 241), but for each of them,
examples can easily be found in works that precede the respectively suggested earli-
est comics by decades, if not by centuries. In contrast to such stories of origin,
Mazur and Danner argue that “no single culture and country can claim ownership
of the medium. The human inclination to tell stories with pictures, to combine im-
age and text, seems universal” (2014, 7). Similarly, Baetens and Surdiacourt write:
“Since scholars have learned to appreciate the multiple beginnings, multiple forms,
and multiple histories of graphic storytelling, the question of primacy (who came
first, and who invented what) has lost much of its urgency” (2015, 348). While this
chapter suggests that the history of comics can be divided into the era of comics
proper and a very long pre-history of ‘proto-comics’ (Inge 2017, 10 and passim), it
also argues that the transition was smooth and drawn out, and that it is not possible
to define a moment or place for the birth of the forms and formats of the visual
narrative that we now call comics. To make this point, the necessarily brief and
incomplete outline of the role of graphic narrative in human history will not pri-
marily focus on examples of acclaimed art but rather on the enormous mass of
graphic narratives that existed before the time usually associated with the birth of
comics, i. e. the nineteenth century. This will also demonstrate that visual informa-
tion transmitted in sequential images was an essential aspect of life in cultural envi-
ronments in which literacy had not yet reached all levels of society.
As vision is our dominant sense and images can be far better remembered than
other sensual stimuli, pictures must have been of particular importance for the
transmission of information and cultural memory from the moment when they were
first created. In pre-literate times, language does not leave records, and thus the
discussion of storytelling among our pre-historic ancestors in the late Pleistocene is
necessarily based on the remnants that survived in myth or on the functions which
tales and oral transmission still have in present-day hunter and gatherer cultures.
Research in the origins of myth and particular stories and motifs based on phyloge-
netic methods has, however, been able to investigate tale-types that appear in mul-
tiple cultures and to establish their origins historically and geographically, among
them the possibly oldest tales that can still be reconstructed, “The Cosmic Hunt”
(D’Huy 2013) and the Polyphemus motif (D’Huy 2015). Both tales may have their
origin in Palaeolithic times, and for the Polyphemus motif, D’Huy suggests that an
illustration “can potentially be interpreted from the Palaeolithic cave drawings
found in the Trois-Frères,” dating from the Magdalenian period, about 17,000–
12,000 years BCE. Of course, “[i]nterpreting narrative through image systems of a
remote earlier period is inevitably problematic and speculative” (D’Huy 2015, 55),
but then it is hardly improbable that the creation and communal experience of cave
art was linked to the oral transmission of narratives, i. e. the recounting of factual
events or some form of imaginative storytelling. Such a distinction between fact and
fiction may well have been irrelevant in pre-historic times; myths were originally the
repository of knowledge about cosmology, the history of the community, geography,
religion etc., and the line between factual information and fiction was only drawn
much later (Haug 2003, 128–144). The combination of language and images would
then possibly be one of the earliest forms in which knowledge could be stored, a
double coding of information that served individual and collective memory.
It would be very difficult to establish sequences in the cave drawings which
frequently overlap and do not show any inherent order. One of the first examples
of sequential imagery that has been discovered as of now may well have been creat-
ed for entertainment and fun. It is an approximately 5,200 year old clay bowl found
in Shahr-e Sūkhté, the Burnt City of ancient Iran, showing a sequence of images of
a Bezoar goat eating from a bush. If the bowl is turned at the right speed, the images
become a short animated movie showing the goat jumping up and down to reach
the higher leaves (Fig. 2.1).
Fig. 2.1: Iranian Goat. © Michał Sałaban, used by permission under CC-BY-SA.
Pictorial art remained the most important repository of cultural memory for large
audiences not only until writing allowed for the permanent storage of information,
but rather until the invention of the printing press and even beyond to the times
when literacy was no longer restricted to a cultural elite. Scott McCloud offers a
sequence of images from an Egyptian fresco showing agricultural work from the
sowing of the plants to the harvest, the bureaucratic assessment of the yield, and
the punishment for peasants who failed to pay their taxes in time (1994, 14–15). The
Egyptian frescoes thus not only show military action, religious events, or the activi-
ties of royalty and the higher echelons of society; they form a comprehensive ac-
count of Egyptian life on all levels of society. Similarly, the murals and manuscripts
of the pre-Columbian era present historical events, religious narratives, or astro-
nomical observations, but also agricultural information or various other accounts
of everyday life – in addition, ceramics, textiles, and basically anything that offered
some kind of paintable surface was used for the preservation and transmission of
visual information. On pots and vessels of the Peruvian Moche, for example, “peo-
ple, animals, and gods go hunting and to war; make music; visit their rulers; bury
the dead; and cure the sick” (Weismantel 2004, 495); moreover, there are frequently
depictions of sexual acts.
38 Dirk Vanderbeke
Further examples of sequential art that are frequently discussed as precursors

of the comic are Trajan’s column, the tapestry of Bayeux, and William Hogarth’s
series of moral engravings like The Harlot’s Progress or Industry and Idleness which
Inge regards as “[p]erhaps the most important and influential prototypes of early
graphic narratives” (2017, 10). (↗1 Comics Terminology and Definitions) More impor-
tant than individual pieces of art, however, is, in analogy with the ubiquity of picto-
rial art in antiquity, the role of images in the cultural communication of communal
memory and ideologies during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A short pas-
sage in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame may be used to illustrate this
point. In Book 5, Chapter 1, the archdeacon of Notre-Dame suggests that the newly
invented printed book will replace architecture as the most important medium for
the transmission of cultural expression:
For some time the archdeacon considered the enormous edifice in silence, then with a sigh,
extending his right hand towards the printed book which lay open upon his table, and with
the left hand extended towards Notre-Dame, his eyes sadly wandered from the book to the
church. “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that.” (Hugo 1993, 146)
Of course, the archdeacon refers chiefly to “the marble letters of the alphabet, the
granite pages of the book” (Hugo 1993, 146), but then the churches and cathedrals
abounded with pictorial narratives on frescoes, pictures, altarpieces, stained glass
windows, and wood carvings, transmitting the stories of scripture and the lives of
saints to people who could neither read nor could they understand Latin. As Rober-
to Bartual Moreno argues, in the Middle Ages graphic narratives “became a moral
instrument of the Catholic church. […] The proliferation of visual sequences during
the Middle Ages had a didactic purpose: the narrative potential of images in an
essentially illiterate society was enormous” (2015, 22–23). We have to keep in mind
that these narratives were literally true for the believers of the time, and that the
images were thus the equivalent of historical accounts, but also mnemonic aids to
recollect the more extensive and detailed stories that were told and retold in the
sermons and homilies. From our perspective, quite a lot of this information no
longer seems to be quite as significant, trustworthy, accurate, and thus relevant,
but for the medieval population that relied on visual and auditory input, images
were the repository of knowledge.
Such images and graphic narratives were not restricted to the sacred space of
the church, but also to be found in various illustrated forms of scripture in which
occasionally the pictorial content dominated the written elements. Of particular in-
terest for the history of comics is the Canticum canticorum (ca. 1465), a biblical block
book that visualizes the Song of Songs and could be regarded as the first adaptation
of a literary text into a graphic novel (Vanderbeke 2019). It consists of 16 pages with
two pictures each, presenting the usual medieval interpretation of the old-oriental
love poetry as an allegory of the love of Christ towards the church as his bride.
There are black and white, but also colored versions, indicating the popularity of
the block book.
The Song of Songs consists chiefly of poetic monological or dialogical speeches

of the lovers who express their affection and desire; in addition, there are a few
passages spoken by the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ who act as a kind of chorus. In the
block book, the utterances are presented in the medieval equivalent of speech bub-
bles, i. e. banners that some scholars named scrolls (Kunzle 1973, 3) and some phy-
lacteries (Bartual Moreno 2015, 32). Laurence Grove suggests that “emblematic
works that have speech bubbles are generally those that have something to sell,
and this most commonly is a religious belief” (2005, 102).
Bartual Moreno claims that
the function of phylacteries in medieval art was quite different from that of balloons in a
modern comic. The purpose of a phylactery was not to represent a conversation; the aim of
the words they contained was to identify the characters that pronounced them. (2015, 33–34)
In the Canticum canticorum, however, the biblical text and the speeches of the lov-
ers are reorganized to make for a more dialogical exchange, and so the use of the
banners already presents us with some of those features that were later seen as
defining elements of the comic. In one of the very detailed and complex pictures
(6b), the dialogue is quite extensive, moreover it is divided into two sub-panels with
scrolls and visual elements intruding from one to the other; quite obviously “the
format, organization, and subtle visual cues in the scenes demanded extraordinarily
active, highly literate and visually sophisticated responses from the historical view-
er” (Petev, n. pag.).
But then medieval pictorial narratives did not merely present approved religious
narratives and often included elements of folk culture like humorous imagery, gro-
tesque devils, Dame Fortune, and also the dance macabre which usually shows a
sequence of images in which Death, the great equalizer, comes to fetch people from
all echelons of society, from the king to the beggar, to lead them to the happy or
not so happy hereafter (Fig. 2.2).
Whatever impact the invention of the printing press may have had on religious
imagery and sequential narratives, in the sacred sphere of the churches the most
severe intervention came shortly afterwards with Protestant iconoclasm. But while
the pictorial arts within the religious edifices were destroyed, Protestants and their
adversaries made use of the new medium that allowed for cheap production and
distribution of religious and political propaganda in the form of broadsheets which,
once more, frequently employed imagery and sequential narratives. David Kunzle
in his seminal History of the Comic Strip suggests that prints were the first mass
medium and argues that the comic strip, which for him includes the narrative strips
of broadsheets, was “the product of the printing press“ (1973, 3). They were, how-
ever, not restricted to political or religious content but also occasionally served to
distribute official proclamations. Moreover, they were the predecessors of the mod-
ern tabloid, reaching a mass audience at times when printed books were prohibi-
tively expensive.
40
Dirk Vanderbeke
Fig. 2.2: Basel’s Dance of Death, Watercolour copy by Johann Rudolf Feyerabend, 1806,
© Historisches Museum Basel, used by permission.
Street literature is concerned with the cheap ballad sheets, pamphlets and other ephemera of
the masses, which circulated from the dawn of printing right up to the end of the nineteenth
century, a literature often more influential than the book. (Shepard 1973, 13)
Broadsheets usually offered pictorial and written information, often a narrative se-
quence of woodcut images that were accompanied by a text that told the story in
more detail or added some further information or argument – depending on the
subject, these texts were frequently in verse and ballad-form and so could be sung
by the hawkers who also used larger portable paintings with sequential narratives
for their performances. The content was any kind of news, be it “religious, political,
criminal, romantic, amatory, bawdy, humorous, superstitious, moralistic, and trag-
ic” (Shepard 1973, 18), and, if possible, sensationalist.
The performances of ‘news-singers,’ ‘bench-singers’ (‘cantabancs’) or ‘picture-singers,’ as they

were variously known, constituted the most accessible, mobile and all-round popular form of
public multi-media spectacle through the period of the early growth of the culture industry:
between the first emergence of a market in vernacular print publications, and the development
of the electronic technologies of mass communication. (Cheesman 1994, 2)
The following broadsheet (Fig 2.3) tells the story of a horrible murder: first, briefly,
in the headlines, then in the sequence of images, and again, more extensively, in
verse; this is followed by an unrelated religious moralist song. The images show all
the important stages of the deed and the punishment. The organization of the pan-
els, however, is unusual: the crime and arrest are shown in the lower tier of panels,
the later trial and execution above.
Due to the limited number of panels that would fit on a broadsheet, the pictures
show significant moments rather than continuous action – in this they are similar
to the sequential narratives presenting biblical stories or the lives of saints and also
to Hogarth’s series of engravings which may span a whole life in six to twelve im-
ages.
Occasionally one can also find captions and even predecessors of the modern
speech balloons, when banners or “phylacteries” (Bartual Moreno) are used to con-
vey dialogical elements. “The speech balloon derives from the scroll of the prophets
in medieval art, but always in conjunction with, not in lieu of, captions and com-
mentaries” (Kunzle 1973, 3). A good example is Francis Barlow’s “A True Narrative
of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot.” It consists of two parts printed on two consecu-
tive pages, and many of the panels show elements of dialogue presented in the form
of scrolls (see Kunzle 1973, 139–140).
One of the prominent occasions for the distribution of broadsheets was the exe-
cution of criminals. The prints sold on these occasions were “repetitive and their
moralizing intrusive and formulaic” (Gatrell 1994, 175); they not only contained lu-
rid biographies of the respective culprits and an account of their crimes – both
frequently highly imaginative – but also the final confessions and words to the spec-
tators which, in fact, still needed to be spoken, and pictures of the hangings that
42 Dirk Vanderbeke
Fig. 2.3: Johann Schubert: „A cruel musician kills his pregnant wife and child.” 1653.
© Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, VI G 111, Photo: Gerald Raab, used by permission.
had not yet taken place. The graphics were often crude, and the woodblocks for the
images were occasionally re-used with only few modifications – “Many execution
cuts served for several generations” (Gatrell 1994, 176). Verisimilitude was obviously
not an issue for the printers or the audience – one may wonder whether the repeti-
tiveness that also marks many comic strips and even longer sequential narratives
could be an intrinsic element of the format, accommodating audiences that delight
in the repetition of fondly remembered experiences.
The works of William Hogarth (1697–1764), of course, mark an important step
in the development of the artistic sequential narrative. Kunzle suggests that “Ho-
garth was conversant with the native broadsheet, although he must have despised
it from the artistic point of view” (1973, 299). One could, however, also see his en-
gravings in the light of his critique of the “grand manner” of Continental historical
and mythological paintings that were fashionable among the English gentility (1973,
298); it could be argued that he turned to a popular art form – he obviously en-
dorsed a similar project in his paintings and engravings of John Gay’s The Beggar’s
Opera – and demonstrated the artistic potential of the ephemeral products that were
relished not by the cultural elite but by the people. Hogarth’s serial narratives are,
as mentioned before, as limited in their number of individual pictures as the broad-
sheets, but now this results from a decision of the artist rather than from spatial
restrictions. The frequently crude form of woodcut representation is replaced in the
engravings by meticulous attention to detail – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s exten-
sive explanations (1794–1799) bear witness to the richness of visual information in-
cluding large groups of carefully rendered people, pictures on the walls, symbolic
spaces, objects and clothes, and various forms of writing, quite a lot of which is
unfortunately lost in the reprints that are usually available to modern audiences.
This complexity turns each of the engravings into a narrative of its own; the depic-
tion of a seemingly momentary event cannot be processed quickly and demands
careful scrutiny – and it thus gains a depth that adds a temporal dimension to the
arrested moment of the image. Too many things are taking place simultaneously to
be realistic, and thus each engraving turns into a sequential narrative condensed
into the frame of a single image. These then add up with the other engravings to a
more panoramic story. Among Hogarth’s successors, James Gillray (1757–1815), the
political satirist, and Thomas Rowlandson, who focused more on social commentary
(see Murray 2017, 44–45), should be at least mentioned in passing.
The development and status of graphic narratives were strongly influenced by
the increase of literacy. For a long time, reading was restricted to the clergy and a
cultural elite, and even the invention of the printing press had not immediately
changed this situation. In consequence, serious matters like history, religion, poli-
tics, public affairs and, of course, crime were transmitted as graphic information
together with varying amounts of written text for the literate or semi-literate element
of the audience, and quite probably these texts were read out and the information
then passed on orally. In the course of the 18th century, literacy had reached a fairly
44 Dirk Vanderbeke
high level, and, in consequence, the written word began to dominate where images
had previously served as sources of information. This loss of relevance may have
triggered one of the most momentous changes in the development of images and
graphic narrative: no longer necessary for the transmission of serious matters, the
pictures set out on new venues and turned to humour and entertainment. Kunzle
points out that, “the truly comic strip does not emerge until pictorial propaganda
and the social cartoon become entirely comic in style, that is, in late eighteenth-
century England” (1973, 3). To some extent then, the changes that ultimately led to
the establishment of comics as a medium for mass entertainment can also be seen
as a decline.
This development went hand in hand with the rise of journals in the 18th cen-
tury and in particular the growing success of political and social caricature.
The period from 1775 […] to 1796 […] also saw the maturation of another style, one antithetical
to all that is neo-classical, sentimental, or academic. It opposed brevity and lightness to the
prevailing ponderousness, it cultivated the witty and comic over the serious. The style is that
of caricature, which proved itself the ideal medium for the development of the picture story
and for graphic satire in general. (Kunzle 1973, 357)
Earlier broadsheets, e. g. propagandist prints in the course of the Reformation, had

already employed elements of caricature, adding grotesque or absurd elements to
the faces or bodies of the respective opponents – the image of Luther as the devil’s
bagpipe is one of the best-known examples. In the 18th century, caricature became
“a new commercial commodity,” and “shops specializing in caricature sprang up,
whereas before the broadsheets had been sold from general book- and print-deal-
ers” (Kunzle 1973, 359). Some of the new humorous etchings and engravings lacked
in narrative content and rather showed series of studies of posture and movement.
Richard Newton’s Progress of a Scotsman shows the social ascendancy of the protag-
onist from poverty to steadily rising jobs as a servant, the marriage to a rich widow,
and finally a seat in Parliament (Fig 2.4).
At the end of the 18th century, “gossip sheets flourished all over England” as
the forerunners of the humor magazine (Horn 1980, 25), the most famous of which
would be Punch, founded by Henry Mayhew in 1841. And while most of the cartoons
published in such magazines consisted only of single images, there were also multi-
panel strips which presented political satire, but also short events or situational
humor including elements of slapstick; the graphic narrative presenting significant
moments of a major event or even a whole life was replaced by gag cartooning
(Harvey 2009, 28). Moreover, some of the artists, e. g. George Cruikshank, Charles
Keene (see Adcock 2012) and William Heath (see Murray 2017, 45), used speech bub-
bles, and thus the works were already very similar to comic strips of the 20th cen-
tury. Later magazines like Judy (1867), Funny Folk (1874) and Scraps (1883) “stuck
to the basic formula pioneered by Punch, but added more slapstick and reduced the
amount of text” (Sabin 1996, 15).
Fig. 2.4: Richard Newton. “Progress of a Scotsman“ (1794). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole
Library, Yale University.
One of the figures to appear in Judy was Ally Sloper, created by Charles H. Ross.
Sloper was a conman and drunkard who permanently thought up new schemes,
often together with his friend Ikey Mo, an anti-Semitic stereotype (Sabin 2009, 178).
He was, however, not only successful on the pages of the magazine but also mo-
mentous for the use of comics characters in advertisement and merchandizing –
ultimately, he developed into a “brand” (Sabin 2009, 179). Kunzle describes Ally
Sloper’s Half-Holiday as “a pioneer in circulation hype and publicity tricks, with
premiums, giveaways, and collateral merchandising of all kinds. Umbrellas, walk-
ing sticks, pipes, toys, sweets, kites, fireworks and especially watches were market-
ed under Ally Sloper’s name, and/or given away with the magazine” (1985a, 42).
In the meantime, what might be called the first graphic novel had been pub-
lished in Germany, Joseph Franz von Goez’s Versuch einer zahlreichen Folge leiden-
schaftlicher Entwürfe für empfindsame Kunst- und Schauspiel-Freunde (1783). It is an
adaptation of an adaptation, i. e. a graphic narrative based on Goez’s own theatrical
production of Gottfried August Bürger’s poem Leonardo und Blandine. It consists
of a long section in which the story and its graphic representation are extensively
46 Dirk Vanderbeke
described, followed by 160 full-page copper engravings. Most of these contain the
lovers in dialogue and, later, Blandine’s lament. The text is broken up into single
sentences and given in captions at the bottom of the pages which present the lovers
in a sequence of embraces and then Blandine, first worried and, after she has been
informed of Leonardo’s death, in the stages of grief until she finally dies. The imag-
es can be regarded as studies of the postures and gestures of love, grief, and desper-
ation – in the ‘announcement’ Goez addresses the difficulties of accurately repre-
senting the physiology, the emotions and passions as expressed in the human face
and body (4). The images are fully reprinted at Andy’s Early Comics Archive (http://
konkykru.com/e.goez.1783.lenardo.und.blandine.1.html). Goez’s work is not partic-
ularly impressive, and it did not have a strong impact on the development of graph-
ic narrative, possibly because the images are rather static and lack dynamic action.
But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one of the most momentous pioneers
of comics, Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), made his appearance.
2 The Two Births of Comics Proper

According to McKinney, two competing groups of comic scholars suggested alterna-
tive definitions of comics in 1996 and thus also different starting points for comics
proper (see McKinney 2017, 53; Stein and Thon 2015, 5). One celebrated Richard Out-
cault’s introduction of speech balloons to The Yellow Kid in 1896 – even though, as
pointed out above, he was preceded by other artist of the 19th century and, if banners
are accepted as proto-speech balloons, also by broadsheets from centuries ago. The
other group saw Töpffer with his lithograph drawings as the father of comics.
Töpffer’s black-and-white, line-drawn stories feature a single strip per page, hand-lettered text
below the images, and no speech balloons. By contrast, American comics of the later period
are often brightly colored, multi-tiered, with speech balloons and machine-type text. With
Töpffer, comics take the form of an artist’s book, whereas those by the American cartoonists
are a mass medium. (McKinney 2017, 53)
Töpffer was a Genevan teacher who originally intended to follow in the footsteps of
his father and become a painter, but turned to writing because of eye troubles. Still,
he began drawing picture narratives for his own and his pupils’ amusement and
only later; when they met with obvious approval and delight not only from his juve-
nile readers, but also from his family, friends, and even Goethe (Kunzle 1985b, 182–
183), he decided to have them printed as “self-published booklets, printed in small
runs” (Baetens and Surdiacourt 2015, 350). He used the fairly new technique of li-
thography, which “enabled him to draw without encumbrance, and to have his light
and unpretentious line drawings reproduced cheaply” (Gombrich 2000, 337). In ad-
dition, he also wrote about his observations and reflections on his art of graphic
narrative in his Essai de Physiognomonie (1845) and also in other essays later collect-
ed as Réflexions et menus-propos d’un peintre genevois (Reflections and Small Talk of

a Genevan Painter, see Kunzle 2007, 113), published posthumously in 1848. Kunzle
describes the first booklet as “a how-to-do-it treatise, an appeal to the amateur who
does not need to know how to draw in order to be able to draw” (2009, 21). In this
essay, Töpffer advocates his own style of line drawing, in “series of sketches where
accuracy counts for little and where, by contrast, the clarity of the idea, quickly,
elementarily expressed, counts for everything” (translated by Figueiredo, n. pag.).
He goes on to argue that
although it is entirely a means of conventional imitation, in the sense that it does not exist in
nature and that it disappears into the complete imitation of an object, the graphic line is never-
theless a method that suffices, moreover, with all the requirements of expression, especially
those of clarity. In this last respect, in particular, that of clarity, the bare simplicity that it
comprises, contributes to rendering a clearer sense and an easier understanding for a common
mindset. (translated by Figueiredo, n. pag.)
He even offers a series of faces and figures rendered in broken lines, suggesting
that “the least practiced eye supplies the gaps in imitation and above all truthful-
ness which turns entirely to the advantage of the artist” (translated by Kunzle 2007,
117). As one of his works, Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1837), was soon translated and
published in a supplement to the illustrated periodical Brother Jonathan in 1842
as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck (reprinted at http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/
vufind/Record/3590807), an influence on the development of American comics can
be assumed.
If Rodolphe Töpffer had occasionally been neglected or even forgotten – he
does not seem to merit an entry among the pioneers in Sabin’s Comics, Comix &
Graphic Novels. A History of Comic Art – this cannot be said of another artist who is
also frequently attributed the title “father of comics,” Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908).
His sequential narratives usually consist of a text, mostly in rhymed verse, inter-
spersed with drawings rendered in wood engraving or zincography. The balance
between images and written text varies. Often, the drawings are accompanied by
couplets, but sometimes they appear as illustrations within longer textual passages;
and then there are also pictorial narratives without any intervening text. In contrast
to Töpffer’s satirical stories about peculiar, but also endearing figures, Busch’s
works appear to be more cynical and, in addition to the occasionally biting satire
of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie, many stories are filled with dark and cruel
humor. They could be seen as a celebration of mischief – and of its punishment,
which is frequently excessive.
The drawings abound in drastic injuries, limbs twisted into corkscrews,
knocked out teeth, or bleeding noses. In what is probably Busch’s best-known story,
Max and Moritz, the boys torture animals, almost drown one of their neighbors, and
stuff gunpowder into the pipe of their teacher, who is severely burnt in the ensuing
explosion. But then the retribution is even more violent, as a miller grinds them
to small pieces which are then eaten by ducks. Similarly, in “Diogenes and the
48 Dirk Vanderbeke
Naughty Boys of Korinth,” the boys play pranks on the stoic philosopher until their
tunics are caught on nails when they roll him around in his barrel and they are
flattened like dough. In “Two Thiefs,” the criminals break into a house, tie up their
victim and hang him on a nail. But later, chased by the police, they fall from a
window and pierce each other’s groins with the points of their umbrellas. Busch
argued that his characters were only ‘contour figures,’ independent of the laws of
gravity, who could take a lot before it would become painful (Busch 1893, see Zan
2014, 49). The argument will resurface later in the defense of violence in American
comics and animated movies, and also, in a very different context, when in Alan
Moore’s and Melinda Gebbie’s controversial Lost Girls one of the connoisseurs of
erotic pictures argues that the victims of the pedophilic incest “are fictions, as old
as the page they appear upon, no less, no more. Fiction and fact: only madmen and
magistrates cannot discriminate between them” (2009, 5). While Busch also aspired
to become a painter and wrote poetry, his graphic narratives made him truly fa-
mous, and they are, in spite of their violent content, still fairly common readings
for German children.
This, finally brings us to the second ‘starting point’ of comics, the strips pub-
lished in American newspapers and supplements. Most famous in this respect is
Richard Felton Outcault’s Yellow Kid of Hogan’s Alley, first published 1895 in New
York World. Marked by a yellow nightshirt, a bald head – probably shaved to rid
him of lice – large ears and buckteeth, the Yellow Kid was, according to his author,
“not an individual but a type” (quoted by Blackbeard 1995, 135), to be encountered
often in the slums of New York. He can be seen as a functional orphan, i. e. it never
becomes quite clear whether he has parents or not; if he does, they do not make an
appearance, and it is quite obvious that the kid has to fend for himself (Vanderbeke
2018, 248).
But while the kid fought his daily battles in the slums of New York, he became
part of the larger war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Pur-
chased in 1883, Pulitzer’s New York World had become the bestselling newspaper of
New York, and when Hearst acquired the New York Journal in 1895, a highly compet-
itive battle between the papers commenced. In January 1896, Hearst lured Morrill
Goddard and his whole editorial staff from Pulitzer’s New York World to his own
New York Journal, in the fall of the same year he brought Outcault to the Journal
and on October 18 the Yellow Kid moved from his previous residence in Hogan’s
Alley to McFadden’s Row of Flats, the comic strip’s new name in the Journal. There
was a little problem, though, because Outcault had merely been able to copyright
the name of the Yellow Kid, but not the figure itself, and so the World kept publish-
ing Hogan’s Alley, now drawn by George Luks. Thus, the Yellow Kid was press-
ganged into the service of two warring masters, bought at a princely price by Hearst,
but simultaneously held hostage by Pulitzer – and he also provided the name for
the “Yellow Journalism” practiced by these papers. The kid from the New York slum
thus turned into a profitable commodity, and his promotional power was not re-
stricted to the newspapers he served. Ostensibly an “anti-establishment celebrity”

(Wood 2017, “Commodifying the Kid”), he was simultaneously used not only as a
“commercial selling point for yellow journals” (Wood 2017), but also for “numerous
unauthorized Yellow Kid products, including songbooks, buttons, chewing gum,
chocolate figurines, cigars and ladies’ fans” (Gordon 1998, 32). (↗16 Richard F. Out-
cault, The Yellow Kid).
3 Early Comic Strips

Newspaper strips were the dominant form of comics until the rise of the mass-pro-
duced comic books in the 1930s. As indicated previously, they were sensationally
successful and reached audiences across the spectrum of American and British soci-
ety – in 1924, the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes pointed out that “of all the lively arts,
the comic strip is the most despised, and with the exception of the movies it is the
most popular” (1924, 213). In Britain, the comic strip emerged in the late Victorian
era with “the growth of the mass-circulation popular press and the transformation
of working-class popular culture” (Chapman 2017, n. pag.), but then the comic strips
also had a strong impact on the rise and fall of papers and magazines, and it “was
the success of their comics and story papers that laid the foundations of the Harms-
worth press empire” (Chapman 2017, n. pag.). Similarly, in America, comic strips
were a decisive factor in the sales of newspapers, journals and magazines. In the
highly competitive attempt to increase their readership, the great metropolitan news-
papers “began publishing extravagant Sunday supplements […] and comic drawings
were in the frontlines of the battlefield” (Harvey 2009, 36).
The strips first appeared in Sunday supplements and later also on weekdays,
with Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff (1907) usually credited as the first successful daily
strip. Daily strips were in black and white and in a single tier, while the Sunday
strips were colored and multi-tiered (Lefèvre 2017, 17). Following The Yellow Kid, a
multitude of strips were created, among them many that are still regarded as artistic
masterpieces: Rudolph Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids, an obvious derivative of Busch’s
Max and Moritz, appeared in 1897 and is still published today, which makes it the
longest running strip in history; Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan (1900) and
Alphonse and Gaston (1901); Richard F. Outcault’s second famed comic character
Buster Brown (1902), who, in contrast to The Yellow Kid, is the son of a prosperous
family, well-dressed but mischievous; Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland
(1905; ↗18 Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland), Lyonel Feininger’s Kin-Der-
Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World, both only published from 1906–1907; and
George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913; ↗17 George Herriman, Krazy Kat) which Gilbert
Seldes hailed as “the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art pro-
duced in America to-day” (1924, 231). In Britain, there were Harry Blyth’s – pseudo-
nym Hal Meredeth – detective Sexton Blake, Charles Hamilton’s – pseudonym Frank
50 Dirk Vanderbeke
Richards – schoolboy Billy Bunter (1908), Charles Folkart’s anthropomorphic mouse

Teddy Tail (1915), and Bertram Lamb’s speaking dog, penguin and rabbit Pip, Squeak
and Wilfred (1919) – the list is necessarily incomplete, and I apologize for the inevi-
table omission of great comics art and artists.
Newspaper strips can be divided into those that offer short gags in single instal-
ments and those that tell continuous tales, occasionally stretched out over months
or even years (Lefèvre 2017, 17–18). Examples of gag-a-day comics from the early
twenthieth century are Happy Hooligan and Krazy Kat, later they were to be joined
by famed strips like R. D. Low’s and Dudley D. Watkins’s Oor Wullie (1936), Charles
M. Schulz’s Peanuts (1950), Reg Smythe’s Andy Capp (1957), Dik Browne’s Hägar the
Horrible (1973), Jim Davis’s Garfield (1978), Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes
(1987), and Bill Amend’s FoxTrot (1988) to name but a very few of the enormous
mass of comic strips. They are often highly repetitive; Seldes, in spite of his favor-
able assessment of comics, wrote that “there is a great deal of monotonous stupidity
in the comic strip, a cheap jocosity, a life-of-the-party humour which is extraordina-
rily dreary” (1924, 213). Gardner describes this narrative form as a loop and a “re-
peated fragment – in a sense the story of the modern industrial city” (2015, 242).
As an additional aspect of this repetitiveness, these strips are usually frozen in
time, i. e. they never really move beyond the historical era of their first creation,
and the protagonists do not age. The Katzenjammer Kids, the kids from Peanuts,
Calvin, or Peter, Paige, and Jason in FoxTrot will never grow up or even move on to
the next grade in school. Charlie Brown has started the same frustrating baseball
season for over sixty years, but, on a more positive note, Andy Capp will never
suffer from the effects of an equally long time of severe alcohol abuse.
Quite a few of these strips employ violence, sometimes quite ‘graphic’ violence.
Chapman writes that “[t]he dominant narrative form of the comic strip was a mix-
ture of farce and physical comedy” (2017, n. pag.), and, as in the other forms of
popular entertainment like the commedia dell’arte, the circus, or many early short
films, this mixture often took the form of slapstick violence. Moreover, the protago-
nists could be dishonest, immoral, greedy, lazy, mischievous, or downright criminal,
i. e. good fun of a kind that would not be tolerated in more genteel forms of culture.
Mutt and Jiggs and Abie the Agent, and Barney Google and Eddie’s Friends have so little respect
for law, order, the rights of property, the sanctity of money, the romance of marriage, and all
the other foundations of American life, that if they were put into fiction the Society for the
Suppression of Everything would hale them incontinently to court and our morals would be
saved again. (Seldes 1924, 224)
The anarchic creation of havoc, albeit usually with some form of retribution that
evokes, or pretends to, a didactic and moralistic message, is indicative of the per-
sistent fascination with the graphic representation of occasionally violent practical
jokes, and, in consequence, this has always been a staple of newspaper strips and
later also of a large segment of comic books aimed at a juvenile audience. Even
Huey, Dewey and Louie, Donald Duck’s nephews who later became paragons of
virtue and knowledge (Gans 1972, 78), started out as incorrigible rascals – when
they were first delivered to their uncle’s door in a Sunday strip on October 17, 1937,
they had just hospitalized their father by exploding a giant fire cracker under his
chair, and they immediately assault Donald with high voltage and water.
The roles of aggressor and victim are often clearly divided – in The Katzenjam-
mer Kids, Hans and Fritz are endlessly playing irresponsible pranks on their mother,
the Captain or the school inspector, followed by a similarly endless routine of corpo-
real punishment; Ignatz Mouse will in eternity hurl bricks at Krazy Kat’s head, who
as persistently mistakes them for tokens of affection; and Lucy will invariably har-
ass Charlie Brown and her brother Linus.
In contrast to the gag-a-day strips, continuity strips tell a story over many instal-
ments. Again, such strips could be divided into those that remain frozen in time,
e. g. Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie (1924), Elzie Crisler Segar’s Popeye, Chester
Brown’s Dick Tracy (1931) or Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant (1937), and those that devel-
op in real or semi-real time like Frank O. King’s Gasoline Alley (1918) or Gary Tru-
deau’s Doonesbury (1970). These stories do not just go on indefinitely but are rather
organised into narrative units with some kind of closure, usually after about 100
strips; they thus already formed lengthy narratives in the early days of comic strips
long before the advent of the “graphic novel” (Lefèvre 2017, 18).
Continuity strips, of course, face the problem that readers need to follow them
closely. This is not always possible, and various strategies are therefore employed
to allow readers to catch up and re-enter the narrative. In consequence, the larger
stories of continuity strips are often organized into several levels of smaller narra-
tive units. Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie may serve as an example. Annie is an
orphan who grows up in an inhospitable orphanage and desperately hopes to be
adopted by a family. The wish is temporarily granted when she is taken up “only
on trial” (Gray 2008, 38) by the cold-hearted and hypocritical Mrs. Warbucks who
merely wants to improve her philanthropic and charitable image, but later repeated-
ly tries get rid of her ward. Such attempts are sooner or later thwarted by Mr. War-
bucks, the richest man in the world, who becomes Annie’s beloved ‘Daddy.’ But
as Mr. Warbucks frequently has to leave for business trips, his wife may succeed
momentarily, Annie is returned to the orphanage, sometimes taken up by other fam-
ilies, or undergoes some adventures on her own, until, eventually, she is re-united
with ‘Daddy’ Warbucks and they can, after some more conflicts and problems that
need to be solved, find rest and comfort in his mansion.
These repetitive cycles are segmented into shorter stories – Annie faces smaller
troubles she can solve – and ultimately each single strip is a minimal event. In the
story “Little Orphan Annie in Cosmic City” (86 daily strips from August 26 to Decem-
ber 31, 1932), in which Daddy Warbucks does not make an appearance, Annie has
run away and comes to a town where she is taken up by a poor family whose house
is mortgaged to the rich villain of the tale. The solution to this major problem of
social inequality and greed ends the tale, which has been divided into smaller units
52 Dirk Vanderbeke
similar to chapters, e. g. Annie’s conflict with a lazy and violent newspaper boy (six
strips, Monday, October 17 to Saturday, October 22). This narrative entity is thus
snugly placed between the larger strips of the Sunday issues, which usually tell a
mini-story of their own. Each of the daily strips is then one event, e. g. on October
20 Annie is attacked by the bully (one panel), wins in hand-to-hand combat (two
panels), and in the final panel is hired in his stead by the owner of the newspaper
who has watched her and considers her “a most resourceful young lady” (Gray 1974,
131).
In Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, repetitive or recursive elements are used to bring
the reader who has missed previous installments up to date. The first panel of daily
strips is often used as an introduction to the respective context in which the episode
takes place. The following panels then form a closed minimal story, often ending in
a punch line. The next daily strip will again begin with an introduction similar to
the last one, followed by a new closed event that nevertheless moves the story for-
ward. Doonesbury thus mixes the continuity strip with multi-strip units that still
follow the gag-a-day format.
The most realistic treatment of time can be found in Frank King’s Gasoline Alley
(1918, reprinted by Drawn and Quarterly as Walt and Skeezix) – it is not the only
comic strip of this kind, but the oldest and best known example. Seldes wrote about
Gasoline Alley and similar strips: “I am convinced that none of our realists in fiction
come so close to the facts of the average man, none of our satirists are so gentle
and so effective” (1924, 218). For the first years, Gasoline Alley was unexceptional,
centring on the protagonist Walter Wallet and his cronies who chiefly discuss cars
and home-brewed hooch while women appear either as nagging wives or erotic
distractions (Heer 2010, 138). But then the publisher wanted also to attract a female
audience and, as Frank King recalled:
Captain Patterson decided there had to be a baby in the strip. I pointed out that, as Walt was
a bachelor, it would take quite a little time to bring this about, what with the courtship, mar-
riage and all. But Captain Patterson said he was in a hurry to get the baby in the picture. He
wanted a baby NOW !!! (qtd. in Rozakis 2002)
And so, on Valentine’s Day 1921, an orphan unexpectedly appears in a basket on

Walt’s doorstep and is adopted without further ado by the bachelor and named
Skeezix – the name being cowboy slang for an orphaned calf. Not only does the
child bridge the gap between male and female spheres and turn the strip into a
more domestic drama (Heer 2010, 139), the characters also enter real time. Similar
to other comic characters, Walter for some time resists the charms of Phyllis, an
attractive woman, but then they marry, have children of their own in addition to
Skeezix, and age together as the children grow up in a realistically changing world.
Skeezix eventually joins the army to fight in World War II, returns to marry his
childhood sweetheart, and takes over Gasoline Alley’s garage which later passes to
his daughter. Phyllis died in 2004, but Walter was still alive and remarkably fit in
the Sunday strip of April 30, 2017.
Between the strict gag-a-day strips and the longer narratives, there are also
strips that show some development within a rather static general situation. In Chick
Young’s Blondie (1930), the eponymous heroine and Dagwood Bumstead married in
1933, a son was born in 1934 and a daughter in 1941. The children grew up for some
time, but since the 1960s have remained teenage look-alikes of their parents who
have not significantly changed in appearance since the 1930s. Similarly, Al Capp’s
Li’l Abner (1934) was frozen at the age of 19 and resisted Daisy Mae’s advances until
they finally married in 1952. Their son, Honest Abe, born in 1953 after an improbably
long pregnancy, eventually grew up to grade school age while his uncle, Li’l Abner’s
brother, continued to be 15 ½ years old.
Moreover, characters moved freely between the media – as early as the 1920s,
strips had been produced about famous actors of slapstick comedy like Harold Lloyd,
Fatty Arbuckle, and Laurel and Hardy (Sabin, 28), and genre heroes were to follow
in the 1930s. Philip Francis Nowlan’s Buck Rogers (1928) made his debut in the pulp
magazine Amazing Stories and Walter B. Gibson’s, pseudonym Maxwell Grant, The
Shadow (1930) was a radio success before they appeared in comic strips. But, as
Duncan and Smith point out: “Although comics have often adapted already known
and popular genres for their use, they have still placed an imprint on them, influ-
enced by the unique conventions of graphic story telling” (2009, 197–198). Moreover,
the direction could also be reversed: Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon (1934), a deriva-
tive and competitor of Buck Rogers, was first a hero in the comic strips and from
there moved on to the radio, film, and, much later, TV.
Comic strips or ‘funnies’ are syndicated, and some of them appear in hundreds
of newspapers daily. As such, they have been an indispensable element of newspa-
per publication and promise to remain so in the future. The topics range from the
hilarious life in prehistory, (Johnny Hart’s B.C.) to the modern work sphere (Scott
Adams’ Dilbert), from almost realistic scenarios to the completely absurd. Of course,
they have also entered the digital sphere – most strips have their websites which are
refreshed with the latest instalment daily. Moreover, some new strips are published
exclusively in digital form and form larger narratives as continuity strips. Thus, the
distinction between the comic strip as part of the newspaper medium and the comic
book as part of the magazine medium is blurred (Duncan and Smith 2009, 5).
4 From Comic Strips to Comic Books

The first comic books that appeared in the early twentieth century were reprints of
newspaper strips (Sabin 1996, 24), and it took some time until readers were willing
to pay for original stories which they expected to be included for free every morning
with the newspapers (Sabin 1996, 35). The first comic books, then, were ‘comical
comics,’ no longer primarily directed at a working-class audience but at children
54 Dirk Vanderbeke
who were able to spend their own pocket money and thus became a commercially
interesting target group.
Comics became a private reading space for children, a place where they could negotiate adult
power and authority, and where their juvenile fantasies could be played out: a world of
naughtiness, make believe violence and what primary school teachers used to call “messy
play.” (Sabin 1996, 28)
In England, DC Thomson’s publication of The Dandy (1937) and The Beano (1938)
marked an important change – instead of the previously dominant captions they
used speech balloons, which “led to a much less static approach to rendering, and
opened the way for more fluent joke-telling” (Sabin 1996, 28). Moreover, they showed
some awareness of the social conditions in Dundee, the location of their publication,
during the Great Depression of the 1930s. After a long and successful career, The
Dandy ceased publication in 2012; The Beano, however, is still with us. Its success
rested on figures created in the early 1950s: the British Dennis the Menace (David
Law 1951) who is basically a hooligan and not to be confused with Hank Ketcham’s
rather mild and endearing American version (also 1951), Roger the Dodger (Ken Reid
1953), Millie the Minx (Leo Baxendale 1953), or The Bash Street Kids (Leo Baxendale
1954), all of which are still harassing their parents, teachers or neighbors on a weekly
basis. The most important narrative element was mischief, already a proven winner
ever since Busch’s Max and Moritz, The Katzenjammer Kids, and innumerable other
juvenile and adult troublemakers.
In America, an important change came with the introduction of a new book for-
mat instead of the previous tabloid-sized publications. The format resembled the
later comic book standard. Devised and promoted in 1933 by Maxwell Charles Gaines,
the future publisher of Educational Comics, the first products in the new format were
highly successful advertisement premiums before Gaines tried to actually sell collec-
tions of reprinted comic strips in three issues of Famous Funnies (Duncan and Smith
2009, 29). New Comics (1935), then, used the new format to publish original stories
which did not yet differ substantially from the newspaper strips but opened up a
new market for the publication and distribution of comics.
Comic books developed a specific style and standardized elements. There were
usually several stories, some of which were serialized in order to encourage readers
to buy the next issue. The stories involved different characters, and new characters
could be introduced and tested for audience response. There were pages with letters
to the editors – usually in praise of some story or development – and often also
letters to the readers. Quite a lot of pages were devoted to advertisement aimed at
the specific audience – these would often include attempts to lure the juvenile read-
ers with the promise of ‘valuable’ prizes into joining organizations like the ‘Junior
Sales Club of America’ and to use them to sell seasonal or all-purpose cards to
friends and neighbors. Other famous advertisement offered mail order items like x-
ray glasses that would supposedly allow you to see through clothes, packets with
hundreds of toy soldiers for only $ 1.98 plus shipping, or courses that would allow
you to learn karate or to play an instrument in only one week (for reproductions of
such ads, see Demarais).
While comical comics have always been an important segment of the market,
alternative topics and genres were soon established. They reflected the popular gen-
res in other media like the radio, the movies, TV and, more recently, video games,
but also their respective cultural environment – e. g. sports comics, of course, fo-
cused on the favorite national sports, and in Britain, Roy of the Rovers (Frank S. Pep-
per 1954) was a famous soccer hero for several decades. Science fiction, crime fic-
tion, horror, war fiction, romance, and the Western were prominent genres in pulp
fiction and on the screen, and have therefore always been staples of comic book
publishing. Western comics, for example, were published since the 1930s and be-
came particularly successful after World War II when the Western also became a
kind of ‘master genre’ in American cinema. Apart from creating their own stories
about iconic figures of the West like Wild Bill Hickock and Billy the Kid or newly
invented cowboys and gunslingers, the comics occasionally adapted Western mov-
ies and also told tales based on famous actors like Roy Rogers or Tom Mix. Comics
historian Michelle Nolan calculated that by 1959 at least 3478 Western comics had
been published (1998, 23). The genre was certainly not restricted to the American
market, and by now the two most famous series may well be Lucky Luke (1946)
created by the Belgian Maurice De Bevere’s (Morris), and Blueberry (1963) by the
Belgian Jean-Michel Charlier’s and the French Jean Giraud (Mœbius).
Comic books with didactical contents also had a noticeable impact, even if they
lacked, of course, the fascination and entertainment value of other genres. In 1941,
Albert Lewis Kanter created Classic Comics – later Classics Illustrated – in an at-
tempt to introduce great literature like The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and Oliver Twist to an adolescent readership
via comic book adaptations. The length of these comic books was fixed first at 64
and later at 56 or even 48 pages. After the publication of 169 titles it ended in 1971
(Blank 2015, 37) but was revived several times in later years (↗6 Adaptations).
The development of one comic book company, originally devoted chiefly to di-
dactical comics, may serve to bring this history of the comics to one of its most
crucial moments, the publication of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent in
1954 and the Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency on April 21–
22 and June 4 of the same year (↗7 Politics). It is necessary to look at this momen-
tous caesura in comics history before I move on to superhero comics, as their devel-
opment was very much influenced by the hearings and the subsequent establish-
ment of the Comics Code.
56 Dirk Vanderbeke
5 Comics Under Attack

EC was founded by Max Gaines (see above) as Educational Comics and started out
“specializing in decidedly uncommercial titles like Picture Stories from the Bible,
Picture Stories from American History, and Animal Fables” (Wright 2001, 135). After
Gaines’ death in 1947, his son William took charge of the ailing company, and soon a
reorientation took place. EC became Entertaining Comics and now turned to horror,
science fiction, crime, and war as subjects for the frequently truly graphic tales.
New titles were, for example, Tales from the Crypt, Shock SuspenStories, Weird Sci-
ence, Frontier Combat, but also MAD. But while the comics were available for all
ages and had a large audience among children, they did not address topics usually
considered suitable for younger readers but rather “mature themes like murder,
lust, psychosis, and political intrigue” (Wright 2001, 136). The stories offered “tangi-
ble evidence of a youth culture slipping out of parental control” (Wright 2001, 149).
Comic books had been criticized for some time, inter alia by Sterling North,
literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, who in 1940 wrote an article “A National
Disgrace,” in which he attacked comics for their poor content and urged parents to
provide their children with literature of higher quality (Nyberg 2017, 25). In 1948,
the psychiatrist Dr Fredric Wertham started to publish articles on the allegedly detri-
mental influence of comic books on the mental health of juveniles, and EC publica-
tions were among the primary targets. The accusations were similar to those that
have accompanied the introduction of new literary genres and new media through-
out history, i. e. the prophecy of moral decline and possibly an increase of violence,
a loss of literary or artistic quality, the decay of literacy, etc.
Wertham has frequently been cast in the role of a vilifier and his research as
“junk science” (History of Comics Censorship Part 1, see also the entry on Wertham
on Wikipedia), but it may well be conceded that many of the stories and graphic
illustrations in EC comic books, e. g. images of strangulation, ripped off limbs drip-
ping blood, a human head carved like a Halloween pumpkin, or a heart freshly cut
from a human body, were perhaps not suitable for a younger audience. In his testi-
mony during the Senate Hearings, however, Wertham addressed not only tales with
horrifying imagery but also Superman comics as being “particularly injurious to the
ethical development of children” (Wertham 1954); and while some of the accusa-
tions may have been justified, others were willful misconstructions of the evidence.
One story that came under attack was “The Whipping,” published in Gaines’
Shock SuspenStories #14 (April-May 1954, reprinted in Nyberg, 1998, 66–72), which
Wertham accused of fostering racism because the derogatory term ‘spick’ for people
of Hispanic origin was repeatedly used in the comic. The story is about a girl falling
in love with a Mexican boy who has recently moved into the neighborhood. When
the father finds out about this romantic engagement, he stirs up a mob, claiming
that the boy tried to rape the girl. However, when they attempt to lynch the boy
they accidentally beat the girl to death, and the father has to realize that he has
killed his own daughter. Quite obviously, the suggestion that the story is racist is a
malicious misconstruction, and in his testimony Gaines argued that “[t]his is one of
a series of stories designed to show the evils of race prejudice and mob violence, in
this case against Mexican Catholics” (qtd. in Nyberg 1998, 64). As Nyberg points
out, there is little actual violence shown in the comic – certainly not in comparison
with other EC comics – and thus the assault was possibly directed against the criti-
cal depiction of a white middle-class American father and “the suggestion that the
evil was perpetrated by a figure of authority whom children have been taught to
respect, and that the innocent are made to pay for the actions of the flawed protago-
nist” (1998, 73).
During his testimony, William Gaines was repeatedly asked whether he consid-
ered particular gruesome images and magazine covers in good taste which he unwa-
veringly confirmed, but one eight-page story with less horrifying illustrations turned
out to be particularly relevant for the Hearings: “The Orphan” also published in
Shock SuspenStories No. 14 (script Al Feldstein, pencils and ink Jack Kamen, reprint-
ed in Barker 1984, 98–105). It is a comic about a 10-year-old girl in a dysfunctional
family – the father is an alcoholic who cruelly beats his daughter, the mother never
wanted to have children and plans to elope with her lover, leaving her daughter
behind. On the night of their departure, the father arrives home early from a drink-
ing spree. He is shot, and the mother and her lover are convicted of murder and
electrocuted. The girl is adopted by her loving aunt and lives happily ever after, but
in the last panel we learn that she actually killed her father and framed her mother.
In this story of murder and perjury, crime is not punished but leads to success and
triumph, and while Gaines tried to claim literary merit by arguing that the story had
a “O. Henry ending” (Gaines 1954), such a conclusion was obviously inacceptable
to Wertham and the jurors at the Senate Hearings.
To prevent repercussions, loss of reputation and possibly even governmental
intervention, the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) was founded to
replace the earlier Association of Comics Magazine Publishers, and it was decided
to implement a code, akin to the Hays Code that had controlled and certified films
since the 1930s. The Comics Code was self-regulatory and enforced by the newly
created Comics Code Authority. Comic books that met the CCA’s requirements car-
ried a stamp of approval. The code demanded not only that crime should not pay,
that good shall triumph over evil, that horror or terror should not be part of maga-
zine titles, that all characters should be dressed in accordance to social norms and
that female physique should not be exaggerated, but also that “[r]espect for parents,
the moral code, and for honourable behaviour shall be fostered” (comic book code
of 1954). One of the consequences of this development was the decline of EC. Wil-
liam Gaines refused to participate in the CCA, and EC Comics went bankrupt. Only
MAD Magazine survived under Gaines’s editorship and became one of the most im-
portant inspirations for the creators of underground comix. More importantly, the
establishment and self-regulations of the Comics Code explicitly defined comics as a
58 Dirk Vanderbeke
juvenile genre and prohibited the inclusion of mature content. It would take several
decades until mainstream comics dismissed these restrictions and produced comics
intended for adult audiences (see below).
Similar anti-comics campaigns were also launched in other countries like Brit-
ain and Germany. In Britain, nationalist and anti-American sentiments may well
have contributed to the dismissal of ‘American style’ comics, first introduced by
American G.I.s during the war, but later imported or, in consequence of restrictions
on import, reprinted (Barker 1984, 8). Genres that particularly came under attack
were horror comics like Tales from the Crypt, i. e. publications that were also the
focus of the American controversy. In Britain, not only organizations for child pro-
tection took part in these campaigns, but also the Communist Party. In Arena: The
USA Threat to British Culture (1951), Sam Aaronovitch suggested that comics were a
part of an American hegemonic agenda:
The exports of films and comics, for instance, produced by great industries, no longer becomes
simply a matter of increasing the profits of those who produce them; they become in addition
valuable means of converting other people to the ideas of American big business, creating the
illusions of American world leadership. (qtd. in Barker 1984, 23)
In 1955, parliament passed “A Bill to prevent the dissemination of certain pictorial

publications harmful to children and young persons” (reprinted in Barker 1984, 16).
However, in contrast to the extended list of condemned matter in the Comics Code,
only three features were actually forbidden: “(a) the commission of crimes; or (b)
acts of violence and cruelty; or (c) incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature” (Bark-
er 1984, 16). In Germany, a law against publications that might be harmful to chil-
dren (Gesetz über die Verbreitung jugendgefährdender Schriften) was passed in 1953.
One year later, a council was created to enforce the restrictions (Bundesprüfstelle für
jugendgefährdende Schriften), and in 1955, the publishers founded a self-regulatory
institution (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle für Serienbilder) in analogy to the American
Comics Code Authority (Spiegel 1996, 41–46).
These attempts to control comics and censor unwanted material soon faced
their first challenges. Over the course of the 1960s, traditional values and normativi-
ty came under attack in all fields of popular culture, and comics were no exception.
With the emergence of underground comix, new, more mature topics were explored,
and non-conformist audiences addressed. These works thus “served as a reminder
that there was nothing inherent in the form of comics that restricted them to telling
children’s stories” (Nyberg 2017, 28). But the need for a Comics Code was also chal-
lenged by mainstream publishers, as they regularly tested the limits of the Code
(Nyberg 2017, 29). New forms of direct distribution which bypassed newsstands,
drug stores, and other common locations selling comics offered ways to circumvent
restrictions, and the rise of comic book stores catering to “readers and collectors for
whom comic books were more than a casual interest” (Nyberg 2017, 29) also reduced
the previous power of the CCA to enforce its norms by withholding the stamp of
approval. More and more publishers left the CMAA until only Marvel, DC, and Ar-
chie remained in the mid-1990s. The CMAA further declined when Marvel, in 2001,
and DC, in 2010, created their own rating systems to announce the suitability of
their products for their various audiences, and it finally came to an end entirely
when DC and one day later Archie announced the discontinuation of their participa-
tion (Nyberg 2017, 30–31).
6 Superheroes Throughout Their Ages

Masked detectives and vigilantes had been around for quite a while before they
made it into the comics, e. g. Baroness Emma Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
and Zorro (in Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano, 1919). In both texts,
some typical elements of the later superhero are already present, most importantly
the secret identity: The Scarlet Pimpernel’s alter ego, Sir Percy Blakeney, is a rich
fop, and so is Don Diego Vega, a. k. a. Zorro. And with Marcel Allain’s and Pierre
Souvestre’s Fantomas (1911), even a masked supervillain had already made his ap-
pearance. Other characters from literature or the movies also embodied some as-
pects of the superhero figure, e. g. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, Buck
Rogers, and The Shadow. In the comics, figures like Lee Falk’s Mandrake the Magi-
cian (1943) and The Phantom (1936), or Will Eisner’s and S.M. ‘Jerry’ Iger’s Sheena,
Queen of the Jungle (1937), had already appeared. But the proverbial birth of the
superhero took place in Action Comics #1, cover date June 1938, the issue in which
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced Superman.
Superman has since been treated as the paradigmatic superhero. Indeed, Rich-
ard Reynolds based his seven defining elements on this figure in his book Superhe-
roes. A Modern Mythology:
1. The hero is marked out from society. He often reaches maturity without having a relation-
ship with his parents.
2. At least some of the superheroes are deities.
3. The hero’s devotion to justice overrides even his devotion to the law.
4. The extraordinary nature of the superhero will be contrasted with the ordinariness of his
surroundings.
5. Likewise, the extraordinary nature of the hero will be contrasted with the mundane nature
of his alter-ego. Certain taboos will govern the actions of these alter-egos.
6. Although ultimately above the law, superheroes can be capable of considerable patriotism
and moral loyalty to the state, though not necessarily to the letter of its laws.
7. The stories are mythical. (Reynolds 1992, 16)
Many of these characteristics are similar to those of mythical heroes, and the super-
hero can be regarded as a descendant or modern revival of stereotypical heroes that
have peopled adventure narratives since the earliest written records and probably
60 Dirk Vanderbeke
also in pre-historic oral story-telling. However, two major aspects of the predeces-
sors are absent from the superhero comic:
1) The adventures of the mythical hero find a conclusion and closure when his
quest ends and he finally returns to become the ruler of his home country – occa-
sionally a conquered country. The theoretically infinite serialization of superhero
comics does not allow for closure, and the hero therefore seems to be stuck in an
endless loop of adventures, each of which promises a solution to problems ranging
from petty theft to murder, serial killings and sociopathic massacres and even to
intentionally devised global catastrophes and cosmic cataclysm, while the very
promise of a new adventure next week undermines any finality and ultimate success
(↗5 Seriality). In consequence, Umberto Eco described Superman as a closed form:
Superman happens to live in an imaginary universe in which, as opposed to ours, causal

chains are not open (A provokes B, B provokes C, C provokes D and so on ad infinitum), but
closed (A provokes B, B provokes C, C provokes D and D provokes A), and it no longer makes
sense to talk about temporal progression on the basis of which we usually describe the hap-
penings of the macrocosm. (Eco 1979, 115–116)
2) The mythical hero enters sexual relationships – sometimes serially – and his
return and kingship usually includes a marriage. In contrast, the typical superhero
cannot form any mature sexual partnership as that would endanger his secret iden-
tity, and his alter ego is usually shy and inhibited and thus invites ridicule and
contempt rather than romantic attachment. It is not unusual that the superhero is
passionately loved by the same woman who despises him in his secret identity –
Lois Lane in Superman may serve as a suitable example. The superhero thus offers
a perfect projection sphere for the stereotypical mediocre and sexually inhibited
reader who dreams of hidden powers and charisma, but also of being admired by
desirable women without the necessity to act and initiate erotic interaction. The
superhero comic is thus a late confirmation of Leslie Fiedler’s claim that in 19th cen-
tury American literature the typical male tried to avoid “the confrontation of a man
and a woman which leads to the fall, to sex, marriage, and responsibility” (Fiedler
1966, 26). He then argued that “The mythic America is boyhood” (Fiedler 1966, 144);
the prototypical American hero leaves society and the threat of the civilizing domes-
tic woman for a predominantly male in-group and the perpetual brawls between
peers. This assessment is certainly valid for superhero comics, even if, to attract a
larger audience, a few female superheroes were accepted into the Parthenon.
Superman came to Earth as a baby, sent by his parents when “a distant planet
was destroyed by old age” (Siegel and Shuster 1938, 1). His spacecraft touches down
in Kansas, and he is raised by a loving childless farm couple, Jonathan and Martha
Kent – some elements of the story of origin were only developed in the course of
the series, a fairly common process in superhero comics where new characters are
often tested in single stories and only later, when they turn out to be successful,
acquire a past. Kansas at the time of the Great Depression was probably not an ideal
place for an immigrant baby, but in the comic it appears as the heartland of Ameri-
ca and Superman’s new hometown Smallville as the epitome of American values

and virtues. Social inequality and the struggles of the population in the 1930s were,
however, explicitly addressed for some time in Superman’s adventures. Sabin
writes:
In his earliest outings, he had been a kind of super social worker, in the comic’s words, a
‘Champion of the Oppressed,’ reflecting the liberal idealism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Drunks, wife-batterers and gamblers received his attention, while in one famous tale a mine
owner who obliges miners to labour in dangerous conditions is compelled by Superman to
experience those conditions himself. (1996, 61)
But while in “the eyes and mind and heart of Superman […] the problems of a penni-
less tramp or other troubled soul was important” (Jerry Siegel qtd. in Tye 2012, 46),
economic success also meant stronger control, and the editors demanded that Siegel
should “cut out the guns and knives and cut back on social crusading” (Tye 2012,
49).
Like other superheroes who were created in his wake, most prominently Captain
America, Superman was employed for propaganda against the Axis powers once
the US entered World War II. But facing the dilemma that with his almost unlimited
powers he could have ended the war in a blink of his eye, stories about direct in-
volvement were problematic. In consequence, Superman’s enlistment was prevent-
ed with a trick, and while the covers of the comic books presented him as the patri-
otic hero who participated actively in the war effort, the stories showed him at the
home front, fighting spies and saboteurs rather than the enemy on the front in Eu-
rope or the Pacific (Tye 2012, 60). Nevertheless, the War changed the image of Su-
perman and paved the way from the socially inclined ‘strong man’ to the iconic
American hero. The question, why superheroes are not able to interfere with real
evens and disasters like war and terror, resurfaced after 9/11, e. g. in The Amazing
Spider-Man’s Black Issue (#2.36); the answer offered is that the attacks, conceived
by madmen, were beyond sane human imagination and thus wholly unexpected
(↗7 Politics).
Histories of superhero comics tend to proceed directly from Superman to Bat-
man, but I would like to digress, if only briefly, to a different kind of superhero who
might be seen as a parodic response to Superman. In 1940, Will Eisner created The
Spirit (1940–1952 and irregularly until the 1980s), a highly inventive series that de-
fies the usually rather repetitive superhero genre with ever-changing formats and a
multitude of graphic and narrative experiments. The Spirit is Danny Colt Jr., who is
believed to be dead and thus enjoys complete anonymity. He does not have any
superpowers, and his signature trench coat makes it seem as if Clark Kent had taken
over Superman’s job as a crime fighter. Of course, he cannot fly, but often takes the
subway to reach his destinations in run down neighborhoods. Moreover, the usually
blue sky of Superman comics is replaced by realistic weather – quite often bad
weather – and the Spirit is frequently drenched by the so-called ‘Eisnershpritz,’ a
“thick, persistent drizzle, much heavier than normal water, that bounces off what-
62 Dirk Vanderbeke
ever it hits […], reflecting the doom in bad men’s hearts” (Wolk 2007, 166). Far from
being a shining hero, the Spirit is regularly knocked down and bruised. He seems
to step, or even fall, into every puddle, and he seems to be helpless in the face of
his opponents or tempting women rather than confident or dominant. All in all, The
Spirit is in many ways an inversion of Superman: an all-too-human hero in a world
that resembles the messy Bronx of Eisner’s childhood rather than glamorous Me-
tropolis.
Less than one year after the first Superman story, the second major superhero,
Bob Kane’s and Bill Finger’s Batman (originally The Bat-man), made his appearance
in Detective Comics #27 (cover date May 1939). In many ways, he is a counter figure
to the man of steel. Most importantly, he does not have any superpowers, as his
physical strength and athletic abilities are purely the result of training. Moreover,
his origin story – he witnessed the murder of his parents – had a far more decisive
impact on his personality. Batman is severely traumatized, and the comic never
allows the reader to forget this – the story how the wealthy Wayne family walks
home from a movie, is held up by a petty criminal who wants to steal Martha’s
necklace and, facing the father’s resistance, kills Thomas and Martha in front of the
boy, has been told time and again with ever new details and nuances. As a conse-
quence of his traumatic experience, the young Bruce Wayne makes a crucial deci-
sion: “I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the
rest of my life warring on all criminals” (Various 2004, 17). He studies to become a
master scientist, trains his body to athletic perfection and then, on an evening when
he contemplates his future disguise, a huge bat flies into the open window and
settles the question: “‘It’s an omen. I shall become a Bat!’ And thus is born this
weird figure of the dark. This avenger of evil, ‘The Batman’” (Various 2004, 17). In
consequence, Batman is far more troubled than the usually cheerful Superman who
was too small to consciously experience the loss of his parents and later grew up in
a happy family, and the comics are atmospherically far darker.
The psychological depth that comes with the trauma, the various ways of cop-
ing with the loss, and possibly also a “sense of guilt and failure towards his parents”
(Reynolds 1992, 67), allow for ever new interpretations of this figure, and Batman
has probably been the most malleable character in the superhero universe. In the
course of the last decades – and in particular after the revival of superhero comics
in the 1980s (more about this later) – he has been depicted not only as the heroic
defender of law and order, but also as the alter ego of his most important sociopath-
ic enemy, the Joker (Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns, and Alan Moore, The
Killing Joke), as a troubled soul trembling on the edge of madness (Grant Morrison,
Arkham Asylum), or, in Tim Burton’s movie Batman Returns, as a violent vigilante,
“deliberately and quite sadistically burning a criminal alive, running over countless
henchmen with his Batmobile” (Hassler-Forest 2015, 105). The four-volume collec-
tion Batman Black and White, to which a multitude of comics artists contributed
eight-page stories, shows the immense variety of possible reincarnations of this fig-
ure. But in the course of the highly creative revisions, the figure has lost its contours
and turned into an empty or free metaphor – if Batman can be anything, he has
lost his substance and ultimately means nothing (↗15 Superheroes).
As Action Comics was also published by Detective Comics (later DC), the two
most important superheroes were in the hand of one company that dominated the
field until the early 1960s. But the immense success of these first superheroes also
initiated a cascade of similar figures. Among the most important were Namur the
Submariner (1939), Flash, Hawkman, Captain Marvel, Catwoman and the Green
Lantern (all 1940), Captain America, Plastic Man and Wonder Woman (1941); others
were not quite as successful, and then there were also superheroes like Doll Man
(1939), Dr. Hormone (1940), or The Mad Hatter (1946), and supervillains like The
Dude (1942), Egg Fu (1965) or Dr. Cesspoole (1966) who failed miserably, lovingly
collected in Jon Morris’ The League of Regrettable Superheroes and The Legion of
Regrettable Supervillains.
As mentioned above, the United States’ entry into World War II forced the su-
perhero genre to adapt to the new situation and also to new constructions of good
and evil, and the heroes and heroines joined the war effort while the comic books
became part of the national propaganda machine. In addition, comic book soldiers
could achieve a status similar to superheroes, most famously Captain America and
Nick Fury (↗15 Superheroes), but also figures like Tex Thompson, a wealthy traveler
who first appeared together with Superman in Action Comics #1. In the war, he took
up special missions, donned a superhero costume and became Mr. America or the
Americommando, joined by his side-kick Bob Daley who became Fat Man and
fought crime as well as Nazis with a broom and a squirt gun. American soldiers
were an important audience for these publications and made up a considerable part
of the readership.
After the war, public interest shifted to crime comics, Western comics, and hor-
ror comics. In the late 1940s, the superhero genre went into decline, and only Super-
man, Batman and Wonder Woman were continuously published in the following
years (Reynolds 1992, 9). This hiatus lasted until the end of the 1950s, when, in the
wake of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, the 1954 Senate Subcommittee
Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency, and the establishment of the Comics Code, the
climate changed again, horror and true crime comics lost their flavour, and superhe-
roes were granted a new lease on life. Some old DC characters like Flash (1956) and
the Green Lantern (1959) were revived, and new ones like Supergirl (1959) created
(Reynolds, 10). More momentous, however, was the rise of Marvel Comics to domi-
nance with the publication of The Fantastic Four (1961), The Incredible Hulk, The
Amazing Spider-Man, The Mighty Thor (1962), The Invincible Iron Man, The X-Men,
The Avengers, (1963), and Daredevil (1964). All these heroes were created by Stan
Lee, who wrote the stories, in cooperation with various artists, most importantly
Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and Bill Everett. In addition to the new creations,
some superheroes from Marvel’s previous publications in the 1940s were resurrect-
64 Dirk Vanderbeke
ed or revised. The Human Torch, previously an android, returned as the brother of

Susan Storm and member of the Fantastic Four, and, of course, Captain America
resurfaced as a new member of the Avengers in 1964.
In the late 1950s and in the 1960s, individual heroes were to some extent re-
placed by groups – previously solitary heroes temporarily united to become the
Justice League of America or the Avengers, other heroes were firmly integrated into
teams like the Fantastic Four or the X-Men. Similarly, supervillains were also in-
creasingly organized as groups. Within such collectives, the individual becomes a
specialized part of the organic whole, an element that contributes one or several
specific features to form a larger integrated unit. Group coherence and collective
identity are, in such series, persistent topics that need to be negotiated in frequent
internal conflicts which are, of course, resolved in the battle with the common ene-
my. The same phenomenon can also be detected in other contemporary popular
genres like the Western and adventure or war movies (e. g. The Magnificent Seven
and The Dirty Dozen). For the Western, Will Wright has argued that this transition
reflects the changing role of the individual in American economy and in particular
the rise of corporate management. Of course, the argument can also be made for
other popular genres:
The professional heroes become an elite intentionally and enjoy its rewards. There is no demo-
cratic bias in their actions. Further they become an elite because of their power. They are
specialized men, each with a technical skill, and they win the fight […] which society cannot
do. (1975, 179)
As commercial products, comics necessarily undergo transformations to meet the

demands and expectations of successive audiences, and while comic strips in news-
papers show a tendency to adhere to rather fixed patterns, comic books, which do
not come for free but have to be bought, show more distinctive changes over time.
Thus superhero comics, the most successful comics genre for the last 70 years, have
developed considerably, and some of the recent incarnations of the heroes would
not have been conceivable when they were first introduced. In general, the histories
of genres are often divided into stages, and Thomas Schatz writes in Hollywood
Genres:
[A] form passes through an experimental stage, during which its conventions are isolated and
established, a classic stage, in which the conventions reach their “equilibrium” and are mutu-
ally understood by artist and audience, an age of refinement, during which certain formal and
stylistic details embellish the form, and finally a baroque (or ‘mannerist’ or ‘self-reflexive’)
stage, when the form and its embellishments are accented to the point where they themselves
become the “substance” or “content” of the work. (1981, 37–38; quoted for example in Coogan
2006, 194; or Ditschke and Anhut 2009, 163)
These ages are commonly named after the biblical eschatology of the Book of Daniel,
i. e. a Golden Age is followed by Silver, Bronze, Iron, and possibly Clay. In the histo-
riography of superhero comics, the classification into such ages has become quite
common, but while Coogan tries to determine the moments of change very precisely
and even pin them down to single comic book issues (2006, 193–194), Ditschke and
Anhut argue that the transitions are more fluid with only one clearly fixed date: the
birth of Superman in Action Comics #1 as the beginning of the Golden Age (2009,
162).
According to this classification, the Golden Age lasted from 1938 to the late
1950s, the revival of the genre and the rise of Marvel Comics would then usher in
the Silver Age, which would last until the beginning of the 1970s when, in the
Bronze Age, existing certainties were cast into doubt. If the superhero comics of the
Silver Age had been predominantly affirmative, celebrating American normativity
and the politics of the Cold War era, the social and political upheavals that had
marked the 1960s now – belatedly – left their marks on the pages of superhero
comics and cast doubt on previously cherished certainties. Social issues like drug
abuse, racism, and poverty are discussed, and the question arises whether it ought
to be the objective of the superhero merely to re-establish an equilibrium or whether
the problems he battles might not rather be systemic (Ditschke and Anhut 2009,
168).
The next major change came in the course of the 1980s, and in the Iron Age
which is occasionally also called the Dark Age, the concept of the superhero as such
came under attack. This era coincided with several developments in comics which
had an important impact on the superhero genre. American comics distribution
shifted dramatically, as the formats and venues in which comics were sold found
new ways of targeting existing readers and opening up new markets. From the early
1980s, the rise of specialized comic book stores gave the major publishers more
control over sales and distribution (Wright 2001, 260). As a form of direct distribu-
tion, these specialized shops had immediate access to comics fans’ preferences and
desires, would purchase all the major titles released by a publisher rather than just
a small selection, and stockpiled older issues instead of returning them unsold to
the distributor. This development sparked an industrial shift, as superhero comics
were increasingly conceived and written specifically for an audience of well-in-
formed and dedicated fans (Wright 2001, 261).
The industry’s stronger focus on comics fans spurred on a renewed interest in
complex narratives and moral ambiguity, as the perception of the comic book reader
shifted from a juvenile audience to post-adolescent fans/collectors. The industry
thus responded to developments that had begun with the rise of underground comix
in the 1960s (more about those later). In the early 1980s, superhero comics therefore
catered to more mature audiences and thus also addressed novel topics like sexuali-
ty or psychological trauma in comparatively complex stories. In its newfound focus
on comics collectors, the industry developed publishing formats that catered to
emergent fan practices while at the same time making comic books accessible to a
larger, more mainstream audience. Two specific formats contributed particularly to
American comic books’ cultural development and industrial shape in the early
66 Dirk Vanderbeke
1980s: trade paperbacks were collections of up to six issues republished together

(without the original issues’ advertising) in “deluxe” editions, while limited series
provided a format in which a single larger narrative could be serialized across a
number of individual issues. Both formats offered ways not only of generating ex-
citement among existing comics fans, but also gave publishers access to previously
undeveloped markets: unlike regular comics issues, trade paperbacks found pur-
chase via mainstream book stores, while limited series (which were often printed
on more expensive paper and sold at a premium price) gave authors new opportuni-
ties to tell more ambitious stories that existed outside of ongoing comics series’
continuity.
These developments also led prominent publishers like DC and Marvel to fore-
ground individual authors who had developed strong reputations among fans, and
whose work clearly lent itself to crossover success with mainstream readers. These
authors explored complex and adult-oriented themes in their work and focused in-
creasingly on the more prestigious (and more profitable) limited series publications
that appealed both to fans and to wider audiences. And as limited series were swift-
ly repackaged in trade paperback publications, the term graphic novel was promptly
adopted by the industry to communicate the industry’s creative ambitions, and to
make it more acceptable to booksellers for whom “comic books” remained firmly
grounded in childish topics and junk culture.
Moreover, in the course of the so-called British invasion, American publishers
hired some of the most innovative British authors and artists, e. g. Alan Moore
(↗24 Alan Moore, From Hell), Neil Gaiman (↗25 Neil Gaiman, The Sandman), and
Grant Morrison (↗30 Grant Morrison, Flex Mentallo), and they, together with Frank
Miller and possibly also Mark Gruenwald, initiated an overhaul of the superhero
genre. Mainstream American comics now became decidedly darker, and the super-
heroes themselves came under scrutiny in comic books that were “more meditations
on the superhero than entertaining superhero-genre stories” (Coogan 2006, 218).
In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986–1987) in particular, “the su-
perhero is no longer presented as the solution to a problem but its source or symp-
tom” (Dirk and Marie Vanderbeke 2015, 202). The anti-democratic aspects that had
always been part and parcel of the genre are now addressed directly when, in a
dystopian world, some of the vigilantes actively support a corrupt government, in-
dulge in excessive violence with impunity, and/or are clinically insane (↗8 World-
building). In the Squadron Supreme series authored by Mark Gruenwald (with vary-
ing collaborators, 1985–1986), as well as in Alan Moore’s last issue of Miracleman
(#16, with John Totleben, 1989), the superheroes take up the challenge formulated
by Umberto Eco in the context of Superman: “From a man who could produce work
and wealth in astronomic dimensions in a few seconds, one could expect the most
bewildering political, economic, and technological upheavals in the world” (1979,
22). Creating a utopia by force, the superheroes’ good intentions are, however,
blighted, and the questions of free will and democratic legitimization overshadow
any benevolent political and social objectives.
In Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (with Klaus Janson, Lynn Varley and
John Costanza), Batman is presented as obsessed, possibly even the Joker’s alter
ego; moreover, he also takes up aspects of the other famous bat of popular culture,
Dracula (Vanderbeke 1994) – most importantly he is haunted by the memory of a
giant bat with a long-fanged fiery mouth which he encountered when as a boy he
discovered the Bat Cave. As he will not toe any lines, he is increasingly blamed to
be part or even the cause of the problems he strives to solve; and when the Joker
commits suicide, he is charged with murder. He finally has to face Superman who
is sent by the government to break his resistance, and in the final battle he fakes
his death – perhaps, like the once and future king, to return again in times of need.
Neil Gaiman, in contrast, deconstructs the traditional superhero in his 10-vol-
ume series The Sandman (with a multitude of collaborators that cannot be listed
here, 1989–1996) by radically altering the traditional superhero character created in
1974 by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon (↗25 Neil Gaiman, The Sandman). The Sandman
became the mythical Dream or Morpheus, ruler of dreams and imagination and one
of the seven godlike Endless – his siblings are Death, Destiny, Desire, Delirium,
Despair, and Destruction. Gaiman created his fantastic universe on the basis of
myths and legends from a multitude of cultures, carefully interwoven with real his-
torical events and processes, to pursue diverse plots and subplots.
While Grant Morrison is not quite as famed as the previously mentioned authors
for his role in rejuvenating superhero comics – or rather for opening it up to adult
audiences –, his works may well include some of the most extreme revisions of the
genre, and are certainly among the most bizarre. In 1989, he not only published
the widely acclaimed Arkham Asylum. A Serious House on Serious Earth (with Dave
McKean) but also took over Doom Patrol, which had originated in 1963. He wrote
this series from vol. 2 #19 to #63 with various collaborators, altered some of the
existing heroes, and introduced a set of new ones, some of whom suffer from dis-
abilities or psychological disorders. Cliff Steele, one of the old characters, is a
whole-body amputee whose brain has been inserted into a robotic body; Crazy Jane
was abused and raped as a child and suffers from multiple personality disorder with
each of her 64 personalities having a different superpower, and Rebis is a biracial
and queer hermaphrodite in whom three people, among them a black woman and
a white man, are merged. This is still topped by Danny the Street – the name is a
joke on the female impersonator Danny La Rue – who is indeed a male transvestite,
but chiefly a piece of urban landscape, a sentient road or thoroughfare, who can
insert himself seamlessly into any city. These and many other heroes fight against
an equally weird set of supervillains like the Brotherhood of Dada who, in spite of
their own strangeness, frequently try to enforce order and a normative perspective
on reality while the Doom Patrol defends chaos, marginality, and multiple co-exist-
ing realities, some of which are hallucinatory, psychedelic and/or drug-induced.
Apart from their radical revisions of superhero comics, these graphic novels are
marked by a narrative, artistic and psychological complexity and by an intertextual
68 Dirk Vanderbeke
and intermedial density that requires reading skills previously not readily associat-
ed with comics audiences. In Watchmen, the reader has to pay extremely close at-
tention to every detail, as important information, intertextual and intermedial allu-
sions, or new developments of subplots may be hidden in the background of the
panels. Similarly, the complex stories in The Sandman require not only careful de-
coding but also an excellent memory. In consequence, the reader will have to weave
forwards and backwards through texts, which constantly require us to re-check and
re-interpret earlier passages, and frequently such a return will also reveal previously
unrecognized information that sends the reader on new quests in these highly inter-
active constructions of the narratives.
In the wake of Moore’s, Gruenwald’s, Miller’s, Morrison’s, and Gaiman’s revi-
sions of the late 1980s and 1990s which challenged the previous certainties and
conventions, superhero comics were opened up to new approaches. Coogan de-
scribes the subsequent and, as of now, last age of superhero comics as a Renais-
sance in which new series “take fresh and innovative looks at familiar characters”
(Coogan 2006, 219). It is, however, also possible to read this as a kind of ‘anything
goes’-approach to superheroes, e. g. in the example Coogan offers, Peter Bagge’s
The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man, “Peter Parker uses his powers to grow rich, and
the book is filled with the hilarious petty bickering and selfishness of Bagge’s work
in his own comics such as Hate” (2006, 219). The process, however, started much
earlier, with re-inventions of particular heroes, e. g. Flash in 1956, or elaborate addi-
tions to timelines and the characters’ biographies. It picked up speed in the Iron
and Dark Ages, and the revisions occasionally became disruptive or bordered on
the grotesque. The evolution of the Summers Family from X-Men may serve as an
example (the following information is chiefly gathered from marvel.com/universe).
In 1963, Scott Summers, a. k. a. Cyclops, was introduced as one of the first mem-
bers of the team; originally, he appeared to be an only child who had witnessed his
parents’ death in a plane crash. In 1969, a previously unmentioned brother, Alex,
a. k. a. Havok, turned up, and the origin story was re-written: With only one para-
chute on the plane, the parents had forced Scott and his brother Alex to use it
together and thus sacrificed themselves. The boys were later separated, and Alex
grew up in the orphanage of the evil geneticist Dr. Sinister. In 1977, it was revealed
that the plane had actually been destroyed by the alien Shi’ar, that the Summers
parents had not died but been teleported to the starship, and that the father, Chris-
topher Summers, was actually a superhero himself, known as Corsair. He was im-
prisoned, while his wife, Katherine Anne, was forced to join the alien Emperor’s
harem. When Corsair escaped and interrupted the Emperor’s attempt to rape his
wife, she was stabbed to death before his eyes. In 2006, it turned out that Katherine
Anne had been pregnant when she was killed and that the Shi’ar harvested the
baby from her dead body. Thus, another younger brother of Scott’s and Alex’s made
his appearance, Gabriel Summers, a. k. a. Vulcan. He ultimately became a supervil-
lain. Quite obviously, the origin story was not only expanded, but with the gradual
decline of the Comics Code, it also became increasingly drastic, indicating a shift in
the intended audience.
The constant additions to and elaborations of superhero timelines and biogra-
phies also led to a situation in which the diverse and contradictory stories could no
longer be reasonably contained within one coherent mega-narrative, and thus the
superhero universe was re-organized into multiverses with parallel worlds, thereby
radically expanding the realms of narrative possibility. Parallel worlds had already
been occasionally suggested in earlier ages, e. g. when the Flash was revised and
relaunched in 1956, and the process accelerated in the Silver and Bronze Ages.
Moreover, some superhero comics were situated in multiverses, possibly based on
Hugh Everett’s and John Wheeler’s “many world”-interpretation of quantum phys-
ics. In Bryan Talbot’s The Adventures of Luther Arkwright (1978–1989), the protago-
nist can actually move between multiple universes. In the mid-1980s, an attempt
was made to tidy up the DC multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths, (1985–1986, creat-
ed by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez), thereby re-writing the branching continui-
ties into a unified history. Coogan sees this as “[p]erhaps the greatest example of
reinvigoration in the Iron Age“ (2006, 215). But the centrifugal forces could not real-
ly be contained, new spinoffs and alternate histories were published, until DC im-
plemented a reboot with the New 52 in 2011, at which point all series were re-
launched with new first issues and revised continuities. Marvel superhero comics
are also now located in a multiverse of alternate histories and realities – a list can be
found at http://www.marvunapp.com/list/appalte.htm. Among the multiple worlds,
Earth 616 is usually considered to be the continuum where most stories are situated.
7 Underground Comix and Alternative Comics

The comics discussed in this chapter up to this point are usually considered ‘main-
stream,’ i. e. they were part of the publishing and entertainment industries, distrib-
uted as supplements in newspapers or magazines, or through the channels provided
within the frame of commercial publication and sold at news stands, drug stores,
or, in case of direct distribution, in specialized comic book stores. They were, at
times, also restricted by the Comics Code – or at least by the decisions of the pub-
lishers who may have pushed some norms of good taste and tested the limits of the
code, but chiefly strove for commercial success and thus tried to prevent moral
outrage, bans, or boycotts. For a look at comics which were created and published/
distributed outside these traditional channels, it is necessary to jump back in time.
In the course of the 1960s, the political and social status quo, but also moral
conventions, traditional restrictions on sexuality, and normative behavior were
challenged in various movements, ranging from the Civil Rights and Anti-War Move-
ments to Flower Power and the Hippies – but also to the motorcycle gangs or, later,
Charles Manson’s Family. Music, art, experimental film, and popular culture in gen-
70 Dirk Vanderbeke
eral were of particular importance for these movements and for the artistic expres-
sions that were integral elements of the cultural communication. In the form of
underground comix, a new kind of comics also joined the anti-establishmentarian
forces – the X, as in ‘X-rated,’ indicating the graphic sexuality and violence that
were incompatible with the Comics Code and mainstream publications.
Underground comix did not simply appear out of thin air: they had their trans-
gressive predecessors in student magazines, in EC’s pre-code publications and in
MAD, which had been reformatted to escape the demands of the CCA. But they also
had an important ancestor in the so-called ‘Tijuana Bibles,’ “clandestinely produced
and distributed small booklets that chronicled the explicit sexual adventures of
America’s beloved comic-strip characters, celebrities, and folk heroes” (Spiegelman
2004, 6; see also Cook 2017, 34). Moreover, the authors picked up elements and
motifs from early comic strips that had not yet been streamlined by the comics
industry and the CCA and which had offered anarchic humor, slapstick violence,
and absurd and occasionally transgressive imagery. Robert Crumb later said: “I
didn’t invent anything; it’s all there in the culture; it’s not a big mystery. I just
combine my personal experience with classic cartoon stereotypes” (Crumb and Pop-
laski 2005, 260). This was interwoven with a political agenda that was generally
left-wing and occasionally radical, as well as featuring autobiographical elements
(↗7 Politics, ↗9 Life Writing). Arguably, underground comix not only dismissed the
restrictions of the Comics Code but also picked up a tradition that had declined
even before the rise of modern comics when serious narratives were replaced by
humour and entertainment. Eventually, this return to more mature matters also of-
fered new possibilities for syndicated mainstream comics, and in 1973 David Kunzle
wrote:
The contemporary American strip has, in a sense, reverted to source; being only partially com-
ic, its appeal has widened, and in ideological content is has resumed somewhat its original
role of providing people with moral and political propaganda. (1973, 1)
A symbolic date for the birth of underground comix could be February 25, 1968,
when Robert Crumb and his first wife Dana sold copies of Zap Comix #1 out of a
baby carriage at Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco (Mazur and Danner 2014, 23). It
carried the “Fair warning: For adult intellectuals only” and a parody of the Comics
Code stamp, according to which it was “Approved by the ghost writers in the sky”
(Mazur and Danner 2014, 22). Crumb was soon joined by authors like Gilbert Shel-
ton, Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, and Rick Griffin, but also, and this
was new in the male-dominated comics community, several women, e. g. Trina Rob-
bins, Aline Kominsky (after 1978 Kominsky-Crumb), Joyce Farmer, Lyn Chevely, and
Melinda Gebbie, who introduced a feminist agenda to the previously chiefly mascu-
line content of comics (↗10 Gender).
In contrast to the division of labor that was practiced in the comics industry,
underground comix were often auteur works, written and drawn – and, in particular
in the early days, also printed, stapled, and sold – by the creator. This meant more
liberties and independence for the highly transgressive material which openly de-
picted and celebrated hitherto taboo forms of sexuality, drug use, and violence,
often in the form of parodies of mainstream comics. Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat
introduced sex and drugs to animal comics, Gilbert Shelton’s Wonder Wart Hog is
an amoral, violent and absurd version of Superman, Spain Rodriguez’s Trashman is
dope-smoking superhero with a crude and radical political agenda, and Kim Deitch
produced “cute cartoons with tormented souls” (Mazur and Danner 2014, 30).
Underground comix, however, also sometimes indulged in transgression for
transgression’s sake. The cheerful dismissal of good taste and the delight in humor
and imagery that would shock genteel audiences had some problematic consequen-
ces, and the radical politics were marred by racist and misogynist jokes. Not only
racial stereotypes, but also rape and other forms of violence towards women, inces-
tuous and paedophile acts, demeaning images of women, and male sexual domina-
tion were present on the pages without any recognizable critical reflection. Trina
Robbins wrote that “[w]omen who thought panels of rape, torture and murder were
not funny were often told by men that they simply had no sense of humor” (2010,
30), and they might even be expelled from the comix community. Moreover, sexist
and racist motifs and images were repeatedly defended with the claim that they
rebelled against political restrictions and censorship, or that their inclusion was
based on an honest exploration of the author’s psychological hang-ups and neuro-
ses which found expression in sexual and violent fantasies.
In response, Robbins edited the all-women anthology It Aint Me, Babe in 1971
and initiated the formation of the Women’s Comix Collective in 1972, which pub-
lished Wimmen’s Comix from 1972–1992. Other all-women anthologies followed,
most notably Tits & Clits (1972–1987) by Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevely, and Twisted
Sisters (1976–1995) by Aline Kominsky and Diane Noomin (Cook 2017, 37). These
publications shared a feminist agenda that was not always in tune with other femi-
nist movements, as some of the stories countered male sexual fantasies with domi-
nant, but also highly sexualized heroines. Significantly, Wet Satin, an anthology of
women’s sexual fantasies, edited in 1976 by Robbins, was rejected by the printer
who argued that the equally graphic male sex book Bizarre Sex he had previously
printed was satire while the book by women was serious and thus objectionable as
pornography (Robbins 1999, 97; see also Ruddock 2013, 2). The exploration of wom-
en’s sexuality in female graphic narratives frequently addressed lesbianism, e. g. in
coming-out stories, and thus opened the world of comix to LGBTQ issues (Cook 2017,
38).
One of the most crucial aspects of many underground comix was, as already
mentioned, the inclusion of autobiographical material. It certainly was a central
aspect of women’s comix, but also in the works of many other authors. Harvey Pe-
kar, for example, described his emphatically unspectacular everyday life in Cleve-
land, Ohio over several decades in American Splendor (with various illustrators,
72 Dirk Vanderbeke
1976–2008); Justin Green addressed his strict Catholic upbringing and his subse-
quent compulsive neuroses in Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972); and
Art Spiegelman in Prisoner of the Hell Planet: A Case Study (1972, later incorporated
in Maus), depicted in painful detail his mother’s suicide and his own inability to
cope with his loss. Thus, comix moved into the realm of ‘Life Writing,’ albeit without
necessarily leaving any of its highly imaginative imagery behind. The specific style
and graphic potential of comics and comix now served as creative ways to visually
represent mental and emotional states, including borderline experiences (↗9 Life
Writing).
Underground comix flourished from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, when they
began to decline for a number of reasons. The countercultural movement petered
out, and some of the originally innovative and shocking concerns like drug use or
explicit sexual imagery lost their flavor and turned stale. Moreover, mainstream
comics publishers increasingly appropriated the labels ‘underground’ or ‘comix’ for
their publications (Cook 2017, 39). Legally, underground comix came under pressure
when the US Supreme Court in the case of Miller vs. California ruled for the criterion
“whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would
find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest” (Miller vs.
California). Thus, local community standards could be applied to decide whether a
work was to be considered offensive, and comic book shops felt the danger of prose-
cution (Mazur and Danner 2014, 40). Over the following years, a transition took
place, and underground comix developed into what is now called independent or
alternative comics.
An important contribution to this transition was Arcade, the Comics Revue (sev-
en issues 1975–1976), founded by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith and anthologizing
work by some of the underground veterans together with new talent. On the fringe
of Arcade, Spiegelman met Françoise Mouly – they married in 1977 – and she be-
came one of the most important figures for alternative comics when, in 1978, she
founded Raw Books and Graphics (Cook 2017, 39) and, together with her husband,
edited Raw (1980–1991). Raw featured not only US comics but also works from Euro-
pean, South American, African and Japanese artists; it is, however, most famed
for serializing Spiegelman’s Maus, the single work that may well have been most
momentous in the establishment of comics as a more widely accepted art form
(↗21 Art Spiegelman, Maus).
8 Enter the Graphic Novel

Simultaneous to the developments of comics magazines and anthologies in the
1970s, Will Eisner published A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories (1978),
the work that popularized the term ‘graphic novel’ even though it actually consists
of four short stories rather than one continuous narrative (↗20 Will Eisner, A Con-
tract with God). Comics of considerable length aimed at an adult audience had cer-
tainly existed before, e. g. It Rhymes With Lust (Arnold Drake, Leslie Waller, Matt
Barker and Ray Osrin, 1950), a noir story about an ambitious and manipulative
femme fatale who tries to take over a steel town. But in the 1970s, in the aftermath
of the underground comix movement with its turn toward a more sophisticated
readership and in the context of the canon wars that challenged the traditional
distinction between high and low culture, extended graphic narratives with com-
plex plots and psychological depth found their way into the halls of bourgeois socie-
ty. The youngsters who had experienced the youth rebellion and relished the anar-
chic comics of the 1960s came of age and entered the scholarly and cultural
institutions, and they brought comics, now ennobled as ‘graphic novels,’ to the
review journals and the literary supplements, to art museums and to academic re-
search.
Similar to the serialized novels of the 19th century, many graphic novels were
still published first as series of monthly comic books or as serialized contributions
to anthologies and later collected into single or even several volumes. But in con-
trast to earlier works, they follow far longer narrative arcs with sometimes substan-
tial subplots – one of the most extreme cases is Dave Sim’s highly controversial
Cerebus, which was published from 1977–2004 in 300 issues and ran over 6,000
pages (↗18 Dave Sim, Cerebus). It is, of course, utterly impossible to survey even
the most prominent authors of graphic novels; some are discussed in the close read-
ings in this volume, and information about them and their artistic environment can
be found in their respective chapters.
Alternative or independent comics have remained a significant segment of com-
ics publication, and various anthologies present works in progress that may be use-
ful as introductions to the diversity of the field. The Best American Comics, for exam-
ple, is an annual anthology published since 2006 with varying editors who are
among the most prominent comics artists of the past decades (Harvey Pekar, Chris
Ware, Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, Neil Gaiman, Alison Bechdel, Françoise Mouly,
Scott McCloud, Jim Smith and Roz Chast – Jonathan Letham in 2015 was the only
editor not closely associated with innovative graphic narrative). Comics with auto-
biographical content have gained rather than lost significance: moreover, another
genre closely related to ‘life writing’ has made its appearance: comics journalism.
9 Non-Fiction Comics and Comics Journalism

Non-fiction comics have a long history, e. g. in graphic manuals and safety instruc-
tions, but also in histories or biographies in comics form, in science comics (↗12 Sci-
ence Comics), and in didactical comics in general. In journalism, comics, and more
often cartoons and caricatures, were originally used as humorous commentary and
thus in sharp contrast to the articles which strove for, or pretended to, serious con-
74 Dirk Vanderbeke
cerns, factual veracity and objectivity. Of course, cartoonists were often important
assets for journals and magazines, and their work could be decisive for the success
of the respective publications. But they were chiefly satirical and thus clearly distin-
guished from journalism proper. In the course of the 1960s and in the context of
the postmodern crisis of representation, the aspiration to journalistic neutrality and
an accurate depiction of reality came under increasing scrutiny, and alternative
forms of journalism, in particular the so-called New Journalism, experimented with
personal experience, subjective perception, and also literary forms to emphasize the
inadequacy of traditional journalistic truth claims. John Hollowell suggested that
“the events reported daily by newspapers and magazines […] often strained our
imaginations to the point of disbelief. Increasingly, everyday ‘reality’ became more
fantastic than the fictional visions of even our best novelists” (1977, 3; see also Van-
derbeke 2010, 3–5). Simultaneously, underground comix merged political issues
with highly imaginative, frequently distorted, and occasionally drug-induced vi-
sions of subjective realities, thus marking a first step towards a new kind of journal-
ism that would bridge the gap between fiction and non-fiction in comics.
In 1970, Gary Trudeau started his daily strip Doonesbury about a group of stu-
dents with diverse lifestyles and political views who live together in a commune,
and has since followed the ongoing tales of their private and professional lives.
Political satire is an important element, and one of characters, ‘Uncle Duke,’ is
based on an icon of new journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, possibly indicating a
similarity in approach and agenda. In addition, the strip features segments about
real events, often in the form of satirical journalism or reportage, but also in the
depiction of real political figures giving interviews and speeches or taking part in
committee meetings. Following an old tradition of political cartooning – Louis Phil-
ippe I was often depicted as, or even replaced by, a pear – some of the real politi-
cians are symbolized by objects, e. g. Bill Clinton by a waffle or George W. Bush by
a Stetson hat and later a Roman helmet. The comic strip boasts a large readership
and has occasionally become the focus of political controversy. According to Kent
Worcester it “is notable for not only straddling the boundary between comic strips
and editorial cartooning, but also crisscrossing the line between political humor,
political advocacy, and actual journalism” (2017, 139).
A more radical approach that combined factual research with bizarre and
shocking imagery was taken by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz in their contribu-
tion to Brought to Light: A Graphic Docudrama (1988). The book consists of two
parts, both of which are chiefly based on research by the Christic Institute and come
with elaborate bibliographies of their sources. While Flashpoint – The La Penca
Bombing (Joyce Brabner, Thomas Yates, Sam Parsons) is a fairly straightforward
graphic narrative about the bomb attack on 30, 1984 during a press conference con-
ducted by the Contra leader Edén Pastora, Shadowplay – The Secret Team dismisses
any pretension to realist reconstruction. It is the history of the CIA as told in a run-
down bar by a retired agent in the form of a drunken anthropomorphized American
Eagle who takes pride in all the illegal activities and atrocities of the agency and
describes them in gory detail. The body counts are calculated as swimming pools
of blood – the average body contains approximately a gallon of blood and a big
swimming pool 20,000 gallons, thus 20,000 victims count as one swimming pool.
Kristian Williams writes about Shadowplay:
[T]he facts are there, and the nightmarish surrealism seems to fit the subject matter. Indeed,
the reader is forced to question the propriety of the standard journalistic conceits – the calm
recitation of facts, the carefully hedged allegations, the measured tone. A drunken eagle swim-
ming in blood may actually come closer to the point. (2005)
Shadowplay’s radical rejection of the realist mode of traditional documentary inau-

gurated a form of political comics journalism that led to works like Spiegelman’s In
the Shadow of No Towers (2004) and Joe Sacco’s Bumf Vol I: I Buggered the Kaiser
(2014), works in which politics are presented as more grotesque than words can tell
and pictures can show and are thus often rendered in fantastic and absurd imagery.
Bumf is, however, a kind of digression from Sacco’s usual work, and he is far better
known for his serious comics journalism – a genre that he pioneered with Palestine
(1994) in which he described his experiences when he travelled in Israel and the
Palestinian territories in 1991 and 1992. The comics format lent itself in particular to
the narrative visualization of the experiences he was told about by his Palestinian
hosts in dialogue, but also to emphasize his specific role as an observer-participant.
Sacco is very much present in the panels of his journalistic comics which show him
as deeply affected – and sometimes also bewildered or terrified – by his encounters
in Israel and Palestine, or later in Gorazde and Sarajevo, and particularly by the
misery and squalor and the stories of violence, exile and oppression.
Since then, comics journalism has developed into a highly successful genre
which “makes use of subjective perspectives, visual metaphorization, fictionaliza-
tion and artistic distortions of reality in its quest for an essential truth that cannot
always be successfully transmitted by a neutral and seemingly detached form”
(Vanderbeke 2010, 79–80). Important works include Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang: A
Journey in North Korea (2004), documenting the author’s two-month visit to the
North Korean capital, in which photography is highly restricted; Josh Neufeld’s AD:
New Orleans After the Deluge (2009), which follows the life of some real-life resi-
dents in the days before, during and after Hurricane Katrina (↗13 DocuComics in
the Classroom); or, in a slightly different direction, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adap-
tation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón (2006).
10 Praise and Acclaim

With the changing perspective on graphic narrative came cultural recognition, and
prestigious awards for comics were established. The Shazam Award was given from
76 Dirk Vanderbeke
1970–1975 by the Academy of Comic Book Arts for outstanding achievement in the
comic book field, the Kirby Award was presented from 1985–1987, and the Eisner
and Harvey Awards since 1988. But comic books were also successful outside the
confines of their own field. Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale – My Father
Bleeds History received the Pulitzer Award in 1992 and The Complete Maus received
the American Book Award in the same year. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watch-
men won the Hugo in 1988, it was later included in Time’s list of the 100 best English
language novels since 1923. Neil Gaiman’s and Charles Vess’s “A Midsummer’s Night
Dream” (The Sandman #19) received the World Fantasy Award in 1991, Joe Sacco’s
Palestine the American Book Award in 1996 and his Footnotes in Gaza the Ridenhour
Book Prize in 2010, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest Kid on Earth the
Guardian First Book Award in 2001, to name only the most prestigious examples.
In addition, Comics Studies have become an integral part of various academic fields
from literary studies to media studies and art history, and scholarly conferences and
publications have multiplied over the last decades.
11 Bibliography
11.1 Works Cited

Adcock, John. Victorian Speech Bubbles. March 25, 2012. http://john-adcock.blogspot.de/2012/
03/victorian-speech-bubbles.html. (12 May 2017).
Arnold, Andrew D. “Never Too Late. (Interview with Will Eisner).” Time, Sept. 19, 2003.
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,488263,00.html. (1 July 2017).
Baetens, Jan and Steven Surdiacourt. “European Graphic Narratives: Toward a Cultural and
Mediological History.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Contributions to the Theory and
History of Graphic Novels. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin and Boston: De
Gruyter, 2015. 347–362.
Barker, Martin. A Haunt of Fears. The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign.
London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984.
Bartual Moreno, Roberto. “The Origins of Graphic Narrative in Popular Culture. A Formal Analysis
of the Narrative Strip from 1550–1700.” On the Edge of the Panel. Essays on Comics
Criticism. Eds. Julio Cañero and Esther Claudio. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2015. 22–40.
Blackbeard, Bill. The Yellow Kid. A Centennial Celebration of the Kid who Started Comics.
Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995.
Blank, Juliane. Literaturadaptationen im Comic. Ein Modulares Analysemodell. Berlin: Christian A.
Bachmann Verlag, 2015.
Boyd, Brian. “On the Origin of Comics: New York Double-Take.” The Evolutionary Review: Art,
Science, Culture 1 (2010): 97–111.
Busch, Wilhelm. Von mir über mich. [1893]. http://www.wilhelm-busch-seiten.de/werke/
autobio.html. (15 May 2007).
Chapman, James. British Comics. A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Partly
reprinted without pagination at Google Books (6 July 2017).
Cheesman, Tom. The Shocking Ballad Picture Show. German Popular Literature and Cultural
History. Oxford and Providence: Berg Publishers, 1994.
Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women. Live Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010.
Coogan, Peter. Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. Austin TX: Monkey Brain Books, 2006.
Comic Book Code of 1954. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Comic_book_code_of_1954. (18 June
2017).
Cook, Roy T. “Underground and Alternative Comics.” The Routledge Companion to Comics. Eds.
Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. 34–
43.
Crumb, Robert and Peter Poplaski. The Robert Crumb Handbook. London: MQ Publications, 2005.
Demarais, Kirk. Mail-Order Mysteries. Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads. San Rafael, CA: Insight
Editions, 2011.
D’Huy, Julien. “A Cosmic Hunt in the Berber Sky: A Phylogenetic Reconstruction of Palaeolithic
Mythology.” Les Cahiers de AARS 16 (2013): 93–106.
D’Huy, Julien. “Polyphemus: a Palaeolithic Tale?” The Retrospective Methods Network Newsletter,
Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki 2015. 43–
64.
Ditschke, Stephan and Anjin Anhut. “Menschliches, Übermenschliches. Zur narrativen Struktur
von Superheldencomics.” Comics. Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen
Mediums. Eds. Stephan Ditschke, Katerina Kroucheva and Daniel Stein. Bielefeld: transcipt,
2009. 131–178.
Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics. History, Form, and Culture. New York
and London: continuum, 2009.
Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” The Role of the Reader. Explorations in the Semiotics of
Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. 107–124.
Fiedler, Leslie. Life and Death in the American Novel, revised edition. New York: Stein and Day,
1966.
Figueiredo, Sergio C. “The Rhetorical Invention of Comics: A Selection of Rodolphe Töpffer’s Late
Reflections on Composing Image-Text Narratives.” ImageTexT 8.4 (2016)
http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v8_4/figueiredo/. (15 May 2017).
Gaines, William. Testimony of William M. Gaines. (The 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into
Juvenile Delinquency). http://www.thecomicbooks.com/gaines.html. (June 18, 2017).
Gans, Grobian. Die Ducks. Psychogramm einer Sippe. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1972.
Gardner, Jared. “A History of the Narrative Comic Strip.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels.
Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Novels. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël
Thon. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 242–253.
Gatrell, V.A.C. The Hanging Tree. Execution and the English People 1770–1868. Oxford: Oxford
Goez, Johann Friedrich von. Versuch einer zahlreichen Folge leidenschaftlicher Entwürfe für
empfindsame Kunst- und Schauspiel-Freunde. Augsburg, 1783.
Gombrich, Ernst H. Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation [1956].
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945. Washington and London:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. 32.
Gray, Harold. Little Orphan Annie and Little Orphan Annie in Cosmic City. New York: Dover
Publications, 1974.
Gray, Harold. The Complete Little Orphan Annie, vol. 1. Will Tomorrow Ever Come – Daily Comic
Strips 1924–1927. Ed. Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW Publishing, 2008.
78 Dirk Vanderbeke
Grove, Laurence. “Emblems with Speech Bubbles.” Visual Words and Verbal Pictures: Essays in
Honour of Michael Bath. Eds. Alison M. Saunders and Peter Davidson. Glasgow: Dept. of
French, University of Glasgow, 2005. 89–103.
Harvey, Robert C. “How Comics Came to Be.” A Comics Studies Reader. Eds. Jeet Heer and Kent
Worcester. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009. 25–45.
Hassler-Forest, Dan. “Superheroes and the Law – Batman, Superman, and the ‘big Other.’” Zizek
and the Law. Ed. Laurent de Sutter. London: Routledge, 2015. 101–117.
Haug, Walter. Die Wahrheit der Fiktion, Studien zur weltlichen und geistlichen Literatur des
Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003.
Heer, Jeet. “Drawn from Life.” Best American Comics Criticism. Ed. Ben Schwartz. Seattle:
Fantagraphics Books, 2010. 133–143.
History of Comics Censorship Part 1. http://cbldf.org/resources/history-of-comics-censorship/
history-of-comics-censorship-part-1/. (18 June 2017).
Hollowell, John. Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Non-Fiction Novel. Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1977.
Horn, Maurice (ed.). The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons. Now York and London, Chelsea House
Publishers, 1980.
Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993.
Inge, M. Thomas. “Origins of Early Comics and Proto-Comics.” The Routledge Companion to
Comics. Eds. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin. New York and London:
Routledge, 2017. 9–15.
Kunzle, David. History of the Comic Strip vol 1, The Early Comic Strip. Narrative Strips and Picture
Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450–1825. Berkeley at al.: University of
Kunzle, David. “The First Ally Sloper: The Earliest Popular Cartoon Character as a Satire on the
Victorian Work Ethic.” Oxford Art Journal 8.1, Caricature (1985a): 40–48.
Kunzle, David. “Goethe and Caricature: From Hogarth to Töpffer. Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985b): 164–188.
Kunzle, David. Father of the Comic Strip. Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 2007.
Lefèvre, Pascal. “Newspaper Strips.” The Routledge Companion to Comics. Eds. Frank Bramlett,
Roy Cook, and Aaron Meskin. New York: Routledge, 2017. 16–24.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. “Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthschen Kupferstiche” [1794–
1799]. Schriften und Briefe, Bd. III. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1994. 657–1060.
Mazur, Dan and Alexander Danner. Comics. A Global History, 1968 to the Present. London: Thames
and Hudson, 2014.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennials, 1994.
McKinney, Mark, “French and Belgian Comics.” The Routledge Companion to Comics. Eds. Frank
Bramlett, Roy Cook, and Aaron Meskin. New York: Routledge, 2017. 53–61.
Miller vs. California. United States Supreme Court. https://web.utk.edu/~scheb/decisions/
Miller.htm. (1 July 2017).
Moore, Alan and Melinda Gebbie. Lost Girls. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2009.
Morris, Jon. The League of Regrettable Superheroes. Philadelphia, Quirk Books, 2015.
Morris, Jon. The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains. Philadelphia, Quirk Books, 2016.
Murray, Chris. “British Comics.” The Routledge Companion to Comics. Eds. Frank Bramlett, Roy
Cook, and Aaron Meskin. New York: Routledge, 2017. 43–52.
Nolan, Michelle. “Collecting the Western Genre.” Comic Book Marketplace 2.61 (July 1998): 23–
26.
Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval. The History of the Comics Code. Jackson. University Press of
Mississippi, 1998.
Nyberg, Amy Kiste. “The Comics Code.” The Routledge Companion to Comics. Eds. Frank Bramlett,
Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. 25–33.
Petersen, Robert S. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels. A History of Graphic Narratives. Santa
Barbara, CA, et. al.: Praeger, 2011.
Petev, Todor T. Spiritual Structures in the Netherlandish Blockbook Canticum Canticorum, ca 1465.
https://liternet.bg/publish17/t_t_petev/spiritual_en.htm. (7 August 2018).
Reynolds, Richard. Superheroes, A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1992.
Robbins, Trina. From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of [Women’s] Comics from Teens to Zines. San
Francisco, California: Chronicle Books, 1999.
Robbins, Trina. “Wimmen’s Studies.” Revised version of an essay previously published in
Underground Classic. The Transformation of Comics into Comix. Eds. James Danky and Denis
Kitchen. New York: Abrams, 2009. 31–33. Comix Grrrls. May 25, 2010. http://comixgrrrlz.pl/
2010/05/25/wimmen%E2 %80 %99s-studies/. (1 July 2017).
Rozakis, Bob. “A Stroll Down Gasoline Alley?” Comics Bulletin. June 24, 2002.
http://comicsbulletin.com/a-stroll-down-gasoline-alley/. (1 May 2017).
Ruddock, Jackie. “Depicting ordinary and nonstandard intimacies in public. Sex, romance and
humour in women’s porn comics.” Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 5, 2013.
https://intensitiescultmedia.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/depicting-ordinary-and-
nonstandard-intimacies-in-public-sex-romance-and-humour-in-women_s-porn-comics-jackie-
ruddock.pdf. (1 July 2017).
Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels. A History of Comic Art. London and New York:
Phaidon Press, 1996.
Sabin, Roger. “Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?” A Comics Studies Reader. Eds. Jeet Heer
and Kent Worcester. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009. 177–189.
Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. New York et. al.: Harper, 1924.
Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres. Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1981.
Shepard, Leslie. The History of Street Literature. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1973.
Siegel, Jerry and Joe Shuster. “Superman.” Action Comics #1, DC Comics: New York, June 1938, 1–
13.
Spiegel, Joseph. “Zensur und Comics in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1949–1970).” Comic:
Zensiert. Band 1. Eds. Achim Schnurrer, Joseph Spiegel, Roland Senn and Dieter Hiebing.
Sonneberg: Edition Kunst der Comics GmbH, 1996. 33–68.
Spiegelman, Art. „Those Dirty Little Comics.” Ed. Bob Adelman. Tijuana Bibles. Art and Wit in
America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930–1950s. New York et. al.: Simon & Schuster, 2004. 5–10.
Stein, Daniel and Jan-Noël Thon. “Introduction: From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels.” From Comic
Strips to Graphic Novels. Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Novels. Eds.
Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 1–23.
Tye, Larry. Superman. The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero. New York:
Random House, 2012.
Vanderbeke, Dirk. “Von Menschen und Fledermäusen: Francis Ford Coppolas Dracula und Frank
Millers Batman.” Neue Rundschau 105.2 (1994): 33–42.
Vanderbeke, Dirk. “In the art of the observer: graphic novels as political journalism.” Comics as a
Nexus of Culture. Eds. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn. Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 2010. 70–81.
Vanderbeke, Dirk. “Orphans in Comics and Graphic Novels.” Orphans in 19th and 20th Century
Anglophone Fiction. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Marion Gymnich, Gerold Sedlmayr and Dirk
Vanderbeke, 2018. 242–307.
Vanderbeke, Dirk. “Graphic Narratives as Non-Fiction in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern
Era.” ImageTexT vol. 11:1. Special Issue: Graphic Realities. Comics as Documentary, History
80 Dirk Vanderbeke
and Journalism. Eds. Johannes Schmidt and Laura Schlichting, 2019. http://
imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v11_1/vanderbeke/. (3 March 2021).
Vanderbeke Dirk and Marie Vanderbeke. “Graphic Dystopia: Watchmen (Moore/Gibbon, 1986–
1987) and V for Vendetta (Moore/Lloyd, 1982–1989).” Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-
Apocalpyse. Eds. Eckart Voigts, Allessandra Boller. Trier: WVT, 2015. 201–220.
Various. Batman in the Forties. New York: DC, 2004.
Weismantel, Mary. “Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America.”
American Anthropologist 106.3 (2004): 495–505.
Wertham, Fredric. Testimony of Dr Fredric Wertham. (The 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into
Juvenile Delinquency). http://www.thecomicbooks.com/wertham.html. (18 June 2017).
Williams, Kristian. “The Case for Comics Journalism.” Columbia Journalism Review March/April
2005. http://producer.csi.edu/cdraney/archive-courses/spring07/engl102/e-texts/comics-
journalism.htm. (3 July 2017).
Wood, Mary. The Yellow Kid on the Paper Stage. html://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma04/wood/ykid/
yellowkid.htm. (14 May 2017).
Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007.
Worcester, Kent. “Journalistic Comics.” The Routledge Companion to Comics. Eds. Frank Bramlett,
Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. 137–145.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation. The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Wright, Will, Six Guns and Society. A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Univesity of California Press, 1975.
Zan, Martha. “Busch, Heinrich Christian Wilhelm.” Comics Through Time. A History of Icons, Idols,
and Ideas 1. Ed. Keith Booker. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2014. 48–50.
11.2 Further Reading

Dolle-Weinkauf, Bernd (with Klaus Doderer, Christiane Körner, Helmut Müller and Katja Ott).
Comics. Geschichte einer populären Literaturform in Deutschland seit 1945. Weinheim und
Basel: Beltz Verlag, 1990.
Forsdick, Charles, Laurence Grove and Libbie McQuillan (eds.). The Francophone Bande Dessinée.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2015.
Gardner, Jared. Projections. Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2012.
McCarthy, Helen. A Brief History of Manga. Lewes: Ilex, 2014.
Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics. From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay (Naissances de
la Bande Dessinée. Transl. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen). Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2014.
Rik Spanjers
3 Text-Image Relations
Abstract: This chapter offers an overview of the different approaches to the analysis
of image-text relations in comics. It begins with a summary review of the wider
discourses surrounding image-text relations in the humanities, drawing from the
works of Lessing, Barthes, and Mitchell, and the early English-language works of
comics practitioner-theorists Eisner and McCloud. Moving away from these influen-
tial, yet exploratory works, the discussion focuses on the contemporary cognitive
linguistics approach of Cohn and the Franco-Belgian semiotic approaches to comics
studies in the works of Baetens and Lefèvre and Groensteen. Finally, in contrast
with the formally preoccupied approaches that precede it, a historicist approach to
image-text relations is outlined in the final section of the chapter.
Key Terms: Image-text relations, visual studies, multimodality, comics, image-text
1 Introduction
The relation between text and image is a central theoretical concern of comics stud-
ies. While comics need not necessarily be combinations of images and text – a clas-
sic example of a wordless comic being Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) – by far most
comics consist of combinations of texts and images. Reading comics, then, often
also means making sense of the different ways in which texts and images are com-
bined in order to produce meaning. This sense-making, however, can be quite chal-
lenging. A straightforward comics page can already raise many questions such as:
Are the images or the texts dominant? Do the texts cooperate with or contradict the
images? What kinds of meanings are caused by the different kinds of cooperations
and/or contradictions? And is it even possible to distinguish between images and
texts in comics where texts have visual properties and images are used in sequence
to tell a story? The theoretical issues raised by these questions have, at the time of
writing, not been solved in any definite way and are rather part of an ongoing dis-
cussion in comics studies and its neighboring disciplines. Instead of trying to an-
swer these questions, this chapter will explore the theoretical difficulties of reading
image-text relations in comics, and discuss how a number of influential approaches
to analyzing comics have tried to navigate these issues. The goal is not to solve the
problem of image-text relations in comics once and for all, but rather to introduce
the reader to a number of particularly influential approaches to these problems in
comics studies.
What follows, then, is a sketch of the key ways in which image-text relations
have been theorized in comics studies. Before diving into the comics medium, how-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-004
82 Rik Spanjers
ever, it is important to situate the discussion of image-text relations in comics in

the wider discussions on this topic in the humanities. Any short overview of the
discourses surrounding image-text relations necessarily omits more than it can in-
clude, seeing as there are already many book-length treatments of this topic in cir-
culation. This short overview will focus on the work of three influential scholars
who frequently appear in comics scholarship: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, W. J. T.
Mitchell, and Roland Barthes.
A central starting point of histories that describe the relation of images and
texts in different art forms is Lessing’s Laokoön (1766). In this work, the German
philosopher addresses the Ut Pictura Poesis (“As is Painting, So is Poetry”) tradition,
which is named after a sentence in Horace’s Ars Poetica. In response to the some-
what naïve equations of poetry to painting in a number of influential Renaissance
treatises on painting (see Lee 1940, 196–198, 202), Lessing claims that the realms of
poetry and painting should be clearly distinguished from one another. He argues
that poetry can only represent actions that unfold over the course of time, while
painting can only represent objects in space (Lessing 1990, 115–116). Lessing’s di-
vide between poetry-action-time and painting-object-space thus succeeded in draw-
ing up a rigid boundary between the visual and the textual, which subsequently
resulted in viewing works of art that crossed these boundaries as impure mixtures
that could never amount to the same artistic value as their purer counterparts that
fit firmly within the domains that suited their art.
This view of mixed media art forms as being impure violations of the natural
boundaries of the arts persisted well into the twentieth century, where it was propa-
gated by influential art critic Clement Greenberg. Building on his earlier work in
“Avant Garde and Kitsch” (1939), Greenberg argues in his essay “Modernist Paint-
ing” (1961) that the central goal of Modernist art is to find the specificity of its medi-
um, that is, that works within a particular art medium must offer a critical reflection
on what only that medium is able to produce. He can thus be seen as moving for-
ward from Lessing’s content-based approach in claiming that what was most critical
for art was not what a particular medium could represent (Lessing’s action-time and
object-space divide) but the technicalities of the formal qualities of the medium –
for example, painting’s use of pigment on a flat surface. This conception of art
proved rather shortsighted and has subsequently been strongly criticized in both
practice and theory. Nevertheless, comparable views concerning the purity of art
remain influential in many areas of culture and criticism, and can be seen as the
cause of some of comics’ difficulties in accruing cultural recognition (Groensteen
2006, 23–24).
Simultaneously, the proliferation of images in modern life in the second half of
the twentieth century – a development in which comics have played a part – made
the study of the relations between texts and images an urgent subject of inquiry.
One of the early responders to tackle this issue was Roland Barthes, who used his
semiotic vocabulary to analyze objects as diverse as photographs, film, advertise-
ments, and comics. In his analyses, he showed that the boundaries between the
visual and the textual were not as insurmountable as they might have seemed. In a
short but influential article called “The Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), Barthes analy-
zes an advertisement poster in great detail to discover that it creates meaning by
co-presenting three messages: the linguistic message, attached to the text, and the
denoted and connoted messages, attached to the images (Barthes 1977, 37).
Before delving into the relationship between the linguistic message (text) and
the iconic message (image), it is important to understand the distinction between
the denotative message and the connotative message of an image. The denotative
message means the literal sign the viewers’ eyes meet. For Barthes, it is impossible
to encounter “a literal image in a pure state” (42), as we would supply it with sym-
bolic meaning upon our first encounter. Pure denotation, then, is a strictly utopian
notion. Nevertheless, images can be more or less coded, and thus stand closer or
further away from pure denotation. Photographic images, for Barthes, occupy one
end of the spectrum. While they can never be purely denotative, they are to a lesser
extent dependent on codes than, in Barthes’ example, drawing. Rendering the out-
side world in a drawing requires a transposition that is based on rules, that must
always omit something, and that demands longer apprenticeship (43). In this way,
for Barthes, there can be differences in the structure of the image that literally meets
the eye. The connotative message consists of the symbolic messages evoked by the
denoted sign. The number of symbolic messages evoked by a single image can seem
endless, and it is precisely in relation to the many possible meanings of the image,
in relation to its polysemy, that Barthes defines the interactions between the image
and the text that accompanies it. Thus, the linguistic message can have two func-
tions vis-à-vis the iconic message, according to Barthes: anchorage and relay (38).
Anchorage signifies an unequal relation between the linguistic and the iconic mes-
sage, where the linguistic message limits or guides the interpretation of the iconic
message. Relay is the term Barthes uses to indicate a more equal relationship be-
tween image and text, of which he argues that comics are a prime example:
Here [in humorous drawings and bandes dessinées] text (most often a snatch of dialogue) and
image stand in a complementary relationship; the words, in the same way as the images, are
fragments of a more general syntagm and the unity of the message is realized at a higher level,
that of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis. (41)
Both the novelty and legacy of Barthes’ approach lay not so much in the precise
vocabulary it deploys to relate image to text but rather in its transgression of the
boundary that Lessing’s work had erected between image and text. Rather than
seeing images and texts as fundamentally different, Barthes sets out to analyze both
images and texts (and the other arts) using the same underlying logic. The impulse
to analyze image-text relations using a vocabulary that arose originally from the
study of language has developed in many different directions. One complaint often
leveled against such approaches is that analyzing image-text relations with a critical
84 Rik Spanjers
apparatus that has its roots in language research results in a lopsided analysis. Such
a method cannot avoid privileging text over image because the very structures out
of which it arose are linguistic – and therefore logocentric – in nature.
Working from a more art-historical background, W. J. T. Mitchell sought to chal-
lenge the dominance of a language-based semiotics approach in his research of
image-text relations. In a landmark essay called “The Pictorial Turn” (1992), Mitch-
ell argues against what Richard Rorty calls the linguistic turn, a development that
saw different models of “textuality” become the central avenue of research in the
study of culture, society, and even psychology (Mitchell 1994, 11). Against the domi-
nance of text in the humanities, Mitchell poses the problem of the image, which
always at least partly seems to elude verbalization. Mitchell invites us, based on the
legacy of scholars such as Charles Pierce and Nelson Goodman, to experiment with
what he calls picture theory. The goal of such picture theory is to analyze images of
their own accord and not subsume them to being, in one way or another, merely
one text among other texts.
Such a shift in the position of the image in the humanities has, of course, reper-
cussions for the analysis of image-text relations, a field in which Mitchell had al-
ready published a number of influential books (see: Blake’s Composite Art: A study
of the Illuminated Poetry (1978); The Language of Images (1980), and, most signifi-
cantly, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986)). For Mitchell, there is no essential
difference between poetry and painting because there are no unchanging laws in
human cognition, media specificity, or the objects of poetry and painting that would
draw a boundary between the potential of the two arts. Rather, he argues that there
are merely differences between poetry and painting based on the specific cultural
historical constellations in which they are produced and read. Through works of art
and their reception, different values are ordered along the difference between po-
etry and painting – for example body and soul, world and mind, and nature and
culture (Mitchell 1989, 49). The strength of this approach to image-text relations is
that it adds a historical or contextual dimension to previous discussions of form
and content, thereby encompassing much more adequately the many meanings that
can be projected on and by image-text juxtapositions.
Mitchell’s approach thereby confronts an important issue concerning the diffi-
culties of the many meanings that can be associated with the words “image” and
“text,” and the many ways in which they can be put together. There is no easy
way in which to navigate the entanglement of different terminologies in image-text
relations, and yet, by deploying a specific terminology, Mitchell suggests at least
three different lines of approach for scholars who study images and texts:
I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate “image/text” as a problem-
atic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation. The term “imagetext,” designates composite,
synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. “Image-text,” with a hyphen, des-
ignates relations of the visual and verbal. (Mitchell 1994, 89)
A comic, then, is an imagetext; an artifact that combines images and texts in order
to propel a narrative, in which we can study either the rupture or gap between
images and texts – image/text – or the relations between images and texts – image-
text. At the same time, while Mitchell offers at least a semblance of order through
this terminology, in practice, and in Mitchell’s own work, the distinctions between,
for example, “problematic gaps” and “synthetic works” are often hopelessly mud-
dled.
The work done by Mitchell and others caused a huge upsurge in the research
of image-text relations. Even more important, in the context of this chapter, is that
they resulted in a reversal of the cultural standing of mixed-media art works. Where
art forms that bridged the image/text divide were before seen as impure, they now
become objects of study that allow analysts to explore the ways in which images
and texts create meaning when they are employed together, a problem that seemed
to become ever more urgent with the development of new media that combined
images and texts in various ways (see, for example, Daniel Stein’s chapter on com-
ics in the Handbook of Intermediality (2015)). This intellectual climate, together with
postmodernism’s increased interest in pop-cultural forms and the rise of cultural
studies in opposition to more traditional academic disciplines such as art history,
empowered early practitioners of comics studies. One of comics’ greatest handicaps
with regards to its acceptance as an art form, its mixing of text and image (Groen-
steen 2006, 23–24), now made it appealing to scholars influenced by the pictorial
turn.
2 Early English-Language Approaches

to Image-Text Relations in Comics
Our point of departure for the discussion of image-text relations in comics studies
will be the by now conventional, albeit somewhat distorted dominance of English-
language scholarship, starting with two of the most famous American comics practi-
tioner-theorists: Will Eisner and Scott McCloud. Their works, which are interesting
image-texts in themselves, might be read anachronistically as responses to Mitch-
ell’s call for an iconology (a study of icons or images) that deals with images that
are “capable of reflection on themselves” (Mitchell 1994, 38). While McCloud’s com-
ic book theory on comics is the more radical of the two, formally speaking (being a
comic book about comic books), Eisner’s arguments concerning image-text relations
in Comics & Sequential Art (1985) also greatly depend on the images with which the
book is riddled.
Eisner begins his discussion of comics by broadening the concept of reading to
include both texts and images. Comics, for Eisner, are “a montage of both word and
image” that are read together and cannot be fundamentally distinguished from one
86 Rik Spanjers
another (Eisner 8). He argues that there is no fundamental difference between imag-
es and texts because “[l]etters are symbols that are devised out of images which
originate out of familiar forms, objects, postures and other recognizable phenome-
na” (14). Moreover, the way in which images are used in comics sequentially likens
them to words in a sentence. Eisner describes how a process of codification of body
language and facial expressions has created an alphabet of gestures that the comics
artist uses in their work. He even goes so far as to include a micro-dictionary of
gestures in Comics & Sequential Art (102).
Regarding texts in comics, Eisner points to the impact of the types of fonts on
the text that is expressed through them (10–12), shows the dramatic possibilities of
the different shapes of the text balloon (27), and demonstrates the temporal func-
tions of text with respect to the composition and pacing of comic book pages (28).
Thus, while the images in comics move towards being a sort of standardized, if not
alphabetical, language, texts in comics move towards being more image-like. All in
all, then, Eisner’s approach to the analysis of image-text relations in comics focuses
more heavily on how images and text approach one another, or are used in unison
by the comics artist, than on how they differ, or are used against one another. And
while Eisner’s approach succeeds in underlining Mitchell’s first point concerning
image-text relations, namely that there is no fundamental difference between the
two, it does not completely succeed in reasoning away the differences between the
two modalities as they are perceived in the present in a given comic.
In what is still the most famous introduction to the analysis of comics, Under-
standing Comics (1994), McCloud builds further on Eisner’s work. In the first chap-
ter, McCloud describes letters as static images (8), thereby implicitly agreeing with
Eisner’s statement about images and texts’ shared ancestry. However, the relation
between images and texts does not play as central a role in McCloud’s discussion
as it does in Eisner’s. Rather, in McCloud, image-text relations are subservient to
what is the unique characteristic of the comics medium: the gutter, and the “silent
dance of the seen and the unseen,” (92) that McCloud places at the very heart of
comics (66). McCloud’s appraisal of the gutter has been rightly critiqued in subse-
quent comics scholarship for its fetishization of what is not on the page, while there
is so much on the pages that begs the attention of comics studies scholars (Groen-
steen 2007, 112–115).
McCloud starts his discussion of image-text relations in the sixth chapter of
Understanding Comics, entitled Show and Tell. Here, initially, some attention is de-
voted to the cultural division between image and text and its history as a way of
more explicitly arguing – like Eisner – that the difference between the two is artifi-
cial and needs to be overcome through practice, critique and analysis. Later in the
chapter, McCloud’s analysis focuses more on the current practices of reading and
creating comics than on the more abstract issue concerning the shared ancestry of
images and texts. For contemporary comics, McCloud distinguishes seven categories
of image-text relations:
– word specific; where texts are dominant and images illustrative

– picture specific; where images are dominant and texts illustrative
– duo-specific; where images and texts transmit a practically identical message
– additive; where texts amplify the message of the images and vice versa
– parallel; where the texts and images seem separated along different tracks
– montage; where texts are an integral part of the visual composition of the panel,
page or spread.
– interdependent; where images and text work together to co-constitute a mean-
ing that would not be achieved by either the images or texts separately.
(McCloud 1994, 152–155)
McCloud argues that his last category, interdependent, is both the most common in
comics, and the most desirable for “good” comics (155–156). While McCloud’s cat-
egories for image-text relations in comics aid our understanding of the widely vary-
ing ways in which texts and images can interact in comics, it also seems to suffer
from the question that haunts all categorizing efforts, namely: how discrete are
these categories? It is very difficult to discern the precise difference between
McCloud’s additive and word specific / picture specific categories; do illustrations
not amplify the texts to which they are added? Any difference between these catego-
ries, therefore, would be differences in degree. Most difficult of all in this respect,
however, is McCloud’s seventh category, interdependent, as its qualification – that
images and texts co-constitute a meaning that would not be achieved by either the
images or texts separately – can without much difficulty be argued to apply to all
the above categories (see Bateman 2014, 98–99).
The approach to image-text relations in both Understanding Comics and Com-
ics & Sequential Art, then, is introductory in nature and opens up a way to gauge,
or begin to think about, the complexity of image-text relations in comics than it
really presents a theoretically grounded approach to its analysis. Still, both intro-
ductions, by underlining the similarity of images and text on a fundamental level
and attempting to offer tentative lines along which we can begin to think about
image-text relations in comics, serve as good introductions to the work of more
recent comics scholars. In the subsequent sections, two widely different approaches
to the study of image-text relations in comics will be discussed. The first is Neil
Cohn’s cognitive linguistics approach to comics as a visual language. The second
will be the work of Jan Baetens, Pascal Lefèvre, and Thierry Groensteen, who deal
with image-text relations in comics from a perspective that might be tentatively
characterized as combining contemporary visual studies with the semiotics of Émile
Beneviste and Roland Barthes.
88 Rik Spanjers
3 The Visual Languages of Comics

Neil Cohn’s central hypothesis is that comics are written in visual languages (Cohn
2013a, 2). Cohn is adamant in separating the “system of communication,” visual
language, from its “sociocultural context,” comics. Cohn’s likening of comics to a
language is, then, more sophisticated than similar claims in other analyses because
the definition of language is discussed in much more detail (Bateman 2014, 100).
What is important for the present discussion is that Cohn’s focus on the specific
visual languages that can be found in comics offsets his discussion of image-text
relations slightly. Rather than asking the question of how texts and images relate in
comics, Cohn instead asks how visual-graphic and visual-verbal modalities connect
in the visual language of a specific comics culture (Cohn 2013b, 60). A more limited
question, then, but also a question that, instead of trying to draw a whole sociocul-
tural history of image-text relations and image/text ruptures into the analysis of
comics pages, is able to maintain a degree of focus for the subsequent analysis.
Cohn’s most wide-ranging theory concerning multi-modality is put forward in
“A Multimodal Parallel Architecture: A Cognitive Framework for Multimodal Interac-
tions” (2015). The approach to comics as visual language allows Cohn to construct
a theory of multimodality that focuses not on the differences between signification
in texts and images as they are grouped together in singular semantic units, but
approaches signification in comics through combinations of images and texts holis-
tically as a singular communicative system for conceptual expression (Cohn 2015,
308). Like verbal language, Cohn argues, visual language utilizes three primary
components: a modality, meaning, and grammar. While the modality and grammar
of visual language are necessarily different from that of verbal language, they can
be grouped together in Cohn’s larger system for conceptual expression because they
share a similar architecture (fig. 1). This holistic approach has the advantage that
while it does not fundamentally distinguish between visual and verbal language, it
does take into account the specificities of both languages. Visual language, as Cohn
shows in The Visual Language of Comics, makes use of a graphic structure as its
modality and a narrative structure as its grammar, whereas verbal language uses a
phonological structure and a syntactical structure. However, these differences can
still be subsumed, in Cohn’s theory, under the wider structures that govern different
kinds of languages. On the basis of these more general similarities, then, the differ-
ent modalities can be compared, as can be seen in figure 3.1.
Building on this system, Cohn describes three groups of multimodal interac-
tions: autonomous, dominant, and assertive. The most practical way into an under-
standing of Cohn’s taxonomy is by asking three questions: (1) The first question
concerns the number of modalities present. For instances of one modality, the out-
come is always autonomous, while multiple modalities lead to further investigation.
(2) The second question concerns the governance of the meaning by one or more
modalities. If one of the modalities is in control of the meaning and is the only
Fig. 3.1: Cohn’s parallel architecture, expanded to allow for multimodal interactions (a),
along with several types of monomodal expression, as manifested within this model.
These include behaviors without grammatical structures (b–d) and those with grammatical
structures (e–h), simplified for clarity.
one that deploys a grammar, the multimodal interaction is either x-dominant or co-
dominant. Now the control of the meaning that is referred to can be tested quite
easily: one only needs to ascertain if the meaning of the sequence remains intact if
the non-dominant is omitted. What is meant here by grammar, however, needs a
little more explanation. As mentioned above, Cohn insists on the existence of a
visual language. This means that this visual language has a grammar.
The grammar of the visual language of comics, as established in The Visual
Language of Comics, is narrative structure, rather than the syntactical structure that
governs the signification of words in a sentence. Now it becomes possible to see
why the presence or absence of a grammar for the modality is so important for
Cohn, as it determines in large part the precise way in which meaning is generated:
90 Rik Spanjers
by the locations of words in a sentence and thus through the visual-verbal markers
on the page, or through a meaningful sequence of images that relate to one another
in a narrative structure. To answer Cohn’s second question, then, one needs to as-
certain, besides which modality controls the meaning, whether the multimodal se-
quence deploys a singular grammar – either narrative structure or syntactic struc-
ture – or both of them simultaneously. This, coincidentally, is the third question
that governs Cohn’s taxonomy: (3) it concerns the presence of a grammar for the
different modalities. As was mentioned above, if only one grammar is deployed in
the multimodal interaction, the relation is always one of dominance. If, however,
both modalities have a grammar, that is, if there is both a syntactical structure and
a narrative structure, the resulting interaction is either x-assertive, when one of the
two modalities governs the meaning, or co-assertive, when both modalities are nec-
essary for the signification to remain successful (Cohn 2015, 320).
Cohn’s cognitive linguistics approach to image-text relations in comics offers a
rather substantial terminology to unpack the various intricacies of the visual lan-
guages of comics. This terminology, however, and the theories that underlie it, can
be daunting for scholars who come from different theoretical backgrounds. The ini-
tial separation of the socio-historical context of comics from its visual language,
moreover, is very problematic from other theoretical perspectives. Are not the rules
that govern the visual language of comics a product of the socio-historical context
of the medium? Is it then even possible to abstract the visual language of comics
from its socio-historical context, and how re-applicable, across time and cultures,
is an analysis that does?
Others would still criticize Cohn for his insistence on the term ‘language,’ which
to them always implies a privileging of the textual over the visual. Cohn’s approach,
in any case, does focus more on meaning generation through often somewhat short
sequences of panels – in analogy to the sequence of words in a sentence – than it
does on the visual composition of comics pages or spreads (Bateman 105). The next
section will deal with an approach to comics that arose from a critique of the privi-
leging of verbal/textual language over other forms of language and accordingly
aims to approach comics from a more visually oriented perspective, as a semiotic
system.
4 Comics as a Semiotic System

To an ever-increasing extent, the gap that once existed between English language
comics scholarship and its Francophone counterpart is finally being bridged. The
French Comics Theory Reader (2016) is a recent example that presents a large num-
ber of translated essays that give a good impression of the vibrant field of Franco-
Belgian comics scholarship. Another important translation is Benoît Peeters’ “Four
Conceptions of the Page” (2007). Most famous among the Franco-Belgian comics
scholars is Thierry Groensteen, whose The System of Comics (Système de la bande

dessinée 1999) was published in English in 2007. Groensteen expands upon and
critiques the Francophone comics scholarship tradition of which Pierre Fresnault-
Deruelle and Benoît Peeters are the other main exponents (see Fresnault-Deruelle
1972; Peeters 1991). Groensteen’s work has rapidly become very influential in inter-
national comics scholarship because of its convincing application of semiotics to
the study of comics as a system. Still, before discussing Groensteen’s work as it
relates to the analysis of image-text relationships in comics, it is worthwhile to de-
vote some attention to a modest but valuable contribution to the study of image-
text relations in comics by the two Belgian comics scholars Jan Baetens and Pascal
Lefèvre.
In “Texts and Images” (a translated chapter from Pour une lecture moderne de
la bande dessinée, 1993), Baetens and Lefèvre first propose a new way of categoriz-
ing the different kinds of verbal units in comics before they use this categorization
in their analysis of image-text relations. In an attempt to escape the pitfalls that dog
a dividing of different verbal units alongside the enunciating instance, Baetens and
Lefèvre propose to distinguish between texts on the basis of their modes of produc-
tion. By focusing on these modes, they approach image-text relations from an origi-
nal and remarkably fruitful perspective. They distinguish between (1) paratexts, i. e.
introductions, cover texts, appendices, etc; (2) lettered texts that are used in the
captions and for the dialogues; and (3) drawn texts which are texts that are, to some
extent, integrated in the drawings of the comic (Baetens and Lefèvre 1993, 185).
Using this categorization of verbal units in comics, Baetens and Lefèvre explore
three ways in which the visual and the verbal interact in comics. Their goal is not
so much to establish a definite number of image-text relations in comics, but rather
to show the range of semantic possibilities that the comics medium offers with re-
gard to the mixtures of images and texts that can be made in it. The first aspect of
image-text relations that is discussed concerns the material connections between
images and texts. For Baetens and Lefèvre, one way in which images and texts
approach one another is that they are both, in comics, a product of a writing-draw-
ing hand. The fact that in many comics the texts have traditionally been lettered by
hand makes these texts connote differently than typeset fonts. Besides their literal
meaning, the visual aspects of these texts can be said to perform a certain intimacy
or closeness that can aid the representative goals of comics, thereby at least partly
effacing the difference between images and texts (Baetens and Lefèvre 2014, 186).
The second aspect of image-text relations that Baetens and Lefèvre deal with is
the space reserved for texts and images in comics. They note that texts are almost
always clearly separated from images in comics. There are multiple ways in which
such clear separations can take place – the word balloon, for example, where the
balloon’s contours separate the space devoted to texts and images (Baetens and
Lefèvre 2014, 188). More importantly, they argue that the more the text is kept sepa-
rate from the images in comics, the more these comics will be able to maintain a
92 Rik Spanjers
degree of realism in the worlds they conjure up. Showing copious amounts of texts
in closer proximity to images, conversely, highlights the artificiality of representa-
tion and thus enables a more critical approach to referentiality in the comics medi-
um (Baetens and Lefèvre 2014, 187–188).
Because they resist definitively delimiting text-image relations in comics, Bae-
tens and Lefèvre are able to show leading conventions of the medium and how
certain comics can deviate from these conventions in a meaningful manner.
Throughout their analysis of image-text relations, however, it seems clear that, at
least for the eye of the beholder, text is subordinated to image, even though texts
can at times project meanings that contest the significations of the images in a
specific comic. Rather than equating text to image and collapsing the difference in
order to get rid of the image/text divide, as was the case in Eisner and McCloud,
Baetens and Lefèvre argue that in comics the visual is in most cases more central
to the medium.
Baetens and Lefèvre’s point about the dominance of the visual in comics is
shared by Thierry Groensteen. Groensteen’s argument for the dominance of the vi-
sual in comics, however, does not only stem from the image’s dominance on the
physical space of the page but also from his specific approach to understanding
meaning creation in the comics medium. Comics, for Groensteen, can be understood
as a system, a conceptual frame that enables the telling of stories. Instead of ap-
proaching comics from the level of the panel, or along the linear sequence of a story,
Groensteen suggests that the point of entry for comics analysis is always initially
the page as a whole. Looking at the comic book page or the spread of two pages
from this perspective, he first describes the various places out of which the space
of the page is made up (spatio-topia) and then the engagements of these places
with each other (general and restricted arthrology) (Groensteen 2007, 21–22). Specific
combinations of spatio-topia and arthrology are how comics signify or create mean-
ing. Neither one of them comes first. Rather, the creation of meaning in comics
occurs through combinations of its spatio-topia and arthrology. Groensteen’s way
of thinking about comics uncovers that spatiality within comics is semiotically sig-
nificant. This means that the specific composition of the comic book page, the way
in which the elements of which it consists are ordered is the way in which comics
create meaning.
Groensteen’s claim that comics are a predominantly visual medium must there-
fore be understood on the basis of the comic book page as a meaningful composi-
tion. In his view, comics are not a neutral site where images and texts come together
or struggle with one another because the comics form, the page that facilitates such
a confrontation, is not neutral. Instead, each image-text relation in comics is already
encompassed within a meaningful page layout. Such page layouts, moreover, are
visual. For Groensteen, the governing role of page composition is therefore what
makes the visual dominant in the medium of comic books (Groensteen 2007, 8).
Groensteen’s at times rather dense approach to the study of comics might be
further clarified by taking recourse to his discussion of narration in comics. For
Groensteen, each medium has its own specific form of narration (Groensteen 2013,
81). In the case of comics, mirroring the above discussion, narration should be di-
vided into three cooperating yet distinctive instances of narration: the monstrating
instance, the reciting instance, and the narrating instance. Simply put, the mon-
strating instance is responsible for the images while the reciting instance is respon-
sible for the narrative text. However, in order to accurately account for the ways in
which images and texts can cooperate and contradict one another in the comics
form, Groensteen introduces the narrating instance, which “is the ultimate instance
responsible for the selection and organization of all the types of information that
make up the narrative” (Groensteen 2013, 95). This narrating instance visually gov-
erns the composition of the page and the placing of different elements on it.
Within Groensteen’s general approach to comics as a system, different types of
interaction between texts and images can take place. Groensteen builds on Barthes’
aforementioned analysis of advertising images to distinguish between seven differ-
ent functions of the verbal in comics: the effect of the real, dramatization, anchor-
age, relay, suture, control, and rhythm (Groensteen 2007, 134). The effect of the real,
dramatization, and rhythm are ways in which comics use the verbal to uphold the
illusion of the story that a particular comic is putting forward. The reality effect of
the verbal is simply constituted by the fact that in comics, as in real life, figures or
characters speak. Dramatization signifies the way in which the verbal can add to
the drama of the situation displayed. Here, especially certain outcries common to
comics – such as Groensteen’s example of “aïe!” – spring to mind, and the relation
of the verbal to the pictorial is often redundant in these cases. Concerning the rhyth-
mic function of the verbal, Groensteen states that the verbal can be employed in
comics to control the tempo of the story. Large blocks of texts can slow the reader
down, while dividing text over multiple balloons can speed up the tempo of the
narrative.
The other four functions of the verbal in comics – anchorage, relay, suture, and
control – have more to do with how the verbal informs the pictorial and completes
the signification that is set up by the sequence of images to which these verbal units
are visually tied (Groensteen 2007, 134). Anchorage in Groensteen is identical to Bar-
thes’ notion, which, to recuperate, indicates the way in which the verbal anchors
the visual to a more limited interpretation of its meaning than would be the case
without the verbal aid. It is important to add, however, that the position of a singu-
lar image in a sequence already limits its polysemy in the comics medium (Groen-
steen 2007, 130). Language is therefore not the only thing that can anchor an image
away from polysemy: this function can also be achieved through a sequence. Relay
is used by Groensteen to describe the way in which dialogue can add meaning to
comics that cannot be reached through images alone, even when placed in a se-
quence. In addition to Barthes’ two terms, Groensteen follows Peeters to introduce
the notion of suture, which designates the ways in which texts can bridge separated
images, thus smoothing over transitions in the narrative without completely con-
94 Rik Spanjers
trolling temporal shifts, as is the case with control (Groensteen 2007, 131). The last
function described by Groensteen is the control function, which he uses to signal
the use of text to control different temporal shifts such as “meanwhile,” “one hour
later,” or even “the end.” In this way, verbal additions play a controlling role in the
use of flashbacks or flashforwards (Groensteen 2007, 131–132).
By his own admission, Groensteen’s discussion of image-text relations in the
comics medium is somewhat limited, especially in relation to his wider discussion
of the comics medium. This limitation stems from Groensteen’s focus on showing
the ways in which images can generate meaning in a page composition. However,
by focusing so heavily on what is unique about comics signification, Groensteen
ultimately neglects to pay proper attention to the importance of text in many com-
ics. In her study Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form
(2013), Hannah Miodrag aims to fill this gap, rightly criticizing the more naïve equa-
tions of text and image found in earlier English language works of comics scholar-
ship. According to Miodrag, both the nullification of the differences between texts
and images and the privileging of the visual over the verbal in comics studies are
partly founded on the defensive stance of comics scholarship that aims to “raise”
comics to the level of literature (Miodrag 2013, 13). The overemphasis on the visual,
in this view, is a defense mechanism against the dominance of the verbal in the
study of culture after the linguistic turn. This defensiveness has caused comics
scholarship to neglect the roles that texts do play in the comics form.
For Miodrag, there are three key differences between linguistic signs and pic-
torial signs. The first concerns the arbitrary nature of signification in language. Un-
like in the case of pictures, which are often made with a specific referent in mind,
language refers to concepts arbitrarily, i. e. on the basis of convention, rather than
through an inherent similitude between a word and the thing represented by it. The
second key difference is that there are different levels of constraint of these modes
of expression with regards to a preexistent langue. What Miodrag points to with this
second difference is that language requires a higher degree of prior knowledge in
order to function than is the case for pictures. The final difference is that language
is discrete, and can be divided into minimal units that hold meaning, while pictures
are to a larger extent continuous (Miodrag 2013, 10). Miodrag’s work should be seen
as an extension of Groensteen, and does certainly not invalidate Groensteen’s argu-
ment that comics are first and foremost visually organized. Rather, it places some
much-needed emphasis on the importance of language specifically and image-text
relations generally, for the medium.
5 Notes Towards the Historicization of the Analysis

of Image-Text Relations in Comics
The introductory section of this chapter demonstrated that the analysis of text-im-
age relations is a central theoretical concern for comics studies. It also showed how
the renewed interest in multimodal artworks in the wake of Mitchell’s pictorial turn
pulled comics out of the periphery to occupy a somewhat more central position
in contemporary academic inquiry. The comics scholars that were discussed in the
subsequent section have all addressed image-text relations in comics in different
ways. And, while Eisner and McCloud’s approaches to the subject can be called
exploratory, scholars such as Cohn and Groensteen have provided much more defin-
itive answers to the “problem” of image-text relations in comics, while also relegat-
ing it to a secondary position by emphasizing the larger system or language that
articulates the interactions between images and texts. In light of this shift in ap-
proaching comics as a system or language, the question arises whether image-text
relations can still be called a central theoretical concern for comics studies, or if
image-text relations, while still remaining an important part of specific comics anal-
yses, have become a more or less resolved issue.
At the very least, it can be argued that the centrality of image-text relations to
comics studies has been challenged (Beaty 2012, 20). Denying the importance of
image-text relations for the study of comics can be a good strategy for dislodging
comics studies from approaches that focus too much on the details of individual
image-text juxtaposition and neglect to look at the wider medium of comics in
which interaction between images and texts takes place. At the same time, a com-
plete denial of the importance of image-text relations to comics does a disservice to
the way in which comics themselves continually struggle or play with the image/
text divide and the way audience preconceptions of image-text relations infuse com-
ics with meaning. Moreover, where all of these approaches to image-text relations
in comics have played out on a formal level, that is, analyzing the precise relational-
ity of the modalities as they can be found in the medium on a structural level, a
more contextually based line of inquiry remains open.
In the final section of this chapter, a historicist approach outlook to image-text
relations in comics will be given. Such an approach is more akin to a history of
ideas that focuses on the concepts text and images as they are deployed within the
field of comics than it is to a formal semiotic analysis. In order to do so, we return
to one of Mitchell’s earlier works on image-text relations, Iconology (1986), in which
he demonstrates that the question of image-text relations is not an exclusively semi-
otic question. Instead, he posits that the semiotic question concerning text-image
relations is rather easily answered, as there is no essential difference between poetry
and painting (Mitchell 1986, 49). However, as Mitchell goes on to state:
There are always a number of differences in effect in a culture which allow it to sort out the
distinctive qualities of its ensemble of signs and symbols. These differences, as I have suggest-
ed, are riddled with all the antithetical values the culture wants to embrace or repudiate: the
paragone or debate of poetry and painting is never just a contest between two kinds of signs,
but a struggle between body and soul, world and mind, nature and culture. (Mitchell 1986,
49)
Mitchell’s project was never a structuralist project aimed at redesigning the semiotic
relations between image and text. Rather, he focuses on the ways in which the
96 Rik Spanjers
differences between sign systems are imbued with different meanings in different
cultures, or in different historical moments of a culture. It is precisely this dimen-
sion that seems to have been overlooked by comics scholars trying to understand
image-text relations in comics from a purely formal perspective.
Following Mitchell, the relevance of image-text relations for the studies of com-
ics is twofold. First, from a formal perspective, the questions concerning image-text
relations in comics are at least not very fruitful avenues of study because so much
work already exists on this subject. Second, from a historicist perspective, there is
still much room for analyses of image-text relations in comics. While such an ap-
proach to image-text relations in comics does not promise to solve the problem of
image-text relations in comics in a timeless fashion, it does offer other, more modest
avenues of exploration for comics scholars. These explorations can be divided into
two categories that, while offering distinct points of entry for analysis, often remain
fully intertwined. The first category of inquiry concerns the ways in which comics
play a role in discourses concerning image-text relations. Here, one might think of
comics’ position vis-à-vis literature or art based on the privileging or discrimination
of multimodal artworks, as can be seen in Groensteen’s Un objet culturel non identi-
fié (2006, 23) and the aforementioned work by Clement Greenberg and other art
critics.
The second category of inquiry, a more historicist analysis of image-text rela-
tions, concerns the ways in which singular comics use different contextual connota-
tions of image-text relations in their narratives. In this field, important work has
been done by Thierry Smolderen, who demonstrates in The Origins of Comics (2014,
116–136) and in Graphic Hybridization, The Crucible of Comics (2014) how early com-
ics reacted to and reflected the development of other media on their pages. An ap-
proach less focused on media history can be found in Hillary Chute’s Graphic Wom-
en (2010). In her study of life writing in contemporary comics (↗9 Life Writing),
Chute demonstrates how a number of comics artists contest and make use of exist-
ing gender connotations regarding representation in text and image in their comics.
Chute’s study exemplifies how a study of image-text relations in an oeuvre of comics
also often deals with the position of comics in a wider context of image-text rela-
tions across media. The discussed “wimmen’s comix” thus challenge the naïve gen-
dering of the dichotomy between pure (masculine) and impure/mixed (feminine)
media in combinations of images and texts (Chute 2010, 10).
Another significant way in which comics can reflect the different, often antithet-
ical meanings that are attributed to image-text relations in specific contexts is by
shifting between different visual and textual styles. As I have shown in my own
analysis of Shigeru Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (1973), shifts in vi-
sual style can radically alter what images communicate and even cause these imag-
es to question their own modes of representation (Spanjers 2016). In Mizuki’s histor-
ical work, juxtapositions of tracings of photographic with more cartoonish images
enable a questioning of the veracity of both these modes of representing the past.
Creative use of different, often oppositional, connotations engendered by image-

text relations in comics, then, might be seen as one of comics’ most persuasive
tools, and a possible site of critique aimed at contemporary structures of privilege
with regard to different genres of representation.
Furthermore, if it is possible to recognize shifts in image-text relations in singu-
lar comics, the same will certainly also be possible concerning oeuvres of comics,
genres and other groupings of individual works. Rather than seeing the relation
between image and text as stable, then, comics studies should remain aware of the
ways in which the relations between images and texts continually change in differ-
ent contexts. This, in turn, would also force some critical reflection upon the ways
in which comics studies has attempted to play a role in discourses sounding image-
text relations in the wider humanities.
6 Bibliography
6.1 Works Cited
Baetens, Jan. “Graphic Novels: Literature Without Text?” English Language Notes 46.2 (2008): 77–
88.
Baetens, Jan, and Pascal Lefévre. “Text and Images.” The French Comics Theory Reader. Trans.
Ann Miller and Bart Baety. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014. 183–190.
Barthes, Roland. “Rhétorique de l’image.” Communications 4.1 (1964): 40–51.
Barthes, Roland. “The Rhetoric of the Image.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephan Heath. London:
Fontana Press, 1977. 32–51.
Bateman, John A. Text and Image: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/verbal Divide. London;
New York: Routledge, 2014.
Beaty, Bart. Comics Versus Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia
Cohn, Neil. “A Multimodal Parallel Architecture: A Cognitive Framework for Multimodal
Interactions.” Cognition 146 (2016): 304–323.
Cohn, Neil. “Beyond Speech Balloons and Thought Bubbles: The Integration of Text and Image.”
Semiotica 2013.197 (2013a): 35–63.
Cohn, Neil. The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of
Sequential Images. London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013b.
Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art. Paramus, NJ: Poorhouse Press, 1990.
Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. La Bande Dessinée: L’univers et les techniques de quelques “comics”
d’expression française. Paris: Hachette, 1972.
Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration: System of Comics 2. Trans. Ann Miller. Jackson:
Groensteen, Thierry. La bande dessinée: un objet culturel non identifié. [Angoulême]: An 2, 2006.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Ann Miller. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Jewitt, Carey. The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. London: Routledge, 2009.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Werke 1766–1769: Laokoon. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1990.
98 Rik Spanjers
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks,
1994.
Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. Jackson:
Mitchell, W.J.T. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton: Princeton
Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Mitchell, W.J.T. “Introduction: Image X Text.” The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on
Literary and Visual Conjunctures. Ed. Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 1–14.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. London: University of
Chicago Press, 1994.
Peeters, Benoît. Case, planche, récit: Lire la bande dessinée. Tournai: Casterman, 1998.
Peeters, Benoît. “Four Conceptions of the Page.” Imagetext: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 3:3
(Spring 2007).
Saraceni, Mario. Language of Comics. London: Routledge, 2003.
Smolderen, Thierry. “Graphic Hybridization, the Crucible of Comics.” The French Comics Theory
Reader. Trans. Ann Miller and Bart Baety. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014. 47–62.
Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. Trans. Bart
Beaty. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.
Stein, Daniel. “Comics and Graphic Novels.” Handbook of Intermediality; Literature – image –
Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015. 420–438.
Spanjers, Rik. “Wartime Weddings: Realism and War Representation in Shigeru Mizuki’s Onwards
Towards Our Noble Deaths.” Image & Narrative 17.4 (2016): 57–78.
Varnum, Robin, and Christina T. Gibbons. The Language of Comics: Word and Image. Mississippi:
Wartenberg, Thomas E. “Wordy Pictures: Theorizing the Relationship between Image and Text in
Comics.” The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach. Hoboken: Wiley, 2011. 87–104.
6.2 Further Reading

Barthes, Roland. “The Rhetoric of the Image.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephan Heath. London:
Fontana Press, 1977. 32–51.
Sequential Images. London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Ann Miller. Jackson: University
Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. London: University of
Stein, Daniel. “Comics and Graphic Novels.” Handbook of Intermediality; Literature – image –
Sound – Music. Ed. Gabrielle Rippl. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015. 420–438.
Jan-Noël Thon
4 Comics Narratology
Abstract: This article provides a broad introduction to comics narratology, the theo-
ry and analysis of comics as a narrative form. Focusing more on systematic recon-
structions of core theoretical and analytical issues than on extensive surveys of ex-
isting research, the article’s three main sections examine (1) the spatial, temporal,
causal, and ontological relations between locally represented situations as part of
a comic’s global storyworld as a whole as well as how comics may use metalepses
that cross or dissolve the borders between ontologically distinct subworlds; (2) the
ways in which comics employ various kinds of narrators, combining a range of strat-
egies of narratorial representation that typically take verbal form with a no less
broad range of strategies of nonnarratorial representation that typically take verbal-
pictorial form; and (3) the ways in which comics provide ‘direct access’ to charac-
ters’ consciousnesses and minds via a range of narratorial as well as nonnarratorial
strategies of subjective representation, which, in combination with strategies of in-
tersubjective and objective representation, lead to occasionally rather complex
structures of subjectivity.
Key Terms: Author, metalepsis, narrative, narrativity, narrator, storyworld, subjec-

tivity, unreliability
1 Introduction
Perhaps more than many other media, comics can be considered to be a prototypi-
cally narrative form. While there may be some examples of nonnarrative comics
(see, e. g., Molotiu 2009; as well as the discussion in Meskin 2007), most comics tell
stories. These stories can be fictional or nonfictional (see, e. g., Chute 2016; El Refaie
2012; Mickwitz 2015; ↗9 Life Writing; ↗12 Science Comics), they can be presented
in the form of a ‘single work’ or be serialized in various ways (see, e. g., Couch
2000; Gardner 2012; Stein 2018; ↗5 Seriality), and they can be part of an intermedial
adaptation or a more encompassing transmedial constellation (see, e.g., Burke 2015;
Freeman 2017; Weaver 2012; as well as Straumann 2015; Stein 2015; Thon 2015;
↗6 Adaptations; ↗8 World-Building). It will come as no surprise, then, that comics
studies has increasingly begun to examine the narrative strategies employed to tell
these various kinds of stories, to apply a narratological perspective to the analysis
of comics (or ‘graphic narratives,’ or ‘graphic novels’; see, e. g., Chute and DeKoven
2006; Gardner and Herman 2011; Stein and Thon 2013; as well as Baetens and Frey
2014; Etter and Thon 2019; Tabachnick 2010; ↗1 Terminology and Definitions).
While literary narratology has become a staple approach to the analysis of liter-
ary texts since its emergence from French structuralism during the 1960s, and film
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-005
100 Jan-Noël Thon
narratology was established within film studies as early as the 1980s (see, e. g.,
Branigan 1992; Bordwell 1985; Chatman 1978), one cannot yet speak of a comics
narratology to the same extent. Yet, there is an increasing interest in narratological
approaches within the broader field of comics studies, and a number of scholars
such as Karin Kukkonen (2011a) or Kai Mikkonen (2017) follow David Herman (2009)
in considering graphic narrative to provide an important ‘test case’ for a transmedial
narratology. Indeed, the past decades have seen a significant rise in studies con-
cerned with the medium-specific strategies of narrative representation that comics
employ, focusing not only on fundamental features of their mediality, such as the
combination of words and pictures, the interplay of panels and panel borders, and
the arrangement of sequences of panels in various forms of page layouts (see, e. g.,
Carrier 2000; Groensteen 2007; Hatfield 2005; Packard 2006; Peeters 1991; Postema
2013; ↗3 Text-Image Relations), but also on the interplay between transmedial as-
pects and the comics-specific realization of salient narrative phenomena and/or nar-
ratological concepts referred to by terms such as ‘storyworld,’ ‘narrator,’ or ‘focali-
zation’ (see, e. g., Groensteen 2013; Herman 2009; Hescher 2016; Kukkonen 2013;
Mikkonen 2017; Schüwer 2008; as well as the transmedial approach developed in
Thon 2016, on which much of the following builds). Accordingly, the following sec-
tions on “Storyworlds, Diegetic Levels, and Metalepsis,” “Narrators-as-Narrating-
Characters and Narratorial Strategies of Representation,” and “Character Subjectivi-
ty and Strategies of Subjective Representation” combine brief surveys of a selection
of existing approaches with systematic discussions of some of the more salient as-
pects of the strategies of narrative representation that comics employ.
2 Storyworlds, Diegetic Levels, and Metalepses

The question of when something can (or should) be considered to be a narrative
and/or to have the quality of narrativity has been one of narratology’s most stub-
bornly recurring problems. Without going into too much detail, it is worth empha-
sizing recent attempts to develop prototypical definitions of narrative, which allow
for gradual conceptualizations of narrativity (see, e. g., Fludernik 1996, 15–52; Janni-
dis 2003; Ryan 2006; Wolf 2004). This view is perhaps best encapsulated in Marie-
Laure Ryan’s proposal to regard “the set of all narratives as fuzzy, and narrativity
(or ‘storiness’) as a scalar property” (2006, 7) that can be defined by eight more or
less salient features. Still, even relatively weak “do-it-yourself definitions” (Ryan
2006, 9) will usually maintain that prototypical narratives are representations of
worlds located in space and time as well as populated by characters – and there is
a broad consensus that most if not all comics are narrative in this sense.
In light of the prevailing prototypical definitions of narrative, it will come as no
surprise that recent narratological practice has increasingly focused on storyworlds
as “the worlds evoked by narratives” (Herman 2009, 105; see also Ryan 2014; as
well as, e. g., Freeman 2017; Horstkotte 2013; Kukkonen 2013; Packard 2015; Thoss
2015; Weaver 2012). Approaches to storyworlds that are located within different re-
search traditions not only use a variety of terms but also conceptualize them rather
differently, but for the purposes of this article it will suffice to say that they general-
ly agree on the core elements of these worlds: Summarizing the classical structural-
ist position, for example, Seymour Chatman states that, for any narrative represen-
tation, “signifieds are exactly three – event, character, and detail of setting” (1978,
25), and while his neoclassical approach primarily focuses on events and “eventful-
ness” (Schmid 2010, 9), Wolf Schmid also mentions “situations, characters,” and
“actions” as the defining parts of a “represented world“ (2010, 31). Likewise, within
cognitive narratology, Patrick C. Hogan discusses how “we must continually form
and revise situation models of the story, detailed structures with characters, events,
motives, and so on” (2003, 118), and David Herman succinctly describes storyworlds
as mental models of “the situations, characters, and occurrences … being recount-
ed” (2009, 106).
Against this background, one can generally distinguish between locally repre-
sented situations and the more complex global storyworld as a whole into which they
are combined (on this and the following, see also Thon 2016, 35–70, 85–104). This
allows us to better account for the fact that comics tend to represent a selection of
spatially, temporally, causally, and sometimes ontologically disconnected situations,
and that a significant part of narrative comprehension – of appropriately imagining
storyworlds – can be described as consisting of the reconstruction of spatial, tempo-
ral, causal, and ontological relations between (as well as within) narratively represen-
ted situations. Moreover, the occasional complexity of the interrelations between the
spatially, temporally, and causally disconnected situations that comics represent
make it seem helpful to further distinguish not only between the story as a succes-
sion of represented events (all of which are part of the storyworld) and the narrative
representation of these events (or ‘discourse’) but also between the story as a succes-
sion of represented events in their chronological order and the “story-as-dis-
coursed” (Chatman 1978, 43), which is more commonly called the plot, as the suc-
cession of represented events in the order in which they are represented.
However, the four-part distinction between a comic’s storyworld, its story, its
plot, and its narrative representation does not yet say all that much about the rela-
tion between ontologically disconnected situations in comics such as Art Spiegel-
man’s Maus (1980–1991; ↗22 Art Spiegelman, Maus), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’
Watchmen (1986–1987; ↗8 World-Building), Frank Miller’s Sin City (1991–2000),
Charles Burns’s Black Hole (1995–2005), Craig Thompson’s Habibi (2011), or Mike
Carey and Peter Gross’s The Unwritten (2009–2015). Within (neo)classical narratolo-
gy, the representation of ontologically disconnected situations is usually described
via reference to Gérard Genette’s work on diegetic levels: Genette “define[s] this dif-
ference in level by saying that any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level
immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing this narrative
102 Jan-Noël Thon
is placed” (1980, 228, original emphasis), but he later concedes that this distinction
is not exclusively about ‘narrative acts,’ as “the second narrative can also be neither
oral nor written, and can present itself, openly or not, as an inward narrative […] or
[…] as any kind of recollection that a character has (in a dream or not)” (1980, 231).
Genette posits the existence of an extradiegetic level on which an extradiegetic
narrator is located. This extradiegetic narrator narrates the primary diegetic level of
the storyworld on which an intradiegetic narrator may be located. The intradiegetic
narrator may narrate a secondary metadiegetic level (which, following Bal 1997, 43–
75 and Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 87–106, may be more appropriately called a hypodie-
getic level) on which a meta- or, rather, hypodiegetic narrator may be located, who,
in turn, may narrate a tertiary meta-metadiegetic or, rather, hypo-hypodiegetic
level, possibly containing a meta-metadiegetic or, rather, hypo-hypodiegetic narra-
tor, and so on, ad infinitum. As “mind-numbing” (Malina 2002, 1) as it may be, this
core narratological terminology does allow for a precise description of narratively
complex comics’ diegetic hierarchy of subworlds by drawing clear distinctions be-
tween diegetic primary storyworlds, hypodiegetic secondary storyworlds, hypo-hypo-
diegetic tertiary storyworlds, and so on (see also Schmid 2010, 67–68, on the distinc-
tion between primary, secondary, and tertiary narrators).
Usually, comics use either narrative media such as the “Black Freighter” comic
in Watchmen and the “Tommy Taylor” novels in The Unwritten or, more commonly,
various kinds of characters to ‘anchor’ ontologically distinct subworlds within the
respective ‘higher-order’ storyworld. However, it is worth stressing that the use of
intradiegetic narrating characters such as Vladek in Maus and Dodola in Habibi are
not the only way in which characters may function as ‘anchors’ for the representa-
tion of ‘lower-order’ storyworlds. Instead, in comics such as Sin City and Black Hole,
these subworlds may encompass the whole range of what Marie-Laure Ryan de-
scribes as “F-universes” – that is, “dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, and fictional
[as well as factual] stories told to or composed by the characters” (1991, 119). Before
the following two sections will discuss some aspects of comics’ use of narrators and
their representation of character subjectivity in more detail, then, let us briefly turn
to yet another aspect of contemporary comics storytelling that reinforces the pro-
ductivity of the concept of diegetic levels or ontologically distinct subworlds pre-
cisely because it allows for the crossing or subversion of the ontological boundaries
between them.
The concept of metalepsis refers to a by now largely conventionalized strategy
of introducing representational impossibilities into a narrative representation that is
characterized by a metareferential play with the ontological boundaries between
the diegetic levels or ontologically distinct subworlds discussed above. The term
‘narrative metalepsis’ was, once more, coined by Genette, who defines it as “any
intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by
diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse” (1980, 234–
235). As influential as the term has proved to be, however, Genette’s narrator-centric
definition of the term ‘narrative metalepsis’ becomes problematic when applied to

multimodal media that do not necessarily have to employ a narrator (see the section
on “Narrators-as-Narrating-Characters and Narratorial Strategies of Representation”
below). Accordingly, Werner Wolf has proposed to use the term to more generally
refer to “a usually intentional paradoxical transgression of, or confusion between,
(onto)logically distinct (sub)worlds and/or levels that exist, or are referred to, with-
in representations of possible worlds [in the sense of storyworlds]” (2005, 91) in his
wide-ranging discussion of metalepsis as a transmedial phenomenon (see also the
comics-specific discussions in Kuhn and Veits 2015; Kukkonen 2011b; Limoges 2011;
Nöth 2007; Schuldiner 2002; Thoss 2015).
It would go beyond the scope of the present article to reconstruct the historical
breadth of metalepsis as a strategy of narrative representation that can commonly
be found in comics as different as Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (1989–1996; ↗25 Neil
Gaiman, The Sandman), Marvel’s Deadpool (1997–2002), Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott
Pilgrim (2004–2010), or the aforementioned The Unwritten, but a few more systemat-
ic remarks on the different forms that the phenomenon may take still seem to be in
order. On the one hand, it is clear that metaleptic transgressions can appear be-
tween any two (or more) ontologically distinct subworlds of the represented story-
world (as is the case when Dream enters the dreams of various characters in The
Sandman or when the “factual domain” (Ryan 1991, 118) of the storyworld and the
ubiquitous “realm of stories” increasingly converge in The Unwritten) as well as
between the storyworld and the level of narrative representation (as is the case
when the eponymous protagonist of Deadpool is repeatedly represented as thinking
about the “little yellow boxes” that are used to represent his thoughts or when the
eponymous protagonist of Scott Pilgrim repeatedly suggests that other characters
“read the book sometime” in order to inform themselves about events that where
represented in previous installments of the comics series). On the other hand, the
paradoxical transgressions that characterize all forms of metalepsis may not only
be more or less pronounced but also more or less encompassing.
In fact, just as with other forms of initially impossible-seeming narrative repre-
sentations (see also, e. g., Alber 2016 on so-called “unnatural narratives”), it is quite
common that what initially appears as a genuine metalepsis is retroactively plausi-
bilized by reference to an additional ‘higher-order’ storyworld or other ‘internal’
explanation of the seemingly paradoxical transgression (as is the case in both The
Sandman and The Unwritten). Accordingly, one may conceive of metalepsis as both
a gradual and a processual phenomenon, with quite a few narrative works generat-
ing metaleptic effects that (eventually) turn out not to be genuinely paradoxical
transgressions after all. Whether or not a comic offers ‘internal’ explanations for
what initially appear to be representational impossibilities or doubles down on the
metareferential quality of a nonplausibilized transgression of ontological bounda-
ries, however, metalepses tend to draw attention to a comic’s representational logic
that, in most cases, very much entails some kind of distinction between diegetic
104 Jan-Noël Thon
levels or ontologically distinct subworlds. And, as has repeatedly been mentioned,

a common strategy to establish distinctions between such diegetic levels or ontolog-
ically distinct subworlds in comics is the use of narrators.
3 Narrators-as-Narrating-Characters and Narratorial

Strategies of Representation
In literary narratology, the concept of the narrator is strongly connected to the idea
that narrative texts should be treated not merely as communication, but as ‘commu-
nicated communication,’ not merely as representation, but as ‘represented repre-
sentation.’ Or, as Wolf Schmid remarks, “a narrative work does [not] just narrate,
but represents an act of narration. The art of narrative is structurally characterized
by the doubling of the communication system: The narrator’s communication in
which the narrated world is created is part of the fictive represented world, which
is the object of the real author’s communication” (2010, 33, original emphases). A
core question here is what we mean when we say that narrators are (and have to
be) more or less explicitly ‘represented’ by a narrative representation, literary or
otherwise: What are the ‘cues’ that allow us to assume the presence of a narrator to
whom we can ascribe the (verbal) narration?
Despite being increasingly contested by narratologists such as Susan S. Lanser
(1981), Richard Walsh (1997), Fotis Jannidis (2006), or Tilman Köppe and Jan Stüh-
ring (2011), the common view that (fictional) verbal narration in literary texts “al-
ways provides symptoms, no matter how weak they may be” (Schmid 2010, 64),
that allow the reader to construct a (fictional) speaker as distinct from the author
may remain defensible with regard to literary narrative texts. When transferred to
comics, however, such a view becomes considerably less plausible, since the former
is not limited to verbal narration and, hence, does not as easily or self-evidently
activate the cognitive schema underlying what Ansgar Nünning has described as
the “mimesis of narration” (2001) – i. e., the impression that (fictional) verbal narra-
tion is, indeed, the representation of an act of representation (see also Walsh 1997;
as well as, e. g., Groensteen 2013, 79–119; Hescher 2016, 108–194; Kuhn and Veits
2015; Marion 1993; Mikkonen 2017, 73–89, 129–149; Schüwer 2008, 388–419 on com-
ics).
One common way to address this problem is to generally treat narrators as con-
structs “organized in the form of characters” (Jannidis 2006, 159; my translation
from the German) while at the same time acknowledging that these narrating char-
acters do not always have to be fully realized. Accordingly, readers of comics and
literary texts alike can construct a narrating character even if there are only very
few, conflicting, or problematic ‘cues’ given by the narration. One of the very basic
‘cues’ that is nearly always necessary, however – and that literary narratologists,
for obvious reasons, tend to take for granted – seems to be the presence of verbal
narration that we can attribute to a ‘speaker.’ Yet, some parts of comics’ verbal pic-
torial representation of storyworlds evidently cannot be attributed to these kinds of
‘speakers,’ that is: to narrators-as-narrating-characters. But do narrators always have
to take the form of ‘speakers’? Do they always have to be ‘organized in the form of
characters’? Perhaps not as rampant as it is in certain areas of film narratology (see,
e. g., Chatman 1990; Gaudreault 2009; Gaudreault and Jost 1999; Jost 1987; Kuhn
2011; Schlickers 1997; and Thompson-Jones 2007; 2009 for critical discussion), the
assumption of what one could generally call a nonrepresented “verbal-pictorial nar-
rating instance” has still gained some traction in comics studies over the last few
decades (see, e. g., Baetens 2001; Groensteen 2013; Kuhn/Veits 2015; Marion 1993;
Mikkonen 2017, 131–134; Surdiacourt 2012).
In contradistinction to these kinds of ‘graphic enunciation’ approaches to com-
ics narratology, understanding narrators as narrating characters conceptualizes
them not as a necessary presence in comics, but rather as an optional strategy of
narrative – or, more precisely, narratorial – representation (on this and the follow-
ing, see also Thon 2016, 125–166, 183–206). Such a conceptualization allows us to
acknowledge that neither readers nor critics need to attribute the verbal-pictorial
representation of comics storyworlds to a ‘narrating instance’ – as distinct not only
from more or less explicitly represented narrators-as-narrating-characters but also
from both actual and hypothetical authors or author collectives – even in cases
where there are next to no ‘cues’ that would allow them to comprehend the ‘narrat-
ing instance’ in question as being (self-)represented in some way. Rather, one can
observe a prototypical ‘division of labor’ between (hypothetical) author(s) and (fic-
tional or, perhaps, merely represented) narrators in many comics: At least in the
context of fictional narrative representations, readers will usually attempt to attrib-
ute verbal narration to some kind of (fictional) narrator-as-narrating-character (even
if there are only a few ‘cues’ to such a narrator’s presence apart from the presence
of the verbal narration itself), while attributing the verbal-pictorial representation
to the comic’s hypothetical author or author collective in a majority of cases (see
Kindt and Müller 2006 on how emphasizing that the author or author collective in
question is hypothetical helps avoid some of the pitfalls of actual intentionalism).
Accordingly, one can speak of narratorial representation with regard to the former
and of nonnarratorial representation with regard to the latter – though one can also
find a range of special cases such as a ‘narrating’ character being represented as
the ‘source’ of parts of the verbal-pictorial representation, which may then be de-
scribed as verbal-pictorial narratorial representation, as is the default case in auto-
biographical or journalistic comics such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), Da-
vid Small’s Stitches (2009), Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993–1995), or Sarah Glidden’s
Rolling Blackouts (2016), but can also occasionally be found in fictional comics such
as Alan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume
One (1999–2000) and Volume II (2002–2003) or Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan
Hock Chye (2016).
106 Jan-Noël Thon
Leaving these comparatively specific cases aside, what types of narrators-as-

narrating-characters to whom recipients can attribute the kind of narratorial repre-
sentation that prototypically takes the form of verbal narration can be distinguished
in comics? On a fairly basic level, one can, for example, analyze the narrator’s posi-
tion within the narratorial hierarchy. As has already been mentioned, Gérard Ge-
nette identifies an extradiegetic level on which a primary extradiegetic narrator is
located. That extradiegetic narrator narrates the diegetic primary storyworld, in
which a secondary intradiegetic narrator, who narrates a meta- or, rather, hypodie-
getic secondary storyworld, may be located (see Genette 1980, 227–234; 1988, 84–
95). However, the distinction between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators does
not apply in the same way to comics as it does to exclusively verbal narrative repre-
sentations. One of the consequences of limiting the term ‘narrator’ to refer to narrat-
ing characters in the sense sketched above is that, in comics, we can encounter
intradiegetic narrators such as V in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta
(1988–1989) or Smiley Bone at the beginning of Jeff Smith’s Bone (1991–2004), with-
out having previously encountered an extradiegetic narrator such as Artie in Maus
(which also employs an intradiegetic narrator, Vladek) or Dodola in Habibi (who
also acts as an intradiegetic narrator in some segments of the comic). Hence, it will
be helpful to say a few more words about the distinction between extradiegetic and
intradiegetic narrators as it applies to comics’ narratorial configurations.
Since intradiegetic narrators cannot be defined as being narrated by extradie-
getic narrators in comics, the core question becomes: Is the narrator located within
the diegetic primary storyworld or ‘outside’ of it? And this question, in turn, is con-
nected to a second question: Does the comic provide any information about the
specific situation in which a given narrator narrates that can be attributed to a
‘source’ different from the narrator? The additional criterion proposed here is neces-
sary since ‘overt’ extradiegetic narrators may, of course, very well provide at least
some information about the situation in which they narrate through the strategies
mentioned above without thereby locating themselves in the diegetic primary story-
world at all. If there is another source that provides information about the situation
in which a given narrator narrates – be it another narratorial voice or some other,
nonnarratorial element of the representation – one can usually assume that this
very information locates the narrator in question in ‘a storyworld of their own.’ It
should also be noted, however, that readers’ views of a narrator’s position within
the narratorial hierarchy may change – as is, for example, the case in Watchmen,
when what initially appears to be extradiegetic verbal narration eventually turns
out to have been part of Rorschach’s intradiegetic diary all along.
While the distinction between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators refers to
the absolute ontological position of a narrator within the narratorial hierarchy de-
fined by the system of diegetic levels or ontologically distinct subworlds that make
up the storyworld as a whole, Genette also discusses the relative ontological posi-
tion of narrators with regard to the story(world) they themselves narrate: Heterodie-
getic narrators such as the unnamed narrator at the beginning of The Sandman.
Preludes and Nocturnes (1989) or the intradiegetic Dodola reading stories to Zam in
Habibi are not part of the story(world) they narrate; homodiegetic narrators such as
Dream in The Sandman. Preludes and Nocturnes or the extradiegetic Dodola in Habi-
bi are part of that story(world) (see Genette 1980, 243–252; 1988, 96–113). Now, there
are obvious problems with that distinction, in that it accounts neither for the rather
subtle differences of involvement that homodiegetic narrators may exhibit nor for
the difference between a narrator who is not part of the story they narrate and a
narrator who is not part of the storyworld they narrate. Still, Genette’s terms are
well established and allow for a good initial analysis of comics narrator’s degree of
involvement in the stories they tell. It should also be noted once more, however,
that there are comics such as Peter Milligan’s The Enigma (1993), whose narrator is
a lizard that has learned of the story he tells through the superpowers of The Enig-
ma. In a rather convoluted way, this narrator is initially represented as being heter-
odiegetic but eventually turns out to have been homodiegetic – a change of narrato-
rial role that may be less decisive than when a narrator who is initially represented
as extradiegetic turns out to have been intradiegetic all along (which is also the
case in The Enigma), but still often forces the readers to reassess their initial hypoth-
eses about the represented storyworld.
The distinction between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators hinges on the
question to what extent the narrating situation is represented as part of the diegetic
primary storyworld, which, in turn, usually boils down to the question of whether
the narrating situation is represented by the nonnarratorial representation of com-
ics. Accordingly, it will come as no surprise that the consideration of a narrator’s
“textually projected role” (Margolin 2009, 362) may also be used to further illumi-
nate the definition of narratorial representation as ‘communicated communication’
or ‘represented representation,’ emphasizing that the mode used to represent verbal
narration does not have to be the same mode that verbal narration is represented
as employing. In other words, the represented mode of the verbal narration may (and
in fact often does) differ from the verbal narration’s mode of representation. While
the verbal narration is usually represented using written text in contemporary com-
ics (though there are exceptions such as the pictorial narratorial representation in
Shaun Tan’s Arrival (2006)), one can often distinguish between verbal narration
being represented as spoken (such as the narratorial representation attributable to
the intradiegetic Dodola reading stories to Zam in Dodola or the narrating lizard in
The Enigma), represented as written (such as the narratorial representation attribu-
table to Mina Murray in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One or Ror-
schach in Watchmen), and represented as thought (such as the narratorial represen-
tation attributable to the eponymous protagonist of Deadpool or Chris in chapter 3
of Black Hole). However, it should also be noted that extradiegetic narrators such
as Dream in most parts of The Sandman or Dodola in most parts of Habibi commonly
do not provide sufficient markers to allow recipients to intersubjectively construct
108 Jan-Noël Thon
the represented mode of the verbal narration as either spoken, written, or thought,
resulting in an unspecified mode of representation.
Another partially connected question that is often particularly relevant to the
narratological analysis of comics is how nonnarratorial representation relates to
narratorial representation. While the narratorial representation of extradiegetic nar-
rators frames the nonnarratorial representation at least to some extent, comics com-
monly use intradiegetic nonframing narrators such as Vladek in some parts of Maus,
V in some parts of V for Vendetta, or Smiley Bone in some parts of Bone, whose
hypodiegetic secondary storyworlds are exclusively represented by their verbal nar-
ration. Still, even in the case of intradiegetic narrators, the more interesting instan-
ces are usually constituted by framing narrators such as Vladek telling the story of
his survival of the Holocaust in other parts of Maus, Dodola reading stories to Zam
in Habibi, or Wilson Taylor writing the “Tommy Taylor” novels in The Unwritten. In
all of these cases, the framing narrators’ narratorial representation is represented
in such a way that the nonnarratorial representation can be understood as contrib-
uting to – or commenting on, or correcting – the representation of the storyworld
the narrator in question tells about in some way, without the comic necessarily iden-
tifying that narrator as somehow being in control of the nonnarratorial representa-
tion.
When analyzing the use of framing narrators, one can further distinguish be-
tween unrelated, redundant, complementary, and contradictory combinations of nar-
ratorial and nonnarratorial representation (see also Kozloff 1988; Kuhn 2011; as well
as the similar work on text-image relations in comics by McCloud 1993, 152–155;
Rippl and Etter 2013; ↗3 Text-Image Relations). Among other things, the relation
between narratorial and nonnarratorial representation is often important for the
analysis of comics that employ some form of narratorial or narrative unreliability. It
would go beyond the scope of this article to extensively discuss the existing re-
search on narrative unreliability, but it will sometimes be helpful to at least distin-
guish between representational unreliability, where the ‘fictional facts’ of the story-
world are represented (or, perhaps, comprehended) unreliably, and evaluative
unreliability, where the ‘fictional facts’ are evaluated (or, perhaps, interpreted) unre-
liably (see also, e. g., Cohn 2000; Ferenz 2008; Fludernik 1999; Helbig 2005; Kindt
2008; Laass 2008 for various similar distinctions). Again, this is a rough distinction
in need of further differentiation, but it still captures the difference between the
unreliable representation of storyworld elements in cases such as the ‘eternal wak-
ing sequence’ at the beginning of The Sandman. Preludes and Nocturnes, which ini-
tially represents Alex Burgess’s recursive nightmare as if it were part of the story-
world’s ‘factual domain,’ and the unreliable evaluation of storyworld elements by
narrators such as Uatu the Watcher in Alex Ross and Jim Krueger’s Earth X (1999–
2000), who regularly offers unreliable evaluations based on his alien norms and
values. While evaluative unreliability is often rather clearly connected to narrators-
as-narrating-characters, then, representationally unreliable nonnarratorial repre-
sentation is usually also attributed to characters in some way, either to the (often
‘misreporting’) unreliable narration of narrators such as Cluracan in Neil Gaiman’s
The Sandman. Worlds’ End (1993), who readily admits that he has embellished his
story with various fictional elements, or to the (often ‘underreported’) unreliable
perception of ‘regular’ characters such as Calvin in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hob-
bes (1985–1995), whose vivid imagination makes Hobbes “come to life” (see also
Phelan for additional discussion of “misreporting,” “misinterpreting,” “misregard-
ing,” “underreporting,” “underinterpreting,” and “underregarding” (2005, 51) forms
of unreliability). And this, in turn, leads us back to the more general question how
comics represent character subjectivity.
4 Character Subjectivity and Strategies

of Subjective Representation
As has already been hinted at, prototypical narrative representations are often con-
sidered to be about worlds populated with characters that get some kind of ‘mental
life’ ascribed to them, experience the represented situations, and function as agents
in a more or less complex network of goals, plans, and motivations. It comes as no
surprise, then, that the problem of subjectivity – or, more precisely, the wealth of
strategies that narrative representations may employ in order to represent the sub-
jective consciousnesses and perceptions of their characters – has been at the center
of narratological interest for the past five decades, with the discussion having been
primarily defined by the three terms ‘perspective,’ ‘point of view,’ and ‘focalization’
(see, e. g., Niederhoff 2009a; 2009b; as well as the contributions in Hühn, Schmid,
and Schönert 2009). As is often the case in contemporary narratology, though, there
is no common consensus regarding the question to which concepts these terms
should refer, and it would go beyond the scope of this article to reconstruct even
the conceptual history of the most exclusively narratological term, ‘focalization,’ in
any detail (for an impression of the range of conceptualizations, see, e. g., the litera-
ture-oriented accounts of ‘focalization’ by Bal 1997, 142–161; Genette 1980, 161–211;
1988, 64–78; Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 72–86; as well as the film-oriented accounts of
‘focalization’ by Branigan 1992, 86–124; Deleyto 1996; Jost 1987; and the recent at-
tempts to transfer the concept of ‘focalization’ to comics in Badman 2010; Fischer
and Hatfield 2011; Hescher 2016, 108–194; Horstkotte and Pedri 2011; 2017; Kakko
and Miettinnen 2015; Kukkonen 2011a; Mikkonen 2017, 150–173; Lanzendörfer 2011;
Schüwer 2008, 392–404).
Despite the fact that the specifically narratological term ‘focalization’ seems to
suggest a certain technical quality rather more strongly than the comparatively gen-
eral terms ‘perspective’ and ‘point of view,’ the lack of consensus regarding the
concepts that the term in question should be used to refer to is similarly glaring in
110 Jan-Noël Thon
all three cases. Arguably, then, the conceptual histories associated with these terms
have become so complex and convoluted that using them is likely to lead to various
kinds of misunderstandings. Without negating the heuristic value that conceptuali-
zations of ‘perspective,’ ‘point of view,’ and ‘focalization’ undoubtedly have, a pos-
sible alternative would be to employ less ‘loaded’ expressions when examining
strategies of subjective representation in comics (on this and the following, see,
once more, Thon 2016, 223–264, 282–304). What one could then call the representa-
tion of (some form of) subjectivity is usually considered to be a prototypical feature
of narrative, but this includes comparatively indirect modes of representation that
allow readers to infer certain aspects of the represented characters’ consciousnesses
or minds without providing anything amounting to what may roughly be described
as “direct access” (Palmer 2004, 210). It is precisely this kind of ‘direct access’ to a
represented character’s consciousness or mind that various more decidedly subjec-
tive strategies of narrative representation provide.
In order to develop a better grasp of the distinction between the representation
of subjectivity as a fundamental prototypical feature of narrative representation in
comics and specific strategies of subjective representation that provide ‘direct ac-
cess’ to a character’s consciousness or mind, a few more words on the question of
how subjective representation relates to nonsubjective representation seem in order.
In the context of a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the analysis of the representation of
subjectivity in comics, it is useful to distinguish between local strategies of subjec-
tive, intersubjective, and objective representation, whose specific combination
leads to a global arrangement of these strategies within a comic’s overarching struc-
ture of subjectivity. Even in narratively complex comics, intersubjective representa-
tion may be considered the unmarked case, while objective representation and sub-
jective representation may both be considered marked cases, albeit on opposing
ends of a continuum that would measure the extent to which a given segment of a
comic represents characters’ consciousnesses. While objective representation sug-
gests that the storyworld elements in question are not perceived or imagined by any
characters at all, subjective representation suggests that the storyworld elements in
question are perceived or imagined by only one character – and often in a way
that is not compatible with an intersubjective version of the storyworld, which is
represented by the unmarked case of intersubjective representation. Despite the im-
portance of intersubjective representation for the reader’s comprehension of charac-
ters’ consciousnesses or minds, however, the remainder of this section will focus
on the subjective representation of (quasi-)perceptual aspects of characters’ con-
sciousnesses – representations, that is, which provide the recipient with ‘direct ac-
cess’ to ‘what is on a character’s mind’ at a given point in storyworld time, including
their perception of the storyworld as well as quasi-perceptual hallucinations, memo-
ries, dreams, and fantasies.
In doing so, one may follow Martin Schüwer (2008, 382–419), Silke Horstkotte
and Nancy Pedri (2011; 2017), Thierry Groensteen (2013, 121–131), Achim Hescher
(2016, 108–194), and various other comics narratologists in stressing that comics
may employ both narratorial and nonnarratorial strategies of subjective representa-
tion. Let us first consider narratorial strategies of subjective representation or, in
other words, the ways in which contemporary comics may use narrators to provide
‘direct access’ to (quasi-)perceptual and other aspects of characters’ consciousness-
es or characters’ minds. The unnamed extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrator in The
Sandman. Preludes and Nocturnes, for example, provides ‘direct access’ to various
represented characters’ minds and (quasi-)perceptions, yet highly subjective het-
erodiegetic narrators appear to be comparatively rare in contemporary comics. How-
ever, comics commonly attribute narratorial strategies of subjective representation
to extradiegetic homodiegetic narrators such as Dream in The Sandman. Preludes
and Nocturnes or Dodola in Habibi (and, of course, the extradiegetic homodiegetic
narrators in ‘graphic memoirs’ such as Fun Home or Stitches). Still, it would seem
that the specific limitations and affordances of comics’ multimodal configurations
as well as the fact that their narrative representation always consists of combina-
tions of narratorial and nonnarratorial representation (if the comic in question em-
ploys a narrator at all, that is) further complicate the analysis of narratorial strate-
gies of subjective representation. Most fundamentally, this refers to the by now well-
established fact that, whether they are attributable to extra- or intradiegetic and
hetero- or homodiegetic narrators, the use of narratorial strategies of subjective rep-
resentation in contemporary comics may be combined with nonnarratorial strate-
gies of subjective as well as intersubjective and objective representation, and the
resulting range of potential relations warrants at least some focused attention in the
context of narratological analyses that aim at reconstructing what could then be
called a comic’s structure of subjectivity.
While the present article cannot provide in-depth discussion of the vast range
of narratorial strategies of subjective representation that comics may employ, it still
seems helpful to distinguish four particularly salient prototypical forms: First, the
narratorial representation of a character’s mind that features prominently in comics
such as The Sandman or Habibi entails a variety of strategies that the literary theo-
rist Dorrit Cohn subsumes under the labels “psycho-narration” (1978, 21) and “self-
narration” (1978, 143), yet this rather broad concept may be specified with regard
to the aspect(s) of the character’s mind that are represented, such as the narratorial
representation of memories, dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations, knowledge and
beliefs, norms and values, wishes and motivations, emotions and moods, or combi-
nations thereof. Second, one can distinguish this still relatively broad category from
a less ‘encompassing’ form of the narratorial representation of a character’s (quasi-)
perceptions that features prominently in comics such as The Sandman or Sin City,
where the subjective representation in question still at least partially refers to the
‘factual domain’ of the storyworld in which the (quasi-)perceiving character is locat-
ed. Now, the realization of what Cohn calls “narrated interior monologue” (1978,
99) and “self-narrated monologue” (1978, 166) is certainly possible in comics as
112 Jan-Noël Thon
well, but it seems that the form is found there very rarely if ever – or, perhaps, is
just very difficult to notice – due to comics’ tendency to employ ‘non-omnipresent’
homodiegetic narrators when it comes to narratorial strategies of subjective repre-
sentation. Hence, one could focus, third, on the narratorially framed representation
of a character’s internal voice that features prominently in comics such as Sin City
and Black Hole, which is comparable to what Cohn describes as “quoted interior
monologue” (1978, 58) and “self-quoted interior monologue” (1978, 161), while at
the same time illustrating that comics commonly do not mark the internal voice in
question as being quoted (which makes speaking of it as being framed by the narra-
torial representation seem more appropriate). Fourth and finally, the narratorially
framed representation of internal voices can still be considered a part of the narrato-
rial representation that constitutes its context, yet the nonnarratorial representation
of a character’s internal voice, which refers to comics’ usually more local realization
of what Cohn calls “autonomous interior monologue” (1978, 217) also appears in
comics such as Black Hole or, rather more prominently, Deadpool. Incidentally, the
observation that this form of the representation of internal voices is not, by default,
a part of the narratorial representation anymore – even though it does, in fact,
sometimes constitute narratorial representation in its own right, which is to be at-
tributed to an intradiegetic or ‘lower-order’ thinking narrator – leads us to the ques-
tion which (other) nonnarratorial strategies of subjective representation contempo-
rary comics may employ.
While literary narratology remains the primary point of reference for any discus-
sion of comics’ use of narratorial strategies of subjective representation, the analysis
of comics’ use of nonnarratorial strategies of subjective representation primarily
benefits from a broad corpus of research within film narratology and film studies
more generally (see Branigan 1984, 73–142; 1992, 86–124; Deleyto 1996; Eder 2008,
565–646; Jost 1987; Kawin 1978; Kuhn 2011, 119–194; Metz 1973; Mitry 1997; Wilson
1986; 2006). Again, it would go beyond the scope of this article to provide detailed
analyses, but it may still prove helpful to once more sketch four prototypical forms
of nonnarratorial strategies of subjective representation in contemporary comics:
First, what is usually called a ‘point-of-view shot’ in film theory may be reconceptu-
alized as referring to segments of a comic’s nonnarratorial representation within
which the storyworld is pictorially represented from the spatial position of a particu-
lar character. A prototypical example of this can be found in the first chapter of
Black Hole, when the first panel of a page shows Keith dissecting a frog, the second
panel shows the dissected frog from Keith’s spatial position, and the third panel
shows Keith’s frozen face. It is obvious that the spatial position of a character heavi-
ly influences their perception, but this pictorial strategy of subjective representation
still represents an intersubjectively valid version of the storyworld, albeit from the
specific spatial position and resulting ‘visual perspective’ of a particular character.
Hence, the merely spatial point-of-view sequence may be considered the ‘least sub-
jective’ of the nonnarratorial strategies of subjective representation distinguished in
the following.
This is different, second, in the special case of the (quasi-)perceptual point-of-

view sequence alternatively described as “perception shot” (Branigan 1984, 79) and
“subjectively inflected” (Wilson 2006, 85, original emphasis) point-of-view shot in
film theory, where the pictorial representation not only approximates the spatial
position of a character but also represents more clearly subjective (quasi-)perceptu-
al aspects of their consciousness, resulting in a representation of storyworld el-
ements that can often not be considered to be intersubjectively valid anymore. A
prototypical example of this can be found in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,
Volume One, when the reader learns that Mr. Hyde has a peculiar way of perceiving
the world in that he can literally ‘see’ temperature: In the second panel on the page
in question, the perceiving character, Mr. Hyde, is shown; in the third panel, what
he perceives in ‘infrared vision’ is shown; and in the fourth panel, Mr. Hyde is
shown again. While the spatial point-of-view sequence tends to be mainly marked
contextually (through the highly conventionalized point-of-view structure that
shows a character, then shows what that character perceives from their spatial posi-
tion, and finally shows the character again), the (quasi-)perceptual point of view
sequence often uses additional representational markers such as filters, blurred
lines, or unusual coloring in order to communicate the subjective quality of what is
being shown (in addition to the point-of-view structure). Yet, considering that (qua-
si-)perceptual point of view sequences are usually treated as a special case of spatial
point-of-view sequences and that the markers of subjectivity that define the former
can be rather subtle, it might be best to think of these two nonnarratorial strategies
of subjective representation as opposed points on a continuum of representations
that always approximate the spatial position of a particular character but add addi-
tional aspects of their subjective (quasi-)perception to varying degrees.
However, the representation of (quasi-)perceptual aspects of a character’s con-
sciousness beyond their spatial position does not necessitate the pictorial represen-
tation’s approximation of that character’s spatial position at all. In what one can,
third, call (quasi-)perceptual overlay – and which more or less corresponds to Brani-
gan’s “projection” (1984, 82, original emphasis) and Wilson’s “impersonal subjec-
tively inflected shots” (2006, 87) – this is precisely what happens: The pictorial repre-
sentation in comics such as Frank Miller’s Sin City. Hell and Back (1999–2000) or Chris
Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan. The Smartest Kid on Earth (1995–2000; ↗27 Chris Ware, Jimmy
Corrigan) usually does not approximate the spatial position of a character but still
(occasionally) represents other (quasi-)perceptual aspects of a character’s conscious-
ness to such an extent that the resulting representation of storyworld elements can-
not be considered intersubjectively valid anymore (such as when Sin City. Hell and
Back extensively represents Wallace’s drug-induced hallucinations or when Jimmy
Corrigan. The Smartest Kid on Earth briefly represents Jimmy mistaking a delivery
man with a cap for a masked man with a cape). Just as in the (quasi-)perceptual
point-of-view sequence, then, what is represented in segments of (quasi-)perceptual
overlay seems often closer to a character’s “private domain” (Ryan 1991, 112) than to
114 Jan-Noël Thon
the ‘factual domain’ of the storyworld, which is commonly marked via content
markers on the level of what is being represented as well as via representational
markers on the level of the representation – but, at the same time, it is represented
as (at least partially) being that character’s perception of the ‘factual domain.’ Inci-
dentally, one could argue not only that (quasi-)perceptual overlay is commonly
combined with the subjective representation of storyworld sound but also that the
subjective representation of storyworld sound (which can also be found in the
above-mentioned sequence from Sin City. Hell and Back) in a certain segment of the
narrative representation may suffice to describe the latter as a form of (quasi-)
perceptual overlay – if it is not a form of (quasi-)perceptual point-of-view sequence,
that is, since both of these forms are defined by the representation of what seems
closer to a character’s ‘private domain’ than to the ‘factual domain’ of the story-
world, while still being best comprehended as the character’s (quasi-)perception of
that ‘factual domain.’
It is this latter criterion that allows us to distinguish (quasi-)perceptual overlay
from, fourth, the full-fledged representation of internal worlds, where what is repre-
sented is intended to be comprehended as being neither the ‘factual domain’ of the
storyworld nor a character’s (quasi-)perception of it, but rather a character’s memo-
ries, dreams, or fantasies that may still take the form of quasi-perceptions, yet are
not represented as a ‘subjectivized’ version of the diegetic level on which the re-
membering, dreaming, or fantasizing character is located anymore. These kinds of
subjective representation – called “mental process narration” by Branigan (1984,
85) and “subjectively saturated shots” by Wilson (2006, 87) – are defined, in other
words, by a change of diegetic level within the storyworld as a whole: If the charac-
ter to whom we can ascribe the ‘private domain’ is located in the diegetic primary
storyworld, what is represented in the case of a nonnarratorial representation of
internal worlds would be a hypodiegetic secondary storyworld (and the same would
be true for at least some forms of the narratorial representation of a character’s
mind briefly mentioned above). While (quasi-)perceptual overlay, once more, tends
not to be marked by transparent markers of subjectivity and, therefore, can require
comparatively complex processes of inference in order to be recognized, the non-
narratorial representation of internal worlds in comics such as The Sandman. Season
of Mists (1990–1991), which represents Hob Gadling’s dream of Queen Elisabeth I
using a personal computer, Black Hole, which represents not only Chris’s dreams
but also her memories, or Sin City. Hell and Back, which represents not only Wal-
lace’s memories but also his visualization of himself sitting in his ‘private place,’
seems somewhat more strongly conventionalized. Indeed, the nonnarratorial repre-
sentation of internal worlds in comics often uses both the kind of contextual mark-
ers typical for spatial point-of-view sequences and the more simultaneous markers
typical for (quasi-)perceptual point-of-view sequences, even though there is no sta-
ble 1:1 relationship between these (at least partially medium-specific) markers of
subjectivity and the ontological status of the represented situations.
5 Conclusion
Evidently, much more could be said about the spatial, temporal, causal, and onto-
logical relations between locally represented situations as part of a comic’s global
storyworld as a whole or the ways in which comics may use metalepses that cross
or dissolve the borders between ontologically distinct subworlds; about the ways in
which comics may employ various kinds of narrators, combining a range of strate-
gies of narratorial representation that typically take verbal form with a no less broad
range of strategies of nonnarratorial representation that typically take verbal-picto-
rial form; or about the ways in which comics provide ‘direct access’ to characters’
consciousnesses and minds via a range of narratorial as well as nonnarratorial strat-
egies of subjective representation, which, in combination with strategies of inter-
subjective and objective representation, lead to occasionally rather complex struc-
tures of subjectivity. Indeed, the present article did not aim to provide more than a
first impression of the range of strategies of narrative representation that comics
narratology is concerned with, but readers interested in delving deeper into the
narratological analysis of comics will find ample references to more in-depth theo-
retical accounts and sample analyses throughout the preceding sections. Even if the
present article’s necessarily cursory discussion of “Storyworlds, Diegetic Levels, and
Metalepses,” “Narrators-as-Narrating-Characters and Narratorial Strategies of Rep-
resentation,” and “Character Subjectivity and Strategies of Subjective Representa-
tion” were to have raised more questions than it has answered, then, it will hopeful-
ly still have provided appropriate tools for its readers to pursue answers to these
questions on their own.
6 Bibliography
6.1 Works Cited
Alber, Jan. Unnatural Narrative. Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln: University of
Badman, Derik A. “Talking, Thinking, and Seeing in Pictures. Narration, Focalization, and
Ocularization in Comics Narratives.” International Journal of Comic Art 12.2–3 (2010): 91–111.
Baetens, Jan. “Revealing Traces. A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation.” The Language of Comics.
Word and Image. Ed. Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2001. 145–155.
Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd edition. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1997.
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Branigan, Edward. Point of View in the Cinema. A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical
Film. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984.
116 Jan-Noël Thon
Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge, 1992.

Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation. Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015.
Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2000.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca NY:
Cornell University Press, 1978.
Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca NY:
Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn. Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2016.
Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction. Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies
52.4 (2006): 767–782.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Cohn, Dorrit. “Discordant Narration.” Style 34.2 (2000): 307–316.
Couch, Chris. “The Publication and Formats of Comics, Graphic Novels, and Tankobon.” Image [&]
Narrative (December 2000): n.pag. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/narratology/
chriscouch.htm (1. May 2017).
Deleyto, Celestino. “Focalisation in Film Narrative.” Narratology. An Introduction. Ed. Susana
Onega and José A. García Landa. London: Longman, 1996. 217–233.
Eder, Jens. Die Figur im Film. Grundlagen der Figurenanalyse. Marburg: Schüren, 2008.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics. Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012.
Etter, Lukas, and Jan-Noël Thon. “Beyond the Written Word. Graphic Novels in the Twenty-First
Century.” New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Ed. Sibylle
Baumbach and Birgit Neumann. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 277–296.
Ferenz, Volker. Don’t Believe His Lies. The Unreliable Narrator in Contemporary American Cinema.
Trier: WVT, 2008.
Fischer, Craig, and Charles Hatfield. “Teeth, Sticks, and Bricks. Calligraphy, Graphic Focalization,
and Narrative Braiding in Eddie Campbell’s Alec.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 70–93.
Fludernik, Monika. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996.
Fludernik, Monika. “Defining (In)Sanity. The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper and the Question of
Unreliability.” Grenzüberschreitungen. Narratologie im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries.
Narratology in Context. Ed. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach. Tübingen: Narr, 1999.
75–95.
Freeman, Matthew. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling. Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia
Story Worlds. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Gardner, Jared. Projections. Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Palo Alto:
Gardner, Jared, and David Herman. “Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory. Introduction.”
SubStance 40.1 (2011): 3–13.
Gaudreault, André. From Plato to Lumière. Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
Gaudreault, André, and François Jost. “Enunciation and Narration.” A Companion to Film Theory.
Ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Malden: Blackwell, 1999. 45–63.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics. An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of

Mississippi, 2005.
Helbig, Jörg. “‘Follow the White Rabbit!’ Signale erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im
zeitgenössischen Spielfilm.” Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur
und Film. Ed. Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2005. 131–146.
Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Hescher, Achim. Reading Graphic Novels. Genre and Narration. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
Hogan, Patrick C. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts. A Guide for Humanists. New York:
Routledge, 2003.
Horstkotte, Silke. “Zooming In and Out. Panels, Frames, Sequences, and the Building of Graphic
Storyworlds.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Contributions to the Theory and History
of Graphic Narrative. Ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 27–48.
Horstkotte, Silke, and Nancy Pedri. “Focalization in Graphic Narrative.” Narrative 19.3 (2011):
330–357.
Horstkotte, Silke, and Nancy Pedri. “The Body at Work. Subjectivity in Graphic Memoir.”
Subjectivity across Media. Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives. Ed. Maike Sarah
Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon. New York: Routledge, 2017. 77–91.
Hühn, Peter, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, eds. Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization.
Modeling Mediation in Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009.
Jannidis, Fotis. “Narratology and the Narrative.” What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers
regarding the Status of a Theory. Ed. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller. Berlin: De Gruyter,
2003. 35–54.
Jannidis, Fotis. “Wer sagt das? Erzählen mit Stimmverlust.” Stimme(n) im Text. Narratologische
Positionsbestimmungen. Ed. Andreas Blödorn, Daniela Langer, and Michael Scheffel. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2006. 151–164.
Jost, François. L’oeil-caméra. Entre film et roman. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1987.
Kakko, Tommi, and Mervi Miettinen. “‘The Image Rules the World.’ Focalization, Hallucinations
and Metalepsis in The Invisibles.” ImageText 8.2 (2015): n.pag.
Kawin, Bruce. Mindscreen. Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film. Princeton: Princeton
Kindt, Tom. Unzuverlässiges Erzählen und literarische Moderne. Eine Untersuchung der Romane
von Ernst Weiß. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008.
Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Müller. The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2006.
Köppe, Tilmann, and Jan Stühring. “Against Pan-Narrator Theories.” Journal of Literary Semantics
40.1 (2011): 59–80.
Kozloff, Sarah. Invisible Storytellers. Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988.
Kuhn, Markus. Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011.
Kuhn, Markus, and Andreas Veits. “Narrative Mediation in Comics. Narrative Instances and
Narrative Levels in Paul Hornschemeier’s The Three Paradoxes.” Author and Narrator.
Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate. Ed. Dorothee Birke and Tilmann
Köppe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 235–262.
Kukkonen, Karin. “Comics as a Test Case for Transmedial Narratology.” SubStance 40.1 (2011a):
34–51.
Kukkonen, Karin. “Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels.” Metalepsis in Popular Culture.
Ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011b. 213–231.
Kukkonen, Karin. Contemporary Comics Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
Laass, Eva. Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths. Forms and Functions of Unreliable Narration in
Contemporary American Cinema. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008.
118 Jan-Noël Thon
Lanser, Susan S. The Narrative Act. Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981.
Lanzendörfer, Tim. “Biographiction. Narratological Aspects of Chester Brown’s Louis Riel.”
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 59.1 (2011): 27–40.
Limoges, Jean-Marc. “Metalepsis in the Cartoons of Tex Avery. Expanding the Boundaries of
Transgression.” Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2011. 197–212.
Malina, Debra. Breaking the Frame. Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 2002.
Margolin, Uri. “Narrator.” Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and
Jörg Schönert. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. 351–369.
Marion, Philippe. Traces en cases. Travail graphique, figuration narrative et participation du
lecteur. Louvain-la-Neuve: Bruylant-Academia, 1993.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.
Meskin, Aaron. “Defining Comics?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65.4 (2007): 369–379.
Metz, Christian. “Current Problems of Film Theory.” Screen 14.1–2 (1973): 40–87.
Mickwitz, Nina. Documentary Comics. Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Mikkonen, Kai. The Narratology of Comic Art. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Mitry, Jean. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997.
Molotiu, Andrei. Abstract Comics. The Anthology. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2009.
Niederhoff, Burkhard. “Focalization.” Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf
Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009a. 115–123.
Niederhoff, Burkhard. “Perspective/Point of View.” Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn,
John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009b. 384–397.
Nöth, Winfried. “Narrative Self-Reference in a Literary Comic. M.-A. Mathieu’s L’Origine.”
Semiotica 165 (2007): 173–190.
Nünning, Ansgar. “Mimesis des Erzählens. Prolegomena zu einer Wirkungsästhetik, Typologie und
Funktionsgeschichte des Aktes des Erzählens und der Metanarration.” Erzählen und
Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger. Ed. Jörg Helbig. Heidelberg:
Winter, 2001. 13–47.
Packard, Stephan. Anatomie des Comics. Psychosemiotische Medienanalyse. Göttingen: Wallstein,
2006.
Packard, Stephan. “Closing the Open Signification. Forms of Transmedial Storyworlds and
Chronotopoi in Comics.” Storyworlds 7.2 (2015): 55–74.
Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Peeters, Benoît. Case, planche, récit. Comment lire une bande dessinée. Tournai: Casterman,
1991.
Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca NY:
Postema, Barbara. Narrative Structure in Comics. Making Sense of Fragments. Rochester: RIT
Press.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. 2nd edition. London:
Routledge. 2002.
Rippl, Gabriele, and Lukas Etter. “Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative.” From
Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative.
Ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 191–217.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Story/Worlds/Media. Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious
Narratology.” Storyworlds across Media. Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology.
Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 25–49.
Schlickers, Sabine. Verfilmtes Erzählen. Narratologisch-komparative Untersuchung zu El beso de
la mujer araña (Manuel Puig/Héctor Babenco) und Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Gabriel
García Marquez/Fransesco Rosi). Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1997.
Schmid, Wolf. Narratology. An Introduction. 2005. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.
Schuldiner, Michael. “Writer’s Block and the Metaleptic Event in Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel,
Maus.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 21 (2002): 108–115.
Schüwer, Martin. Wie Comics erzählen. Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen
Literatur. Trier: WVT, 2008.
Stein, Daniel. “Comics and Graphic Novels.” Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image –
Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 420–438.
Stein, Daniel. Authorizing Superhero Comics. On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre. 2021/
forthcoming.
Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon. “Introduction. From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels.” From
Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Contribution to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative.
Ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 1–23.
Straumann, Barbara. “Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality.” Handbook of Intermediality.
Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 249–267.
Surdiacourt, Steven. “Can You Hear Me Drawing? ‘Voice’ and the Graphic Novel.” Travelling
Concepts, Metaphors, and Narratives. Literary and Cultural Studies in an Age of
Interdisciplinary Research. Ed. Sibylle Baumbach, Beatrice Michaelis, and Ansgar Nünning.
Trier: WVT, 2012. 165–178.
Tabachnick, Stephen E. “The Graphic Novel and the Age of Transition. A Survey and Analysis.”
English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 53.1 (2010): 3–28.
Thomson-Jones, Katherine. “The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator.” British Journal of
Aesthetics 47.1 (2007): 76–94.
Thomson-Jones, Katherine. “Cinematic Narrators.” Philosophy Compass 4.2 (2009): 296–311.
Thon, Jan-Noël. “Narratives across Media and the Outlines of a Media-Conscious Narratology.”
Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2015. 439–456.
Thon, Jan-Noël. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lincoln: University of
Thoss, Jeff. When Storyworlds Collide. Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics. Leiden:
Brill | Rodopi, 2015.
Walsh, Richard. “Who Is the Narrator?” Poetics Today 18.4 (1997): 495–513.
Weaver, Tyler. Comics for Film, Games, and Animation. Using Comics to Construct Your
Transmedia Storyworld. Burlington: Focal Press, 2012.
Wilson, George. Narration in Light. Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Wilson, George. “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 64.1 (2006): 81–96.
Wolf, Werner. “‘Cross the Border – Close that Gap.’ Towards an Intermedial Narratology.”
European Journal of English Studies 8.1 (2004): 81–103.
Wolf, Werner. “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon. A Case Study of the
Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts.” Narratology beyond Literary Criticism.
Mediality, Disciplinarity. Ed. Jan Christoph Meister. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005. 83–107.
120 Jan-Noël Thon
6.2 Further Reading

Alber, Jan, and Per Krogh Hansen, eds. Beyond Classical Narration. Transmedial and Unnatural
Challenges. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.
Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven, eds. Graphic Narrative. Special issue of MFS. Modern
Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006).
Gardner, Jared, and David Herman, eds. Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory. Special issue of
SubStance 40.1 (2011).
Grishakova, Marina, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. Intermediality and Storytelling. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2010.
Hühn, Peter, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, eds. Handbook of Narratology. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2009.
Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Müller, eds. What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers regarding
the Status of a Theory. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003.
Kuhn, Markus, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. Transmedial Narratology. Current Approaches. Special
issue of Narrative 25.3 (2017).
Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. Narrative across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. Storyworlds across Media. Toward a Media-Conscious
Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Contributions to the
Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.
Daniel Stein and Lukas Etter
5 Seriality
Abstract: At first sight, digital serial comics seem to challenge our understanding
of serial comics based on analog materials. Yet upon closer inspection, many el-
ements – such as the dialectics of order and chaos, or predetermination and ar-
bitrariness, which accompanies the classic distinction between the series and the
serial – have remained surprisingly consistent. This article develops the metaphor
of the archive as a means of unraveling the serial specificities of comics (mainly
superhero comic books and newspaper strips). Revisiting the series-vs.-serial dis-
tinction and differentiating among (dis)organized archives, excessive archives, and
archival impulses allows for a conception of serial comics as crucial agents of cul-
tural (re)production. These comics may tend toward the subversive and anarchic
just as easily as they may favor a more pessimistic outlook: forms of escapism that
cement the political status quo.
Key Terms: popular seriality, serial archives, unruly serialities, superhero comics,
newspaper comic strips
1 Laying Out Seriality

In a recent entry of her Bird and Moon webcomic series (birdandmoon.com), Rose-
mary Mosco presents a chart that is structured by questions. One of the questions
inquires whether a reader “like[s] waking up early,” and the answer determines
what types of birds or other animals might best fit this reader’s interest. In general,
the reader’s answers to the questions posed by Mosco’s strips determine the path to
a specific category of plants or animals (http://www.birdandmoon.com/comic/
study-species). The chart is an anomaly in the series, however, as it serves as an
invitation to an interactive and more or less panel-free 2D adventure. More often,
single installments of Bird and Moon appear as relatively self-contained comic strips
ranging anywhere between two and eight panels in length. But the sense of map-
ping and exploration that underlies the chart is anything but anomalous: Mosco’s
series, though humorous in nature, seeks to inform and teach readers about scientif-
ic topics in botany, zoology, and ecology, and it encourages an engagement with the
vastness of natural phenomena that is homologous to the notion of comics seriality.
Practices of mapping and exploration are conducive to a reflection on the serial-
ity of comics and the potential of interaction it involves. Yet the chart is even more
productive as a starting point for such a reflection because it contrasts another fea-
ture on the page located above the chart: A button with the black inscription “Ran-
dom.” This button occupies the middle position between buttons on the immediate
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-006
122 Daniel Stein and Lukas Etter
left and right, each marked by a single arrow, that allow the reader to move to comic
strips in the immediate vicinity, i. e., to click the left arrow for the “Prev[ious],” the
right one for the “Next” one. These buttons are framed by additional ones that indi-
cate, through double arrows, the option of moving to the very “First” or very “Last”
strip in the series.
Modest in appearance and almost insignificant at first sight, the “Random” but-
ton foregrounds a dialectics of predetermination and arbitrariness that constitutes
the core structure of serial narration in comics, graphic novels, and related types of
visual-verbal storytelling and that connects seriality with a range of archival func-
tions. In the present Handbook entry, we will ponder the workings of this core struc-
ture and consider its implications for our understanding of seriality as an archive.
We will speak of ‘comics’ rather than the more broadly conceived ‘graphic narra-
tives’ or ‘forms of visual-verbal storytelling’ because we draw our examples from
realms of comics production and reception that recognize and frequently also label
themselves as such (see Chute 2008; Stein and Thon 2013 for further terminological
considerations).
2 The ‘Series’-vs.-‘Serial’ Distinction

A clickable episodic webcomic with a “Random” button like Mosco’s institutional-
izes serendipity and champions exploration as a mode of reception. The effect of such
purely stochastic processes is to draw the reader into an experience that evokes a
sense of vastness and gestures beyond this single example to the wider field of
serial storytelling. In this field, vastness is often associated with the tendencies of
serial narratives, and especially popular serial narratives produced for and con-
sumed by large audiences, to proliferate in terms of storyworld, character constella-
tion, and plot options, and to move across the borders of individual media. Accord-
ing to Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (2009, 2), this type of storytelling
necessitates collaborative authorship; it tends to extend itself into cross-media itera-
tions (including transmedia adaptations) and frequently facilitates increased inter-
activity.
These specific affordances of seriality involve a sense of predetermination: a
plannable and controllable directedness of serial narration. But, as Mosco’s Bird
and Moon example underscores, these affordances constitute only one side of the
serial equation. The other side comprises a crucial element of arbitrariness and coin-
cidence, a sense of serial sprawl (Kelleter 2017) that is neither easily contained nor
altogether controllable. These two dynamics of serial vastness – what we conceptu-
alize as a largely pre-determined process of proliferation and a largely undetermina-
ble tendency to sprawl – have been part and parcel of modern, i. e., commercial
and mass-addressed, serial storytelling since the early decades of the nineteenth
century. This is the moment in the history of modernity when “serial media, interac-
5 Seriality 123
tive from the start, [came to] embody what may well be the structural utopia of
the capitalist production of culture at large: the desire to practice reproduction as
innovation, and innovation as reproduction” (Kelleter 2017, 30; see also Meteling
2013, 91). The connection between pre-determination and arbitrariness, according
to this view, is not dichotomous. Rather, it appears as a fluid relation that unfolds
along a continuum from the pre-determined to the contingent to the random.
Let us postpone this train of thought for a moment to revisit the productivity of
common modes of seriality in relation to comics. To study serial narratives in comics
is to recognize the sheer mass of materials available for analysis (Stein 2018a). This
is particularly the case in popular serial comics, where the desire to reach mass
audiences (or niche audiences that offer coveted cultural capital) and the wish to
integrate wide-ranging audience responses into the unfolding story impacts what is
told and how it is told. No matter which side of the conventional distinction be-
tween series (episodic narratives without continuing story arcs) and serials (episode-
transcending story arcs that work themselves toward a not-yet-fully determined fu-
ture ending) they come down on: all serial narratives create a backlog of accumulat-
ing stories whose size and complexity, or at least level of detail and sheer mass of
information, increases with each new episode or installment. They do so as individ-
ual narratives (intraserial backlog), as competing narratives in particular genres or
media (interserial backlog), and as entities in a larger media economy (trans-serial
backlog) in which popular stories in one medium – take Superman comics as an
example – branch out into other media – think of Superman radio serials, television
cartoons, movies, computer games, toys and merchandise, and so forth (Meier
2015).
The categorization of serial narratives into series/serial is complicated by the
existence of a “double formal structure” (doppelte Formstruktur, as conceptionalized
in Hickethier 2003), according to which serial narratives follow the logic of the epi-
sode as an individual segment of an unfinished story while projecting an “overall
idea (Gesamtvorstellung)” (Kelleter 2017, 17) of a yet-to-be-finished larger whole. Su-
perhero comics have produced a number of hybrid forms that include elements of
the episodic series, the longer story arc or event, and the open-ended serial. Story
arcs and events such as DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths (Apr. 1985–Mar. 1986,
Marv Wolfman, George Pérez et al.) can rein in a previously accumulated sprawl of
characters, settings, and storylines by, for example, killing off hundreds of superhe-
roes and resetting (or rebooting) the continuity. Marvel’s Civil War (July 2006–
Jan. 2007, Mark Millar, Steve McNivel et al.; see also Nehrlich and Nowotny 2017)
was conceived as a crossover narrative that spread a single story set in the Marvel
Universe across several comic book series (Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man,
Fantastic Four, etc.) and thereby brought these series into close alignment with
each other. Such medium-length formats alleviate the strain involved in producing
and following extensive serial continuities – which, in the case of the oldest super-
heroes, can span many decades – by releasing creators and readers alike from the
burden of engaging with a serial narrative over an extended period of time (Meteling
2013, 95; see also Wüllner 2010). DC Comics’ relauch of their major titles as The New
52 in 2011, which included resetting all of the storylines and even restarting the
numbering of the new issues, further foregrounds the need to streamline overly
baroque storylines and character histories of long-running serials to allow new
readers an easier entry into the storyworlds while offering experienced readers a
new angle on familiar material.
In this sense, then, the ‘random’ button in Mosco’s Bird and Moon is a peculiar
phenomenon. After all, a genuinely arbitrary plunge into a series is possible only
in some forms of serial storytelling. It is possible in Bird and Moon and digital strips
that feature the same button, including Randall Munroe’s XKCD and Nick Seluk’s
Awkward Yeti (for more on serial webcomics, see Campbell 2006; Reichert 2011;
Hammel 2015). Such strips are episodic series, which implies that the available pool
of episodes can be entered at any time and any point, and left again ad libitum.
This is not the case in the serial (in the narrow sense of the word), where one install-
ment depends on the previous one in its function to help build a larger narrative.
In such narratives, which are often based on the principle of “open-ended seriality”
(Gardner 2012), characters age and develop deep personal histories that prevent, or
at least complicate, any random entry into the narrative. The same is true, though
perhaps to a lesser extent, for “flexinarratives” (Nelson qtd. in Jones 2005, 527),
which combine episodic and serial storytelling.
Superhero comics have developed unique solutions to the problem of attracting
new readers by repeatedly retelling and also updating origin stories and by seg-
menting the ongoing continuity into more clearly defined story arcs that, upon com-
pletion, can be reprinted (and resold) in graphic novel editions. Newspaper strips
like Frank King’s Gasoline Alley or Sidney Smith’s The Gumps played the game of
open-ended storytelling, as well, but they depended on the principle of serial conti-
nuity to a lesser degree than superhero comics. In Gasoline Alley, it is the synchro-
nicity of story time and narrated time – a day in the strip is a day in the real world –
that established the continuity but allowed readers to find their way back into the
story even if they had missed a few episodes. The Gumps is a slightly different case
because Smith’s melodramatic and sentimental story arcs sometimes extended over
many weeks and thus necessitated a more extensive reader commitment: missing a
single installment could have, at one point, meant missing the tragic death of a
beloved character (Stein and Etter 2018). Even though there was always the chance
to reread what one had missed (if one could allocate a copy of yesterday’s paper),
such an effort of catching up would have precluded the powerful sense of a commu-
nal reading experience that serial narratives can foster so well. Moreover, as noted,
even in episodic series, the full arbitrariness of the random plunge is an idealized
construct. Even such series as Bird and Moon are governed by the double formal
structure that shapes the architectures of the installment and the overall product.
5 Seriality 125
3 Seriality and Materiality
3.1 The (Dis)Organized Archives
The inevitable story backlog of serial narratives, including serially structured com-
ics, can be conceived through the lens of the archive (Gardner 2006; Jenkins 2013;
Meteling 2013; Stein 2016; Crucifix 2018). In the analog cases of newspaper comic
strips, some of which were launched in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies and are still ongoing (continued by succeeding generations of creators), and
superhero comics, which began in the late 1930s and now reach us through both
new installments and republications of stories from the past (e. g., through archive
or treasure editions), the archives are often exceedingly sizeable. Some of them are
pronouncedly extensive – consider the heft of the hardcover editions of Charles
Schulz’s collected Peanuts strips or the time one would need to devour all of David
Sim’s Cerebus comics (see the chapter on Cerebus in this Handbook). In fact, some
are so extensive that they have generated specific practices of handling the resulting
multiplicity, or serial proliferation, of characters and the plotted world in which they
act over long periods of time. Canon formation (the “Batman canon”), continuity
management (including retrospective continuity, or retcon, where the serial past is
retroactively changed through narrative ploys in the present), what-if formats (al-
lowing for alternative scenarios that leave the ongoing continuity intact), and paro-
dies (reining in potentially subversive counter-narratives and reinforcing established
conventions through self-reflexive humor) are central examples of seriality manage-
ment.
The archive is not a metaphor exclusive to critical writing about comics – it is
equally present in the self-reflection of comics authors. A formidable example is
Alison Bechdel’s “Cartoonist’s Introduction” to the anthology The Essential Dykes
to Watch Out For (2008). The author of more than two decades of Dykes to Watch
Out For comic strips draws ‘herself’ as a cartoon avatar who addresses the readers
of her anthology head-on and takes them on a twelve-page tour through her hyper-
bolically-sized personal archives. Everything on these twelve pages is hand-drawn,
yet in a myriad of styles: The many diegetic layers of both the drawings (the avatar,
her alter ego in the ‘photographs’ she finds, her own stylistically distinct childhood
drawings) and the text (a ‘Friends’ Album,’ the child’s fillings, textbox comments
on the temporal framing, the avatar’s speech bubbles in the time of narration) show-
case the medium’s exploratory potential. Since Bechdel’s artistic career is clearly
not that of a superhero comics artist, and since the hyperbolically represented ar-
chive of early drawings created before her Dykes series found a sizeable audience
in alternative queer zines in the USA, and later beyond, the archives emerge as a
metaphorical sine qua non here: Without these early edgy and angry drawings and
their political import, the mainstream audience today would have had no access to
the late Dykes strips, the acclaimed pages of Fun Home (2006), and similar works
(for a more extensive discussion, see Etter 2013a; Etter 2013b).
Bechdel’s and other authors’ graphic mediations of their personal archives pro-
vide a snapshot of the idiosyncratic pull of the archival impulse that has led to the
preservation of materials not originally intended for it. Comics were long believed
to be a kind of semi-literate (or “low”) form of throwaway entertainment produced
for the momentary stimulation of the reader and the instant financial gain of the
publisher. Yet they became perhaps the most emphatically collected (think scrap-
books for newspaper strips and collectors’ editions as well as back order catalog for
superhero, crime, horror, adventure, and romance comic books) and most obses-
sively protected (think polypropylene bags, CDS boxes, climate-controlled storage
rooms) media of print-bound popular serial storytelling. “Your comics are slowly
dying! Air, UV light, warmth, humidity, dirt, fungi, vermin, insects, acids, chemi-
cals & more are causing this to happen,” a horror-comics-style advertisement on
one comic preservation company’s website declares (https://www.bcemylar.com/).
Such advertisements remind us of the stark discrepancy between the disposable
material qualities of comic books and their enduring relevance as an essential part
of recent American (popular) history.
3.2 The Excessive Archives
Taken seriously, the metaphor of the physical archive is somewhat difficult to sus-
tain when it comes to popular seriality. It is not that popular series are not interested
in their pasts. Quite the contrary, from “remembering forward” (Sielke 2016) to “re-
cursive progression” (Kelleter 2017), almost any given model used to describe popu-
lar seriality attests to the importance of the ‘already told’ for the ‘to be continued’
and vice versa. Repetition and variation, or identity and transgression, are assess-
ments that only come into being with a view toward the serial past, and thinking
about historiography has been considered one of the influences vital for serial story-
telling from its inception (Hughes and Lund 1991; on the serial dialectics of repeti-
tion and variation, see Eco 1990; Kelleter 2012; Kelleter 2017). The complicating as-
pect of the metaphor of the archive to describe popular seriality lies elsewhere, as
the metaphor not only connotes looking back but also evokes a form of nomencla-
ture and a type of logic and order intelligible for the archive’s users. Yet serial pro-
duction and reception have also been described as inherently dynamic and inter-
locking processes, displaying a potential sprawling quality, an unruliness and
unpredictability (see Turner 2014) linked to their dependence on factors such as
economic success or participatory engagement of the audience, which are difficult
to calculate and control from a production perspective and which may result in
countless narrative mechanisms, such as cliffhangers, reboots, retrospective conti-
nuity, and what-if/elseworld formats. Especially relatively institutionalized formats
5 Seriality 127
or genres, such as US superhero comics, have learned to sustain themselves through

a dialectics of centrifugal (multiplication, proliferation, diversification) and centrip-
etal forces (consolidation, canonization, preservation) (Stein 2016).
When we speak of the comics archive or, more broadly, of the “popular culture
archive” (Gardner 2006, 794), we ultimately envision a serial archive. An archive
not only filled with serial stories, but an archive whose creation, maintenance, and
further development relies on a number of serial practices, including that of collect-
ing. Turning to recent graphic novels by creators like Ben Katchor and Kim Deitch,
Jared Gardner notes that
[a]rchives are everywhere in the contemporary graphic novel, although almost inevitably not
the ordered collections of the academic library or a law firm’s records. These are archives in
the loosest, messiest sense of the word – archives of the forgotten artifacts and ephemera of
American popular culture, items that were never meant to be collected. ( Gardner 2006, 787)
The cultural value that collectors and those who enjoy republications of old comics
attach to these artifacts historically came after the fact – after these comics, haphaz-
ardly produced, cheaply printed without any particular intention to make them last
past their sell-by date, and quickly devoured, were publicly decried as trivial, even
harmful reading material. Indeed, as Gardner puts it provocatively, collecting com-
ics is a perversity in the proper sense of the term because it takes the ephemeral
nature of the original product and gains from it the type of satisfaction one can gain
when “collect[ing], organiz[ing] and fetishiz[ing]” (2006, 787) valuable objects. It is
exactly “the ways in which popular culture forms – despite being designed to be
disposable, dissolved in the moment of consumption – are always haunted by the
excess that cannot be buried or co-opted” (2006, 796) that turn the unruliness of
serial comics into an incentive to do something with them beyond the commercially
and culturally meaningful acts of buying and reading.
This excess is linked, quite paradoxically, to the medium-specific absences, or
gaps, that distinguish comics from the literary novel, film, radio, and other storytell-
ing media. As Gardner maintains, what may count as the driving force for collectors
is the “compulsive need to fill in the gaps” in their collections in ways that repeat,
on a larger level, the filling in of the “serial gap” between issues and “the gaps
between the frames themselves” (2006, 800; see also Stein 2019). Ultimately, the
“archival drive” at the core of the form’s production and reception “is a forge for
the (always uneasy) collaboration between reader and writer that is central to the
comics form” (Gardner 2006, 800; see also Gardner 2012).
As Gardner’s observations (and his reference to the double meaning of ‘gap’ in
particular) suggest, comics are an inherently serial form. This includes their sequen-
tial storytelling structure (in most cases successions of usually framed panels) and
their frequently serialized mode of publication. Christy Mag Uidhir goes as far as to
state that “[c]omics, perhaps more so than any other medium, involve series” (2017,
248), as they have derived much of their popularity not only from their serial publi-
cation and reception, but also from their formal reliance on the panel sequence of
which they prototypically consist. The distinction is, however, methodologically
fuzzy, as sequentiality refers to some form of seriality: a series with a structure and
a design. Sequentiality, i. e., the sequence of panels that makes up the comics page
and with the help of which we gain “closure” (McCloud 1993) or “develop a coherent
mental model” of a storyline (Kukkonen 2013, 160), lies at the definitional core of
comics.
In essence, then, reflecting on the gap is reflecting on seriality in a broad sense
of the word: seriality as a serial publication format as well as seriality as sequentiali-
ty. And just as the serial archive may imply a loss of control, comics artists have
experimented with several outcomes of panel arrangements to create a similar loss
of control or at least to avoid unilinearity. The connection between seriality and
sequentiality becomes particularly obvious in such experimental forms as the ‘po-
lyptych’ page – a sequence of panels that together constitute a bigger image (some
of which we find in Frank King’s Gasoline Alley). This phenomenon provokes a me-
andering and decidedly exploratory type of gaze. In the same vein, creators of ‘ab-
stract comics’ have speculated on various outcomes when confronting their readers
with geometric forms lacking figurative ‘content’ (see Rommens et al. 2019). Yet
other authors of experimental comics, among them those of the Ouvroir de Bande
Dessinée Potentielle, have extracted thematically unrelated panels from an existing
bande dessinée album and positioned them in a new order so as to form a new
narrative arc (see Kuhlman 2010; Etter 2016a).
Whether sequentiality is a subcategory of seriality or an entirely independent
model, it makes sense to describe comics as a serial medium even though not all
comics are published and received serially and though not all comics narrate sequen-
tially. It makes sense, in other words, to follow Shane Denson’s view that an “emer-
gent seriality” has remained inherent to sequential art, “no less present (though dif-
ferently articulated)” in non-serial comics (2013, 271). Comics’ unruliness, many have
argued, extends well into the world of the graphic novel. It remains in place in the
present-day markets that are a complex mix of single publication and new physical
formats on the one hand (see Crucifix 2018) and the processes of reselling and canon-
izing older materials on the other (Capart 2018) – thereby potentially diversifying the
medium’s authors and readers, in the long run.
4 Archival, Ephemeral, and Residual Serialities

Seriality and sequentiality have far-reaching implications for our understanding of
the archival sway of comics. One of these implications concerns the nature of their
reception. What types of readers and consumers do serial narratives qua “cumula-
tive narratives” (Newcomb 2004) produce? Umberto Eco has famously described the
popular series as operating along the lines of an “oneiric” logic, according to which
5 Seriality 129
episodes routinely return to an eternal status quo. Placing his focus on Golden and
Silver Age superhero comics, he maintained in an essay first published in 1962 that
these comics participated in a prominent creation of modern myths, to which the
predominantly young readers would subject themselves in regular temporal succes-
sion. In his 1985 essay on ‘repetition and variation,’ he confronted the problem of
seriality from the point of view of reception, propagating the idea of a double-model
reader. According to this model, every product of popular culture has to appeal to
two types of readers at the same time. The ‘naïve’ one, who does not know the series
as a whole and who, when picking up a single installment, is intrigued by the novel-
ty and what seems to be creative innovation to her; and the ‘smart’ one, who is
capable of appreciation on a different level by acknowledging the artistic novelty
it has taken to stimulate this naïve reader’s interest. The sophistication of serial
storytelling, according to Eco, can be measured depending on the degree to which
the product not only allows for smart readers but properly creates them.
It should be mentioned in parenthesis, however, that things may not always
have been as clear-cut in the history of comics. As an example of historical anoma-
lies, one only needs to look at the consistency of characters over time, a major
element of popular seriality according to Kelleter (2012). Such consistency consti-
tutes an important part of the ‘center of gravity’ described by Coogan (2009) and
delivers the ‘formulaic patterns’ that develop into full-blown ‘formulas’ and, eventu-
ally, into genres, as outlined in Cawelti’s classic model (1976). It is mostly and some-
times altogether absent in contemporary webcomics like XKCD and Bird and Moon.
What is more, very early examples of comics storytelling only developed very slow-
ly. In the case of early proto-comics targeting children and young adults in France,
including Bécassine by Joseph Pinchon (1905), it took a number of years until a
fixed set of protagonists consolidated itself (Groensteen 2012). Yet in both the early
and the very contemporary examples, a portion of the audience seems to have con-
ceived of these comics as recognizable – through the place where they were pub-
lished as well as, presumably, through the artistic style that marked these narratives
(Etter 2016b).
Eco’s model is also fruitful as an early reflection on the complicated mecha-
nisms of active distinction – a distinction from, or even within, a dynamic form of
either high-brow or popular culture canons (Kelleter 2012). Although without ex-
plicit reference, this point comes up in Henry Jenkins’s analysis of Art Spiegelman’s
In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a book with a peculiar serial history. Parts of it
were published in newspapers in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks
on 9/11, while the later book version frames the narrative through various paratexts.
Jenkins identifies three serial impulses that emerge from the sequential and serial
nature of comics: “the archival, which tends to stress values of tradition and legacy,
or perhaps the ways that contemporary authors build upon what has come before”;
“the ephemeral, referring to uncertainty about which materials survive or are lost”;
and “the residual, describing how works that may seem to have lost their currency
exert a strong influence (perhaps most powerfully in the kinds of nostalgic narra-
tives we construct)” (2013, 301).
Each of these impulses highlights a particular facet of comics seriality. Like any
other medium, comics have a history (or “tradition and legacy,” as Jenkins puts it),
but in the case of serial comics, this history can never simply be relegated to the
past, as it continues to influence the narrative present in various ways. Bob Kane’s
initial Batman origin story may have been revised and extended countless times,
but its basic thrust and key elements still determine most current enunciations of
the character. Even the most recent installments of the Katzenjammer Kids by Hy
Eisman leave Rudolph Dirks’s original cast of characters and their looks from the
turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century largely intact. The point of the ar-
chive, then, is that the past or sections of a series’ or serial’s past may either be
active or dormant, but that they can always “be brought back to life” (2006, 797),
as Gardner writes about Kim Deitch’s Hollywoodland (1988), a narrative about
Deitch’s love of early cinema that connects the comics medium with the trans-serial
archive of American film.
To stay with Jenkins’s notion of an archival impulse, serial comics constantly
produce a “growing excess of things that have already been told.” This “forces them
to engage in incessant continuity management” (Kelleter 2017, 16). The intensive in-
vestment of serial narratives in origin stories is a case in point. The archive accounts
for the power of, for instance, origin stories in superhero comics, or, as in Bechdel’s
case, an alternative creator’s origin story, cast through her depiction of her relation-
ship to her own personal archive. Superhero origin stories function simultaneously
as a generative force for the serial narrative and as a legitimization for its manifold
realizations, as Batman writer and editor Dennis O’Neil observed in the early 1990s:
“The origin [story] is the engine that drives Batman” (qtd. in Pearson and Uricchio
1991, 25). They are also the anchor that grounds this narrative in a core set of givens
(see Uricchio and Pearson 1991, 194–195). Moreover, the origin story invites both
creators and readers to unearth materials that may be revitalized after having been
forgotten but nonetheless preserved in an archive of some form and that may regain
some of their agency in the act of rediscovery. Recent postmodern and/or experimen-
tal superhero comics by writers such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gai-
man build upon these developments. They seek to engage with the complicated dis-
cursive structures of twentieth-century mainstream reception, and it seems apt that
metaphors semantically related to the archive – e. g., ‘archeology’ (Kukkonen 2010),
‘mythopoeisis’ (Meteling 2013), ‘musealization’ (Stein 2016; see also Huyssen 1995) –
have been evoked to describe these phenomena.
Ephemerality is equally crucial when it comes to comics’ seriality. First of all,
the medium was born in the ephemeral pages of mass-printed newspapers, which
were meant to be read on the day or week of their appearance in order to be discard-
ed and then supplanted by the next day’s or week’s issue. Serial ephemerality thus
relates to the materiality of the publication (paper not meant to last) and to the
5 Seriality 131
short-lived currency of the content, with today’s news turning into old news within
a day. Second, comics are ephemeral in a cultural sense, as they were long associat-
ed with the escapist pleasures of the trivial instead of the lasting appreciation of so-
called high culture and art. While it is true that the association with triviality does
not necessarily depend on the serial structure of the narrative, the fact that ongoing
series deny closure, involve readers in immediate and intimate rather than dis-
tanced and distinguished forms of appreciation, and are not beholden to the aes-
thetic of the closed (art)work makes them particularly prone to such kinds of pres-
tige devaluation. Third, comics are ephemeral because – at least as long as they are
still ongoing – they provide and subvert a sense of stability. On the one hand, they
grant a forward-oriented sense of a bright future to come (i. e., more and ideally
better stories, a heightened sense of identification with stories through long-term
investment) to both authors and readers. On the other hand, they provide a more
immediate sense of an eternally latent crisis (no more stories because of lack of
sales, unanticipated formal and/or aesthetic changes, dying characters, unwelcome
plot developments). This uncertainty (or unreliability; see Stein 2018b) over the con-
tinuation of a series relates not only to the future, but also to the past, the latter of
which can always be changed through narrative mechanisms such as retrospective
continuity or simply cut off from the present narrative through the practice of re-
booting.
Jenkins’s third serial impulse, the residual, is the most difficult to pin down.
Jenkins specifies the residual as referring to “iconic comics characters functioning
as ‘ghosts’ of older ideologies as America falls back on the same old scripts to em-
ploy disruptive new experiences” (2013, 305). He does so in his analysis of Spiegel-
man’s embrace of old newspaper comics as a means of resisting post-9/11 attempts
to streamline the attacks and the American response into a linear narrative of “us
vs. them.” Another, more recent, example, are internet memes and Twitter messages
that process the political fallout of the 2016 presidential election and the early years
of the Trump presidency through the iconography of the comic book superhero. D. H.
Higgins’s Twitter account “President Supervillain” (https://twitter.com/PresVillain),
for instance, pasted quotes by President Trump onto the speech bubbles of the super-
villain Red Skull; a poster from the campaign to stop the so-called “Alt-Right” drew
on a famous image of Captain America punching Adolf Hitler to claim, “Fighting
Nazis Is an American Tradition” (the artwork is rumored to have been created by Sal
Buscema). Here, then, we witness an American culture clinging to older images and
icons to convince itself that it ‘remains’ (if it ever was) a ‘righteous’ force of democra-
cy and liberation in the world in order to resist the arrival of a new brand of populist
authoritarianism. The power of this poster emerges not simply from its visual content
or from the pictorial reference to one particular superhero. Rather, it stems from its
ability to evoke instantly a whole archive of superhero images and narratives that
are so deeply ingrained in the American imaginary that they mobilize a whole dis-
course and a vast array of sentiments without appearing themselves in the form of
a sequential and/or serial narrative.
5 Seriality and Agency, or: Comics as Archivists

The decision to unpack the structures of comics’ seriality through the metaphor of
the archive foregrounds a particular perspective on this medium as well as a partic-
ular approach to the study of comics. While it makes sense to pay attention to the
media specificities and core narrative mechanisms of comics (such as sequentiality,
series vs. serial, double formal structure, cumulative narration), it is vital that the
study does not end there. After all, comics have played a significant part in the
development of modern media societies since the nineteenth century, when they
emerged from the double nexus of serial storytelling and popular culture and
gained a foothold in several fields of cultural production (visual culture, literary
culture, periodical culture). Indeed, comics have been agents of cultural transforma-
tion as much as they have been made possible by such transformations, including
medial and technological ones, as Baetens and Surdiacourt’s (2013) mediological
historiography of European comics has shown. They have served, at different times
and in different ways, as vehicles of, or forums for, intense depictions and negotia-
tions of gender, race, class, and an array of political conflicts. This is why we need
to place them within a larger framework that enables us to discern their role in “the
cultural work of serial narrative” and their contribution to the “culture of serial
reproduction” that Frank Kelleter identifies as a hallmark of our present cultural
moment.
This is not the place to unfold the evolutionary trajectory of serialized comics:
a trajectory that might begin with Rodolphe Töpffer’s (1820s–1840s) ‘speedy’ succes-
sion of protopanels and the serial distribution of his work and continue with the
feuilleton novel, penny dreadfuls, story papers, dime novels, pulp fiction, political
caricature, etc. as significant precursors of comics. This trajectory might culminate
in the “birth” of the comic as newspaper strip in the late 1890s and early 1900s and
then again in the emergence of the superhero comic book in the late 1930s and early
1940s. In the grander scheme of things, however, it is more important to conceive
of serial comics as a “network of cultural practices rather than a set of distinct
structures” – to view individual “series as moving targets” (Kelleter 2017, 12, 15)
whose narrative momentum and cultural dynamics require a perspective different
from approaches developed for non-serialized (art)works. One such perspective fol-
lows from Kelleter’s identification of five elements of popular seriality, which deter-
mine popular serial stories as a) evolving narratives (2017, 12), b) narratives of recur-
sive progression (2017, 16), c) narratives of proliferation (2017, 18), d) self-observing
systems and actor-networks (2017, 22), and e) agents of capitalist self-reflexivity (2017,
26). These five elements are certainly not specific to comics, yet they take on specific
forms in the field of comics production and reception.
a) We have already described serial comics as evolving narratives that differ
from self-contained works by interlacing production and reception, thus allowing
readers to impact the ongoing narrative and mandating producers (and indeed the
5 Seriality 133
narratives themselves) to monitor and manage their own reception. Letters to the
editor are perhaps the most obvious example in this regard, such as when Sidney
Smith, the creator of the newspaper comic strip The Gumps, received torrents of
mail after he had killed off a particularly likable character in a drawn-out sequence
of installments (see Gardner 2012). Other examples include Milton Caniff’s enlist-
ment of readers as unofficial experts whose steady supply of information allowed
him to heighten the realist appeal of his Terry and the Pirates strip (Hayward 1997),
as well as the letter columns that began to shape much of the public discourse in
and about superhero comics by the early 1960s (Stein 2013). In all of these cases, it
is the seriality of these comics that “extend[s] the sphere of storytelling onto the
sphere of story consumption” (Kelleter 2017, 13) and complicates a purely formalist
approach.
b) Serial comics are narratives of recursive progression. As such, they must come
up with new installments that extend the story backlog into the present and create
the sense that the present story is a logical consequence of previous developments
that could not have fully foreseen their own future. Kelleter speaks of constant “acts
of reworking” that ongoing series must perform in order to do the kind of “pruning”
and retroactive “coherence building” necessary to simulate a sense of predetermina-
tion and inevitability (2017, 16). The process of retrospective continuity in superhero
comics may be one of the most effective ways of achieving coherence after the fact
by rendering certain past elements obsolete, filling in gaps in older stories with new
information, or explaining away unintentional inconsistencies typical of the fast-
paced production of popular serial narratives. After Marvel’s Captain America series
had ended in the late 1940s, relaunched versions changed essential elements of the
original continuity (e. g., that Captain America had not retired after WWII and was
at some point fighting communists during the Cold War) in order to make the new
stories more relevant to a new generation of readers and more timely for a new
political era (see Dittmer 2013, 64–72).
c) As narratives of proliferation, serial comics (at least those addressed to a pop-
ular audience) have a tendency to spread into many different directions. Most sim-
ply, each serial narrative is itself a narrative of proliferation, as installment after
installment accretes and story matter accumulates. In addition, popular series tend
to generate spin-offs and adaptations. The Yellow Kid, drawn by Richard Felton
Outcault and George B. Luks for rivaling newspapers and extending into a whole
array of other media (Meyer 2017), is an early example, but we can also read the
development of particular comics formats (or genres), such as newspaper strips or
superhero comics, as the consequence of interserial narrative proliferation. In su-
perhero comics, we also witness a historical move from more or less linear serial
narratives to multilinear and even cascading narratives (Kelleter and Stein 2012):
from a single comic book series to parallel series to the current “age of multiplicity”
(Jenkins 2009), in which different versions of a character within but also across
media (and across the highly permeable producer-receiver divide) stand side by
side. As noted above, however, proliferation can turn into uncontrollable, centrifu-
gal, and indeed cascading sprawl. It can thus trigger centripetal counter-activities
that seek to regain a sense of control through practices of canon formation (also,
rankings: the best Batman graphic novels, etc.), continuity enforcement, and the
like. We may ultimately conceptualize such activities through the lens of ongoing
authorization conflicts (Kelleter and Stein 2012) over the legitimacy and validity of
concurring and competing variations of a series’ content and aesthetics.
d) The notion of serial comics as self-observing systems and actor-networks
builds on the insight that “production and reception – or industrial and quotidian
actors – are best understood as coevolving forces” (Kelleter 2017, 24–25). Serial com-
ics are produced by their creators and readers, but they also produce them. Follow-
ing Latour (2005), they offer particular subject positions, or roles, to various human
and non-human actors (Kelleter and Stein 2012; Stein 2013; Stein 2014), and these
roles are only made possible in the first place by the ongoing need to continue the
story (and everything else this continuation entails). Like other popular forms of
serial storytelling, serial comics can be described as “self-observing systems” given
that they involve authorship and some form of intentionality, but they can never be
reduced to being exclusively the ‘product’ of such intentional acts and conscious or
semi-conscious decisions. “In shaping the self-understanding of their human con-
tributors,” Kelleter maintains, “series themselves attain agential status. […] Series
are not intentional subjects but entities of distributed intention” (2017, 25). They
unfold their serial agencies, for instance, by motivating intensely personal engage-
ments with the narrative, which explains why so many academic books about com-
ics begin with autobiographical recollections of the writer’s childhood experiences
of reading comics and/or unabashed self-revelations of fannish dedications to a
particular character, series, or genre.
e) As agents of capitalist self-reflexivity, serial comics address “a core problem
of modernity itself: the problem of renewing something by duplicating it” (Kelleter
2017, 29). As such, they have stabilized capitalism as a currently prominent “system
of cultural production” by creating “procedural communality where dogmatic com-
munality is no longer probable or even possible” (Kelleter 2017, 27). It is precisely
the authorization conflicts, diverging reactions, and controversial engagements seri-
al comics enable that make them such powerful agents of capitalism. While they
can certainly generate anxieties over the future of society, especially in moments of
crisis, such as the post-9/11 era covered in Marvel’s Civil War, their very existence
reconfirms a continuation of what has come before.
By packaging proliferating narratives into variation-prone structures, sched-
ules, and genres, popular series day in, day out sustain the illusion that the unex-
pected always comes in a familiar format: that there will forever be something fol-
lowing from our present-day excitements and that each disaster is simultaneously a
continuation of our stories and debates because the new and the unsettling always
reach us in the reassuring shape of what is already known (Kelleter 2017, 30).
5 Seriality 135
In terms of blunt political impact, this aspect may appear rather pessimistic.
Wherever the current political situation (September 2019) may lead, the fact that we
can continue to read and watch our favorite serial narratives and hope that Batman,
Superman, Supergirl, Jessica Jones, or Captain America will still be there even if the
crisis of Western liberal democracy worsens in the United States and in Europe,
seems to provide stability in an age of instability – just as well as it can be used as
a form of nihilistic escapism. This fact encapsulates the very dialectics – of repeti-
tion and variation, of sprawl and containment, of determinedness and serendipity –
that have made serial storytelling a particularly powerful kind of storytelling since
the nineteenth century.
6 Onwards with Seriality, but Whither?

In Alternative Comics, Charles Hatfield argues that, with some significant exceptions
(see 2005: 161), graphic novels are still “by and large [...] created serially” (2005,
154). Indeed, if the fully-fledged book is just a collection of otherwise serialized in-
stallments, how best to approach these works creates a number of challenges. Chris-
ty Mag Uidhir thus distinguishes between comics “with a serial [i. e., sequential] com-
position” and comics “with a non-serial composition,” and between a “serial comic”
(whose narrative unfolds through “non-trivially ordered” installments) and a “comic
collection” (where “the sequence [of stories] does not matter”) (Uidhir 2017, 249, 250).
The challenges of these distinctions include the temporal procedure, which is distort-
ed during the reading process of a collected edition. Reading intervals from week to
week cannot be reproduced through the voluntary recreation of the original serial
progression. There is also the problem of materiality. The final panel of a comic book
may end up being merely a final panel in a collection, where a new story may start
on the next page. This creates a sense of ending that differs substantially from the
act of physically holding the last page of a comic book in one’s hand and thus literal-
ly feeling the end coming. Finally, even if it were possible to simulate a serial reading
process, we cannot possibly be fully aware of the many contextual factors that
shaped the historical reading experience versus our present one.
As the preceding remarks have illustrated, comics are particularly predisposed
toward serial storytelling: on the level of culture, as they emerged in the second
half of the nineteenth century and came into their own in the early decades of the
twentieth century at a time of industrialization, urbanization, modernization, and
commodification; and on the level of narrative structure and storytelling apparatus,
where they embody principles of sequentiality, multimodality, page fragmentation,
and episodic storytelling. In fact, it seems safe to suggest that seriality has been
(and continues to be) one of the major driving forces in the evolution of comics,
including the turn to the graphic novel format and the transmedial extensions,
many of which at least in some ways seek to mimic the serial possibilities of comic
book storytelling. Seriality, in that sense, has been conducive to the popularization
of comics, and it is certainly one reason why comics continue to be a popular form.
What is more, seriality may explain why the history of comics can be understood as
the prehistory of more recent forms of serial popular culture, from so-called quality
television to movie serialization (including sequels, prequels, and reboots). As the
subtitle of Gardner’s Projections (2012) puts it, (serial) comics helped define “the
history of twenty-first-century storytelling.”
Yet we must also note that the seriality of comics poses great challenges to
those who wish to study and perhaps also teach them. Due to the inherent unruli-
ness of serial storytelling, its essential unpredictability, and its continual evolution,
recursive progression, profuse proliferation, distributed intentions, and heightened
self-reflexivity, serial comics are difficult to discipline: difficult to contain in schol-
arly accounts and difficult to manage in any kind of classroom setting (Stein 2018a).
It is not that they should necessarily be disciplined, as Henry Jenkins (2012) reminds
us, because that might curb their potentially anarchic appeal and downplay their
significance as agents of cultural transformation. How we can do justice to their
complexities remains an open question.
In the case of Mosco’s Bird and Moon, the archive is comparatively small, cur-
rently consisting of some 120 strips. But if we utilize the “Random” button and look
at 5 randomly chosen strips per day, we will most likely see a different combination
each day. Through something as simple as randomization, which is, of course, not
exclusive to comics but is intensified in the case of serial (vs. work-bound) publica-
tion, aided by the arrival of digital technology, strips like Bird and Moon invoke a
type of physical archive that invites exploratory reception. As such, the chart exam-
ple described at the beginning illustrates several of the tensions we have perused
in this chapter as central to serial storytelling in comics: the comics archive as
marked by the dialectics of order and chaos, of predetermined proliferation vs.
largely undetermined sprawl; the reception of these comics as offering overt and
covert forms of interaction, and several impulses associated with them; and, ulti-
mately, the phenomenon of comics themselves in their roles as archivists and as
cultural agents that can have an anarchic appeal just as easily as they can facilitate
pessimistic attitudes towards the political status quo.
7 Bibliography
7.1 Works Cited
Baetens, Jan, and Steven Surdiacourt. “European Graphic Narratives: Toward a Cultural and
Mediological History.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and
History of Graphic Narrative. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.
347–362.
Campbell, T. The History of Webcomics. San Antonio: Antarctic Press, 2006.
5 Seriality 137
Capart, Philippe. “Store Memory.” Comics Memory: Archives and Styles. Eds. Maaheen Ahmed
and Benoît Crucifix. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 277–280.
Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Coogan, Peter. “The Definition of the Superhero.” A Comics Studies Reader. Eds. Jeet Heer and
Kent Worcester. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 77–93.
Crucifix, Benoît. “From Loose to Boxed Fragments and Back Again: Seriality and Archive in Chris
Ware’s Building Stories.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 9.1 (2018): 3–22. DOI:
10.1080/21504857.2017.1303619.
Denson, Shane. “Framing, Unframing, Reframing: Retconning the Transnational Work of Comics.”
Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. Eds. Shane
Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 271–284.
Dittmer, Jason. Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2013.
Eco, Umberto. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” 1962. Trans. Natalie Chilton. Arguing Comics: Literary
Masters on a Popular Medium. Eds. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2004. 146–164.
Etter, Lukas. “Autobiographische Graphic Novels: Das Beispiel von Alison Bechdels Fun Home.”
Autobiographie: Eine interdisziplinäre Gattung zwischen klassischer Tradition und
(post-)moderner Variation. Eds. Uwe Baumann and Karl August Neuhausen. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013a. 532–545.
Etter, Lukas. “On the Drawing Board: The Many Autobiographical ‘Wedges’ of Alison Bechdel.”
American Lives. Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013b. 313–326.
Etter, Lukas. “Reihung und Reibung: Zur Serialität in Chris Wares Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest
Kid on Earth.” Serialität in Literatur und Medien. Eds. Petra Anders and Michael Staiger.
Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, 2016a. 156–169.
Etter, Lukas. “Visible Hand? Subjectivity and Its Stylistic Markers in Graphic Narratives.”
Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives. Eds. Maike Sarah
Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon. New York: Routledge, 2016b. 92–110.
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twentieth-Century Storytelling. Stanford:
Gardner, Jared. “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics.” Graphic Narrative.
Eds. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven. Special issue of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52.4
(2006): 787–806.
Groensteen, Thierry. “Série.” Neuvième Art 2.0: La revue en ligne de la Cité internationale de la
bande dessinée et de l’image. Ed. Thierry Groensteen. 2012. http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/
spip.php?article447. (8 Dec. 2016).
Hammel, Björn. Webcomics: Einführung und Typologie. Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag.
Harrigan, Pat, and Noah Wardip-Fruin, eds. Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives.
Boston: MIT Press, 2009.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2005.
Hayward, Jennifer. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to
Soap Opera. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
Hickethier, Knut. “Serie.” Handbuch populärer Kultur: Begriffe, Theorien und Diskussionen.
Ed. Hans-Otto Hügel. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2003. 397–403.
Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1991.
Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge,
1995.
Jenkins, Henry. “Introduction: Should We Discipline the Reading of Comics?” Critical Approaches
to Comics: Theories and Methods. Eds. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan. New York:
Routledge, 2012. 1–14.
Jenkins, Henry. “Archival, Ephemeral, and Residual: The Functions of Early Comics in Art
Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels:
Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël
Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 301–322.
Jenkins, Henry. “‘Just Men in Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an Era of Multiplicity.” The
Contemporary Comic Book Super Hero. Ed. Angela Ndalianis. New York: Routledge, 2009. 16–
43.
Jones, Sara Gwenllian. “Serial Form.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David
Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 527.
Kelleter, Frank. “Populäre Serialität: Eine Einführung.” Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution –
Distinktion: Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2012. 11–46.
Kelleter, Frank. “Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality.” Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank
Kelleter. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 7–34.
Kelleter, Frank, and Daniel Stein. “Autorisierungspraktiken seriellen Erzählens: Zur
Gattungsentwicklung von Superheldencomics.” Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution –
Distinktion: Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2012. 259–290.
Kukkonen, Karin. “Warren Ellis’ Planetary: The Archeology of Superheroes.” The Rise and Reason
of Comics and Graphic Novels. Eds. Joyce Goggins and Dan Hassler-Forest. Jefferson:
McFarland, 2010. 154–167.
Kukkonen, Karin. “Navigating Infinite Earths: Readers, Mental Models and the Multiverse of
Superhero Comics.” The Superhero Reader. Eds. Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent
Worchester. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013. 155–169.
Kuhlman, Martha. “In the Comics Workshop: Chris Ware and the Oubapo.” The Comics of Chris
Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking. Eds. David M. Ball and Martha Kuhlman. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 78–89.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. 2005. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
Meier, Stefan. Superman transmedial: Eine Pop-Ikone im Spannungsfeld von Medienwandel und
Serialität. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015.
Meteling, Arno. “To Be Continued…: Zum seriellen Erzählen im Superhelden-Comic.” Erzählen im
Comic: Beiträge zur Comicforschung. Eds. Otto Brunken and Felix Giesa. Essen: Christian A.
Bachmann, 2013. 89–112.
Meyer, Christina. “Serial Entertainment / Serial Pleasure: The Yellow Kid.” Media of Serial
Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 74–89.
Nehrlich, Thomas, and Joanna Nowotny. “‘We’re not fighting for the people anymore… We’re just
fighting’: US-American Superhero Comics Between Criticisms of Community and Critical
Communities.” American Communities: Between the Popular and the Political. Eds. Lukas
Etter and Julia Straub. Tübingen: Narr, 2017. 223–242.
Newcomb Horace. “Narrative and Genre.” The SAGE Handbook of Media Studies. Ed. John
Downing. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2004. 413–422.
Pearson, Roberta E., and William Uricchio. “Notes from the Batcave: An Interview with Dennis
O’Neil.” The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media.
New York: Routledge, 1991. 18–32.
5 Seriality 139
Reichert, Ramón. “Die Medienästhetik der Webcomics.” Theorien des Comics: Ein Reader. Eds.
Barbara Eder, Elisabeth Klar, and Ramón Reichert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. 121–141.
Rommens, Aarnoud, Benoît Crucifix, Pablo Turnes, Erwin Dejasse, and Björn-Olav Dozo, eds.
Abstraction and Comics – Bande Dessinée et Abstraction. 2 vols. Liège: Presses
Universitaires de Liège, 2019.
Sielke, Sabine. “Network and Seriality: Conceptualizing (Their) Connection.” Network Theory and
American Studies. Eds. Ulfried Reichardt, Heike Schäfer, and Regina Schober. Special issue
of Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.1 (2016): 81–95.
Stein, Daniel. “Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Functions of the Comic Book Paratext.”
From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic
Narrative. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 155–189.
Stein, Daniel. “Popular Seriality, Authorship, Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a
Transnational Genre Economy.” Media Economies: Perspectives on American Cultural
Practices. Eds. Marcel Hartwig, Evelyne Keitel, and Gunter Süß. Trier: WVT, 2014. 133–157.
Stein, Daniel. “Mummified Objects: Superhero Comics in the Digital Age.” Journal of Graphic
Novels and Comics 7.3 (2016): 283–292.
Stein, Daniel. “Can Superhero Comics Studies Develop a Method? And What Does American
Studies Have to Do with It?” Projecting American Studies: Essays on Theory, Method, and
Practice. Eds. Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre. Heidelberg: Winter, 2018a. 259–271.
Stein, Daniel. “Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Superheldencomics.” Comics: Interdisziplinäre
Perspektiven aus Theorie und Praxis auf ein Stiefkind der Medienpädagogik. Eds. Christine
Dallmann, Anja Hartung-Griemberg, Alfons Aigner, and Kai-Thorsten Buchele. Munich:
Kopaed, 2018b. 25–37.
Stein, Daniel. “Gaps as Significant Absences: The Case of Serial Comics.” Significant Absence:
Gaps in Signifiers across Media. Eds. Nassim Winnie Balestrini, Walter Bernhart, and Werner
Wolf. Studies in Intermediality 11. Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2019. 126–155.
Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon. “Introduction: From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels.” From
Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative.
Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 1–23.
Stein, Daniel, and Lukas Etter. “Long-length Serials in the Golden Age of Comic Strips: Production
and Reception.” The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel. Eds. Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey,
and Stephen Tabachnick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 39–58.
Turner, Mark W. “The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and in the Digital Age).”
Serialization in Popular Culture. Eds. Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg. London: Routledge,
2014. 11–32.
Uidhir, Christy Mag. “Comics and Seriality.” The Routledge Companion to Comics. Eds. Frank
Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin. New York: Routledge, 2017. 248–256.
Uricchio, William, and Roberta E. Pearson. “‘I’m Not Fooled by That Cheap Disguise.” The Many
Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media. New York:
Routledge, 1991. 182–213.
Wüllner, Daniel. “Suspended in Mid-Month: Serialized Storytelling in Comics.” The Rise and
Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. Eds. Joyce Goggin and
Dan Hassler-Forest. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 43–55.
7.2 Further Reading

Baetens, Jan, Hugo Frey, and Stephen Tabachnick, eds. The Cambridge History of the Graphic
Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Cortsen, Rikke Platz. Comics as Assemblage: How Spatio-Temporality in Comics Is Constructed.

Diss. University of Copenhagen, 2012.
Etter, Lukas, Thomas Nehrlich, and Joanna Nowotny, eds. Reader Superhelden: Theorie –
Geschichte – Medien. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018.
Giesa, Felix, and Anna Stemmann, eds. Comics & Archive. Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann, 2021.
Hoppeler, Stephanie, and Gabriele Rippl. “Continuity, Fandom und Serialität in anglo-
amerikanischen Comic Books.” Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution – Distinktion: Zum
seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012.
369–381.
Kirtley, Susan E. Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips. Columbus: Ohio State
McDaniel, Nicole. “Self-Reflexive Graphic Narrative: Seriality and Art Spiegelman’s Portrait of the
Artist as a Young %@#*!” Studies in Comics 1.2 (2010): 197–211.
Sabin, Roger, and Teal Triggs, eds. Below Critical Radar: Fanzines and Alternative Comics From
1976 to Now. Hove: Slab’O’Concrete/Codex, 2001.
Wilde, Lukas R. A. Der Witz der Relationen: Komische Inkongruenz und diagrammatisches
Schlussfolgern im Webcomic XKCD. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2012.
Juliane Blank
6 Adaptation
Abstract: Comics and graphic novels create their own storyworlds, but they also
frequently draw on literary works. Comic adaptations have been popular since the
1940s and have lately reached a new ‘Golden Age’. At the same time, narratives and
storyworlds from comics have been adapted into films, TV shows, and computer
games. This chapter will discuss theoretical concepts about what adaptation is in
general as well as how it works specifically in the medium comics. Notions of high
and popular culture had an enormous influence on the production and perception
of adaptation in comics. Both have changed significantly over the last 50 years. In
examining the historical, theoretical and aesthetic dimensions of the phenomenon,
this article provides an overview of the most important factors to be considered in
studying comic adaptations.
Key Terms: adaptation, intermediality, narration, popular culture, world literature
1 Introduction
When we speak of adaptation, we most often refer to the transposition of a work
of literature, a film, or a computer game into another medium. Hutcheon defines
adaptations as “deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of prior works”
(Hutcheon 2013, xvi). The practice of ‘revisiting prior works’ has always been popu-
lar, but it seems to have obtained a particular significance in the context of post-
modernist cross-media culture: novels are transferred into films, films into comic
books, comic books into computer games, games into films, films into novels and
novels into operas, radio plays, musicals, TV shows etc. Considering the increasing
number and new forms of adaptation in various media, one might well say that
adaptation in contemporary culture seems to have “run amok” (Hutcheon 2013,
xiii).
Comics and graphic novels have participated in intermedial transfers at least
since 1941, when Albert Kanter founded the comic book series Classics Illustrated.
They have played an important part in overcoming the border between high and
popular culture. Comic adaptations have recently gained scholars’ attention, which
is partly due to the fact that comics have increasingly acquired cultural renown
since the late 1980s. This shift in perspective has also influenced the production of
comics, allowing comic adaptations to flourish. Considering the multitude of comic
adaptations today, one could assume that we have entered a “Golden Age” (Kick
2012, 1). But how did we get there? By discussing general concepts of adaptation
theory as well as medium-specific techniques and specific forms of comic adapta-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-007
142 Juliane Blank
tion, the following sections will provide an introduction to the phenomenon and its
theoretical, aesthetic, and historical dimensions.
For heuristic reasons, this chapter will focus on adaptations into the medium
comics because they can be considered as adaptations in a stricter sense, whereas
comic adaptations in films (Gordon, Jancovich, and McAllister 2007; Constantinides
2010, 75‒90; Burke 2015), film franchises, and TV shows ‒ e. g. the films of the
Marvel Cinematic Universe (Vignold 2017) or recent superhero shows on Netflix ‒
often take on “story worlds” (Hutcheon 2013, xxiv) instead of “a single, fixed, recog-
nizable story” (Hutcheon 2013, xxiii). Adaptation studies will have to deal with the
challenge these recent examples of comic adaptation present to both the notion of
adaptation and the instruments for analyzing adaptations. This chapter, however,
is not the ideal setting to do this. Instead of raising new questions, it concentrates
on presenting results from an area of adaptation that has recently gained a more
solid theoretical and analytical foundation.
2 What is an Adaptation? Terminology and Theory

In order to understand adaptation in comics, we will have to ask a very basic ques-
tion: What exactly does the term “adaptation” mean? In its original sense, which
has been popularized as part of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, “adaptation” refers
to a process of adjustment: ‘to adapt’ means to make an effort to “fit with another,
or suit specified conditions, esp[ecially] a new or changed environment” (Oxford
English Dictionary). It has been critically discussed if this term is really suitable to
denote a phenomenon of media transfer, since the aspect of ‘adjustment’ seems to
imply that adaptation is a process in which an artist tries to make a work from a
certain medium (e. g. literature) ‘fit’ into his/her medium of choice (e. g. comics) –
a process that is often thought of as a reduction of the source. Still, none of the
terminological alternatives suggested over the years proved to be as universal and
as memorable as ‘adaptation’ (Hutcheon 2013, 15).
The term ‘adaptation’ is ambiguous, referring both to a transformative process
and the product resulting from it (Hutcheon 2013, 15 passim). When we talk about
adaptation as a process, we ask what happens to a text, what is done with it. When
we focus on adaptation as a product, we are primarily concerned with the achieve-
ments of the target medium – we want to know how the end product works as a
comic that is based on a literary text. In studying adaptations, these two perspec-
tives cannot be applied individually, but rather complement each other. In order to
achieve a deeper understanding of adaptation, we have to deal with its “double
nature” (Hutcheon 2013, 6) and acknowledge the fact that it reaches back to an
existing source and reimagines some of its aspects, while at the same time it produ-
ces something entirely new. In fact, the mixture of “repetition and variation” seems
to be responsible for the popularity of adaptations: “Recognition and remembrance
6 Adaptation 143
are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change”
(Hutcheon 2013, 4).
On a more theoretical level, the question what adaptation – as a process and
as a product – is and what it does, can be answered from different perspectives. It
has to be noted that these perspectives are not mutually exclusive, but rather stress
different aspects that are connected to each other. Most theories focus on adaptation
as a phenomenon of media exchange (Straumann 2015, 249) and place it within a
theoretical frame of intermediality. As a field of research, intermediality is con-
cerned with all kinds of relationships between two or more media (Rippl 2015, 1).
Rajewsky distinguishes three basic forms: media combination, medial transposi-
tion, and intermedial references (2002, 15‒17; 2005, 51–52). Strictly speaking, comic
adaptations fall into all three categories (Stein 2015): As a medium, comics are hy-
brid in nature, since they use both images and words, thus combining two originally
distinguishable media (Rippl and Etter 2013, 192‒194). As adaptations of literature,
they perform medial transpositions, and can thus be understood as “remediations”
(Bolter and Grusin 2000). Finally, comic adaptations often include a large number
of references not only to the adapted text, but also to products of visual media like
paintings, films, or other comics.
Focusing on the aspect of cross-media transfer, some scholars have compared
the process of adaptation to translating a text from one language into another. If
we assume that comics as a medium ‒ i. e. as a distinctive communication system
(Wolf 1991, 87) ‒ employ a different sign system than literature (although they share
the use of the written word), comic adaptations can be regarded as intermedial and
intersemiotic translations (Hutcheon 2013, 16; with reference to comics Kimmich
2008, 90; Schmitz-Emans 2009, 285). The notion of adaptation as a form of transla-
tion highlights the fact that there can never be a “literal adaptation” – just as there
is no such thing as a “literal translation” (Hutcheon 2013, 16).
Since there is no literal translation to be had, translations necessarily provide
an interpretation of the translated text. This also applies to adaptations, even more
so since they frequently make deliberate changes that provide a new frame of refer-
ence, focusing on certain aspects of the adapted text and omitting others (Sanders
2006; Hutcheon 2013; Schmitz-Emans 2012a). Flix’s comic book adaptation of the
German classic Faust, for instance, transfers the story from the 16th century to mod-
ern-day Berlin. Furthermore, the artist provides ‘translations’ of the main charac-
ters, relying on stereotypes of contemporary German culture: Margarethe (Goethe’s
Gretchen), for example, comes from a religious Muslim family and is forbidden to
see Faust. Her struggle between love and family obligations clearly echoes the con-
flict of Goethe’s Gretchen who is torn between her Christian upbringing and her
desire for Faust. This strategy of updating (Blank 2015, 328–332) is employed in
order to provide an interpretation of the classic as a story of ‘love against the odds’
to which modern readers can relate.
Flix’s example also brings to mind the question what exactly it is that is being
adapted. It is usually assumed that adaptations deal with the story of the adapted
144 Juliane Blank
text. But what exactly does that involve? Flix adapts Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s
drama Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil (1808), which is part of a long history of telling
and re-telling the story of Faust and his pact with the devil. So how do we know
that Flix’s graphic novel is an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust and not simply another
interpretation of the Faust storyline that had existed before Goethe? We can only
understand adaptation as a phenomenon if we get a clearer idea of the components
of a story that the adapters are working with. In adapting a work of literature, some
of the basic components that an adaptation can react to are “themes, events [and
their structure; J.B.], world, characters, motivation, points of view, consequences,
contexts, symbols, imagery, and so on” (Hutcheon 2013, 10). Flix’s characters are
clearly based on Goethe’s. Furthermore, his focus on the theme of love connects his
comic book adaptation explicitly to the German classic, since the Gretchen storyline
was added to the Faust tradition by Goethe. In dealing with comic adaptations,
differentiating the elements of a story will provide a more precise perspective on
what exactly happens when a literary text is transposed to a comic book or graphic
novel. However, adaptations are in no way obliged to concentrate equally on all of
the components of a literary narrative. Nor is an adaptation which takes great pains
to find ‘equivalents’ for all of these categories necessarily ‘better’ than others, al-
though critics sometimes seem to consider ‘completeness’ an indicator of quality.
In reality, adaptations are often more interested in some aspects of a story than
others, much like any other interpretation.
Having touched upon the questions what adaptation is and what it does, there
is still a more practical question to be dealt with: Which kind of comics that refer
back to prior works qualify as adaptations – and which do not? For example: Is a
comic book on Anne Frank’s life (e. g. Jacobson and Colón 2010) an adaptation of
her diary or a graphic biography? Can a sequel, like Will Eisner’s The Appeal, a
surreal continuation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (↗20 Will Eisner, A Contract with
God), be discussed as an adaptation of this novel? If only the rough outlines of the
story are, quite literally, adapted to the structure of a pre-existing storyworld like
the Donald Duck universe (see Marjanovic 2011; Herrmann 2002), is it still an adap-
tation? The answer is necessarily ambivalent: It depends. What it depends on has
been critically discussed in adaptation studies, with different results.
In order to distinguish different kinds or degrees of transfer, Julie Sanders has
suggested the alternative term “appropriation” for transformation products like Eis-
ner’s The Appeal. According to Sanders, appropriations are not set within the same
plot frame as the adapted text but are characterized by a “more decisive journey
away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain”
(Sanders 2006, 26). Sanders’s distinction has been accepted by some scholars and
criticized by others who argue that appropriation can well be considered a form of
adaptation and that the distinction is artificial (e. g. Nicklas and Lindner 2012, 5).
Regardless of the terminological preference of individual scholars, the debate on
different forms or degrees has made it clear that ‘adaptation’ is not a clear-cut me-
6 Adaptation 145
chanical process with fixed rules, but refers to a large number of heterogeneous
creative practices that employ different modes and produce different forms of adap-
tation.
As a process and a product, adaptation is defined by its target medium. It can
be enlightening to examine the role adaptation plays within the medium comics. In
this context, one can ask if adaptation is a genre of comics. In general, genres in
comics seem to be difficult to determine. Comics studies have offered a number of
heterogeneous categories to classify comics – like “funny animal comics, romance
comics, superhero comics, Tijuana bibles, alternative comics, autobiographical
comics, mini-comics, graphic novels, comix, adult comics and fumetti” –, but not
all of them may qualify as genres (Abell 2012, 68). If we define genre as a set of
conventions that affect both the content and the structure of a comic and have an
effect on the readers’ expectations (Abell 2012, 77–78), only the latter aspect seems
to apply to adaptations.
Adaptations often use paratextual markers that serve as signals of adaptation,
making sure that adaptations are perceived as adaptations. One of the most com-
mon markers is the reference to the author of the adapted text on the cover of the
adaptation. Furthermore, adaptations in comics sometimes include information on
the adapted text, its author and/or the adaptation process in a preface or afterword
(Blank 2015, 116‒122). Although these practices are used to distinguish adaptations
from other comics, it is still unclear if these mainly paratextual markers are suffi-
cient for adaptation to be discussed as a genre of comics. Although there are certain
strategies and techniques that are typical for the process of adaptation (e. g. the
updating strategy), these are not specific to the medium comics, but are also fre-
quent in film, radio, musicals etc. Therefore, it seems more productive to treat adap-
tation in comics as one form of a transmedial practice that shares certain strategies
with adaptation in other media, but at the same time uses comic-specific techniques
to realize these strategies. The following chapter will examine in more detail which
techniques comics use in adaptation.
3 How Do Adaptations in Comics Work?

Medium-Specific Techniques
As Kukkonen points out, adaptations in general are determined by the capabilities
of their target medium. These “media affordances” (Kukkonen 2013, 73) are essen-
tial to the ways comics deal with the task of adapting a literary narrative. One of
the most basic features of adaptation in comics is the principle of visualization:
Comics – like film – necessarily provide concrete images, whereas a verbal text
always possesses a certain amount of vagueness (Unbestimmtheit) or even gaps (Iser
1970). When a prose text mentions a “beautiful man” or a “big house,” the readers
146 Juliane Blank
can imagine the man or the house however they like – whereas an adaptation in
film or comics has to provide unambiguous and concrete visualizations, that is,
“precise people, places, and things” (Hutcheon 2013, 43; Vanderbeke 2010, 116).
Again and again, critics have turned the concrete and unambiguous nature of film
and comic adaptations into an argument against them, claiming that the possibili-
ties of interpretation are severely reduced by the precise images that visual adapta-
tions of literary texts provide. On the other hand, it is the visual dimension that
many publishers consider to be an important instrument in introducing new audien-
ces to the literary classics. Visualization is a basic principle of adaptation in comics,
and thus can be considered an obligation rather than a choice. However, comic
artists have many techniques at their disposal that can be used deliberately to adapt
the different aspects of a literary text, e. g. the plot and its structure, themes and
motifs, characters, setting, and perspective. In order to explore how these tech-
niques are employed to make an adaptation work in comics, we will have to revisit
the prior text.
As already established, most theories assume that it is the ‘story’ of a literary
text that is adapted. But many adaptations do not only react to the mere events
of the action (story), but also to its structured form (plot). Literary theorists have
distinguished different types or patterns of plot structure that can be found in vari-
ous texts (Kukkonen 2014). Literary texts often have overt structural units like chap-
ters or scenes. In comic adaptation, the overt and covert structure of the adapted
text sometimes serves as an inspiration, but more often it is superimposed by a
different structure that works for the adaptation. A comic book or graphic novel can
have chapter boundaries as well, but its structure is primarily determined by the
boundaries of the page or the double page. In fact, page breaks are often used to
create comic-specific structural units – to indicate a shift in perspective, the begin-
ning of a new phase of events or of a side plot, a turning point, or to create sus-
pense. Within the boundaries of the double page, narrative structure is created by
means of the page layout, i. e. the utilization of the form, size, and alignment of
panels (Peeters 1991, 34‒53). In his adaptation of the notoriously complex novel The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (↗29 Martin
Rowson, Tristram Shandy), Martin Rowson uses unconventional page layout to chal-
lenge the concept of a linear narrative.
The issue of structure provides the perfect example of how comic adaptations
handle the balance between re-imagination and reinvention. In his adaptation of
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1916), for instance, Peter Kuper adopts the prior
text’s division into three chapters, thus paying reverence to Kafka’s narrative con-
struction. Within this overall structure, however, he breaks up the action into units
of double pages that serve as a means to present the plot in a new way: Kuper
envisions Gregor Samsa’s story as a series of escalating events that surprise the pro-
tagonist as well as the reader. In order to create suspense, he often introduces speech
bubbles or sounds at the very end of a double page (Kuper 2003, 15, 19, 37, 39, 61,
69), forcing the reader to turn the page to find out where it comes from (fig. 6.1).
6 Adaptation 147
Fig. 6.1: Peter Kuper: The Metamorphosis. New

York: Three Rivers Press, 2003, 19. © 2003 by
Peter Kuper. Used by kind permission of the
author.
Page layout can also be used to reflect on themes and motifs that are either part of
the prior text or introduced by the adapter. In the first chapter of Kuper’s Metamor-
phosis, the page layout resonates with the theme of pressure that Gregor Samsa
experiences. This kind of layout has been called “rhetoric,” because it is used to
express important aspects of the plot (Peeters 1991, 42). In The Metamorphosis, the
theme of pressure is connected to Gregor Samsa’s stressful job as a travelling sales-
man and his role as the sole provider of his family. On top of it all, he has been
transformed into a giant insect, unable to make sense of what has happened to him.
The pressing necessity to explain why he is still in bed while being unable to move
is symbolized by the page layout (fig. 6.1): The individual panels are arranged
around an alarm clock in the middle of the page and in their shape seem to resem-
ble areas on the face of a clock. Five of these panels show very similar images of
Gregor lying in bed. While the action level is low on this page, the layout suggests
that all the time the clock is ticking. This is confirmed by the sound of the doorbell
coming from the next page which finally forces Gregor Samsa to react. As demon-
strated by this example, adapters can claim the story of the adapted text as their
own by imposing on it a new comic-specific structure. In fact, this form of structural
appropriation has proven a fundamental instrument of creating a new reading of
the prior text.
Time is not only important in Kuper’s time-obsessed page layout, but also an
important factor to be considered in the adaptation of a literary text in general.
Literature and comics do not construct time in the same way. In his ground-breaking
148 Juliane Blank
essay Laokoon (1766), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing makes a fundamental distinction

between temporal and spatial forms of art (Ryan 2012). He argues that action in time
is an essential element of literature, while painting as a visual art can only show
individual moments frozen in time (Lessing 1990, 115). When extended to visual
media in general, Lessing’s ideas can also shed some light on the way comics can
construct action in time. According to Lessing, the selection of so-called ‘pregnant
moments’ that have the greatest narrative potential (Lessing 1990, 117) is one of the
most important tasks of painters. This is also true for comic artists, especially when
dealing with transforming a verbal narrative into a narrative that uses images and
words in sequence. Not only is the plot of the prior text often condensed, e. g. by
cutting side plots and characters, but the adapters will also have to decide which
elements of the action they will visualize. Critics have often considered the process-
es of condensation and visualization a reduction not only in length, but also in
complexity. Only recently, scholars have started to consider visualization and con-
densation as opportunities to open up new perspectives of interpretation by concen-
trating on certain aspects of the adapted text (Stuhlfauth-Trabert and Trabert 2015,
12; Hutcheon 2013, 36 passim).
In adapting a literary text, the adapters have to decide to what extent they will
use written words in speech bubbles and captions. Words and images in comics can
engage in a number of relations, and are not necessarily redundant (Saraceni 2003,
29; ↗3 Text-Image Relations). Quite often, adaptations ‘dissolve’ descriptions of
rooms, buildings, landscapes or characters into uncommented visualizations. But
even if the adapted text does not provide a description of characters and setting, a
comic adaptation will need to come up with a concrete image of them. In return,
this necessity also opens up the opportunity to interpret characters in a certain way
and make sure that the readers – quite literally – see them in the same way. Not
only can characters represent certain types, they can even be modelled after con-
crete people. In adaptations of Kafka’s works, for instance, it is not uncommon to
present the protagonist as bearing a certain resemblance to the author. On the one
hand, this form of character representation can be used to present a biographical
reading, drawing parallels between the character’s experience and the life of the
author. On the other hand, this method reflects back on a practice of typecasting as
a means of interpreting a character in a film adaptation. The concrete depiction of
a story’s setting can also be used as an instrument of interpretation. Not only is the
setting able to convey a certain atmosphere and thus set the mood for a specific
reading. It also offers important information about the world the story takes place
in ‒ which is not necessarily the same as in the adapted text. In fact, place and time
of the narrated events are often subject to significant changes in adaptations. As in
film, the strategy of ‘updating,’ i. e. transferring the story to a contemporary back-
ground, becomes most apparent in the visualization of setting.
The fact that an adaptation into comics entails a process of visualization also
seems to pose a problem for the adaptation of specific features of written texts like
6 Adaptation 149
its narrative situation. In dealing with narrative prose of the 19th century, for in-
stance, the adapters need to decide what to do with the, often pronounced, narra-
tor’s voice. As a concession to the narrative situation of the adapted text, many
comic adaptations, e. g. Classics Illustrated, include an extraordinary amount of the
original narrator’s words in captions. This solution can draw the reader’s attention
to the verbal rather than to the visual dimension of the adaptation. First-person
narration that provides insight into the narrator’s or the characters’ thoughts and
feelings can also be transformed into dialogue or ‘acted out’ by the characters, i. e.
externalized as facial expression or gestures.
In a predominantly visual medium, first-person narration, let alone narrative
techniques like interior monologue, free indirect speech and thought or stream of
consciousness, seems hard to achieve. At first sight, it seems difficult to show the
interior and subjective dimensions that are characteristic of these forms of narra-
tion. But comics have developed their own techniques of character-bound, subjec-
tive narration (Vanderbeke 2010, 112). As in film, point-of-view techniques that show
the action strictly through the eyes of a character are employed sparingly. A more
common tool of visualizing subjective narration is the so-called “half-subjective”
image that shows us the action as if looking over a character’s shoulder, thus creat-
ing an equivalent to internal focalization (Schüwer 2008, 178). In visualizing subjec-
tive narration, adapters can also use distortion as well as non-realistic and express-
ive colors to indicate that what we see is the subjective experience of a character
(Vanderbeke 2010, 112). As in Kuper’s adaptation of The Metamorphosis, “rhetoric”
layouts can also be a tool of expressing a subjective quality of the action. As these
examples have demonstrated, comics have at their disposal a large number of narra-
tive techniques that can be used to create an equivalent rather than a copy of the
narrative situation of the adapted text. Comic adaptations have gradually become
more confident in using these techniques in order to claim an adapted story as their
own. At the same time, scholars and critics have started to think about adaptation
as a process of creating artistic works in their own right by using the full narrative
potential of the medium. These changes in the production and perception of comic
adaptations will be discussed in the following two chapters.
4 A Short History of Comic Adaptations

Whereas film has relied on literature from its very beginning, comics took several
decades to explore their own storyworlds filled with talking animals, cunning de-
tectives, naughty children and, later, superheroes, before they turned to literature.
In their early years, comics were published in newspapers and consisted only of a
few panels. Due to their format, they were unfit to adapt literary works. This changed
with the advent of comic books and magazines. When Albert Kanter founded the
comic book series Classic Comics in 1941 (Jones 2002), he established a template for
150 Juliane Blank
comic adaptation that would be dominant for many decades to come – at least in
the English-speaking world (Schmitz-Emans 2009, 284). After it was renamed Clas-
sics Illustrated in 1947, the series ran until 1971 and was shortly revived in the early
1990s. During the first generation of Classics Illustrated, various artists created 169
adaptations of world literature and biographies, with a focus on classics of English
and American culture (Schmitz-Emans 2012a, 252). As the title of the series suggests,
the primary goal of these adaptations was to introduce young readers to the literary
classics (Versaci 2007, 186). Unlike today’s graphic novel adaptations, the Classics
Illustrated issues had a limited number of 64, later 56 and even 48 pages (Jones
2002, 13), forcing the adapters to condense and concentrate the plot of the adapted
texts. Interestingly, it is not primarily the reduction in length that critical reviewers
have focused on, but rather the lack of artistic imagination, which can partly be
attributed to the necessity to ‘fit’ every story into a standardized comic book format
(Schmitz-Emans 2012a, 253; Boschenhoff 2013, 52).
The educational approach of Classics Illustrated became a template for adapta-
tion in the English-speaking world and, for example, in Germany – countries in
which for a long time comics were regarded as trivial products of mass culture. In
these countries, adaptation was one way of establishing a connection between pop-
ular culture (i. e. comics) and high culture (i. e. literature). In contrast, France and
Italy – and in part Belgium and Switzerland – have always had a different, more
positive attitude towards comics. Therefore, conditions for comic adaptation in
these countries were quite different from the US or Germany. The Italian artist Dino
Battaglia (1923–1983), for instance, created a number of comic adaptations that do
not represent a canon of world literature, but rather reflect his own personal taste
in literature. Battaglia was primarily interested in telling an interesting story, and
he frequently found it in 19th-century literature (Jans 2006, 25). Most of the texts
adapted by Battaglia have a connection to the fantastic, or even the Gothic
(Schmitz-Emans 2012a, 361). In his adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, for ex-
ample The Fall of the House of Usher (1969), the artist employs his favorite tech-
niques in order to provide visual equivalents to the unsettling experience of Poe’s
protagonists: relying on the visual archive of expressionist film (Schmitz-Emans
2012a, 364), he creates menacing shadows and shapes emerging from them. In this
way, he presents a visual equivalent to affective qualities of a literary text, like
shock or suspense. Battaglia’s approach of assimilating 19th-century Gothic stories
to the kind of comics he likes to draw is representative of an alternative tradition of
comic adaptation that is not concerned with questions of education, but confidently
explores the means of comics in telling beloved stories. This approach, also prac-
ticed by Italian and French artists like Guido Crepax or Stephane Heuet, had a con-
siderable influence on the history of comic adaptation as well, but only after the
cultural status of comics had begun to change.
This change can at least in part be attributed to the arrival of the so-called
graphic novel. Being introduced to the market (but not invented) by Will Eisner in
6 Adaptation 151
1978 (↗20 Will Eisner, A Contract with God), the term came to convey the notion of
comics as an art form very close to literature. Although today it is mainly used as a
marketing term (Stein 2015, 425), the perception of comics as “graphic novels” has
improved their reputation. Furthermore, it has opened up new possibilities of pro-
duction and helped to gain the interest of new audiences (↗2 History, Formats,
Genres). The graphic novel “turn” also seems to have brought about a new self-
confidence that extended to adaptation (Schmitz-Emans 2012a, 17): comic artists
began to explore new topics and new ways of storytelling, and in the process re-
discovered literature as an inspiration. The term “graphic novel” was particularly
successful in countries that had rather traditional ideas of ‘high and low’ culture,
dismissing comics as a product of the latter. It is in these countries that comic adap-
tations have experienced the most noticeable changes since the days of Classics
Illustrated. In fact, they “have gone through a distinct evolution, ranging from para-
doxical self-effacement of the comics medium, to embracing the unique formal and
stylistic elements that comics have to offer” (Versaci 2007, 183).
Given the “evolution” that Versaci diagnoses, it is not surprising that the ‘new
generation’ of comic adaptation strives to distinguish itself from the established
model of Classics Illustrated (Ferstl 2010, 61). Looking back on the ambitious Neon
Lit series (1994–95), one of the first advances towards re-inventing comic adapta-
tion, Art Spiegelman claims: “[T]he goal here was not to create some dumbed down
‘Classics Illustrated’ version, but visual ‘translations’ actually worthy of adult atten-
tion” (Spiegelman 2004, no pag.). While it is noteworthy that Spiegelman also
thinks of adaptation as translation, it is mainly the concept of ambition and as-
sumed worth that indicates a turning point. Spiegelman dismisses the Classics Illus-
trated template and focuses on the possibilities of comics in ‘translating’ a literary
text, thus advertising a way of comic adaptation that had in fact been practiced for
decades in parts of Europe. With publications like the Neon Lit series, comic adapta-
tion in the US and other countries that were influenced by Classics Illustrated be-
came more interested in what comics can do with and for a literary text. This new
self-confidence was advertised by choosing texts that were considered ‘difficult to
adapt’ like Paul Auster’s postmodernist novel City of Glass (1985), the first text to
be adapted for Neon Lit by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli.
The production of comic adaptations has changed significantly in the last twen-
ty years. Today, comic adaptations are often published as graphic novels within a
series. This system seems to be part of the Classics Illustrated heritage and is now
practiced in many countries (Schmitz-Emans 2012a, 12–17). Apart from Neon Lit with
only two issues, there are quite a few long-running series, e. g. Ex-Libris by Delcourt
and Collection Fétiche by Gallimard (in France), Eye Classics and Manga Shake-
speare by SelfMadeHero (in the UK) or Brockhaus Literaturcomics by Brockhaus Pub-
lishers (in Germany). Many of these series follow a specific program and focus on a
particular author or a specific canon of national or world literature. It is an indicator
of the current popularity of comic adaptations that publishers often invite acclaimed
152 Juliane Blank
artists to create adaptations for their series, granting them a considerable degree of
artistic freedom. Often, the reputation of the artist influences the perception of the
adaptation. When Robert Crumb adapted the book of Genesis in 2009 (↗23 Robert
Crumb), critics were likely to read his work in light of his artistic past as a pioneer
of underground comix. But an adaptation is not necessarily the work of one artist.
Like other comics, adaptations are often collaborative products. It has to be ac-
knowledged that artistic concept, penciling, coloring, inking, and lettering, as well
as the written script – and in many cases, a translation – contribute to the adapta-
tion as a product.
A special case in recent developments is the extremely condensed one-page
adaptation that is often published in anthologies, e. g. Alice im Comicland (Switzer-
land, 1993), 100 Meisterwerke der Weltliteratur (Germany, 2001), or 50 Literatur ge-
zeichnet (Austria, 2003). All three publications present primarily wordless adapta-
tions of works of world literature, adapted by Swiss, German and Austrian comic
artists. At least 100 Meisterwerke and 50 Literatur gezeichnet can be regarded as
contributions to the preservation of a literary canon. Not only do these publications
contain a ‘best-of’ selection of world literature, they also present the adaptations in
alphabetical order of the adapted texts’ authors, while the adapting artists are only
named in second place. As the adaptations are only one page long, they necessarily
condense the plot to an extreme extent. Given the popularity of the adapted texts,
an informed reader can nevertheless follow the narrative and make sense of it. In
fact, many adaptations do not simply re-tell or illustrate the adapted text, but can
be read as ironic comments or even parodies that make fun of the weaknesses of
the adapted texts. While these anthologies may contribute to the preservation of a
canon of world literature, they also provide an opportunity to collect works of pre-
eminent comic artists of Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. One has to keep in
mind that these anthologies have been published when comics were still largely
regarded as trivial and unambitious products of mass culture in the German-speak-
ing countries. In this context, adaptations can also serve as a means to promote the
great variety of comics as a medium and to establish a connection between high
and popular culture.
Across all media, most adaptations are based on literature of the 19th and early
20th century (Sanders 2006, 121), with only a few exceptions (e. g. Homer, Dante,
Cervantes, Molière, Shakespeare, Goethe). Comic adaptations mostly turn to narra-
tive prose, whereas lyrical poetry or even drama are not as prominently featured
(see Schmitz-Emans 2012a, 264–269 on rare exceptions). Canonicity and popularity
still play an important role for the selection of adapted works (Sanders 2006, 120;
Lewis and Arnold-de Simine, 2020). Still, the fact that “[a]daptation both seems to
require and perpetuate the existence of a canon” (Sanders 2006, 8) does not prevent
it from occasionally being “oppositional, even subversive” to notions of canonicity
(Sanders 2006, 9). In fact, many comic adaptations show a certain amount of ironic
distance to the adapted text. In ridiculing certain aspects of a text or its general
6 Adaptation 153
position within high culture, comic adaptations often draw on the more ‘comical’
traditions of the medium. In drawing Gregor Samsa as an insect with a human head
(fig. 6.1), Kuper evokes the tradition of the anthropomorphic animal. He uses the
conventions of funny animal comics to stress the more absurd aspects of Gregor
Samsa’s metamorphosis. If adaptations explicitly make fun of the plot and charac-
ters as well as the canonical status of the prior text, they can even take the form of
parodies.
Only rarely are comic adaptations based on literary works that have not been
adapted to film before. Some noteworthy exceptions are Paul Karasik’s and David
Mazzucchelli’s City of Glass (1994), several of Jacques Tardi’s adaptations of French
crime fiction (e. g. Le cri du peuple [2001‒2004] after the novel by Jean Vautrin
[1998]; La position du tireur couché [2010] after the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette
[1981]) or Nicolas Mahler’s Alte Meister (2011, after Thomas Berhard’s novel). In the
intermedial ‘afterlife’ of literary texts, comics and graphic novels are rarely the first
reincarnation. In fact, comic adaptations sometimes reflect on the history of the
adapted text by including visual references to prior adaptations. In their 2008 adap-
tation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, for instance, Chantal Montellier and David Zane
Mairowitz frequently quote Orson Welles’s iconic film adaptation Le procès (1962),
thus paying homage to the images the film created for Kafka’s sinister world (Blank
2015, 170–172). Comic adaptations have begun to experiment with different perspec-
tives on the adapted text since the 1990s. The number of playful references to film,
visual arts, and other comics can be regarded as characteristic of an ‘anything goes’-
approach to literature and the arts that is often associated with postmodernism.
References to prior adaptations also have a self-referential function, since they call
attention to the fact that most comic adaptations are part of a tradition of adapta-
tion.
Since the days of Classics Illustrated, adaptations in comics and graphic novels
have come a long way. Most noticeably, formats have changed. While the comic
book adaptation following the Classics Illustrated template was restricted to 64, 56,
or 48 pages (Jones 2002, 13), today’s adaptations can be books with hundreds of
pages. Moreover, the artist’s contribution has gained more attention, with comics
being praised for their originality and their ingenious use of the medium’s means
of storytelling. But critics’ demands seem to have changed in general: While comic
book adaptations in the days of Classics Illustrated were judged negatively for not
being “faithful” to the original, “[s]ubjective readings, individual visions and occa-
sional glimpses of some ‘essential’ aspects or artistic ‘truth’ now meet with approv-
al” (Vanderbeke 2010, 106).
Recent publications, e. g. Russ Kick’s The Graphic Canon (2012‒13) seem to indi-
cate a desire to document, classify, and anthologize the abundance of comic adapta-
tions. The Graphic Canon consists of three large volumes that collect adaptations of
various lengths, styles, and levels of abstraction. They also include illustrations and
other forms of graphic engagement with literary texts. The first volume starts with
154 Juliane Blank
the epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Babylon, the last ends with David Foster Wal-
lace’s Infinite Jest (1996). By dedicating a whole volume to authors from Samuel
Taylor Coleridge to Oscar Wilde, the Graphic Canon perpetuates the dominance of
19th-century literature in adaptation, while at the same time expanding the scope of
the anthology by adaptations of lyric poetry and non-fictional works like Charles
Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. In their multitude of forms, the collected works
seem to confirm the editor’s declaration that we live in a “Golden Age” of adaptation
(Kick 2012, 1) which is characterized by an exchange between high and popular
culture on many levels. In fact, adaptations have not only become more popular
with readers and publishers, they have also begun to attract the interest of acade-
mia – as a “test case” for intermediality (Rippl and Etter 2013, 191), as a form of
literary reception, and as a phenomenon of popular culture.
5 Academic Approaches to Comic Adaptations

As comics are a hybrid medium, comics studies as such are characterized by their
interdisciplinary and eclectic methods (Heer and Worcester 2009, xi). It is only logi-
cal that adaptations in comics have also been studied from various perspectives. It
is therefore necessary to acknowledge the fact that various fields have directly or
indirectly contributed to the study of comic adaptations, among them literary stud-
ies, film studies, intermedia studies, adaptation studies, theatre studies, reception
studies, and of course comics studies.
All research on adaptations has profited from the introduction of the concept
of intertextuality by French post-structuralist thinkers, first and foremost Julia Kris-
teva. This theory has challenged traditional ideas of authorship and originality, es-
pecially the concept of the author-bound ‘original’ product of one mind (Emig 2012,
15). In general, postmodernist theory has rejected the idea of a solitary and wholly
independent author as the source of a truly original text. From this perspective, it
is no longer logical to distinguish between works of an auteur and products of the
film or comics industry. This new way of thinking about texts also paved the way for
the concept of intermediality that is at the center of adaptation studies (↗2 History,
Formats, Genres).
Adaptation studies as an academic discipline is rooted in film studies and is to
this day mainly concerned with film adaptation. Generations of publications on film
adaptations have discussed fundamental questions about the subject of adaptation
as such and can be an inspiration to the study of comic adaptation as well (e. g.
Bluestone 1957; Wagner 1975; McFarlane 1996; Cartmell and Whelehan 1999; Nare-
more 2000; Cardwell 2002; Elliott 2003; Stam and Raengo 2005; Leitch 2009). Many
of the central questions of film adaptation can be applied to comic adaptations as
well, for instance: How do adaptations use the vocabulary of the target medium to
6 Adaptation 155
create equivalents of the structure, perspective, characters, and themes of a text?

Are there different types of adaptation?
Only recently have adaptation theory and intermedia studies begun to explore
the relationship between literature and comics (Vanderbeke 2010, 105). Although
most of the work in the field of adaptation studies is not explicitly concerned with
comics, it has provided a theoretical basis for studying comic adaptations. When
Hutcheon classifies adaptations into film and other visual media like comics under
the general category of transpositions to the “showing mode” (Hutcheon 2013, 38–
46 et passim), she stresses the visual aspects of adaptation in film and comics, while
neglecting the hybridity of film, theatre, or comics as well as the differences in
visual adaptations. Although they hardly mention comics and graphic novels, gen-
eral ‘theories of adaptation’ like Hutcheon’s and Sanders’s studies offer theories
about what the process of adaptation into a visual medium entails.
In contrast to the more general approach of adaptation studies, comics studies
pay more attention to aesthetic principles and narrative possibilities of an adapta-
tion as a comic book or graphic novel. Among the first academic contributions were
didactic case studies which were primarily interested in the use of adaptations in
education, thus focusing on adaptations that fit the Classics Illustrated template.
Accordingly, these case studies focus on evaluating how the adaptation ‘serves’ the
adapted text and how it can be used to introduce potential readers to classic litera-
ture. As comics studies developed, adaptations were often used to exemplify central
issues of the field, like possibilities of visual storytelling or text-image relations. As
comics scholars often have a background in literary studies, adaptations of litera-
ture served as a means to expand the scope of the discipline without leaving its
comfort zone. Although this type of case study helped to introduce comics to literary
studies, it can be problematic to look at adaptations from the perspective of litera-
ture only. If adaptations are considered merely as comic book ‘versions’ of a literary
text, the fact that they use very specific means to appropriate a prior work tends to
be ignored. Newer approaches rooted in media studies tend to stress the aspect of
medium specificity, exploring the differences between literature and comics as well
as the processes of media transposition. From the perspective of cultural studies,
comic adaptations are interesting as a phenomenon of popular culture that challen-
ges traditional notions of cultural value by actively ‘closing the gap’ (Fiedler 1969)
between ‘high and low’ art. Since comic adaptations often draw on a corpus of
‘world literature,’ they also cross cultural borders, making adaptation a process of
intercultural transfer.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the majority of publications on comic adapta-
tion were case studies that compared an adaptation to the prior text. These case
studies have offered some useful tools for the comparative analysis of comic adapta-
tions. Yet, many of them, especially studies with a background in literature, have
shown a tendency towards evaluating the adaptation mainly with regard to its
‘faithfulness’ to the ‘original.’ To think of adaptations in terms of fidelity often
156 Juliane Blank
means to dismiss them as “inevitably blurred mechanical reproductions of original

works of art” (Leitch 2008, 163). This way of thinking is based on the assumption
that literature is superior to other media (Stam 2000, 58), especially visual media
rooted in popular culture like comics. Since the notion of fidelity does not contrib-
ute to understanding adaptation as a process and a phenomenon, its forms and
techniques, film studies have already dismissed it as unproductive (Stam 2000;
Hutcheon 2013). Nevertheless, critical assessments seem to keep sneaking back into
the discourse on adaptation. Some critics still seem to take offence at the “second-
ary” and “derivative” nature of adaptations (see Hutcheon 2013, 31) as well as the
alleged triviality of comics as a medium. But on the whole, the rhetoric on adapta-
tion has changed considerably over the last 50 years. While early studies (on film
adaptation: Bluestone 1957; Wagner 1975) often thought of adaptation in terms of
distance from the “original,” stressing aspects of reduction and loss, recent publica-
tions make an effort to establish a notion of adaptation that stresses the possibilities
and challenges of intermedia adaptation (on comic adaptation: Stuhlfauth-Trabert
and Trabert 2015, 12).
Although each case study has undoubtedly produced results that would be use-
ful on a greater scale of adaptation studies, genuine progress could only be made
after the results of these individual studies were put into the theoretical frame of
adaptation studies. But publications that try to explore the phenomenon of comic
adaptation in all its historical, aesthetic, and technical aspects have been scarce
until around 2010. In the following paragraphs, I will present some more systematic
approaches to the field of comic adaptation, concentrating on publications (papers,
chapters in books, and monographs) that explore the phenomenon in a broader
cultural and aesthetic context.
In the last chapter of his study This Book Contains Graphic Language, Versaci
explores the “relationship between comic books and literature” (2007, 183) primarily
in a historical dimension, but also remarks on some features of comics that are
important in adaptation, e. g. composition, perspective, and page layout. In accord-
ance with his goal to establish comics as a rewarding subject of literary studies,
Versaci treats adaptations as an indicator of comics’ artistic independence and the
expressive, even “literary” qualities of the “language” of comics (2007, 200).
In his paper “It Was the Best of Two Worlds, It Was the Worst of Two Worlds’:
The Adaptation of Novels in Comics and Graphic Novel,” Vanderbeke compares re-
cent examples, deriving from the comparison some fundamental “theoretical ques-
tions and aesthetic problems” of adaptation in comics (2010, 104). Starting with the
ongoing denigration of comics and its connection to the “fidelity” debate, he reflects
on the ratio of text and image, the transposition of first-person narration, the con-
struction of time in a sequence of static images, the significance of visual references,
and the treatment of “gaps.” Although Vanderbeke acknowledges the damage
caused by the notion of “fidelity,” he also holds on to the idea of a “suitable” adap-
tation, i. e. an adaptation as an “artistic comment” (117) that engages with essential
aspects of the adapted text (107).
6 Adaptation 157
Schmitz-Emans’ pioneering monograph Literatur-Comics (2012a) explores the

whole range of adaptation and appropriation in comics and graphic novels, includ-
ing comic books on literature. Building on her earlier works on the subject (e. g.
Schmitz-Emans 2004, 2008, 2009, and 2010) she analyzes a huge number of exam-
ples from all over the world and discusses them in their relation to comics as a
medium, to other arts (photography, film, painting, theatre, literature), and to a
canon of ‘world literature.’ The study explores the varieties of comics’ reactions to
literature in great detail by presenting a large number of case studies and placing
them in a historical and theoretical context. It does not, however, intend to establish
a systematic framework for the analysis of adaptation. Its objective is to point out
different ways in which literary studies could engage with comic adaptations rather
than lay down rules for dealing with them. Apart from suggesting three basic types
of adaptation in comics ‒ a mediating, a transforming, and a comparative type
(Schmitz-Emans 2012a, 299; in the original: “Vermittlung,” “Verwandlung,” and
“Vergleich”) – the study is exceptionally unobtrusive in its methodology.
Boschenhoff’s doctoral thesis Tall Tales in Comics Diction is predominantly in-
terested in theory. The author applies narratological concepts to comic adaptations,
arguing that “these adaptations bear a close relationship to the work they adapt and
at the same time have to delineate the original source text in another ‘language’”
(Boschenhoff 2013, 9). In contrast to Schmitz-Emans’ monograph, the study propos-
es a model for a narratological analysis of comic adaptations. In detail, Boschenhoff
discusses the relation of time and space; the creation of an atmosphere by means
of setting; narrative situations and narrators; perspective and focalization; transla-
tion of metaphors or allegories and meta-narrative features of adaptations. Al-
though comic adaptations form the corpus of the analysis, it is “meant to contribute
to the study of the narratology of comics in general,” not specifically of comic adap-
tations (Boschenhoff 2013, 283). Still, the application of theoretical concepts from
narratology can help to understand comic adaptations on a deeper level and finally
dispel with the methods of comparative evaluation derived from the notion of “fidel-
ity.”
In the fourth chapter of her Introduction to Studying Comics and Graphic Novels,
Kukkonen traces the differences between the adaptation and the adapted text back
to the medium-specific means of storytelling. In focusing on the “media affordan-
ces” (Kukkonen 2013, 73), i. e. on what comics can do instead of what they cannot
do too well, she promotes an understanding of adaptation that stresses the choices
and decisions made in the adaptation process. These choices can be considered as
deliberately applied strategies of adaptation. From this perspective, genuine tech-
niques of comic storytelling in “images, words, and sequence” (Kukkonen 2013, 73)
can be analyzed in their connection to the adapted text. Drawing on media and
intermedia studies, Kukkonen discusses some exemplary questions derived from
the notorious problems of intermedia adaptation: what to do with narrative strate-
gies of literary texts? How to deal with their ambiguity, the verbal descriptions, the
158 Juliane Blank
text’s specific pacing and perspective (Kukkonen: 2013, 75)? In order to illustrate
the multiple opportunities of comic adaptation, certain storytelling tools like page
layout are examined in more detail. On a more theoretical level, Kukkonen also
tackles some problems that have come up again and again in adaptation studies,
like the concept of fidelity or the assumption that the complexity of literature cannot
be met in comics.
In my own book-length study on comic adaptations of literature (Blank 2015) I
have tried to establish some fundamental categories for analyzing the technical,
narrative and aesthetic features of adaptation in comics. These categories are de-
rived from the visual appearance of an adaptation as a product, but tell us some-
thing about the transposition process as well. By relating the analysis of the aesthet-
ics of the comic, its plot structure, its depiction of characters and setting as well as
narrative perspective back to the adapted text, these features can be understood as
techniques of adaptation, as medium-specific solutions to a task presented by the
adapted text (Blank 2015, 308–312). In addition, paratextual elements and the con-
text of production can tell us something about the “why” of adaptation, i. e. the
adapters’ and publishers’ intentions and the strategies used to realize them (Blank
2015, 314–356).
In recent studies, conferences, and research projects on adaptation, comics as a
medium of adaptation have gained more attention. The increased interest becomes
apparent in collected volumes that exclusively focus on adaptation in comics (e. g.
Schmitz-Emans 2012b; Mitaine, Roche, and Schmitt-Pitiot 2015; Mälzer-Semlinger
2015; Tabachnick and Saltzman 2015; Trabert, Stuhlfauth-Trabert and Waßmer
2015). Moreover, volumes on adaptation sometimes feature sections on comics (Gog-
gin and Hassler-Forest 2010; Leitch 2017; Lewis and Arnold-de Simine 2020). By
adding to the database of case studies, these volumes contribute to exploring the
phenomenon of comic adaptation in more detail and in various cultural and politi-
cal contexts. Another recent development is the increasing interest in comic adapta-
tions as part of the reception of one particular author and his/her works (e. g. Hohl-
baum 2015). As the overview of recent publications has demonstrated, academic
approaches are finally catching up with new forms and techniques explored by ad-
aptation in comics.
6 Conclusion
As “extended revisitations of prior works” (Hutcheon 2013, xiv), comic adaptations
are representative of today’s intermedia culture and participate in an ongoing trend
to re-invent cherished stories in visual media. Comic adaptations do not only cross
the borders between media, but also between high and popular culture. In bringing
together works of classic literature and comics, they challenge the notion of origi-
nality as well as the idea of cultural status. Understanding comic adaptations can
6 Adaptation 159
be a matter of perspective. If we look at adaptation as a product, it can be compared

to the results of a translation. Like a translation, it provides an individual interpreta-
tion of the adapted text. In comics, the means of interpretation are images and
words that are arranged in narrative sequence. Looking at adaptation as a process,
it becomes clear that the use of comic techniques can be traced back to deliberate
artistic decisions of the adapters and thus be regarded as a solution to the tasks of
adaptation. Comic adaptations have profited from the self-confidence comics have
gained after the shift in cultural status that is often connected to the rise of the
“graphic novel.” This shift did not only influence the production of comics and
comic adaptations, but also triggered an increased academic interest in comic adap-
tations. While early studies were restricted by the reputation of comics as a ‘trivial’
medium of popular culture, recent publications begin to explore comic adaptation
as one form of a transmedial practice that uses its own medium-specific means of
adaptation.
As a part of the afterlife of literature, comic adaptations are representative of a
cross-cultural and cross-media exchange that is increasingly abandoning notions of
‘high and low.’ As comics, however, comic adaptations allow artists to demonstrate
that comics are perfectly suited to deal with allegedly much more complex works
of literature. In finding visual equivalents or alternatives instead of trying to recre-
ate the prior text, comic adaptations can convince critical reviewers that comics are
in no way less complex than literature. Of course, this is something comic readers
and scholars have known for a long time. Albert Kanter thought of his Classics Illus-
trated as a way to introduce readers to ‘real’ literature. Today, one could probably
think of comic adaptations in a different way: Instead of introducing comic readers
to the complexity of literature, comic adaptations are able to introduce new audien-
ces to the complexity of comics.
7 Bibliography
7.1 Works Cited

Abel, Sven et. al. (eds.). 100 Meisterwerke der Weltliteratur. Berlin: Bostel Prod., 2001.
Abell, Catharine. “Comics and Genre.” The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach. Ed. Aaron
Meskin and Roy T. Cook. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 68–84.
“adaptation.” Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/2115?
redirectedFrom=adaptation#eid (5 August 2016).
Alber, Wolfgang, and Heinz Wolf (eds.). 50. Literatur gezeichnet. Furth/Triesting: Edition Comic
Forum, 2003.
Battagla, Dino. “La caduta della casa degli Usher.” Linus 50 (1969): 5.
Blank, Juliane. Literaturadaptionen im Comic. Ein modulares Analysemodell. Berlin: Ch. A.
Bachmann Verlag, 2015.
Bluestone, George: Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1957.
160 Juliane Blank
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.
Boschenhoff, Sandra Eva. Tall Tales in Comic Diction. From Literature to Graphic Fiction: An
Intermedial Analysis of Comic Adaptations of Literary Texts. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag
Trier, 2013.
Burke, Liam P. The Comic Book Film Adaptation. Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre.
Cardwell, Sarah (ed.). Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel. Manchester et. al.:
Manchester UP, 2002.
Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan (eds.). Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text.
London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Cartmell, Deborah. “Familiarity versus Contempt: Becoming Jane and the Adaptation Genre.”
Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation. Literature, Film, and the Arts. Ed. Pascal Nicklas and
Oliver Lindner. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter 2012. 25‒33.
Constantinides, Costas. From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptation: Rethinking the
Transition of Popular Narratives and Characters across Old and New Media. New York and
London: Continuum, 2010.
Crumb, Robert. The Book of Genesis. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, 2009.
Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Eisner, Will. “The Appeal.” Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices
from the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: Norton, 2008. 118–125.
Emig, Rainer. “Adaptation in Theory.” Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film, and
the Arts. Ed. Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012. 14‒24.
Ferstl, Paul. “Novel-based Comics.” Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of
Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Ed. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke, and
Gideon Haberkorn. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 60–69.
Fiedler, Leslie. “Cross the border, close the gap.” Playboy (December 1969): 151, 230, and 252‒
258.
Flix. Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil. Hamburg: Carlsen Comics, 2010.
Goggin, Joyce, and Dan Hassler-Forest (eds.). The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic
Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010.
Gordon, Ian, Mark Jancovich, and Matthew P. McAllister (ed). Film and Comic Books. Jackson: UP
of Mississippi, 2007.
Heer, Jeet, and Kent Worcester. “Introduction.” A Comics Studies Reader. Ed. J.H. and K. W.
Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. xi‒xv.
Herrmann, Maike. Literatur in Comic-Adaptionen: Ein aktueller Überblick. Thesis: University of
Stuttgart, 2002.
Hohlbaum, Christopher. Kafka im Comic. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. With Siobhan O’Flynn. London and New York: Routledge,
2nd edition, 2013.
Iser, Wolfgang. Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer
Prosa. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1970.
Jacobson, Sid, and Ernie Colón. Anne Frank: The Authorized Biography. New York: Hill and Wang,
2010.
Jans, Michel et. al. Battaglia: Une monographie. St. Egrève: Mosquito, 2006.
Jones, William B. Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History. Jefferson, North Carolina and London:
McFarland, 2002.
Karasik, Paul, and David Mazzuchelli. Paul Auster’s City of Glass. New York: Harper Perennial,
1993.
Kick, Russ. “Preface.” The Graphic Canon: The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals.
Ed. Russ Kick. Vol. 1. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012. 1.
6 Adaptation 161
Kick, Russ (ed.). The Graphic Canon: The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals. 3 vols.
New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012‒13.
Kimmich, Matt. “Disorienting Visualisations. Adapting Paul Auster’s City of Glass.” Mediality /
Intermediality. Ed. Martin Heusser, Andreas Fischer and Andreas H. Jucker. Tübingen: Narr,
2008. 87–104.
Kukkonen, Karin. “Plot.” The Living Handbook of Narratology [2014]. Ed. Peter Hühn.
http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/plot. Hamburg: Hamburg University. (30 September
2016).
Kukkonen, Karin. Studying Comics and Graphic Novels. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Kuper, Peter. The Metamorphosis. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003.
Leitch, Thomas M. “Adaptation, the Genre.” Adaptation 1.2 (2008): 106‒120.
<http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/content/1/2/106.full.pdf+html> (13 September 2016)
Leitch, Thomas M. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (2003):
149‒171.
Leitch, Thomas M. Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion
of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010.
Leitch, Thomas (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford and New York: Oxford
UP, 2017.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie.” Werke und
Briefe, vol. V, 2: Werke 1766–1769. Ed. Wilfried Barner. Frankfurt/Main: Klassiker Verlag,
1990. 11–206.
Lewis, Ann, and Silke Arnold-de Simine (eds.). Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization,
Interpretation. Cambridge: Legenda, 2020.
Mahler, Nicolas. Alte Meister. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2011.
Mahrer-Stich, Irene (ed.). Alice im Comicland: Comic-Zeichner präsentieren Werke der
Weltliteratur. Zurich: Edition Moderne, 1993.
Mälzer-Semlinger, Nathalie (ed.). Comics: Übersetzungen und Adaptionen. Berlin: Frank & Timme,
2015.
Marjanovic, Lucia. “Literaturadaptionen in Disneys Lustigen Taschenbüchern.” Theorien des
Comics: Ein Reader. Eds. Barbara Eder, Elisabeth Klar, and Ramón Reichert. Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2011. 43‒60.
McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996.
Mitaine, Benoît, David Roche, and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot (eds.). Bande dessinée et adaptation
(littérature, cinéma, tv). Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Université Blaise Pascal, 2015.
Montellier, Chantal, and David Zane Mairowitz. Franz Kafka’s The Trial: A Graphic Novel. London:
SelfMadeHero, 2008.
Naremore, James (ed.). Film Adaptation. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000.
Nicklas, Pascal, and Oliver Lindner. “Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation.” Adaptation and
Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film, and the Arts. Ed. P.N. and O. L. Berlin and Boston:
de Gruyter, 2012. 1‒13.
Peeters, Benoît. Case, planche, récit: Comment lire une bande dessinée. Tournai: Casterman,
1991.
Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on
Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6 (2005): 43–64.
Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke, 2002.
Rippl, Gabriele, and Lukas Etter. “Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative.” From
Comics Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic
Narrative. Ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. 191‒217.
Rippl, Gabriele (ed.). Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Berlin and
Boston: De Gruyter, 2015.
162 Juliane Blank
Rippl, Gabriele. “Introduction.” Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image – Sound – Music.

Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 1‒31.
Rowson, Martin. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. London: SelfMadeHero,
2010.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Narration in Various Media” [2012]. The Living Handbook of Narratology.
Ed. Peter Hühn. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narration-various-media. Hamburg:
Hamburg University. (30 September 2016).
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Saraceni, Mario. The Language of Comics. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Kafka in European and US Comics: Inter-Medial and Inter-Cultural
Transfer Processes.” Revue de litterature comparée 132.4 (2004): 485‒505.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Weltliteratur im Comic ‒ Kunstform einer globalisierten Bilderwelt?” Die
Vermessung der Globalisierung: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Ed. Ulfried Reichardt.
Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 273‒298.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Literatur-Comics zwischen Adaptation und kreativer Transformation.”
Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen Mediums. Ed. Stephan
Ditschke, Katerina Kroucheva, and Daniel Stein. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. 281‒308.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Weltliteratur im Comic.” Intermedien: Zur kulturellen und artistischen
Übertragung. Ed. Alexandra Kleihues, Barbara Naumann, and Edgar Pankow. Zurich: Chronos
2010. 531‒551.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. Literatur-Comics: Adaptationen und Transformationen der Weltliteratur.
With Christian A. Bachmann. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012a.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. Literatur und Comics: Konstellationen. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter,
2012b.
Schüwer, Martin. Wie Comics erzählen: Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen
Literatur. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008.
Spiegelman, Art. “Picturing A Glassy-eyed Private I.” Introduction to: Mazzucchelli, David and
Karasik, Paul. Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Reprint. New York: Picador, 2004. no page
numbers.
Stam, Robert. “Introduction. The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide
to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo.
Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. 1–52.
Stam, Robert and Alessandra Raengo (eds.). Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and
Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.
Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James
Naremore. London and New York: Continuum, 2000. 54‒76.
Stein, Daniel. “Comics and Graphic Novels.” Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image –
Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 420‒438.
Straumann, Barbara. “Adaptation – Remediation – Transmediality.” Handbook of Intermediality.
Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015.
249‒267.
Stuhlfauth-Trabert, Mara, and Florian Trabert. “Vorwort: Graphisches Erzählen in Literaturcomics.”
Graphisches Erzählen: Neue Perspektiven auf Literaturcomics. Ed. Florian Trabert, Mara
Stuhlfauth-Trabert, and Johannes Waßmet. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015, 9–16.
Tabachnick, Stephen Ely, and Esther Bendit Saltzman (eds.). Drawn from the Classics: Essays on
Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015.
Tardi, Jacques. Le cri du peuple. 4 vols. Tournai: Casterman, 2001‒2004.
Tardi, Jacques. La position du tireur couché. Paris: Futuropolis, 2010.
Trabert, Florian, Mara Stuhlfauth-Trabert, and Johannes Waßmer (eds.). Graphisches Erzählen:
Neue Perspektiven auf Literaturcomics. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015.
6 Adaptation 163
Vanderbeke, Dirk. “‘It Was the Best of Two Worlds, It Was the Worst of Two Worlds’: The
Adaptation of Novels in Comics and Graphic Novels.” The Rise and Reason of Comics and
Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. Ed. Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest.
Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 104–118.
Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. New York:
Continuum, 2007.
Vignold, Peter. Das Marvel Cinematic Universe. Anatomie einer Hyperserie. Marburg: Schüren,
2017.
Wagner, Geoffrey. The Novel and the Cinema. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1975.
Wolf, Werner. “Intermedialität als neues Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft? Plädoyer für eine
literaturzentrierte Erforschung von Grenzüberschreitungen zwischen Wortkunst und anderen
Medien am Beispiel von Virginia Woolfs ‘The String Quartet.’” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und
Amerikanistik 21.1 (1991): 85–116.
7.2 Further Reading

Blank, Juliane. Literaturadaptionen im Comic. Ein modulares Analysemodell. Berlin:
Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag, 2015.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. With Siobhan O’Flynn. London and New York: Routledge,
2nd edn., 2013.
Kick, Russ (ed.). The Graphic Canon: The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals. 3 vols.
New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012‒13.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. Literatur-Comics: Adaptationen und
Transformationen der Weltliteratur. With Christian A. Bachmann. Berlin and Boston:
De Gruyter, 2012a.
Part II: Contexts and Themes
Stephan Packard
7 Politics
Abstract: The political dimensions of comics are many and heterogeneous. This
chapter outlines three different fields of interactions between realms of politics and
this art form, beginning with comics that contain or serve as utterances with a more
or less direct political purpose, engaged in political advocacy or education (1). The
chapter then moves on from these treatments of politics in the comics to the subjec-
tion of comics under political discourses, encompassing direct censorship and other
forms of media control as well as politically engaged criticism of individual comic
books and genres as well as the art form as a whole (2). While all of these aspects
concern effects of individual comics or comic genres that either topicalize obviously
political matters or are rendered as the object of policy, the third part of the chapter
will discuss different ideas on a possibly fundamentally political aesthetics of com-
ics (3), asking whether there is a critical stance to the very use of their signs that
informs a basic political attitude and whether that disposition is then to be consid-
ered ineluctable.
Key Terms: politics, power, identity, critical theory
1 Politics in Comics
Art Spiegelman’s In The Shadow of No Towers first appeared serialized in the Ger-
man weekly newspaper Die Zeit (2002–2004) and was eventually collected as a
large-format board book (Spiegelman 2004). An elaborate reaction to the attacks of
September 11, 2001, it serves at once as an account, as an ostentatious, possibly
therapeutic exhibition of Spiegelman’s traumatic individual experience of that day,
and as a political staking-out of a position that navigates a difficult area between
direct aporia in the face of the emergent violence and a generalized insistence on
liberal values. All of this is superimposed on enormous, drastic images of the de-
struction of the World Trade Center itself: its shape is repeated on the oversized
pages over and over, crumbling or exploding, reduced to a shadow, outline, or ab-
stract geometrical shape, or represented as a rectangular mesh of walls and win-
dows contoured by flaming lines. On these large splash-pages, most of the sequen-
tial storytelling and argument takes place in comparatively diminutive inserts that
sometimes present Spiegelman’s cartoon alter ego in dialogue or addressing the
reader directly, and sometimes use elaborate metaphorical settings to make their
point. These inserts convey two communicative objectives: One the one hand, the
comic’s pages deal in an autobiographical fashion with Spiegelman on and since 9/
11, detailing concerns for the safety of family members, his own movements through
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-008
168 Stephan Packard
a now-chaotic New York, the association of these events with his family history in
his mind, and the attempts to deal with nightmares, insomnia, and fears that con-
tinued to haunt him for months and years (↗9 Life Writing). On the other hand, In
the Shadow of No Towers contains direct and bold political commentary, such as a
sequence that depicts the President and Vice-President riding the American bald
eagle’s back while cutting its throat from behind.
One of the most visible and often referenced cases of comics interventions into
political discourse, Shadow represents a number of features typical of political speech
in comics. First of all, direct political statements exist and are prominent in some of
the most-regarded works of comic art. Any perspective that would attempt to limit
comics to entertainment and youth culture, and in turn to relegate political utteran-
ces in comics to exceptions and suspensions of generic conventions, falls short of
that fact.
But secondly, political comics often navigate that very assumption of a limited
scope by presenting their forays into political discourse as suspensions, and couple
them with other interruptions of alleged regimes of comic art: the direct reference
to reality as well as the close engagement with history will often in themselves serve
as signals of political intent and a claim to political relevance. In this, as in many
other cases, the historical turn involves not merely political history but pays equal
attention to the history of the art form. Many of the metaphorical settings in Spiegel-
man’s short sequential inserts reflect characters, motifs, or even individual strips
from the daily and weekly comic strips before syndication, repurposing old gags
such as neighbors waiting for ‘the other shoe to drop’ after having been woken up
by a late home-comer taking off his shoes, now made to represent the fear of repeat-
ed attacks, and of equally devastating reactions that are about to write the yet un-
known present history of the post-9/11 USA. Including imagery from the ‘Comic Sup-
plements’ of the major New York newspapers around the previous turn of the
century in the last third of the collection, Spiegelman also connects Shadow to the
specific role of New York as the birthplace and major historical producer as well as
setting of mainstream comics. Reality, history, and politics are closely intertwined
where comics treat politics.
Thirdly, an abundance of metaphorical and artistic devices often governs the
treatment of real, historical, and political fact. In Shadow, and beyond the recourse
taken to the reminiscences of the comic supplements, this happens most notably as
Spiegelman returns once more to the imagery of his Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (↗22 Art
Spiegelman, Maus), which was first published in the periodical comic anthology
RAW (1980–1991), edited by Spiegelman and his wife Françoise Mouly, and eventu-
ally collected in two volumes and later in a single-volume edition (Spiegelman
1991). Focusing on the story of his father’s survival in Auschwitz, and framing these
events with autobiographical and meta-poetical commentary on his own relation-
ship with his father, on his view of himself as a second-generation survivor, and
not least on the production of the comic itself, Spiegelman represents Jews as an-
7 Politics 169
thropomorphic creatures with the heads of mice; Germans as cats; Americans as

dogs; and so on. The intricate artistic setting revels in the created contradictions,
calling upon the aporias of a racist gaze that cannot ever be eliminated from the
story or the protagonists’ real lives. Sometimes the animal heads are drawn as mere
masks, but it remains impossible to see what lies underneath. Shadow eventually
does present Spiegelman both with a mouse’s and a human’s head, but the cartoon-
ish style, repeatedly exposed and commented upon in other images as well as the
accompanying text, always reminds us that there is no uninterpreted appearance of
these or any faces (Frahm 2006).
The special position of comics within political discourse outlined by these three
tenets might be understood in two ways. On the one hand, they hail from the car-
toonish aesthetics and generic dispositions of an art form that emerged from “The
Funnies” and drew on the traditions of political caricature as well as racial physiog-
nomy (Gray 2004; Frahm 2011). On the other hand, societal conventions connected
to the publication history of comics in the United States continue to present an
interpretative stance that is much more easily contradicted or denied than it is for-
gotten or ignored (Groensteen 2006). Political comics will often speak as if they are
treating politics in spite of themselves, and then turn this spite into a focus that
produces the most salient artistic measures from the established tropes and topoi
of the art form itself.
This is true even for the most direct kinds of propaganda in comics. Consider the
advertisements for war bonds in American Funnies from 1942 onwards. Established
characters from Bugs Bunny to Batman will address the reader directly, or be shown
to address a crowd from a podium, and advise their audience to invest. In many
cases, the style of the cartoonish characters is set in deliberate contrast to imagery
of detailed war planes, heroic depictions of soldiers in the field, or the differently
cartoonish and deeply racist depiction of the Japanese enemy as a comic book char-
acter (Munson 2012). But at the same time, the material takes up memories of more
indirect treatments of politics in previous issues, such as the first issue of Captain
America (1940), which famously depicted the hero punching Adolf Hitler on its cov-
er. While war bonds were an object of the government-supported political message,
the overlap to these earlier motifs connects the adverts to a case for US intervention
into the war that had been waged on and off in the superhero comics for two years,
one that was more implicit and more personal to the authors’ private stances (Ger-
stenberg 2014). Similar considerations hold for later depictions of the Cold War (Cos-
tello 2009), where the shift towards less explicitly political treatments in comic
books drives these depictions towards fictitious doubles of actual countries and
leaders, as comics in turn become objects of political control and various forms of
censorship.
But even factual genres in comics, such as those devoted to political documenta-
ry, to education, or to various attempts at an actual ‘comics journalism’ (Nyberg
2006), will rarely escape the intermedia rapport that is entailed by the (re)purposing
170 Stephan Packard
of a seemingly differently purposed form towards the aim of informing the audi-
ence. Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón turned the report of the 9/11 Commission into a
comic book (2006). Tracing the original lingual and printed document closely, the
pages of this comic stand out by their almost complete avoidance of the usual devi-
ces of sequentiality: Characters are easily divided into non-comical cartoons of rec-
ognizable political figures, and scarcely distinguished anonymous protagonists; col-
or is used sparingly; scenes are hinted at rather than fully realized; but most
strikingly, the characters’ depiction is rarely repeated on any page, resisting the
appropriation of the real individuals into comic book bodies, but perhaps also fail-
ing to produce a readable comic book at all. The text that repeats or summarizes
the report dominates the pages as well as the means of information conveyance.
But what is perhaps more notable in this effort is the follow-up volume on the war
on terror (2008). Its subtitle reads A Work of Graphic Journalism, but rather than
merely turning towards a more documentary stance, this is by far the more openly
critical volume. Introducing repeated motifs, characters, and elements of represen-
tation that the previous volume avoided, it turns these into means of evaluation
each time. For instance, a rhythmic series of politicians’ portraits caught in speak-
ing poses serves to summarize not so much a panorama of various voices, but to
rise to a climax of ever more intense criticism of American warfare in Iraq, culminat-
ing in a large, colorful panel depicting US strategic rockets in flight aimed for a
Baghdad engulfed in flames (Jacobson and Colón 2008, 43–45).
This touches upon the issues of representation that open the political semantics
of comic books to questions that go beyond their immediate rhetorical purpose.
When Milton Caniff, famous for his Terry & the Pirates that defined much of mid-
century American popular comic tropes, drew a comic army manual by the name of
How to Spot a Jap in 1942, ostentatiously intended not to propagandize and per-
suade, but merely to teach American soldiers proper conduct on the Pacific front,
the line between propaganda and education became most obviously blurred in the
depiction of Japanese faces (Hessel 2014). The question that Maus dealt with
through aesthetic devices and autobiographical reflection here becomes immediate-
ly practical: what does the cartoonish depiction of a person say about the recogniza-
bility of their features, including most prominently the presumption of race? This
question, specific to cartoonish media such as comics (and extending for the same
reasons to political cartooning and caricature, animation, and some computer-gen-
erated imagery), cannot be divorced from the more general questions of representa-
tion that apply to the political message or subtext of all media, and most pertinently
to those central in popular culture. When William Moulton Marston, Elizabeth Mars-
ton, and Olive Byrne created Wonder Woman as a female model of heroism to inter-
rupt the male dominance of the superhero genre, the close connection that the poly-
amorous creators drew between their egalitarian and feminist approach to gender
(↗10 Gender) and their stance towards sexual liberation could not be divorced from
Harry G. Peter’s artistic decisions in depicting a half-clad female body as strong,
7 Politics 171
ostentatiously sexual, and continuously involved in scenes detailing bondage. (For

an eloquent and comprehensive, albeit controversial account, see Berlatsky 2015.)
In a culture that identifies direct realism with the photographic image, the freedom
of putting pen to paper necessitates a number of decisions that cannot help but
imbue any representation with a politically relevant stance.
The unease about cartoonish representation coupled with a deliberate turn to-
wards the politically controversial and the culturally marginalized or obscene de-
fined much of the aesthetics of the Underground Comix in the 1960s and 70s (Estren
1993; Danky and Kitchen 2009). Most famously represented by Robert Crumb
(↗23 Robert Crumb), but perhaps realized most eloquently by Aline Kominsky-
Crumb, the deliberately disconcerting exposure of stereotypes and fantasies about
the female, the Jewish, the abject, the disfigured, and the erotic body flourished in
this movement that emerged in a setting dominated by a sanitized style governed
by the Comics Code Authority (see below) and the mainstream-oriented control ex-
erted by a cultural entertainment industry. It is probably here that a whole section
of comic art is most immediately defined by its political stance, but equally by its
political marginalization. Robert Crumb’s art in Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor
(1976–1991; continued by Dark Horse Comics 1991–2008) received the most attention
for its usually comical but always dissident stance and has become one of the most
influential sources for the ensuing two generations of comic artists (Hatfield 2005),
with diverse styles ranging from Alison Bechdel (↗26 Alison Bechdel, Dykes to
Watch Out For) to Alan Moore (↗24 Alan Moore, From Hell).
There can be no doubt about the immediate political matter negotiated in these
comics. In some of the epigones that would later return this political impetus to
the mainstream of popular culture, however, the ironic gesture that pervades these
imageries can become ambivalent: while it treats politics in comics with a greater
breadth of reflected possible stances, there can also be a concomitant loss of differ-
entiation. The third wave of superhero comics (↗15 Superheroes) brought the uncer-
tainties and the social and political criticism from these self-affirmed margins of the
original Underground Comix back into what had become the main genre of Ameri-
can comic book production. The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, Klaus Janson,
and Lynn Varley’s reimagining of Batman as a gratuitously violent and dubiously
moral vigilante at odds with law and justice and as psychologically deranged as his
villainous antagonists (1986), is another defining moment in the development of the
art. But while it was originally hailed as a deeply ironic treatment of proto-fascist
and reactionary fantasies, later works by Miller have affirmed those very fantasies.
One need not go as far as his volume Holy Terror! (2011), originally devised as anoth-
er Batman story but realized without the copyright holders’ approval as a thinly
veiled Batman pastiche instead, in which the vigilante deals with brutal and stereo-
typically depicted Middle Eastern terrorists by surpassing their brutality and their
immorality. The much more elaborate retelling of the Spartan battle against the Per-
sians at Thermopylae in 300 (serialized 1998; reworked and definite single-volume
172 Stephan Packard
edition 2000) equally supports a reactionary heroification of war, in the course of

which enemies are depicted as physically deformed, sexually deviant, and black,
while white protagonists excel at masculinity, brutality, and a direct claim to politi-
cal and personal dominance.
But as comics continuously appropriate other mainstream imagery, they are
likewise apt to subject their own productions to new treatments, commenting on
old comics within new comics and reintroducing both irony and criticism even to
sources that lacked these traits originally. In Kieron Gillen’s Three (serialized 2013–
2014, collected 2014), three escaped Spartan helot slaves tell their own stories, or in
one case pointedly refuse to do so, in the face of the slave-holders’ oppression.
While the story already positions itself as a counter-tale, casting one of the three
slaves as a narrator continuously risking his life as purveyor of politically unwel-
come narratives, two more devices inform the claim of this political speech. Gillen
works with historiographers of Ancient Greece and includes interviews with these
experts at the end of each issue in the short series; and he uses these conversations
not only to connect his tale to the lost reality of ancient slavery and warfare, but to
draw parallels to his own engagement for pacifism and labor rights today: “This is
a book about class,” he notes in the addenda to the first issue. Once more, the turns
towards reality, to history, and to politics coincide. In this case, the engagement
with historical sources does not merely ground a realist gesture, but also opposes
realism’s possible temptations towards naiveté, as the problems of reconstructing
the truth and the contradictions in depictions and evaluations are emphasized:
rather than presenting the reconstruction as evident in Miller’s fashion, Gillen
showcases the efforts and decisions involved and makes the current perspective on
ancient events obvious. In addition, the artists – Ryan Kelly, Jordie Bellair, and
Clayton Cowles – turn the cartoonish aesthetics to yet another use that underlines
both the irony and the reflective appropriation of other imagery: the Krypteia, Spar-
tan youths who hunt slaves for sport, appear as birds of prey and no less as carrion
birds; the parallels between several tellings of each tale reinforce the general uncer-
tainty towards any one version of history, foregrounding the position, intentions,
and limitations of each teller; and the depiction of ancient sculptures, ubiquitous
in this somewhat fantastical version of Sparta, play a special trick on the reader, as
each posing statue is drawn and coloured in exactly the same way as the living
actors in the story. Sculptures and comics are thus exposed as mere imitations of
life, and neither deserve our trust.
A different kind of ironic appropriation of previous political comics in a (some-
what) new comic is presented by Katz, an anonymous volume from 2012 that re-
printed Spiegelman’s Maus with cat heads drawn over all non-feline characters’
faces: Jews, Germans, Americans, and everyone else now appeared as the same
species. As a gesture that is probably intended to attack racism and emphasize hu-
manity’s equality, that work might well be said to have failed to grasp Spiegelman’s
much more intricate examination of the historical reality not of race, but of the
7 Politics 173
racist gaze, that is not as easily overcome as its depictions might be erased. And
yet the volume has given rise to interesting ensuing discussions and might best be
considered part of the reception of that very same intricate treatment, exploring one
of its provocative dimensions by trying and failing to remove it (Beaty 2012; Löwen-
thal and Manouach 2012).
2 Comics in Politics
As comics engaging with politics by commenting on other comics, these last exam-
ples already present comic books as the object as well as the medium of political
communication. But comics are of course also subjected to political critique, argu-
ments, and to limits set up by politics, power, government, and law in various ways.
As is often the case with media control in modern Western-style democracies,
the governing of conditions for the production and consumption of comic books in
the United States uses the term censorship not so much as a descriptive term but as
one of agitation: it questions the reach and the legitimacy of political interference
in the communication between artists and their audience more than it clearly de-
fines the shape of those interventions (Schauer 1998). In this sense, any political
discourse about comics as a medium or an art form, by theorizing about its nature,
standards, and effects, is always already involved in doubling – as reaffirmation or
contradiction – the discourse in literary and art criticism as well as poetology and
media studies.
This is certainly the case for the most famous volume to play a part in American
attempts at political regulation of comic books, Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the
Innocent (1954, ↗2 History, Genres, Formats). Arguing from interviews with minors
who habitually read comic books, as well as from his own analyses of the graphic
and narrative features of some common comics genres at the time, German émigré
and psychiatrist Wertham condemned comics as a source of intellectual and physical
deformation, sexual deviance, and most of all criminal dispositions in minors. Fo-
cused not least on the crime and horror genres published by EC Comics, Wertham’s
argument today appears ambivalent (Evanier 2003). On the one hand, his psycho-
logical claims are unconvincing. His calls for regulations, and perhaps even more
so the ensuing public condemnations of comic books that followed the publication
of his book, were contrary to the freedoms of speech, art, and press; they would go
on to help institutions and laws that greatly limited the scope of American comics
production and creativity for more than three decades. At the same time, his argu-
ment upon closer examination is in fact emancipatory in other ways: it presents
juvenile delinquency as a problem to be solved rather than as grounds for the abso-
lute condemnation of minor perpetrators, and is clearly motivated by a fear of a
fascist worship of supermen waging brutal war on victims presented as visually
distinct, often in stereotypically racist fashion. And finally, his work at the time was
174 Stephan Packard
among the very first to provide a detailed analysis of the comic page and its various
artistic devices. While his interpretation is clearly biased and fraught with misun-
derstandings, his attention to detail renders his volume the site of many firsts in
comics studies: the cataloguing of story and plot schemata, the attention to cartoon-
ish and exaggerated physiognomies, and not least the awareness of political depth
to the comics. All of these are noteworthy not merely for their innovation, but equal-
ly for their contribution to the disfavor that such questions fell into among avid
comics readers until the late 1980s, who did not wish to repeat Wertham’s mistakes.
But Wertham’s book was merely the most popularly visible among many similar
voices at the time; and their work would influence comic book production decisive-
ly, albeit indirectly. On April 21, 22, and June 4 of the same year, a US Senate Sub-
committee of the Committee on the Judiciary to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency
held hearings to assess the dangers of comic books in this context, with Wertham’s
testimony appearing among others (Horn 1974). The records are probably the best
source on the publishers’ and artists’ as well as the popular and the academic dis-
course on comic books at the time, represented within the political discourse that
had newly sought out comics as an object for its intervention. Rather than wait for
legislative control to take definite shape, publishers introduced the Comics Code as
a means of self-regulation, and an institution to administer its workings, the Comics
Code Authority. While largely credited with saving the industry, the Code stifled
creativity, limiting topics to the comical and the palatable, and completely exclud-
ing the ambivalent as well as the political – whereas nationalist and capitalist stan-
ces were considered unpolitical and welcome (Nyberg 1998). EC’s horror and crime
lines went out of business. Mainstream comics, most notably the superhero genre,
took a turn towards comedy and towards an even greater focus on science fiction
and fantasy than before. This helped set the stage for the dissident voices of the
Underground Comix that followed. It would not be until May 1971 that a mainstream
series, Amazing Spider-Man, would once more present a cover without the CCA seal
of approval for a story depicting drug abuse. But it would take another three de-
cades until adherence to the Comics Code fell away almost completely.
While the Code acted as a gatekeeper to mainstream publishing and set the tone
for the standards against which the Underground Comix rebelled, it could not actu-
ally prevent the publication and sale of those books. Two other legal conditions
applied much greater pressure. On the one hand, obscenity laws could prove both
restrictive and, much worse, unpredictable. The foundation of the Comic Book Legal
Defense Fund in 1986 grew from attempts to finance the defense of a comic book
retailer charged with distributing obscene comics; Kitchen Sink Press joined the
case as a publisher, releasing works donated by artists to gather further funds. The
closest to a political body speaking for the creators’ and readers’ scene as well as
its assorted industry, the CBLDF continues with annual fund-raising publications,
typically anthologies that remain among the most explicitly political comics in
broad circulation in the US today.
7 Politics 175
The third effective form of media control shaping comic books concerns issues
of copyright, intellectual property, and trademarks. Playing a major role during the
final shift from the daily comic strips to the serialized mainstream comic books that
popularized the superhero genre in the late 1930s, the legal concepts developing
around cartoon characters (and sometimes influenced by the cartoons, as evidenced
by the extension of copyright terms in accordance with the age of the main Disney
characters) would contribute greatly to many of the main structures that are now
considered commonplace in mainstream comics: the serialization of characters and
stories with exchangeable writers and artists (↗5 Seriality); the combination of char-
acters into shared storyworlds depending on the convergence of the relevant copy-
right within certain publishing houses; and even the content of certain stories. In
one early ruling in 1940, Judge Learned Hand declared Wonderman a violation of
the Superman property, and in doing so provided both a definition of the superhero
as a genre that would become compatible with the prescriptive force of law, and set
attention for copyright matters on aspects such as the secret identity of the superhe-
roes (Coogan 2006, 29–30, 58), which now became central to defending the unity of
a work against imitators, and eventually equally central to the genre’s narrative
content.
Meanwhile, legislative and executive decisions were not the only factors driving
a politically critical discourse on comics. Wertham’s view had already pointed to a
critique that associated comic books with the suspect powers of a culture industry
not unlike that spectre that was most famously criticized in the Frankfurt School of
critical theory. This view cast popular culture, the popularity of mass media, and
serialization especially as a blanket positivity of culture that had moved beyond the
meanings contained in any kind of classical ideology to a general affirmation of
mass media consumption. Explicit continuations of this argument, however, though
dealing with American comics productions, are mostly found abroad. On the one
hand, the British comics scene recognized an ironic and socially critical stance with-
in EC’s horror brands that even the publishers had not seriously brought up in their
defence in the US (Barker 1984). On the other hand, critical readings of some main-
stream US properties equated the culture industry as a mode of production with
meanings ascribed more specifically to an American cultural imperialism. Ariel
Dorfman’s and Armand Mattelart’s originally Chilean publication Para leer al Pato
Donald (1971) – How to Read Donald Duck – saw Uncle Scrooge’s campaigns of
financial conquest and global treasure hunts as a direct expression of a capitalist
and military claim to power, as well as of its naturalization under the guise of the
cartoonish creations of Carl Barks, whose unnatural characteristics are so obvious
as to be deceptive, making their acceptance seem less substantial politically than
its critics perceive it to be (↗13 Postcolonial Perspectives).
176 Stephan Packard
3 Political Aesthetics in Comics

The arguments from cultural criticism and critical theory discussed in the previous
section touch upon a further issue that goes beyond the treatment of explicit politics
in comics, or the regulation and critique of comics within political discourse. Dorf-
man and Mattelart argue that the ideological force of Donald Duck stems not from
a prima facie confusion of its absurd comical adventure stories and cartoonish char-
acters with reality, much less from any attempt to elevate the entertainment comics
to the level of a political pamphlet. But at the same time, they are not satisfied with
critical theory’s general interpretation of these comics’ mass media production as a
mere part of the totality of an affirmative entertainment industry that receives that
affirmation regardless of the semantics of its content. Rather, in their eyes it is the
very unremarked routine with which we commonly accept the unreality of these
tales that provides dispensation to stories of a capitalist oppressor literally swim-
ming in his own cash and acting as a patriarch exploiting his almost exclusively
male family. Similarly, what constitutes the true acceptance of the stereotype in
their view is not that readers believe the depiction of foreign countries and peoples
in the comics to be accurate, but their readiness to accept that those parts of the
globe might as well be replaced by fantastical inventions.
This poses the fundamental question: Is there a basic political stance inscribed
into the very aesthetics of comics? Several theorists and artists have dealt with that
question in different and productive ways. We have already seen some of the pos-
sible answers: a political aspect might be found in comics if considered as mass
media and criticized along with the remainders of the culture industry in critical
theory. Another version of that argument considers comics an expression of Ameri-
can cultural imperialism. A third point of view would remind us of the roots of the
cartoonish depiction of the human body in the racist physiognomies of the 18th and
19th century and their embodiment in political caricature.
Contrary views emphasize the ironic use and appropriation, even deconstruc-
tion of established imageries and their encoded power relationships in the funnies’
pages, although they pursue a number of different strategies to ground that view. I
want to briefly discuss three of the most prominent perspectives. Consider another
treatment of 9/11 in comics: The Amazing Spider-Man’s “Black Issue” (#2.36), pub-
lished very shortly after the attacks. J. Michael Straczynski’s story returns us to the
two direct relationships between the series and the city of New York: Spider-Man
lives and fights in a fictional New York (as opposed to the more indirect representa-
tions in competitor DC’s comics, such as Batman’s Gotham City and Superman’s
Metropolis). And Marvel Comics are published in New York. Indeed, Spider-Man’s
civilian alter ego Peter Parker sometimes works for a fictitious New York daily news-
paper called The Daily Bugle, its headquarters usually depicted as situated in the
Flatiron Building. At the same time, Straczynski breaks with the continuity of the
series: the first page following the uniformly black cover, almost completely black
7 Politics 177
itself, features a text caption in its centre that quotes the news broadcasts from
September 11 – “We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you the
following Special Bulletin” (1). This both pulls us back into the mainstream media
usage of that day and tells us that the following story does not fit precisely at any
one point in Spider-Man’s fictional biography. In doing so, it instantly appropriates
the phrase, relocating its use and forcing us to reconsider the nature of that inter-
ruption. In similar ways, the following page-filling panels will adopt and adapt im-
ages of the destruction at Ground Zero, while never quite showing us the crumbling
towers. Here instead are the gothic arches inside the ruins, as well as generic pic-
tures of rubble and fractured beams burying victims now to be excavated by the
arriving superheroes.
Those superheroes are put into a complex relation with the real events of the
day and with the other people depicted, taking up issues already prominent in the
treatment of WWII by contemporary superhero comics (↗2 History, Formats, Gen-
res). On the one hand, they are shown to be lifting beams off bodies, cutting through
rubble with laser-beams, saving lives as we expect them to. But at the same time,
Straczynski and artist John Romita Jr. take pains to remove them from any immedi-
ate co-presence with the real suffering people and the rescue workers that represent
groups of people who were actually there. The images position the mighty works
of the supermen as small and almost passive in the face of total destruction; the
annihilation of two skyscrapers brings tears to the eyes of heroes and even supervil-
lains who have in other issues destroyed whole planets without a second thought.
It is the text that develops that relationship into an intricate play with visibility
and invisibility. Though Spider-Man’s first-person narration addresses the common
mortals at Ground Zero directly in the second person (“the light of your unbroken
will,” 14), he describes an absence of communication and indeed perception: “You
cannot hear us for the cries, but we are here.” (8) That sentence, strikingly, answers
the very question that the accompanying image implies: why can’t we see them in
the originals of those pictures? Both perceptions, sight and sound, here not only
serve to interdict each other, but are equally suspended by the pathos of the pain
associated with the events: the cries that make it impossible to hear the heroes
make them invisible in the photographs.
One view of the deconstructive force of comics’ political aesthetics will under-
line how comics appropriate images from other mainstream sources, and at once
integrate the written word and its symbolic authority on a level that confronts it
with a different pictorial force. We recognize the imagery and the event, and not
least the words that mark it as a forceful interruption. That suspension is now recast
as an interruption of fictional continuity; rather than destroying the claim of The
Amazing Spider-Man to reality, this stance emphasizes that claim by bringing to-
gether the political, the history of the genre, and its connection to real New York
that draws on the political and on the historical alike. Comics thus become a kind
of appropriation art (Schauer) that goes beyond the laws of imitations and citations
178 Stephan Packard
as governed by copyright and displaces as well as exposes the seemingly natural

and predetermined position of given mainstream representations.
A second view will point out that comics treat not only imagery lifted directly
from other sources this way, but destabilize the very foundation of their means of
representation. Ole Frahm has described this as a parodistic aesthetics that he be-
lieves characterizes not just a few specifically political comic books, but forms one
of the main features of the art form as a whole (Frahm 2000). Focusing on the crea-
tion of signification through explicit repetition in the comics’ pictorial sequences, he
posits comics’ pictures as copies without an original, as repeatable signs that do not
emerge from any unrepeated source. In this view, we cannot trust the representation
of Spider-Man either as an indication of reality or of his fictional world; indeed, we
might not even be able to trust his depiction in terms of this one story, as the cartoon-
ish appearance of his body not only deforms what might be there in the storyworld,
but is removed from our sight and our hearing by the very pathos it elicits.
A third view might take up the description of political aesthetics by Jacques
Rancière (Rancière 1995). He distinguishes the everyday police from a much more
rare and dissensual politique. The police includes common political arguments and
partisan policy, as well as the established and functioning representation of the
government and the governed by ‘political representation’ in parliaments and in the
bodies of rulers, in demonstrations and in factions. The political, on the other hand,
interrupts those representations, renders inoperable the common means of commu-
nication, and reminds us that the consensus that had given that communication its
weight is always limited by the distinctions of who and what may be seen and
heard, and who is absent from the regime of the senses. By removing the certainty
of any representational regime from our reading, comics may employ the cartoonish
logic of their non-descriptive imagery and the dislocation of the relationships
among our senses to criticize the appropriated imagery from mainstream sources, to
parody the aesthetics of any seemingly authorized governing code, and to dovetail
aesthetic and political suspension.
Each of these views suspects that the very ways in which comics draw upon
politically specific traditions and devices – physiognomies and racist gazes, produc-
tion conditions defined by mass media and popular culture as well as their integral
copyright, and the previously determined place for their communication in a histo-
ried and storied society – simultaneously effects a distancing from those powers.
From this point of view, the question might become not whether and how comics
are political, but how they can ever avoid to be. Also at stake in that question is the
idea of both the harmless as well as the monologically ideological comic: the possi-
bility of any comic book that does not interfere with politics; and even more so that
of any propaganda comic that would manage to avoid undermining its message
through the dubious signification of its sequential and cartoonish signs. That ques-
tion has yet to find an answer beyond the many concrete answers, affirmative as
well as negative, in each collectively predicted or individually surprising reading,
7 Politics 179
repeating at least that political feature of asymmetric mass media that incites imag-
es of collectives but relegates knowledge of the audience to the imagination of its
parts and the creators.
4 Bibliography
4.1 Works Cited
Barker, Martin. A Haunt of Fears. The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign.
London: Pluto Press Limited, 1984.
Beaty, Bart. “Conversational Euro-Comics: Bart Beaty on Katz.” The Comics Reporter, http://
www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/conversational_euro_comics_bart_beaty_on_katz/,
2012.
Berlatsky, Noah. Wonder Woman. Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–
1948. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Coogan, Peter. Superhero. The Secret Origin of a Genre. Austin: Monkeybrain, 2006.
Costello, Matthew J. Secret Identity Crisis. Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America.
London: Continuum, 2009.
Danky, James and Denis Kitchen (eds.). Underground Classics. The Transformation of Comics into
Comix. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.
Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. Para leer al pato Donald. Santiago de Chile: Siglo XXI,
2002.
Estren, Marc James. A History of Underground Comics. 3rd ed. Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1993.
Evanier, Mark. Wertham was right! Another Collection of Pov Columns. Raleigh: TwoMorrows,
2003.
Frahm, Ole. “Weird Signs. Comics as a Means of Parody.” Comics Culture. Analytical and
Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Eds. Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen
Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2000. 177–192.
Frahm, Ole. Genealogie des Holocaust. Art Spiegelmans Maus – A Survivor’s Tale. München:
Wilhelm Fink, 2006.
Frahm, Ole.”Populäres Bild. Stereotyp. Antisemitismus.” Rechstextremismus, Rassismus und
Antisemitismus in Comics. Ed. Ralf Palandt. Berlin: Hirnkost, 2011.
Gillen, Kieron, Ryan Kelly, Jordie Bellair and Clayton Cowles. Three. New York: 2014.
Gerstenberg, Micha Johann. “‘The Justice Society of America Pursues Victory for America and
Democracy.’ Der amerikanische Superhelden-Comic als Propagandamedium im
Spannungsfeld von Antisemitismus und amerikanischer Außenpolitik 1940–1945.” Comics &
Politik. Ed. Stephan Packard. Berlin: Christian A Bachmann, 2014. 227–251.
Gray, Richard T. About Face. German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2004.
Groensteen, Thierry. Un objet culturel non identifié. Paris: Editions de l’An 2, 2006.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics. An Emerging Literature. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 2005.
Hessel, Florian. “Comic, Information, Propaganda: Milton Caniff’s How to Spot a Jap in der
Kulturindustrie.” Comics & Politik. Ed. Stephan Packard. Berlin: Christian A Bachmann, 2014.
253–271.
Horn, Maurice. “US Senate Hearings. Official Facsimile. Excerpts.” The World Encyclopedia of
Comics. Ed. Maurice Horn. Broomall: Chelsea House, 1998. 859–919.
Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colón. The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. New York: Macmillan,
2006.
180 Stephan Packard
Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colón. After 9/11. America’s War on Terror (2001– ). A Work of Graphic
Journalism. New York: Macmillan, 2008.
Löwenthal, Xavier and Ilan Manouach, eds. Metakatz. Brussels: La Cinquième Couche, 2012.
Miller, Frank and Klaus Janson. The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics, 1986.
Miller, Frank. 300. Milwaukee: Dark Horse Books, 2000.
Miller, Frank. Holy Terror! Burbank: Diamond Comics, 2011.
Munson, Todd S. “‘Superman Says You Can Slap a Jap!’ The Man of Steel and Race Hatred in
World War II.” The Ages of Superman. Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times.
Ed. Joseph J. Darowski. Jefferson, London: McFarland, 2012. 5–15.
Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval. The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: UP of Mississippi,
1998.
Nyberg, Amy Kiste. “Theorizing Comics Journalism.” International Journal of Comic Art 8.2 (2006):
98–112.
Rancière, Jacques. La Mésentente. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1995.
Schauer, Frederick. “The Ontology of Censorship.” Censorship and Silencing. Practices of Cultural
Regulation. Ed. Robert C. Post. Los Angeles: Getty, 1998. 147–168.
Simon, Joe and Jack Kirby. Captain America Comics #1 (dated 1941). New York: 1940.
Spiegelman, Art. in The Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Penguin, 1991.
Straczynski, J. Michael and John Romita Jr. Amazing Spider-Man 2.36. New York: Marvel Comics,
2001.
Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1954.
4.2 Further Reading

Alessandrini, Marjorie. Robert Crumb. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1974.
Cho, Jennifer. “Touching Pasts In The Shadow of No Towers. 9/11 and Art Spiegelman’s Comix of
Memory.” Avant Garde Critical Studies 25.1 (2010): 201–211.
Cortsen, Rikke Platz, Erin La Cour and Anne Magnussen (eds.). Comics and Power. Representing
and Questioning Culture, Subjects and Communities. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2015.
Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from Underground. Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture.
3rd ed. Bloomington: Microcosm, 2008.
Kowalik, Jessica. “Miller Misunderstood. Rethinking the Politics of ‘The Dark Knight.’”
International Journal of Comic Art 12.1 (2010): 388–400.
Mickwitz, Nina. “A profusion of signs. Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics and the
implications of reading American Splendor through the lens of documentary.” Studies in
Comics 3.2 (2012): 293–312.
Strömberg, Fredrik. Comic Art Propaganda. A Graphic History. New York: Griffin, 2010.
Dan Hassler-Forest
8 World-Building
Abstract: Comics have long been published as serialized works that develop elabo-
rate and often complex storyworlds. This chapter relates theories and practices of
world-building to the historical development of Western comics. It first establishes
the key theoretical concepts related to world-building, using examples from comics
history to illustrate and contextualize them. The chapter then discusses the relation-
ship between serialized comic strips and systematic world-building, using Popeye/
Thimble Theatre as a central case study. The second section foregrounds the politi-
cal and ideological implications of world-building by drawing on Hergé’s Tintin se-
ries. The third section then examines the complex world-building of American su-
perhero comics and the central internal contradictions within these storyworlds,
with Watchmen as an example of a text that foregrounds rather than diminishes
them. Finally, a brief discussion of Chris Ware’s Building Stories discusses the read-
er’s activity in comic book world-building.
Key Terms: World-building, storyworlds, superhero comics, politics and ideology,

franchising, serialization
1 Introduction
In the twenty-first-century world of media production, world-building has become
increasingly common. Indeed, our cultural landscape is dominated by elaborate
world-building franchises that are continuously expanded across many media and
platforms. Relating comic books to other similar fields of cultural production, Henry
Jenkins famously wrote that “more and more, storytelling has become the art of
world-building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be explored
or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium” (2006, 116). From Star
Wars and Harry Potter to Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the
basic idea that media franchises offer a single coherent diegetic environment, or
storyworld, has become increasingly ubiquitous. This phenomenon is hardly limited
to any single medium: world-building has been a common feature of many fantastic
narrative genres throughout the twentieth century, including fantasy and science
fiction literature, video gaming, tabletop roleplaying games, television series,
amusement parks, and so forth.
But more than any other medium, comic books have developed an especially
strong cultural association with world-building as a commercial narrative frame-
work. This is largely the consequence of twentieth-century American comic books
developing an industrial form in which serialized narrative installments continu-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-009
182 Dan Hassler-Forest
ously revisit and expand a narrative space in which a recurring set of central charac-
ters has monthly adventures, usually based on a single formulaic paradigm. It is
certainly enhanced by the set of industrial and material practices in which most
American comic books were typically produced, with clear style guides and rule-
books established for the highly regimented and segregated division of labor – from
chief editors to writers, pencillers and inkers down to colorists and letterers. And
finally, comics’ most prominent contribution to world-building as a narrative and
industrial form has been strengthened by Marvel Comics’ creative work in the 1960s,
when editor-in-chief Stan Lee made a conscious effort to integrate the separate Mar-
vel characters into a single continuity, thus establishing a shared “universe” that
allowed for profitable cross-overs, team-ups, and guest appearances (Wright 2003,
218–223).
This chapter will first introduce the concept of world-building as a narrative
and industrial phenomenon, providing a basic historical and theoretical framework
for world-building in comics. More elaborate discussions will then relate world-
building to comics forms that are historically and industrially specific, thereby illus-
trating some of the concrete ways in which world-building has taken shape in com-
ics history. First, E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre comic strip (1919–1938) will illustrate
the process of world-building in the cultural and industrial context of American
newspaper dailies. Second, a discussion of Hergé’s Tintin series will demonstrate
how world-building in comics often creates a parallel reality that in many ways
feeds off and reproduces the reader’s knowledge of the real world. Then, a closer
look at Marvel’s integration of multiple stand-alone characters into a single narra-
tive universe, resulting in the widespread adoption of world-building as an industri-
al technique both for the production of serialized narrative and for the branding of
a particular style and sensibility within a highly competitive commercial market-
place. And finally, a short reflection on Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2015)
(↗27 Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan), which provides a uniquely flexible perspective
on the potential for participation and creativity in comics world-building.
2 World-building in Fiction
World-building is a deceptively slippery concept. In its broadest sense, it clearly
applies to all forms of fiction, which by their very definition construct an alternate
reality for readers to engage with. Every fictional narrative, from Beowulf to Black
Panther, constructs a storyworld that provides textual cues enabling the reader to
understand the ways in which it reproduces the most basic coordinates of their own
physical reality, and those in which it diverges from them. To take a well-known
example from American comics: Donald Duck inhabits a storyworld that is similar
in many ways to readers’ social and physical reality, in the sense that the inhabit-
ants of Duckburg have jobs, drive cars, live in houses, are subject to laws of gravity,
and can visit really-existing locations, from Paris, France to Timbuktu. At the same
time, Donald Duck’s comic book storyworld also diverges rather obviously from our
physical reality by populating its storyworld with various kinds of anthropomor-
phized talking and (at least partially) clothed animals, by offering narrative epi-
sodes in which they visit imaginary nations or even continents, and by introducing
various fantastic creatures and technologies. Carl Barks’s celebrated Donald Duck
and Uncle Scrooge comics therefore exemplify in many ways how world-building is
not so much a question of inventing entirely new and fantastical narrative environ-
ments, but rather of combining familiar elements with imaginary extensions and
additions.
In many ways, J. R. R. Tolkien’s original concept of subcreation therefore re-
mains extremely helpful for understanding the most basic elements of world-build-
ing as a narrative practice. For the devoutly catholic Tolkien, inventing imaginary
worlds was a process that directly mirrors divine creation (1997, 138–141). Hence,
subcreation according to his definition cannot invent anything truly new, but can
merely reproduce variations of the actual creation from which it is derived. Mark
J. P. Wolf approaches world-building the same way, relating Tolkien’s definition to
subcreation as a creative process of world-building (2012, 23–25). He makes a basic
distinction between the Primary World (the physical world) and the Secondary World
of the storyworld we enter via the text (25–29). The level of any given storyworld’s
“secondariness” can vary strongly, from storyworlds that appear wholly fantastic
(like Tolkien’s own storyworld of Arda) and those like Duckburg, which operate like
an alternate version of the Primary World, with a lower level of secondariness. How-
ever, even storyworlds with a very high level of secondariness have a strong tendency
to remain tethered to the Primary World in seemingly unbreakable ways. While liter-
ary theorists like Lubomir Doležel have approached world-building in more far-reach-
ing theoretical ways, developing a literary approach to possible worlds theory (2000,
1–29), a pragmatic understanding of world-building in comics can easily limit itself
to the basic categories of subcreation and secondariness.
In the specific case of comic books, which are most typically produced as long-
running serialized narratives that resist formal closure, questions of continuity have
figured prominently in academic discussions of comic book world-building. Wheth-
er we are talking about daily comic strips, monthly superhero comic book issues
(↗15 Superheroes), multi-volume manga epics, or consecutive installments of Fran-
co-Belgian bandes dessinées, storyworlds in comics are not merely built as complet-
ed and internally consistent narrative frameworks, but are also continuously under-
going revision, transformation, and reconstruction. And while comic book
storyworlds do exist that have made only minimal changes to the original design
and direction of their long-running serialized narratives (like, for instance, The Kat-
zenjammer Kids or The Walking Dead), the commercial markets in which they are
produced make it far more common for these storyworlds to take shape incremental-
ly and provisionally rather than emerging fully-formed as elaborate forms of narra-
tive subcreation. In this sense, world-building must always be understood within

its material and industrial context, in which comics publication typically also con-
stitutes a form of media franchising (Johnson 2013, 32).
Historically, comics have embraced and developed storyworld continuity ex
post facto rather than by initial design. With early incarnations of many serialized
comics having been created without a coherent and durable storyworld in mind,
imposing any meaningful sense of continuity on even the most basic aspects of
the comic’s general laws, locations, and characters has typically involved either
incremental changes in which earlier statements, implied laws, or events were sim-
ply ignored or contradicted, or, especially in increasingly convoluted American su-
perhero comics, the more aggressive process of retconning – a now-common abbre-
viation for imposing “retroactive continuity” by actively revising the existing
chronology in order to better facilitate new plans for the comic’s future. Superman,
for instance, is famous for the amount of retconning that has occurred over the
character’s many decades of publication history: having been established in his first
appearances as a strong-man figure who was able to “leap tall buildings in a single
bound,” later radio adaptations gave the Man of Steel the ability to fly – an inspired
change that was swiftly adopted by the writers and editors at DC Comics without
comment or further explanation. Much later in its publication history, DC Comics
has intervened in its increasingly byzantine structures of continuity with more elab-
orate and explicit retcons designed to both simplify the storyworld and generate
publicity for its brand of superhero comics. The 1986 limited series Crisis on Infinite
Earths is one of the most famous examples of this type of intervention in comics
continuity (↗15 Superheroes).
In short: even as world-building has become increasingly dominant in commer-
cial transmedia franchising, the actual practice of world-building in comics is hard-
ly ever as precise or as internally consistent as academic theories or common-sense
perceptions tend to suggest. Not only is it exceedingly rare for fantastic storyworlds
to emerge fully-formed; it is also more complicated than it sounds to establish clear
and obvious distinctions between Primary and Secondary worlds on the page. Only
a true literalist would insist that Duckburg is a wholly imaginary and completely
fantastic Secondary World – just as Tolkien’s made-up village of Hobbiton is clearly
at least as much the product of a longstanding British pastoral cultural tradition as
it is the author’s purely imaginary subcreation. More productive than the question
whether world-building is fundamentally defined by its degree of secondariness, as
Mark J. P. Wolf would insist (2012, 14), is a discussion of the ways in which serialized
comics have incrementally constructed fictional universes that remain grounded in
the political, ideological, cultural, and economic contexts from which they emerge.
In the following case studies of world-building in comics, this chapter will therefore
focus on how the construction of elaborate storyworlds has been a provisional and
always-unfinished project.
3 “Blow Me Down”: Thimble Theatre and Popeye’s

Comic Strip Storyworld
Like many other pop-culture icons, Popeye is most famous from his many appearan-
ces in audiovisual media like film and television. But just like Superman, his origins
lay on the comic book page. Thimble Theatre was one of many daily comic strips to
appear in 1920s newspapers, narrating the daily misadventures of a small group of
ne’er-do-wells living in small-town America. But while the hugely popular animated
films inspired by cartoonist E. C. Segar’s absurdist comics work reduced the cur-
mudgeonly one-eyed sailor to never-ending bouts with his arch-nemesis Bluto, the
comic strip had previously established a storyworld of its own with much more
complexity than the formulaic animated shorts ever even attempted. Once Popeye
established himself as the breakaway character in Thimble Theatre, shifting the
strip’s emphasis slowly but surely from the largely domestic affairs of the Oyl family,
Segar’s daily comic strip quickly grew ever more ambitious in its world-building
efforts. From 1931 onwards, with Popeye clearly established as the defining central
character, the longer story arcs of the daily strips veered further and further away
from their hometown, incrementally developing a growing cast of colorful charac-
ters, and a growing number of imaginary towns, cities, and even nation-states that
kept expanding the comic strip’s storyworld.
For the overall structure of the American daily comic strip’s form, it is important
firstly to distinguish between the two basic publication processes that shaped it
(↗2 History, Formats, Genres). As with many other comic strips from the early 1900s
onward, Thimble Theatre would appear as a syndicated daily strip made up of from
three to six or seven panels, printed in black and white line drawings. These so-
called “dailies” would appear six times a week in newspapers on the “funny pages,”
while the Sunday edition would feature a longer, full-page comic story in color. As
with Mutt and Jeff, Peanuts, Archie, and other long-running popular dailies, Thimble
Theatre would generally feature loosely structured week-long narrative arcs, with
each individual daily ending with a minor punchline or mini-climax. These week-
long micro-arcs could themselves again be structured into longer-running narrative
threads that could span many weeks and even many months.
Clearly, dailies that were primarily comical (like Thimble Theatre) did not devel-
op complex narratives in these rapid-fire publications. Even comic strips with a
much stronger focus on narrative progression, like the science fiction daily Buck
Rogers or the romance comic strip The Heart of Juliet Jones, were designed to be
easy to pick up for new readers without extensive knowledge of the characters or
preceding plot lines. Positioned between the more purely self-contained ‘gag-a-day’
comic strips and single-panel dailies on the one hand, and the never-ending narra-
tives of science fiction and romance comic strips on the other, Thimble Theatre in
the 1920s and 1930s did maintain a clear focus on punchlines and narrative mini-
arcs, but did simultaneously develop more elaborate long-running adventures

spread across multiple weeks.
Tellingly, twenty-first-century collected reprints of these daily comic strips orga-
nize these narrative arcs into chapters with individual titles. In these more or less
distinct adventures, the main characters could venture forth into the world to ex-
plore parts of their imaginary storyworld that weren’t contained within the strip’s
central household location. These narrative episodes weren’t commonly distin-
guished as such in their original published form: the endings of ongoing storylines
would be made to coincide with the micro-climax that ended the week’s run on
Saturdays, and the start of a new narrative sequence would either begin without
further reference to preceding strips, or would in some cases be introduced with a
text caption briefly summarizing the earlier plot line and setting up a new through
line for the coming weeks. For instance, the Thimble Theatre narrative sequence in
which Popeye, Olive Oyl and Castor Oyl track down Western outlaw Clint Gore (col-
lected as “Chapter I: Clint Gore, The Outlaw” in The Complete Popeye) ran from
December 22, 1930 until March 14, 1931. It ends with the comically abrupt capture
of Clint and his gang of horse rustlers, the first bunch of whom are knocked out by
the muscular sailor, while the remaining thirteen turn out to have been shot in the
shoulder and pushed into the basement by the redoubtable Olive Oyl (Segar 2007,
24–25). The hunt for Clint and his gang thus finally concluded, the March 16, 1931
strip begins once more with a text panel that reads as follows:
The rustlers are all in jail – Popeye, Castor and Olive are at Hoofney’s ranch, and will take the
next train for home. Castor and the old sailor will reopen the detective agency which they
started sometime [sic] ago........ (25)
Segar’s ongoing strip thereby clearly signposts the start of a new main narrative
based on an idea that was introduced at some earlier point in the comic’s history,
but which can be picked up and put to use for this coming narrative sequence. This
strategy of constructing long-form story arcs within the obvious constraints of a
humorous daily comic strip illustrates clearly how the invention of durable and
elaborate imaginary storyworlds was already firmly embedded even within early
newspaper comics as a form of cultural production. For while Thimble Theatre is
set in a diegetic environment that seems in many ways like a more exaggerated
and – indeed – cartoonish rendition of our own familiar reality, Segar constantly
took the design and elaboration of his gags and narrative conceits in directions that
were much closer to a more fantastical alternate reality than merely a comic strip
expansion of our own.
A good example of the limited kind of world-building that Thimble Theatre en-
gaged in frequently throughout the 1930s (and which may be considered typical for
world-building in other similar comic strips throughout the twentieth century) is
the narrative sequence “The Great Rough-House War,” which ran from May 5 until
November 11, 1931 (Segar 2007, 32–49). Following the introduction of King Blozo in
the last week of the preceding story arc, Popeye is summoned by this king’s emissa-
ries to the island kingdom of Nazilia, which is at war with the neighboring (and
equally fictitious) nation of Tonsylvania. A roughly-drawn and quite rudimentary
map shows how this island in the Pacific is divided neatly in two by these warring
kingdoms, and the gags and narrative of the sequence revolve around the quite
silly but also hugely imaginative sketching out of the imaginary kingdom’s customs,
fashions, forms of etiquette, and political system.
As with so many other complex storyworlds that developed over the course of
a longer period of incremental world-building – from Tolkien to Star Trek – Segar’s
loosely-constructed storyworld geography would change substantially over time.
But unlike the feats of retconning and reverse-engineering that have so frequently
gone into other narrative universes, revisions to Thimble Theatre’s diegetic land-
scape occurred in the flexible and reliably humorous ways so befitting a daily comic
strip. Thus, after its introduction in the aforementioned chapter, Nazilia would be
renamed several times throughout the comic’s long run before finally settling on
the name “Spinachovia” – in tandem with the growing popularity of the animated
cartoons, which placed a much stronger emphasis on Popeye’s dependence on the
canned vegetable’s mythical powers.
But instead of suggesting a stable and unchanging storyworld undergoing au-
thorial changes in hindsight, the many name changes were in this case attributed
to King Blozo’s indecisive character and the country’s inability to properly manage
its own bureaucracy. The narrative organization of this particular storyworld, as
well as its ideological arrangement, was therefore in keeping with the daily comic
strip’s playful, anarchic, and anti-authoritarian sensibility. Even without the elabo-
rate systematicity and detailed mapping of something like Tolkien’s Arda, the con-
tinuous elaboration of recurring characters, locales, customs, and cultures within a
loosely designed narrative framework does constitute a basic type of world-build-
ing. Ironically, Thimble Theatre’s combination of rote daily production and formula-
ic construction alongside publication as part of a medium and a genre that could
not be taken seriously by their very definition as explicit ‘funnies’ allowed for a type
of world-building that pioneered the form in ways that continue to teach us about
its possibilities and limitations today.
4 Tintin and the Politics of World-building

Like Popeye in Thimble Theatre, the similarly world-famous comic book character
Tintin began in comic strip form. But whereas the one-eyed sailor’s ongoing celebri-
ty would remain associated primarily with short-form comics and animated shorts,
Tintin’s lasting impact resulted from his appearance in the longer-form narratives
of the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée tradition: a publication format that, unlike
the American comic book, had a substantial degree of cultural standing in France
and Belgium, as well as in some other European countries – albeit primarily as a

beloved form of children’s literature. Like Segar’s world of Popeye and Olive Oyl,
author Hergé’s storyworld is set within what we might superficially categorize as
the Primary World. The ‘realistic’ appearance of Hergé’s celebrated ligne claire (or
‘clear-line’) style, juxtaposing simply designed and often cartoonish characters with
surroundings that have a much higher degree of photorealism, further underlined
the comic’s popular reception as a storyworld firmly anchored within our own reali-
ty (McCloud 1994, 42).
But as with Thimble Theatre, a closer inspection of the adventures of Tintin
reveals an elaborate and remarkably imaginative form of comics world-building: the
series of 24 albums that together represent the official ‘Tintin canon,’ The Adven-
tures of Tintin (originally published in French as Les Aventures de Tintin from 1929
to 1976) constantly interweave existing locales, nations, institutions, technologies
and customs with imaginary countries, cultures, science-fictional tropes, fantastical
powers, and mythical creatures. But where Popeye’s ostentatiously silly, almost infi-
nitely flexible comic strip world-building functioned in the first place to provide
variety to its absurdist daily gags, Tintin’s storyworld develops a much more stable
and coherent narrative environment, in which the imaginary elements mainly serve
to exaggerate or underline existing perceptions of obvious real-world counterparts.
The series therefore provides an excellent opportunity to examine more closely the
most basic political and ideological elements at play in comic book world-building
(see Hassler-Forest 2016). At the same time, Tintin’s almost fifty-year publication
history also illustrates how even in such seemingly “stable” storyworlds, incremen-
tal change and shifting cultural expectations and sensibilities unfailingly result in
storyworld changes that reflect the Primary World’s own history – in the case of
Tintin, most especially the cultural and political struggles surrounding racism, im-
perialism, and colonialism. (Another element worth noting, but otherwise left unex-
plored in this chapter, is that of gender: Tintin’s storyworld is extremely male-ori-
ented, with hardly any female characters of significance appearing across the comic
book’s long history, see also ↗10 Gender.)
While every storyworld has its own (often implicit) set of politics, Tintin is one
of the rare comic book characters that was first invented as part of an explicitly
political publication project. The main character of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets,
originally published in serialized form in the French weekly magazine Le Petit Ving-
tième between 10 January 1929 and 8 May 1930, was designed to embody positive
liberal European values in opposition to the author’s negative depiction of Soviet
Russia. Announced by the periodical as a hand-drawn series of allegedly non-fic-
tional photo journalism, the grossly exaggerated anti-Communist politics were obvi-
ous. At the same time, the tension between the author’s often outrageous world-
building and the vastly more complex historical reality of the Soviet Union at the
time provide a telling illumination of Hergé’s lasting cultural work. His construction
of a supposedly non-fictional storyworld is driven not necessarily by first-hand re-
search or historical reality, but by the shared ambition of creating an exciting week-
ly comic book installment as well as a larger political project of vilifying communist
regimes in the interbellum years (Apostolidès 2004, 9–10).
As the Tintin storyworld took shape in the post-WWII decades, new adventures
would first appear in the popular weekly Tintin comics magazine before being re-
published in the 62-page bande dessinée “album” format. These first, overtly propa-
gandistic narratives were not included in the 24-album “canon” that offered color-
ized and reworked reprints of the original comics, and which continue to be
published around the world. (In Anglophone nations, the first two albums Tintin au
Congo and Tintin en Amérique are generally excised from the generally available
series due to their overt racism.) As the increasingly industrialized production of
Tintin stories became the very epitome of mainstream Franco-Belgian comics, the
worldview it expressed also changed to reflect the global shift from pre-war coloni-
alism to post-war decolonization (Draga Alexandru 2015, 164). Or, to put it more
concretely, where the first phase of the Tintin storyworld was focused primarily on
the young and idealistic investigative reporter traveling around the world righting
wrongs and solving mysteries, the later stories reliably see Tintin and his growing
entourage of central characters leading a domestic and inward-looking life, only
moving outside their national boundaries when unavoidable external crises inter-
rupt their daily routines and force them to venture outward.
To illustrate this point, consider the difference between an early album like The
Blue Lotus (1936) and Tintin and the Picaros (1976), the last published album to be
authored by the original Hergé studio. In the former, Tintin travels to China as a
matter of course, and immediately finds himself at the center of a massive conspira-
cy in which the Japanese government seeks to gain political control of mainland
China. By the end of the narrative, the reporter’s heroic efforts have unmasked the
culprits and restored the existing balance of power – thereby perfectly mirroring
the logic of European colonialism, in which the enlightened humanism of white
subjectivity intervenes in other nations’ cultures and politics out of purely altruistic
reasons. The character of Tintin, and the storyworld he inhabits, thus implicitly
reproduces and mythologizes the cultural logic of Eurocentrism and benevolent
white imperialism in The Blue Lotus and other early Tintin adventures (Langford
2008, 77).
As struggles to decolonize the Global South transformed public discourses of
colonialism, race, ethnicity, and cultural identity in the decades following World
War II, the “benevolent imperialism” that informed the comic’s earlier phase was
reshaped to reflect these changing definitions. In Tintin and the Picaros, the intrepid
investigative reporter (accompanied by his growing entourage of avuncular white
men) travels across the globe to involve himself with the affairs of a former Euro-
pean colony – in this case, the fictional South-American country of San Theodoros.
Having developed a personal interest in South-American revolutionary movements,
Hergé attempted to author a Tintin adventure that built upon many of the familiar
characters from his now-iconic storyworld, while making substantial changes to re-
flect a Primary World that was itself obviously in a state of destabilizing postcoloni-
al transformation.
But while the basic formula of Tintin’s globe-trotting adventures in exotic and
exciting locales remains basically unchanged, both the character’s motivation and
the presentation of a now postcolonial world introduce tremendous alterations to
the politics of world-building. Firstly, Tintin (now firmly ensconced at Marlinspike
Hall, the residential castle to which he retreated midway through the series to share
a more domestic life with his friends) is no longer depicted as the indefatigable
investigator and righter of wrongs wherever they occur. In Tintin and the Picaros,
he is initially reluctant to even leave his home, foreseeing a trap and anxious that
the world is no longer a safe environment for white Europeans. And secondly, while
his motivation to go forth into the world in the early years was most commonly to
report on the news, to solve a mystery, or to assist a local government in restoring
the status quo (as in The Blue Lotus and King Ottocar’s Sceptre), Tintin’s motivation
to involve himself in these later years is strictly personal: in Tintin and the Picaros,
he is first lured by the report that his personal friends Bianca Castafiore and the
inspectors Thomson and Thompson have been taken hostage, and even then he
only undertakes the journey once he realizes his even closer friends Haddock and
Calculus have put themselves in harm’s way. Thus, just as Western-European nation
states in the postwar years no longer acted out fantasies of colonial empire on a
global stage, Tintin’s involvement with geopolitics becomes increasingly reluctant
in this period.
At the same time, another important change to the series in terms of its world-
building concerns the comic’s depiction of national politics in postcolonial nation
states like the fictitious San Theodoros. Where earlier-era Tintin adventures (like
King Ottocar’s Sceptre) would reliably depict a ‘good’ ruler or government – associ-
ated with long lines of tradition and the political status quo – being threatened by
an aggressive rival neighbor state and/or radical elements from within, Tintin and
the Picaros features two competing rulers who ultimately prove to be more or less
interchangeable. While Tintin and his friends are initially taken in by General Alca-
zar (a character with whom the hero has a longer history) and his radical gang of
“Picaro” revolutionaries, they later realize that Alcazar is just as corrupt and uncar-
ing as his rival, the now-unseated President Tapioca. And finally, the book displays
Alcazar’s revolutionary struggle for power as one that is waged only by himself
and his group of guerrilla fighters, disconnected from any broad social, cultural, or
political movement. As a way of representing in a fictional register the political
struggles of postcolonial nations in South-America, in which Hergé had developed
such a strong interest, we may note that its depiction in Tintin and the Picaros obvi-
ously depoliticizes such struggles for hegemony by reducing them to a personal
conflict between two competing characters, who ultimately prove to be interchange-
able.
This long-term transformation of the politics of the Tintin storyworld, from the
early-era benevolent colonialism to a more cynical postcolonial view of geopolitics
in the later years, demonstrates how the political organization of even such relative-
ly stable and coherent world-building projects as Tintin provide a worldview that is
irreducibly ideological. While these political and ideological values may be elusive
at the moment of their first appearance, their “common-sense truths” become easier
to detect and critique as time goes by, and even more so as the ongoing series intro-
duces gradual changes that reflect the transformation of discourses and ideas in the
world around it. As a comic book storyworld whose celebrated ‘realism’ makes it
less obviously the product of conscious and deliberate world-building than more
fantastical series, the Tintin storyworld’s imaginary nations, supernatural plots, and
science-fictional speculations nevertheless situate it firmly in a Secondary World
that incorporates mainly familiar elements from our own Primary World. The choi-
ces made by Hergé and his many uncredited creative collaborators across the series’
long history therefore come to highlight the fundamentally political nature of this
type of world-building.
5 Superhero World-building: Storyworld Continuity

in Watchmen
Just as the Tintin series constructs a gradually evolving storyworld that forms an
alternate reality to our own, American superhero comics have historically situated
themselves similarly as fairly mild deviations from our Primary World. Unlike, for
instance, Star Wars and its “galaxy far, far away,” the worlds inhabited by popular
heroes like Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man are set in a world that strongly
resembles our own. Each in its own way, both Batman’s Gotham City and Super-
man’s Metropolis are transparently fictionalized depictions of New York City, where-
as the ‘actual’ New York that has been home to Spider-Man and so many other
Marvel characters over the years incorporated some aspects of Primary World histo-
ry, while altering, eliding, or simply ignoring others. Each of these series has accu-
mulated bewilderingly complex narrative chronologies – generally referred to as
comics “continuity” (Reynolds 1992, 41). But American comic book publishing
house Marvel’s pioneering attempt to develop a shared universe for its growing sta-
ble of superhero figures in the 1960s (↗15 Superheroes) has in many ways become
a model for world-building in comics as well as for larger transmedia franchises
(Johnson 2012: 5–6). As a way on the one hand to facilitate more complex storytell-
ing and on the other to increase opportunities for cross-marketing Marvel’s various
individual superhero comics series, editor Stan Lee and his Silver Age associates
established their alternate version of New York as a storyworld shared by all those
characters (Wright 2003, 218).
This obviously allowed for frequent cross-overs between series, as Iron Man
helps Peter Parker improve his suit or the Incredible Hulk dukes it out with Fantastic
Four’s Thing, including long-running team-up series with varying group members,
like The Avengers. While both occasional and repeated crossovers and team-ups
(like Justice League) did certainly occur in DC Comics’ competing series, the absence
of a single and coherent shared storyworld resulted in a proliferation of narrative
contradictions and inconsistencies that were never really resolved. At the same
time, the greater “realism” of superhero stories set in a Primary World city made it
easier for the authors to develop characters and narratives who were, in their own
way, also more “realistic.” Thus, The Amazing Spider-Man constantly foregrounded
its protagonist’s ongoing financial troubles as Peter Parker struggled to combine his
secret superhero activities with daily life as a high school student of limited finan-
cial means. By the same token, the publisher’s long-term investment in a shared
storyworld helped develop serialized narratives in which jealousies, romances,
friendships, and other inter-character dynamics could slowly grow and develop,
while at the same time allowing more easily for the incorporation of casual referen-
ces to current affairs and youth culture (Wright 2003, 210).
But in spite of this apparent dedication to a basic form of historicity in the
notoriously ahistorical comic book genre, some basic contradictions have always
remained across the countless members of the American superhero canon. For even
as comics continuity’s relentless accumulation of narrative details continues, all the
characters have steadfastly refused to age – just as Popeye, Tintin, and most other
comics characters somehow always stay more or less the age they were when they
first appeared. Besides underlining the basic “timeless time” of superhero comics
so famously described by Umberto Eco in his well-known essay on Superman (1989,
934), this also means that the boundary between the reader’s Primary World and
the characters’ Secondary World is not stable, but becomes basically porous: some
historical events, landmarks, and figures continuously spill over into the imaginary
storyworld, like for instance the special issue of The Amazing Spider-Man in which
the destruction of the World Trade Center somewhat implausibly unites many of
Marvel’s most iconic superheroes with numerous supervillains, as they join forces
to help clean up the rubble at Ground Zero and collectively grieve for the victims.
This flexible and constantly-shifting relationship between human history and
superhero continuity has kept both Marvel and DC superhero comics from develop-
ing as truly alternate histories, including the long-term effects the visible existence
of super-powered beings, alien invasions, and the many other garish and often ab-
surd events so common in superhero comics would have on any ongoing story-
world. One of the most essential contradictions of superhero world-building has
therefore been that while these storyworlds have amassed such voluminous narra-
tive chronologies (including innumerable inconsistencies), they have only very rare-
ly established any definite points of separation that would make their internal histo-
ry truly ‘alternate.’ Instead, they have always maintained a ‘fuzzy’ relationship to
Primary World histories, constantly re-establishing, re-negotiating, and re-inventing

their most basic foundational coordinates. But unlike the many ongoing superhero
comic book continuities, more self-contained forms like limited series and stand-
alone graphic novels have engaged in world-building that is indeed strongly fo-
cused on historicity and alternate histories. Of the revisionist comic book authors
whose work proliferated in the late 1980s and 1990s (↗15 Superheroes), Alan
Moore’s unique combination of formalism, familiarity with and reliance on tradi-
tional superhero tropes, and an explicit form of engagement with questions of poli-
tics and ideology resulted in some of the most critically celebrated and most popular
world-building efforts within the genre (↗24 Alan Moore, From Hell).
Among the many superhero comics the hugely prolific Moore authored in this
period, none has been more universally celebrated as a work of elaborate world-
building than Watchmen. First published from September 1986 to October 1987 as a
limited series comprising twelve monthly issues, Watchmen (co-authored with artist
Dave Gibbons) was subsequently repackaged as a trade paperback that was soon
absorbed by the emerging “graphic novel,” which was becoming increasingly com-
mon in reference to stand-alone comic book narratives. Celebrated by critics for its
formal rigor, its knowledgeable yet subversive take on superhero comic conven-
tions, and its novelistic complexity, Watchmen became one of the key works in the
developing pantheon of ‘literary’ comic books that were popular amongst existing
comic books audiences while also appealing to readers unfamiliar with the medium
or the genre (see Hughes 2006, Wolf-Meyer 2003).
Because Moore and Gibbons were able to work with characters that were unique
to this limited series, they had much more freedom than the authors and editors of
ongoing series, including the option of having main characters die without facing
complex continuity issues. But more importantly for Watchmen as an instance of
world-building, they took the opportunity to create an elaborate alternate history
for the storyworld these characters inhabited. As the eponymous film adaptation
(Snyder US 2009) so memorably dramatizes in its opening credits sequence, this
storyworld hinges on a specific point of rupture with Primary World history. While
there are many other points of deviation, the two most basic differences are the
following: first, the notion that the popularity of superhero comics in the late 1930s
inspired many individuals to create elaborate costumes and to fight crime (often in
costume) as real-life vigilantes; and second, that an accident at a nuclear facility
in this alternate-history version of 1959 transformed ordinary human Dr. Jonathan
Osterman into the super-powered Dr. Manhattan.
In the Watchmen storyworld, these two points of deviation from Primary World
history are shown to have created a whole series of spiraling differences that have
shaped this Secondary World in unpredictable ways. For instance, one imagined
consequence of real-life costumed vigilantes is that superhero comics soon lost their
popularity among readers, and that comics about pirates subsequently became the
dominant genre in the American comic book industry. Another long-term deviation
is the fact that Dr. Manhattan’s military interventions on behalf of the US govern-
ment radically altered the outcome of the war in Vietnam, one byproduct of which
was that president Richard Nixon was able to alter the American constitution to
allow presidents to serve more than two terms, and thereby keeping him in office
as late as the year 1986. His combative and corrupt administration, in turn, leads to
an even more aggressive Cold War climate in the 1980s, as geopolitical tensions
between the United States and the USSR mount almost to the point of nuclear war-
fare in an ongoing depiction of geopolitical tension that informs Watchmen’s own
plot while at the same time commenting critically on the political climate of the
period in which the book was published.
As with other superhero storyworlds in comics, Watchmen depends strongly on
an implicit familiarity with genre tropes – even to the extent that both the aesthetic
choices and the organization of the narrative will almost certainly discourage read-
ers without a minimal degree of familiarity with these traditions. But Watchmen also
deviates noticeably from the genre tropes it draws upon and, as many scholars have
noted, cleverly deconstructs them precisely in its much more systematic and consis-
tent approach to world-building. By approaching the timeline of its own storyworld
not as a constant proliferation of characters and events that maintain their notori-
ously blurry relationship with Primary World historicity, but as a thoroughly consis-
tent alternate history, Moore and Gibbons’ limited series establishes its diegetic co-
ordinates with remarkable precision.
Besides the limited nature of the twelve-issue series, which by its design stands
outside of DC’s ongoing superhero continuities, this systematic approach to world-
building is also obviously facilitated by the individual author figures who share
creative responsibility for this one work. For while certain writers and/or artists
have been known for either establishing a superhero storyworld (most famously,
Siegel and Shuster’s invention of Superman) or giving an existing storyworld their
own signature (for instance, author/artist Frank Miller’s celebrated reinvention of
Daredevil during his run in the early 1980s), only rarely are authors of mainstream
American superhero comics granted creative control to the degree that the creators
of Watchmen were. The unusually high degree of autonomous and coherent narra-
tive and aesthetic world-building within the comic therefore hinges strongly on the
distinct imaginative and often idiosyncratic styles of writer Alan Moore, penciller
and inker Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins.
One other formal aspect of Watchmen heightens the series’ commitment to a
fully autonomous storyworld and its detailed alternative history further. In Ameri-
can comic book publishing, the last four pages of an issue are reserved for such
paratextual materials as letters to the editors, responses to reader queries, editori-
als, and advertising. But while the issues of the Watchmen limited series were pro-
duced in a way that simply followed DC Comics’ standard practice of publishing
28 pages of creative content, there was no appropriate content available for the back
section, as there were obviously no letters from readers responding to previous is-
sues in the series. As a creative solution to a problem created by the highly stan-
dardized publishing practices of the American comic book industry, the indefatiga-
ble Alan Moore suggested filling those extra pages with content that fleshed out the
characters’ background and illustrated aspects of the storyworld that were left ob-
lique or implicit in the text proper. Most of these additions took the form of prose
texts authored by Moore, with occasional black-and-white illustrations by Gibbons
that carried through the aesthetic vocabulary of the preceding comic book pages.
But they also included materials like advertisements for diegetic action figures of
characters in the text, designed and marketed by the most entrepreneurial character
Adrian Veidt – thereby also commenting on the relationship between comic book
superheroes and the various ways in which they have come to extend into other
markets and industries.
The paratextual additions that appeared in the back pages of the limited series’
original print run were later reproduced in the trade paperback edition that would
quickly come to be identified (and swiftly canonized) as the Watchmen ‘graphic
novel.’ The narrative depth and internal consistency that these supplements gave
to the series as a world-building project contributed greatly to the book’s blockbust-
er status within the burgeoning graphic novel genre, not least because the suppos-
edly more demanding prose form these additions took could more easily be catego-
rized as explicitly ‘literary.’ Therefore, in the same way that Art Spiegelman’s Maus
(↗22 Art Spiegelman, Maus) became a breakthrough mainstream success because
its comic book form was legitimized by its serious subject matter, Watchmen’s ambi-
tious and more traditionally literary world-building fueled its acceptance by book
critics, scholars, and audiences outside of comic books’ existing readership.
Ironically, while Watchmen’s unusual status within superhero comic books de-
rived from its very nature as a limited series rather than an ongoing franchise, the
brand name and its vaunted status in later years proved too tempting to its copy-
right holders to resist revisiting. In 2012, DC Comics started publishing a spin-off
series entitled Before Watchmen, in which the prominent characters from the series
were revisited in “prequel” fashion. And spin-offs and adaptations in other media,
including Zack Snyder’s feature film and a remarkable television series for US pre-
mium cable channel HBO, continue to proliferate. Even if these further additions to
the franchise were largely renounced by the original series’ author and have re-
mained divisive among fans of the original series, these ongoing expansions do
clearly demonstrate how Watchmen established a resilient storyworld that authors
and readers still wish to continue exploring further.
6 Coda: World-Building in a Box

Throughout this chapter, we have discussed how world-building in comics is de-
fined on the one hand by the creative construction of a Secondary World that di-
verges tangibly from the coordinates of our shared Primary World, and on the other
by extratextual factors (including industrial, cultural, ideological, and political fac-
tors) that delimit and constrain the construction of imaginary storyworlds. Thus,
world-building in a daily comic strip like Thimble Theatre would tend to be provi-
sional and playful rather than structured and coherent – while comic strip authors
would at the same time be able to use the affordances of daily newspaper produc-
tion to develop and define an alternate reality with its own narrative logic and its
own geography (no matter how vaguely defined). In the serialized Adventures of
Tintin, we similarly notice that the construction of a recognizable storyworld is re-
fined and subtly altered over the years in order to adjust both to changing cultural
and political sensibilities and movements (most crucially, the European shift from
colonialist to postcolonial frameworks) and to creative and media-industrial evolu-
tion (in this case, the shift within francophone European comics from single author-
ship to the industrial production overseen by a single author-creator). And finally,
within superhero comics’ ‘fuzzy’ Secondary World of retcons, reboots, and non-his-
toricity, Watchmen illustrates how truly alternate histories are more feasible within
the industrial parameters of the limited series, while even these cases remain in
many ways dependent upon readers’ familiarity with the common practices and
genre conventions of the American superhero comic book genre.
Each of these three examples illustrates some of the most crucial ways in which
world-building in comic books can never be separated from the industrial, political,
and cultural contexts from whence they sprang. As ever, Fredric Jameson’s classic
mantra “Always historicize!” certainly bears repeating. But in each of these cases,
we have looked only at the interplay between text and context. One important factor
has been sadly neglected, and therefore requires some closing commentary in this
final section: the reader. For while we may interpret texts however we wish, literary
theory too often and too easily overlooks the active role that readers take in co-
creating the storyworlds on the basis of the texts they access, process, and interpret.
Scott McCloud, in what remains one of the key foundational works in comics
studies, explains comics’ defining characteristic as that of active suturing: readers
are confronted with two dissimilar sequential images, and must draw on their imag-
inations (and, obviously, a voluminous reservoir of cultural conventions) to infer
the relationship between them, thereby ‘filling in the gap.’ For McCloud, as well as
for countless other comics authors and scholars, comics are therefore a “writerly”
medium – at least, in the Barthesian definition of the word (Barthes 1975, 5). Still,
McCloud – perhaps predictably, as a comics author himself – somewhat stubbornly
continues to privilege the traditional hierarchy between writer and reader. In his
most frequently cited example, panel one depicts a man lifting an axe over a fearful
victim’s head, while saying “Now you DIE!,” after which the second panel depicts
the sound of a scream over a city skyline. As the narrator then somewhat pedantical-
ly explains, it was the reader rather than the writer who made the axe fall: the writer
was “not the one who let [the axe] drop or decided how hard the blow [sic] or who
screamed, or why” (McCloud 1994, 68). Inferring the action that sutures two other-
wise separate panels is the constant work of the reader, whose deliberate and volun-
tary closure of the conceptual space of comics’ gutters “is comics’ primary means
of simulating time and motion” (69).
Clearly, the reader’s activity in McCloud’s examples is more limited in scope
and range than what one would imagine from the potential of Barthes’ “absolutely
plural text” in which readers are free to unleash their creative energies in more
radical ways (Barthes 1975, 5). Guided by cultural and narrative conventions of many
kinds, a much more limited range of options presents itself when suturing these
panels together, with readers in practice doing little more than connecting the dots
to form a pre-existing generic picture. On a larger scale, the same limitations apply
to world-building, as textual cues aid readers in extrapolating meaningful differen-
ces from the Primary World that are useful for filling in the rules that distinguish
and define the diegetic Secondary World.
In this chapter, we have seen different kinds of comics storyworlds, where vari-
ous genres and industrial frameworks made possible specific forms of world-build-
ing. But in decoding each of these, the top-down process of subcreation remained
intact, as we relied exclusively on recognizing more or less consistent formal el-
ements that could be used to construct a recognizable Secondary World. Whatever
political or ideological ideas these storyworlds reproduce or express, they still rely
on a hierarchical structure of meaning that maintains the binary division of power
between author/master/God and reader/servant/subject. The question therefore
raises itself whether world-building can also resist this ontological binary, and em-
power the reader in some ways while still constructing a stable and meaningful
storyworld.
The last case study in this chapter provides at least a provocative example of
how a narrative world can be created in which the reader becomes a more active
participant and collaborator, at least in the ways in which the storyworld comes
into being across a series of different entry points. Chris Ware’s Building Stories is a
decidedly unusual publication in the world of comic books, and one that might be
considered unthinkable outside the realm of high art, were it not for Ware’s vaunted
status as a widely celebrated author figure. Published not as a book, but as an
oversized rectangular box holding fourteen different-sized objects, the text’s materi-
al form presents an obvious first challenge to the reader. For while the packaging
strongly resembles that of a board game, neither the box itself nor its contents in-
clude anything resembling a useful instruction manual. For instance: a comically
pointless set of instructions on the back of the box tells the reader how to turn
pages to access the text, and in what physical positions one might read it (sitting,
standing, lying down), but gives no other clues as to a possible hierarchy or order
amongst the texts. When first unpacking the many different comics, which range
from large blueprint- and newspaper-like objects to pieces of cardboard and book-
lets and pamphlets of various sizes and materials, the order in which they are
opened and read soon proves to be decisive for how meaning and structure are
created.
The arbitrariness that by necessity defines the order in which one reads the
fourteen different texts clearly affects how one organizes the larger storyworld con-
tained therein: which characters, locations, and themes are prioritized over others,
how to make sense of overarching motifs and pathways, and how to connect these
texts into a larger whole all depends strongly on the order in which they are encoun-
tered, as well as the many associations readers will have with similar kinds of ob-
jects, genres, and comic book publishing forms and traditions. At the same time,
the knowledge that the patterns and connections established during this first expe-
rience of the text create irreversible networks of meaning feeds an unusual kind of
anxiety, as the lack of sequence or hierarchical order among the texts imposes no
outside structure or meaning to guide the reader.
As Jason Dittmer has argued, this approach to world-building establishes a me-
diated narrative form that expresses what he describes as the urban assemblage:
directing our attention not to any one particular way of organizing a storyworld, but
instead to the multiple forms of “human–nonhuman interaction that are continually
unfolding all around us in the processes of dwelling, as well as the various compet-
ing temporalities of urban life and the way that they intersect in the unfolding of
the present” (2014, 485). Therefore, even in a work of comics that does not set up a
Secondary World that is unambiguously fantastical, Building Stories creates a read-
ing experience that involves the reader’s active participation on a level beyond that
of McCloud’s definition of closure: by offering up a single work of which neither the
temporal nor the narrative relationships between its component parts are defined
by the author, a far more writerly experience is all but forced on the reader. Or, to
put it slightly differently: while readers clearly follow fairly obvious sequences of
panels within the many separate texts, the connections between these parts are de-
cided by the reader rather than the author.
As a form of world-building, this experiment is liberating both in an aesthetic
sense and in terms of the politics it represents. It illustrates how comics do indeed
have characteristics that can be harnessed to create rich and dramatically compel-
ling storyworlds that are irreducible to top-down definitions of time and space. In-
stead, Building Stories by its very design offer up possibilities for participatory
world-building that multiply and transform with every new interaction the reader
has with the collection of textual objects. While this does not necessarily affect the
internal organization of this particular work’s storyworld, to which the reader obvi-
ously does not contribute, the loose, hypertextual organization of the text’s fourteen
segments, and the freedom to connect them in multiple ways and thereby create
new connections, new experiences, and new meanings, offers a useful exploration
of a more “writerly” form of world-building. Ware’s work therefore represents a kind
of world-building in which the reader is activated, involved, and participatory in a
more meaningful sense.
7 Bibliography
7.1 Works Cited
Apostolidès, Jean-Marie. The Metamorphosis of Tintin; or Tintin for Adults. Transl. Jocelyn Hoy.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Transl. by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Dittmer, Jason. “Narrating Urban Assemblages: Chris Ware and Building Stories.” Social & Cultural
Geography 15.4 (2014): 477–503.
Doležel, Lubormir. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Draga Alexandru, Maria-Sabina. “Narrative Exploration against Mentality Issues: Indirect
Education for Multiculturalism in Tintin.” Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and
Graphic Novels. Ed. Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague. New York: Routledge, 2015. 163–176.
Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” The Critical Tradition. Ed. David H. Riker. Boston: Bedford
Books, 1989. 929–941.
Hassler-Forest, Dan. Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age. Hants: Zero
Books, 2013.
Hassler-Forest, Dan. Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond
Capitalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016.
Hughes, Jamie A. “‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’ Ideology and the ‘Real World’ Superheroes.”
Journal of Popular Culture 39.4 (2006): 546–557.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York
Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries.
New York: New York University Press, 2013.
Johnson, Derek. “Cinematic Destiny: Marvel Studios and the Trade Stories of Industrial
Convergence.” Cinema Journal 52.1 (Fall 2012): 1–24.
Langford, Rachael. “Photography, Belgian Colonialism and Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo,” Journal
of Romance Studies 8.1 (Spring 2008): 77–89.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
Reynolds, Richard. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.
Segar, E.C. Popeye, Volume 2: “Well, Blow Me Down!” Seattle: Phantagraphics Books, 2007.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” The Monsters & The Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher
Tolkien. London: Harper Collins, 1997 (1983). 109–162.
Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London and
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. “The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture,
and the Conservation of Difference.” Journal of Popular Culture 36.3 (2003): 497–515.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
7.2 Further Reading

Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London and
Gibbons, Dave. Watching the Watchmen. New York: Titan Books, 2008.
Hassler-Forest, Dan. Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond
Capitalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016.
Astrid Böger
9 Life Writing
Abstract: This article discusses diverse forms of graphic life writing that have
emerged roughly since the 1970s, as a sub-formation of the so-called underground
comix, which were addressing a more adult readership than mainstream comics.
Autobiographical comics or autographics, a term coined by Gillian Whitlock, have
covered a variety of crises such as growing up in a dysfunctional family or suffering
from a severe illness. Beyond such personal predicaments, more and more works
have in recent years devoted themselves to global crises including war, genocide,
and terrorism. This essay explores the question in what ways graphic life writing
distinguishes itself from traditional, literary autobiography. It discusses how Phi-
lippe Lejeune’s influential concept of the autobiographical pact can be applied to
autobiographical comics as well, which use different forms of authentication to con-
vey a sense of truthfulness. In the second part, it focuses on several sub-genres of
graphic life writing to give readers a sense of both the productivity and the diversity
of this innovative cultural form.
Key Terms: Autographics, graphic memoir, authentication, graphic style, crisis comics
1 Introduction: Definitions and Concepts

Life writing is a literary form that goes by many names and has evolved significantly
across cultures at least since antiquity (Smith and Watson 2001, 83–109). Today,
there are numerous sub-formations including the short-lived internet blog and its
older cousin, the diary, which have become an everyday practice for innumerable
people around the globe. What is more, there are established literary genres such
as the confession and the memoir that have made important contributions to the
evolution of a Western cultural canon for centuries. Despite their obvious disparate-
ness, what all these genres have in common is their autobiographical impulse, to
invoke a contemporary term serving as umbrella for many different kinds of life
writing (in this regard it is worth noting that Smith and Watson discuss “Fifty-two
Genres of Life Narrative” in their seminal study Reading Autobiography; Smith and
Watson 2001, 183–207). Autobiography, in Philippe Lejeune’s succinct definition, is
“the retrospective prose narrative that someone writes concerning his own existence,
where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his own personality”
(Lejeune 1989, viii). Constituting both a literary genre and a critical concept of self-
fashioning originally clearly conceived as a male prerogative, “[t]he emergence of
autobiography […] thus coincides with what has frequently been called the emer-
gence of the modern subject around 1800,” as Helga Schwalm (2014, 9) maintains.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-010
202 Astrid Böger
While we have to agree with Schwalm that autobiography is “notoriously diffi-

cult to define” (2014, 1), we can cull from Lejeune’s above definition several impor-
tant elements that help circumscribe the genre. To begin with, autobiography nar-
rates past events but re-enacts them in the space of the text, usually rendered in
the past tense and focalized through a first person narrator. Next, autobiography is
literally, according to the Greek origins of the term, a form of “self life writing”
(Smith and Watson 2001, 1) traditionally focusing on the process of someone’s iden-
tity formation over a longer period of time. What is more, either the author or the
circumstances of his or her life – and ideally both – must be interesting enough to
deserve being told, and ultimately read, in book form in order to make for a success-
ful autobiography. As a matter of fact, many autobiographies published during the
Age of Enlightenment, when the genre came to fruition, even advertised their popu-
lar appeal in their very title, a good example being Olaudah Equiano’s The Interest-
ing Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African originally
from 1789 (Equiano 2004). Perhaps the most important characteristic of life writing,
however, is its assumed inherent truthfulness; in other words, we have to be able
to believe what we are being told to be true in order to become engrossed in some-
one else’s life as readers. Hence, Philippe Lejeune has proposed the influential con-
cept of the “autobiographical pact” between writers and readers, which is based on
the notion that author, narrator, and protagonist are veritably one and the same
person. Thus, “[t]he autobiographical pact is the affirmation in the text of this iden-
tity, referring back in the final analysis to the name of the author on the cover”
(Lejeune 1989, 13–14). Lejeune (1989, 30) concludes that autobiography “is a mode
of reading as much as it is a type of writing; it is a historically variable contractual
effect.”
After having thus inhabited a solid place in the literary landscape for centuries,
autobiography has recently lost much cultural currency due to a radically changed
cultural environment “in the wake of the various social, cultural and linguistic turns
of literary and cultural theory since the 1970s,” as Schwalm (2014, 14) aptly ob-
serves. Not only has the very notion of a stable identity come under much scrutiny;
but also, poststructuralist theory has revealed all texts including autobiographical
ones to be mere fabrications of reality, further weakening the genre’s fundamental
truth claim. Finally, autobiography’s defining feature, namely its enactment of per-
sonal memory, which was not only shown to be selective but also biased or even
false, has only increased the skepticism toward it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some
critics have gone so far as to anticipate “the end of autobiography” altogether
(Finck 1999, 11; qtd. in Schwalm 2014, 20), though somewhat in spite of the genre’s
undeniable and ongoing cultural impact as well as its considerable commercial suc-
cess. The latter is owed in no small part to new media formats rekindling interest
in autobiographical writing which, as a consequence, has migrated more and more
to the internet and other non-traditional media platforms in recent years.
Among those new forms of life writing, graphic memoir has emerged as a partic-
ularly fruitful field beginning in the 1970s. Indirectly, then, graphic life writing has
9 Life Writing 203
from its inception reflected the mounting critique of autobiography’s outdated liter-
ary paradigm, “with its tenets of coherence, circular closure, interiority, etc.”
(Schwalm 2014, 20), by introducing innovative, inter-medial forms of storytelling
that move beyond such limitations, thereby re-inventing autobiography as a genre
that shows as much as it tells us about someone’s life. Gillian Whitlock (2006, 966)
has coined the term “autographics,” an abbreviation of “autobiographics,” in turn
referring to Leigh Gilmore’s (1994) feminist reconceptualization of the traditionally
male genre, in order to mark the important differences between literary autobiogra-
phy and its graphic counterpart. In Whitlock’s own words,
[b]y coining the term “autographics” for graphic memoir I mean to draw attention to the specif-
ic conjunctions of visual and verbal text in this genre of autobiography, and also to the subject
positions that narrators negotiate in and through comics […]. (Whitlock 2006, 966)
The fact that Whitlock uses the terms “autobiography” and “memoir” synonymous-
ly here points to a larger question concerning graphic life writing’s claim to truth-
telling. After all, whereas literary autobiographies almost by definition – or, rather,
as a consequence of the autobiographical pact discussed above – exude an aura of
quasi-objective truth and authenticity, a memoir is expected to take certain liberties
with the factualness of its account, advertising as it does the emphasis on subjective
memory from the start. Graphic memoir, of course, makes use of another mode of
representation, namely, cartoon images further destabilizing the truth claim ger-
mane to traditional, i. e. literary autobiography, resulting in a verbal-visual artifact
which resists any clear-cut categorization as either fiction or fact, leading Nancy
Pedri (2013, 127) to argue that it is, in fact, neither.
By invoking Lynda Barry’s (2002, 7) authorial “Introduction” to her graphic
memoir One! Hundred! Demons! consisting of three panels which show the author
at her desk while pondering the question, “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not
true?” followed by another, equally challenging one, “Is it fiction if parts of it are?,”
Pedri debunks any facile notion of truth in graphic memoir in favor of a far more
complex picture. Lynda Barry’s (2002, 5) own description of her work as “autobific-
tionalography” is a tongue-in-cheek attempt at giving a name to some of these com-
plexities, while also playfully exposing the epistemological aporias at the heart of
graphic memoir and, by extension, autobiography more generally. Unlike a literary
autobiography, however, a graphic memoir cannot hide its own subjectivity, not
least because the narrator must always be shown, consequently appearing as a
character in the story of someone’s life as much as the author remembering and
telling it. Or, as Jared Gardner (2008, 6) elegantly puts it, “the power of memory
must always share the act of self-representation with the devices of fiction.”
Arguably, it is precisely this melding of fact and fiction that has made graphic
life writing so appealing to many readers increasingly wary of traditional autobiog-
raphy’s more straightforward approach. Also, the reading experience itself is quite
different, as readers have to not only absorb the visual-verbal information but ‘fill
204 Astrid Böger
in the blanks’ as they go back and forth between words and images, different pan-
els, and entire sequences, while gradually putting the story together in a process
that Scott McCloud (1993, 67) has somewhat counterintuitively termed ‘closure’ de-
spite its evident open-endedness. As a result, readers are rather actively engaged in
the reading experience even as they become conscious of their own part in it. As
Pedri writes,
[t]he overt commingling of fact and fiction brings readers to confront their union as generating
a continuous assessment of their own expectations and assumptions in relation to the author’s
intention of fidelity. Readers are thus made aware of their own role in believing the narrated
events. (Pedri 2013, 139)
It can thus be argued that graphic life writing foregrounds some critical issues at
the heart of all autobiography which, apart from the problematic boundary between
fact and fiction, include the role of subjective experience and its effective communi-
cation to others in the form of art. Whereas the subject of a literary autobiography
remains invisible except for the occasional paratextual author’s photograph, the
subject of a graphic memoir is usually present. Cartoonishly drawn rather than real-
istically rendered, it points to
the creative interplay between an individual, private self and its representation in the public
realm of graphic memoir to dismantle notions of self (and reality) as anything other than
always mediated and assumed, and not given. What ultimately comes to light is the central
role of the subjective in graphic memoir’s commitment to the portrayal of a self and its life.
(Pedri 2013, 148)
Each graphic memoir, then, has to develop its own ways of visually communicating,
through pictures and lettering, subjective experience to its readers, in turn lending
great importance to graphic style as a constitutive element of all graphic life writing.
As Hillary Chute (2010, 146) clarifies, “[t]he fact of style as a narrative choice – and
not simply a default expression – is fundamental to understanding graphic narra-
tive.” In an important sense, then, graphic style “speaks not so much to what is
seen and remembered,” according to Pedri (2013, 145), “but rather to the subjective
interpretation of the facts […].” Many authors of graphic life writing make use of
visual metaphors as a particularly effective means of conveying their own interpre-
tation of the narrated events. For example, as Elisabeth El Refaie (2014, 33) explains,
the Chinese American graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang, in American Born Chinese
(2006), has expressed the identitary dilemma of his protagonist and alter ego
through “the use of shape-shifting as a metaphor for transnational identity.” El Re-
faie goes on to argue that
shape-shifting is an apt metaphor for the unstable nature of all cultural identity, particularly
in immigrant nations such as America, where culture is inevitably constituted both within and
across categories of class, gender, race, ethnicity, politics, and religion. (El Refaie 2014, 33)
9 Life Writing 205
However, visual metaphors are frequently found in other sub-genres of graphic life
writing, as well. For instance, in numerous graphic illness narratives, they are em-
ployed to give readers an immediate sense, which does not depend on verbal de-
scription but is for the most part conveyed through images alone, of what having
epilepsy or a severe eating disorder might feel like, namely, according to two well-
known examples, a contorted snake (B., 2005, 291) and a gradually disappearing
body (Green 2013, 125), respectively. Not only are such stark visual metaphors ex-
pressive of certain painful experiences; they also have the capacity to trigger strong
affective responses in readers who are thus invited to identify with the protagonist
suffering from them.
Even though graphic life writing makes use of rather different representational
strategies than, say, documentary photography, the notion of authenticity is key to
both (Beaty 2009). However, unlike a photograph, which is conventionally invested
with a life-likeness unavailable in most other media, authenticity in graphic mem-
oirs is of necessity a kind of performed authenticity, as El Refaie (2012, 135–178) sug-
gests. Thus, there are different ways of producing an ‘authenticity effect’ in graphic
narrative, to invoke Roland Barthes’s (1968) related theorization of the ‘reality ef-
fect’ of realist literature, which include what El Refaie (2012, 144) terms “explicit
authentication” through genre classification typically found in a book’s subtitle and
also in paratexts such as editors’ notes assuring readers of the truthfulness of a
given work of graphic life writing. Furthermore, authentication is achieved through
the use of quoted dialogue and other reality bites such as visual documents (El
Refaie 2012, 148; 158–165). As a matter of fact, more and more graphic autobiogra-
phies have made use of photographs in recent years, either re-drawn by hand or
technically reproduced from the actual print or negative, as an effective authentica-
tion device (El Refaie 2012, 159–169; Pedri 2013, 136–145; Schmid 2016, 31–33). How-
ever, it would be naïve to assume that the role of photographs, when included in
graphic memoirs, were simply to anchor the latter in historical reality. As Marianne
Hirsch reminds us, writing about Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic memoir Maus
(Spiegelman 1986; 1991),
[i]n moving from documentary photographs – perhaps the most referential representational
medium – to cartoon drawings of mice and cats, Spiegelman lays bare the levels of mediation
that underlie all visual representational forms. (Hirsch 1997, 25; qtd. in Pedri 2013, 138)
In sum, graphic life writing has emerged as a much-noted sub-genre of autobiogra-

phy roughly since the 1970s, at a time when the latter found itself increasingly in
crisis as a result of a growing distrust in the capacity of traditional autobiography
(or any other genre, for that matter) to tell a life truthfully. By using different aes-
thetic strategies which, above all, emphasize the important role of both mediation
and subjectivity, and moreover foregrounding their creative melding rather than
hiding it; and finally by replacing truthfulness with the self-aware performance of
authenticity instead, this still new visual-verbal form has convinced readers includ-
206 Astrid Böger
ing more and more scholars that there are few themes that cannot be dealt with in
the form of a graphic memoir, and rather more engagingly so than in many others.
2 Contexts and Themes

Following Jared Gardner’s (2008, 1) trajectory of “Autography’s Biography,” the ear-
ly 1970s can be identified as the pivotal moment when the genre of the graphic
memoir first emerged out of a felt urgency of expression calling for “new ethical
and affective relationships and responses,” which more and more readers found in
this brand-new hybrid form. Roughly up until then, comics had appeared either
piecemeal, in the form of daily or weekly newspaper strips, or else in the shape of
hardly less ephemeral comic books, the latter having become a highly desirable
commodity in the thriving collector’s scene by then regardless of their material flim-
siness. In terms of content, comics “had for three decades been associated with
juvenile entertainment and superhero fantasies,” but were, according to Gardner
(2008, 6), “hijacked and made to speak unspeakable (and often deeply disturbing)
new fantasies” by the likes of Robert Crumb and others as of the late 1960s, when
the so-called underground comix started to appear. These independent and fre-
quently self-published magazines subverted the official comics code, were clearly
intended for a more adult readership, and immediately garnered an eager following
especially among politically aware youths looking for an alternative to the rather
bland fare offered by the mainstream comics industry. As Gardner explains,
[m]ost of the early work in the underground comix movement found its pleasures and its justi-
fication in iconoclasm, and in expressing openly topics and fantasies long forbidden (and
explicitly outlawed by the comics code of 1954) in mainstream comics and in mainstream soci-
ety. But in opening up the form to new ideas, images, and audience [sic], the underground
comix movement spawned a new form of graphic expression that would ultimately outlive the
movement by many decades. (Gardner 2008, 7)
As a seminal work marking the transition from underground comix to auto-

(bio)graphical memoir, Gardner (2008, 7) singles out Justin Green’s Binky Brown
Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, which was originally published in 1972. With its focus
on the author’s compulsive neuroses due to his strict Catholic upbringing, this work
indeed paved the way for a thoroughly new direction in graphic narration, which
has since then become a prime outlet for life writing. What is more, autobiographi-
cal comics have offered a platform to write and read about intimate memories of
such difficult experiences as childhood trauma, injury or illness, migration, terror,
and war, to name but a few rather typical subjects of contemporary autography.
Indeed, it seems that graphic life writing has evolved into a much-needed genre
in which to tell and learn about some of life’s most pressing problems (Gardner
2008, 6). Still, Gardner’s (2008, 12) provocative question, “[w]hy tell these difficult
9 Life Writing 207
stories in a form that is still today, despite the accomplishments of several genera-
tions of serious comics storytellers, associated with the cultural gutter?,” continues
to pose an undeniable challenge. Possible answers might focus on the unique form
of comics’ elliptical narration, which allows for a much more dynamic interplay
between what to show and tell and what to leave out, arguably an ideal prerequisite
for encapsulating traumatic experiences otherwise resisting, or even unavailable to,
more linear narration. Moreover, as Hillary Chute argues, “[t]he most important
graphic narratives explore the conflicted boundaries of what can be said and what
can be shown at the intersection of collective histories and life stories” (2008, 459).
In this context, it is noteworthy that the most innovative graphic memoirs, in-
cluding Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986; 1991) about his father’s memory of surviving
the holocaust (↗22 Art Spiegelman, Maus) as well as his In the Shadow of No Towers
(2004) dealing with the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, have simul-
taneously been among the most experimental ones in terms of form (↗7 Politics).
More specifically, they have creatively adapted established modes of comics story-
telling such as the Funny Animals tradition to surprising and, to some, even shock-
ing ends. Although never uncontroversial, the overwhelming success and cultural
impact of Spiegelman’s award-winning graphic memoirs is owed at least in part
to the powerful combination of several core themes of autography. These include
traumatic memories of the past prompting mental illness as well as various kinds
of neuroses that, if left untreated, are passed on from one generation to the next.
Those haunting memories thus create an urgent need for mediated expression and,
by implication, sharing with others outside of the immediate family context, thereby
opening up a private world under pressure for a larger public’s concern. Precisely
through their personal approach to storytelling, using a first person narrator stand-
ing in for a real person who is also a witness, these works achieve a rare degree of
authenticity and credibility. Moreover, they possess a seemingly boundless creativi-
ty with which the cartoon aesthetic has been refashioned into an entirely new kind
of comic, one that primarily “presents a traumatic side of history” (Chute 2008,
459), albeit one which is shown to be inseparable from personal experience and, as
a consequence, requires highly subjective forms of expression.
In what follows, some of the most prevalent themes of graphic life writing will
be explored, divided into three parts which deal, first, with graphic memoirs of
family life under various kinds of pressure. Next, several graphic memoirs of close
encounters with devastating illnesses will be discussed. The last section, finally,
turns to works that explicitly embed personal experience within a more global con-
text, usually with a clearly political intent. It should be noted from the start that
the selection is not intended to be exhaustive let alone complete by any means,
which would be impossible given the immense productivity of the genre. Rather, it
is meant to be representative of this burgeoning segment of contemporary comics.
Throughout, the overall aim is to delineate some of the most significant features of
graphic life writing while further exploring the important question raised by Chute
208 Astrid Böger
and others, namely, of how these works manage to encapsulate “a traumatic side
of history” (Chute 2008, 459), and to what ends.
2.1 Family Affairs
Considering the development of the genre in its entirety, exploring one’s immediate
family circle in order to gain deeper insight into its (dys)functioning has been not
only among the first, but also the most prevalent subjects of graphic life writing.
Following the popular and critical success of such diverse graphic memoirs as Justin
Green’s aforementioned Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) and, some
years later, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, many
emerging artists made the genre their own in order to tell their families’ stories,
among them Craig Thompson, Alison Bechdel, and David Small, whose works will
be summarily considered here. Concomitant with its growing popularity new genre
classifications appeared, of which the label “graphic novel” has become the most
frequently used, despite numerous critical voices denouncing it as a mere marketing
scheme and, what is more, deeming it inappropriate to non-fictional forms of life
writing (Chute 2008, 453). Notwithstanding such legitimate criticism, Craig Thomp-
son’s Blankets, first published in 2003, is labeled “a graphic novel” according to the
book’s subtitle. Alison Bechdel has used a more playful approach, by designating
Fun Home a “A Family Tragicomic,” thereby not only calling into question tradition-
al genre boundaries but also effectively demonstrating the book’s indebtedness to
comics from the start (↗26 Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For). David Small’s
Stitches, finally, is simply titled “a memoir.” Among other things, these different
labels indicate a certain degree of anxiety surrounding the still new genre of the
graphic memoir and, more specifically, its inherent claim to truthful representation.
Viewed in a more positive light, they testify to the wide range of creative possibili-
ties including different genre specifications afforded by contemporary life writing.
When comparing the books by Thompson, Bechdel, and Small, it is striking that
all three develop a highly innovative, unique form, which supports the notion that
graphic style is indeed of central importance to life writing, as it visualizes the au-
thor’s personal experiences while also making them sharable with others in mediat-
ed form. Moreover, as argued by Pedri, graphic style is used in order to present
the facts by way of subjective interpretation rather than as objective truth arguably
unavailable in any medium (2013, 145). Consequently, the style of each work is not
only unique but also remarkably expressive, thus engaging readers in the process
of meaning making through the combination of images and words and their creative
organization in the form of panels, pages, and entire sequences. It is striking, more-
over, that all three works share a coming of age theme focusing on the artist-to-be
as a young person who gradually becomes aware of the damaging flaws in his or
her closest relations, and after considerable emotional turmoil eventually manages
9 Life Writing 209
to leave them behind altogether. This basic narrative pattern can be found in many
other works of graphic life writing, as well, which not only suggests that the graphic
performance of someone’s coming of age against considerable odds is a theme of
particular relevance to this genre; in a more self-referential vein, its prevalence
might also signify the coming of age of the medium of comics as a whole.
Another element all three works have in common is their use of a very limited
color scheme consisting of black and white only in the case of Blankets, which is
supplemented by all shades of grey in Stitches. Fun Home, by contrast, uses a
washed-out non-color somewhere between green and grey throughout, in addition
to white and black. Despite such minor differences, all three works, then, eschew a
realist color scheme in favor of one that reduces color to a minimum. They thus
mark a clear difference to more commercial comics fare while also signaling their
formal proximity to “serious” literature nearly always consisting of black letters on
a white surface, on the one hand, and (documentary) black and white photography,
on the other, in turn asserting graphic memoir’s firm place among the realist media
and, by implication, its contribution to cultural memory formation.
In terms of their depiction of family life under pressure, differences naturally
abound, as all three works deal with highly specific constellations consequently
producing problems leading, in each case, to a different resolution, albeit one which
allows all three protagonists to move on and pursue the life that will enable them
to finally express their painful experiences in the form of graphic art. In this regard,
it is interesting to note that all three works emphasize the act of writing and drawing
by hand, which visualizes the process of creating one’s auto(bio)graphy and, more-
over, serves as a powerful visual metaphor for the genre in its entirety (Thompson
2003, 143; Bechdel 2006, 141–143; Small 2009, 48).
Arguably, what makes these books so satisfying to read is their shared theme
of a successful transformation via creative self-expression. Thus, Craig in Blankets
exorcizes the ghostly memories of the past by giving them material form, and even-
tually he outgrows the narrow world of his unsympathetic parents who are too pre-
occupied with religion to notice, let alone stop, various forms of abuse in their
home. Alison learns to accept the Fun Home she grew up in (which was really any-
thing but) as well as her budding life as a lesbian by using her creative skills to
draw nearer her sadly absent father, who may or may not have killed himself follow-
ing the exposure of his own, carefully closeted homosexuality. David, finally, over-
comes the various challenges of growing up in a dysfunctional family, also with a
parent who hides her homosexual desires and takes out her frustration on those
around her, and a father who gives his son cancer by treating his sinus problems
with too many X-rays considered a cure back in the 1950s. The stitches that gave
the book its title simultaneously refer to the wound David incurs following life-
saving surgery to remove the tumor and the act of stitching together the disparate
experiences of his young life into one coherent whole, in the form of a memoir
which graphically depicts his most haunting memories. Thus, after David loses sev-
210 Astrid Böger
eral of his vocal cords due to the operation and temporarily finds himself without a
voice – a terrifying experience dramatically rendered in the form of a mise-en-abyme
expressing the sensation of feeling trapped in one’s own mouth (fig. 9.1) – he mainly
depends on his drawing skills to express and, eventually, cure himself (Böger 2011,
614), achieving personal fulfillment by transforming his family’s haunting memory
into art.
Fig. 9.1: David Small, Stitches. A Memoir, p. 234.
2.2 The Graphic Cure
From its inception in the 1970s, much graphic life writing has been devoted to ill-
nesses both mental and physical, with the already mentioned works by Justin Green
and David Small serving as compelling cases in point. Thus, Green’s Binky Brown
Meets the Holy Virgin Mary focuses on his compulsive neuroses and obsessions as
a young person, while Small treats his cancer basically as a symptom of growing
up in a dysfunctional home. Both have in common, amongst other things, that they
establish a strong causal link between their authors’ individual pathologies and
their closest family relations, which are exposed as (literally) sickening. Moreover,
both embed their memoirs in the larger social environment, which in Small’s case
consists of the consumerist 1950s in the American Midwest. Green’s narrative, on
the other hand, is set in the early 1970s, i. e. the phase of the so-called ‘Americaniza-
tion’ of the Vietnam War leading to an appalling loss of lives on all sides and, what
is more, to the military as well as moral defeat for the Americans in the end. In a
2012 roundtable discussion with other authors on Comics and Autobiography, Green
commented on this important nexus as follows:
Everyone I knew knew at least someone that was killed in Vietnam. And a couple people that
were injured. And there was a feeling of a real collision, […]. I had terrible survivor guilt. I felt
9 Life Writing 211
that what I was doing was very trivial, and I needed to wage my own war. And so I looked
within […], but I didn’t want to present myself as a hero, but rather as a specimen. So the
comic form gives you a multifaceted view of doing that. (“Panel” 2014, 86)
Several things are worth noting in this statement. First, the military metaphor (“I
needed to wage my own war”) is quite striking and rather apropos considering the
specific historical context in which the book was situated. Furthermore, while su-
perhero comics have traditionally focused on the battle between good and evil,
there seemed to be little room left for heroism according to Green; instead, what
was called for was to “look within.” Remarkably, he ends by praising comics as a
particularly suitable form to explore one’s inner self, in his case exposing a sick
specimen deemed representative of society’s larger ills.
Following Green’s influential memoir of his troubled youth, more and more
graphic illness memoirs appeared, which made the struggle with a potentially life-
threatening disease their main focus, with Joyce Brabner and Harvey Pekar’s Our
Cancer Year (1994) among the best-known ones. Like Green, they make it clear from
the start – the very first panel, in fact – that Harvey’s bout with cancer, which took
place in the same year as the First Gulf War, 1991, should not be understood as a
merely personal affair:
This is a story about a year when someone was sick, about a time when it seemed that the rest
of the world was sick, too. It’s a story about feeling powerless, and trying to do too much.
Maybe doing more than you thought you could and not knowing what to do next. (Brabner
and Pekar 1994)
The emphasis throughout is on the devastating effects of an illness that makes pa-
tients not only feel very sick but also disempowered – an impression that is ironical-
ly counteracted by the blurb on the book cover which refers to the story as “a true
and unflinching account of two people battling cancer.” However, Frank Stack’s
visualizations of an increasingly fragile Harvey likely evoke sympathy rather than
admiration in readers. Consequently, such ambiguities “serve to undermine the idea
that a sick body must be treated as an enemy” (El Refaie 2012, 90). Numerous graph-
ic memoirs have by now treated firsthand encounters with serious illnesses but,
importantly, most of them have emphasized the slow process of recovery, with the
graphic memoir itself serving as an eloquent material testimony to the transforma-
tion of painful experiences into art which, unlike the illness itself, can be shared
with others.
In recent years, more and more graphic memoirs have appeared that offer read-
ers insight into formerly tabooed or in any case rarely covered illnesses, including
Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, my Mother, and Me (2012), and
Katie Green’s Lighter than My Shadow (2013) about the author’s long struggle with
anorexia. Tangles, as already indicated in its full title, focuses on Leavitt’s close but
increasingly complicated relationship with her mother, who suffers from Alzheim-
er’s and as a consequence becomes completely dependent on her family, who do
212 Astrid Böger
Fig. 9.2: Sarah Leavitt, Tangles. A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me, p. 21 (detail).
their best to support her through the final phase of her life. In order to convey the
experience of slowly fading away – and of being close to someone to whom this is
happening – Leavitt developed a distinct graphic style which combines words and
images in such a way that the predicament of her mother’s affliction becomes immi-
nently apparent. For instance, when Sarah returns home after a longer stay abroad,
she is surprised to find her mother unusually quiet and passive (Leavitt 2012, 21).
The image accompanying the verbal memory of this incident shows the shape
of her mother drawn in very thin lines, without substance, as it were. In the follow-
ing panel, Sarah is greeted by her mother and notes her being happy to see her, but
the differences between both figures are striking: whereas Sarah is drawn in detail,
with facial features, curly hair and donning a black sweater giving her figure defini-
tion and presence, her mother again appears as a mere silhouette without such
individualizing features, creating the impression that she is literally vanishing. In
the third panel of this sequence, mother and daughter are shown in a close embrace
suggesting a loving relationship, although the peaceful image is troubled by Sarah’s
written commentary, “But something was wrong.” Strikingly, both figures are now
drawn as mere silhouettes placed against an ominously black background, which
is an apt visual metaphor not only for the close relationship between mother and
daughter, but also for the ways in which the mother’s illness inevitably ‘entangles’
the people around her (fig. 9.2). Considered in its entirety, Leavitt’s graphic memoir
about her mother’s progressing illness and eventual death goes a long way in con-
fronting the complexities of life with a devastating illness such as Alzheimer’s, by
giving it a material form and thus the space to express frustration and grief but also
achieve some kind of healing.
Katie Green’s Lighter than My Shadow is in some ways similar to David Small’s
work discussed above, in that it also treats the story of a very young person who
falls seriously ill. The book covers Katie’s development of an eating disorder since
she was a girl, but especially focuses on her worsening physical as well as mental
state following an incident of sexual abuse by a self-appointed healer when she was
a teenager. This traumatic incident results in her rapid deterioration, before she
eventually learns to accept her body with the help of a female psychotherapist, and
starts a slow process of recovery. She finally overcomes her illness by creatively
expressing its hold on her life in the form of a graphic memoir. It seems significant
9 Life Writing 213
that visual metaphors are employed throughout Lighter Than My Shadow, as well,
for instance in the shape of an amorphous cloud, which hovers over Katie and at
times fully envelops or even engulfs her. Never explicitly mentioned in the narra-
tive, this is a good example of how a concrete visualization of an abstract condition
can evoke feelings without relying on any verbal account, thus giving readers access
to Katie’s sick and depressed state, not requiring further verbal explanation.
In sum, books such as Tangles and Lighter Than My Shadow make it possible to
evoke experiences that are difficult to express in any medium, by making use of
specifically graphic forms that have the capacity to convey what otherwise resists
representation – and being remembered in the first place. In her personal corre-
spondence with the physician, comics artist and author Ian Williams, Katie Green
acknowledged the recuperative power of creating a graphic memoir about her ill-
ness:
In many ways, … I am more present and aware now than I was when the events were actually
happening, so choosing to relive them is actually choosing to really feel those emotions for
the first time. I didn’t know what it felt like to be bullied at school – I was completely numbed
by anorexia. I didn’t know what it felt like to be molested – it felt like I was watching it happen
to someone else, like I was in a different place, a different time. Those things have become
more real to me through writing about them than they ever felt when they were happening.
(qtd. in Williams 2011, 365)
Although graphic illness memoirs may well provide a space of healing or graphic
cure, they should not, however, be considered as therapeutic in any narrow sense.
As Phoebe Gloeckner reminded her audience at the 2012 roundtable discussion on
Comics and Autobiography mentioned earlier, “Art is not therapy. It just makes you
feel more connected to the world, perhaps, if you’re lucky” (“Panel” 2014, 93).
2.3 The Bigger Picture
The last sub-genre of graphic life writing briefly considered here presents “a trau-
matic side of history” (Chute 2008, 459) even more explicitly than graphic memoirs
dealing with individuals and families in trouble or someone’s bout with devastating
illness. Thus, from the 1970s onwards, i. e. roughly since the emergence of auto-
graphic works in the United States, efforts have been made to expand the medium
of comics in order to cover subjects such as war, terrorism, and exile, to name but
some of the most prevalent ones. The turn toward such sobering subjects prompted
Sidonie Smith (2011, 64), among others, to create a new genre designation: crisis
comics. Some of the best-known graphic memoirs belong into this category, includ-
ing those by Spiegelman as well as other influential works such as Marjane Satrapi’s
Persepolis (2003) (↗30 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis). In fact, it is a valid question
which graphic memoirs would not fit under this umbrella term, whose greatest merit
214 Astrid Böger
may be that it indicates how far graphic narrative has come as a serious cultural
formation today.
Among the authors addressing the world’s major crises in graphic form, Joe
Sacco inhabits an important position, not least because he developed a new kind
of graphic life writing which he termed ‘comics journalism’ and which uses the
medium of comics to tell stories through the perspective of a witness, standing in
for the author himself. Thus, in Palestine, we follow Sacco’s graphic avatar on his
extended visit to the Occupied Territories in 1991–92, where he encounters many
acts of oppression mainly against the Palestinians, which he experiences either di-
rectly or through interviews with victims and eyewitnesses. Trained as a journalist,
Sacco decided to leave behind traditional journalism in favor of the medium of com-
ics, which he believed to be a more adequate form to represent painful realities
including those he witnessed in war-like places such as Israel/Palestine and Bosnia.
Comics journalism, according to Sacco, is not too concerned with notions of objec-
tivity. What is more, as a graphic journalist he does not shy away from making a
clear political statement. In the foreword to the 2001 edition of Palestine, Sacco
writes thus:
This book is about the first intifada against the Israeli occupation, which was beginning to run
out of steam at the time of my visit. As I write these words, a second intifada is taking place
because, in short, Israeli occupation, and all the consequences of the domination of one peo-
ple by another, has not ceased. The Palestinian and Israeli people will continue to kill each
other in low-level conflict or with shattering violence – with suicide bombers or helicopter
gunships and jet bombers – until this central fact – Israeli occupation – is addressed as an
issue of international law and basic human rights. (Sacco 2001, vi)
One page from Palestine serves as a good example of Sacco’s approach in terms of
both his aesthetics and also his ethics as a graphic journalist whose aim is to make
a record of deeply unjust and often violent situations where other media, according
to Sacco, fall short. Together with a Japanese journalist named Saburo, Sacco visits
the surrounding area of a West Bank settlement and meets Palestinians who were
evicted from their land and who gather to tell him about a confrontation with set-
tlers in which violence erupted, killing two of their relatives who were supposedly
merely standing by (Sacco 2003, 70–71). The page covering these sad events is divid-
ed up into three panels prominently featuring people’s agitated faces and their rapid
account in the form of several speech bubbles (fig. 9.3). In addition, two text boxes
contain background information on how such acts of violence have been handled
by the Israeli legal system, namely, according to the author, very mildly and thus
unlike cases where Palestinians committed violent acts against settlers, which were
invariably severely punished.
When Sacco and Saburo are about to leave after hearing out the Palestinians,
someone gives a photograph of the two dead men to Subaro, who decides that he
does not want to keep it because it is “too heavy” for him even though he is a
journalist and also a photographer who should be used to such violent images.
9 Life Writing 215
Sacco then takes the photograph and comments, in the form of a textual insert, that
“faces are what it’s all about, man” (Sacco 2003, 71). This statement serves as a
meta-commentary on Sacco’s approach to graphic journalism, which very much fo-
cuses on faces, in order to convey the situation in which someone tells his or her
own version of certain events with a maximum degree of authenticity. Moreover,
faces shown in close-up always have great affective power as they let us witness, and
potentially sympathize with, someone’s first-hand experience. This can be seen in
the upper panel of the page below, which emphasizes how the Palestinians are made
to feel by the traumatic events that they associate with the settlers who, from their
point of view, have invaded their territory and taken their livelihood away (fig. 9.3).
Fig. 9.3: Joe Sacco, Palestine, p. 71.
Finally, it is remarkable that the photograph is taken and stored away by Sacco,
thus finding its way, albeit in a very small and sketchy version, into the graphic
narrative of Palestine. In other words, graphic journalism as developed by Sacco is
shown to be superior to traditional journalism, in that it manages to include sub-
jects otherwise considered “too heavy” and therefore beyond what can or ought to
be shown. Implicitly, this points to the capacity of graphic narrative to encapsulate
what is frequently left out, for whatever reasons, in other media. By the same token,
the inclusion of the photograph and the gruesome account that goes with it suggests
that there are few subjects that are considered “too heavy” for graphic journalism –
a notion that has meanwhile been confirmed by other, arguably much “heavier”
publications such as The Photographer (Guibert et. al., 2003), which do not flinch
even from the most horrific sights and demand that, as readers, we too open our
eyes to them.
216 Astrid Böger
3 Conclusion
Since its inception roughly forty years ago, graphic life writing has become an im-
portant field of cultural production. By combining different media traditions into an
innovative format that makes it possible to tell familiar stories in entirely new ways,
it reaches audiences open to a more interactive and open-ended reading experience
than traditional autobiography allows or even aims for. Even though in this article
the scope of possible themes of graphic life writing has been limited to three repre-
sentative sub-genres dealing, in that order, with troubled families, devastating ill-
nesses, and violent global conflicts, it can be safely assumed that there are few, if
any, subjects that cannot convincingly be dealt with in graphic form. In fact, there
are more and more cases where the graphic form is the preferred mode of telling
about real-life events, which raises the question why so many authors and readers
trust this mode of representation as much as they obviously do. As emphasized in
the opening part of this essay, a possible reason might be the empowerment of the
reader, who becomes an active collaborator in the meaning making process, and
thus something akin to the author’s interlocutor, when turning to life writing in the
graphic mode.
4 Bibliography
4.1 Works Cited
B., David. Epileptic. New York: Pantheon, 2005.
Barry, Lynda. One! Hundred! Demons! Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2002.
Barthes, Roland. “L’Effect de Réel.” Communications 12 (1968): 84–89.
Beaty, Bart. “Autobiography as Authenticity.” A Comics Studies Reader. Ed. Jeet Heer and Kent
Worcester. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 226–235.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Böger, Astrid. “Conquering Silence: David Small’s Stitches and the Art of Getting Better.”
Amerikastudien/American Studies 56.4 (2011): 603–616.
Brabner, Joyce and Harvey Pekar. Our Cancer Year. Illustrations by Frank Stack. New York and
Philadelphia: Running Press Book Publishers, 1994.
Chaney, Michael A. Graphic Subjects. Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels.
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
Chute, Hillary L. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2 (2008): 452–465.
Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women. Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia
El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics. Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. “Transnational Identity as Shape-Shifting: Metaphor and Cultural Resonance
in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese.” Transnational Perspectives on Graphic
Narratives. Comics at the Crossroads. Ed. Denson, Shane, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein.
London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 33–47.
9 Life Writing 217
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa,
the African. New York: Random House, Inc., 2004 [1789].
Finck, Almut. Autobiographisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der Autobiographie. Berlin: Erich
Schmidt, 1999.
Gardner, Jared. “Autography’s Biography, 1972–2007.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 1–26.
Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca:
Green, Justin. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. San Francisco: Last Gasp Eco Funnies,
1972.
Green, Katie. Lighter Than My Shadow. London: Random House, 2013.
Guibert, Emmanuel, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier. The Photographer. Translated by
Alexis Siegel. New York and London: First Second, 2009.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard
Leavitt, Sarah. Tangles. A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me. New York: Skyhorse
Publishing, 2012.
Lejeune, Philippe. “The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiogaphy. Ed. Paul John Eakin, translated
by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 3–30.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
“Panel: Comics and Autobiography. Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and
Carol Tyler. Moderated by Deborah Nelson. May 19, 2012.” Comics & Media. Critical Inquiry.
40.3 (2014): 86–103.
Pedri, Nancy. “Graphic Memoir: Neither Fact Nor Fiction.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels.
Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Narratologia 37. Ed. Stein,
Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. 127–153.
Sacco, Joe. Palestine. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001 [1993].
Sacco, Joe. Public Presentation of his work at the Graphic Novel Days, Hamburg, April 10, 2012
(unpublished).
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. Paris: L’Association, 2003.
Schmid, Johannes C.P. Shooting Pictures, Drawing Blood. The Photographic Image in the Graphic
War Memoir. Yellow. Schriften zur Comicforschung 5. Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag,
2016.
Schwalm, Helga. “Autobiography.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn et. al.
Hamburg: Hamburg University. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/autobiography [view
date: 19 Aug 2016].
Small, David. Stitches: A Memoir. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Smith, Sidonie. “Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and
Transnational Rescue Networks.” Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and
Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael A. Chaney. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
61–72.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon,
1991.
Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Viking Adult Press, 2004.
Thompson, Craig. Blankets. A Graphic Novel. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2003.
Watson, Julia. “Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 27–58.
Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4
(2006): 965–979.
218 Astrid Böger
Whitlock, Gillian, and Anna Poletti. “Self-Regarding Art.” Biography 31.1 (2008): v–xxiii.
Williams, Ian. “Autography as Auto-Therapy: Psychic Pain and the Graphic Memoir.” Journal of
Medical Humanities 32.4 (2011): 353–366.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: Square Fish/Macmillan, 2006.
4.2 Further Reading

Denson, Shane, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, eds. Transnational Perspectives on Graphic
Narratives. Comics at the Crossroads. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Ditschke, Stephan, Katerina Kroucheva, and Daniel Stein. Comics. Zur Geschichte und Theorie
eines populärkulturellen Mediums. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009.
Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels. Stories to Change your Life. London: Aurum Press Ltd., 2005.
Kukkonen, Karin. Studying Comics and Graphic Novels. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2013.
Schüwer, Martin. Wie Comics erzählen. Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen
Literatur. WVT-Handbücher und Studien zur Medienkulturwissenschaft 1. Trier:
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008.
Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History. The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and
Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989.
Anna Oleszczuk
10 Gender
Abstract: This chapter discusses the gendered nature of comics as a medium, as an
industry, and as texts through which various narratives are told. The first section
introduces the social construct of gender and describes it in the context of sex and
expressions of desire. The chapter then maps out the changes in the understanding
of gender over the last hundred years in Anglophone countries of the so-called
Western world and proceeds to establish them in relation to the evolution of comics.
In order to do so, it reviews selected examples from comics history focusing espe-
cially on those which, influenced by various incarnations of feminism (both in theo-
ry and practice), challenge the patterns of male domination and go beyond the tra-
ditional view of gender roles. The final section identifies the main remaining
gender-related problems in comics and looks at pioneering work that has already
been done to solve them.
Key Terms: gender, social construct, feminism, male domination, sex, gender roles
1 Introduction
Gender is an essential element of people’s social lives that shapes both their identifi-
cation and categorization. The dominant understanding of gender presupposes its
congruence with sex and expressions of desire and establishes a heterosexist male/
female masculine/feminine dichotomy as the norm of cultural intelligibility (Butler
1990, 22). However, over the last century, feminist scholars and activists have been
questioning the patterns of male domination and challenging their necessity as well
as desirability. This resulted in some drastic changes in gender-related attitudes and
policies; moreover, the complexity of the construct was also revealed. Thus, various
social practices and contexts of gender that had previously been considered uniform
(or, if deemed unfit, excluded from the general discourse) were embraced by inter-
sectionality that allowed to take into account the wide variety of gendered catego-
ries (such as race, ethnicity, class, etc.) and demonstrated the ways in which they
have been reinforced across cultures and over time.
Hence, it is hardly surprising that comics, as a medium using narratives to tell
stories as well as a product of culture that always exists within its sociopolitical
context, are highly gendered and shaped by the social norms surrounding the orga-
nization of knowledge and power relations of gender, class, and race. Similar to
other media, for the majority of the last century comics relied on the perpetuation
of unrealistic and stereotypical portrayals of gender, underrepresentation of women
and minorities, and distorted representations of cultural and social lives.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-011
220 Anna Oleszczuk
Two gendered archetypes of the superhero genre are a good example of the
heavy reliance on gender stereotyping and biases that are deeply ingrained in West-
ern societies. Superman, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the 1940s, con-
tributed to the popularization of the medium and provided a lasting template for
the desired: one-dimensional and heavily exaggerated masculinity; the comic thus
played a prominent role in both propagating the view that comics are “for boys”
and in leading readers “to value and identify with the hypermasculine rather than
other potentially radical, liberating, or transgressive gender traits” (Brown 2000,
176). In contrast, the first female superhero, Wonder Woman, introduced at the be-
ginning of World War II (in 1941) by William Moulton Marston, is a curious example
of a character originally designed as feminist and targeted at boys with an intention
to alter the prevailing feminine archetype. The idea of a liberated and liberating
woman was so far ahead of its time that it died with the writer. Robert Kanigher,
who took over the character, wrote her as yearning for traditional gender roles,
oftentimes helpless and romance-oriented. Still, the impact of Wonder Woman on
both the superhero genre and comics readership is undeniable. As an icon for fe-
male empowerment, she appealed to many young girls who had previously felt un-
welcome in the male-dominated comics industry (Finn 2013, 18).
Since the creation of these two characters, comics have, of course, featured
various (super)heroes disrupting the patriarchy more successfully or even existing
outside the gender binary altogether. However, many negative preconceptions
about mainstream comics’ portrayal of men and women can be traced back to Su-
perman and Wonder Woman. Thus, despite the fact that the potential of comics to
conceptualize and introduce the quality of being different from the heterosexist cul-
tural standard has been utilized more and more frequently (as evidenced by the
presentation of previously marginalized characters and themes from a new perspec-
tive in the mainstream American comics), numerous researchers assert that main-
stream comics reflect nationalistic, sexist, and homophobic ideologies and that fem-
inist and queer themes can be found only in a few graphic novels and some
alternative or independent comics.
2 Doing and Undoing Gender

No detailed discussion of gender can be complete without establishing the crucial
distinction between sex and gender. While the former is “a determination made
through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria” (West and Zim-
merman 1987, 127) resulting in the general categories of females and males, the
latter eludes simple definition and has been given multiple meanings over the last
one hundred years or so. The first systems of gender recognition relied on an implic-
it or explicit notion that social and cultural differences and inequalities between
men and women can be attributed to sex and biology (McElhinny 2003, 23). How-
10 Gender 221
ever, shifts in the understanding of biological and cultural processes brought about
gradual theoretical reconceptualizations. Gender stopped being seen as a fixed at-
tribute and started to be perceived as something that can be done as “the activity
of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and
activities appropriate for one’s sex category” (West and Zimmerman 1987, 127) or
expressed as “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that
identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be
its results” (Butler 1990, 34).
The aforementioned framework of “doing gender” is currently the most com-
mon perspective in both contemporary sociological studies (Risman and Davis 2013,
741) and queer and feminist discourses that recognize the plurality and multidimen-
sionality of masculinities and femininities as well as the need to include other cat-
egories in the gender and politics scholarship as “the insistence upon the coherence
and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultur-
al, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are
constructed” (Butler 1990, 19). Thus, it has been suggested that the categories of
difference should be incorporated in the concepts of gendered bodies and gendered
experiences, with race considered as a social construction “signifying the simulta-
neous distinguishing and positioning of groups vis-a-vis one another” (Higgin-
botham 1992, 253) and feminist theories acknowledging the inseparable connection
between race, gender, class and other dimensions of identity, such as sexualities
and border and transgender identities (Keenan 2003, 121).
If the theoretical and critical literature on gender has been undergoing so many
profound changes, it is no wonder that throughout the last century, attitudes to the
expressions of gender, gendered bodies, and gendered spaces have been shifting
and the culturally imposed social norms (re)creating a system of privilege based on
the “performative reinforcement [...] through a problematic reliance on an ‘other’
less privileged identity” (Haslam 2015, 114) have been coming under close scrutiny
in various cultural texts, including comics.
3 Desired He, Valuable She

With the emergence of comic books in the 1930s that allowed for more widespread
publication of original stories as well as the further development and codification
of specific styles, the creative content of comics became somewhat limited by the
formulaic nature of genres, especially the ones in which characters pursuing all
kinds of justice had to “operate in the context of the male, white, heterosexual
realm, with women primarily portrayed as young, sexual objects in need of protec-
tion” (Phillips and Strobl 2013, 140). In fact, one could say that notions of gender
and other categories of difference, their transformative histories, mutually compli-
cating relationships, and theoretical discourses on them run parallel to the evolu-
222 Anna Oleszczuk
tion of comics. Since the origins of the medium, these issues have been implicated
in it on a number of levels as they have been defining and determining what was
considered valued and valuable (gendered) body in terms of authorship, readers,
and characters. Consequently, comics started off as a medium privileging white,
straight men, rife with images of hegemonic masculinity “implicitly or even explicit-
ly reaffirming the ‘natural’ dissimilarities of males and females” (Kareithi 2014, 35).
This can be illustrated by a number of examples from well-known early American
comics. Prince Valiant travels the world fighting numerous enemies while women
around him die, get kidnapped, or are used to further the storyline by getting mar-
ried and giving birth. Superman keeps saving Lois Lane who, in her vanity, rejects
his alter ego, Clark Kent, because he lacks traditional masculine features she associ-
ates with desirability (Pecora 1992, 63). DC Comics’ Captain Marvel falls in love with
Beautia Sivana, a tall blonde who is so beautiful that Captain Nazi considers her
the perfect Aryan.
One could argue that these portrayals of women as secondary characters are
largely dependent on the historical context of their creation: she had to be subordi-
nate to him and what made her “valuable” was almost exclusively her appearance.
However, the practice of underrepresenting and misrepresenting people who do not
fall into the category of white heteronormative men understood as “hard, tough,
independent, sexually aggressive, unafraid, violent, totally in control of all emo-
tions, and – above all – in no way feminine” (Wood 2010, 260) has continued
throughout the 20th century and well into the 21st.
As mentioned above, Marston’s Wonder Woman was the first successful and
widely popular female superhero, originally meant to challenge the “damsel in dis-
tress” trope and reflect feminist views of the times. Still, the creator’s notion of an
independent and empowered woman, a heroic Amazon, was only possible within
the very conventional femininity of weak and submissive Diana Prince. After several
years of careful reconciliation of these two spheres, the character lost much of its
integrity with Marston’s death and for many years to come her roles and privileges
were to be portrayed as inferior to those assigned to men.
Other important genres of late 1940s and early 1950s are romance and crime
comics. The former relied on the reiterations of traditional gender roles (with the
wife’s subservience to her husband); however, their portrayal of the problems of
married life was realistic and reflected “loneliness, financial constraints, neglect,
and boredom” (Gardner 2013, 22) that shaped the lives of many women of that peri-
od. This contributed to an increase in female readership: in the early 1950s about
half of all comic book readers were female (Lavin 1998, 96). At the same time “true
crime” comics often had women portrayed almost exclusively as sex objects subject-
ed to extreme violence (including rapes) and having no voice of their own. However,
further evolution of both genres was hindered by the implementation of the Comics
Code in the United States that followed the publication of Fredric Wertham’s Seduc-
tion of the Innocent in 1954. This self-regulatory body set the standards for future
10 Gender 223
mainstream portrayals of masculinities and femininities, reinforced the hegemonic

perception of deviant men and women and rejected any attempts at cultural trans-
formations and equality: “As to the ‘advanced femininity,’ what are the activities in
comic books which women ‘indulge in on equal footing with men’? They do not
work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother-love is en-
tirely absent” (Wertham 1955, 233–234).
The early days of comics and the assembly-line-like production of comic art in
the Golden Age that largely coincided with World War II required a substantial
workforce which led to the employment of women artists and scripters in the indus-
try (though, unfortunately, their work is difficult to trace as many of them had to
create anonymously). However, the progressing conservatism of the late 1950s and
the years following the establishment of the Code saw the reconfiguration of the
market. Increased gender-based stereotyping of labor, domesticity, and fun resulted
in the profound shifts in the genre’s popularity and a sharp decline in non-male
creators entering the field (Robbins 1993, 66).
Thus, it is not surprising that mainstream female characters of the era were few
and heavily policed. Superheroines would reflect the prevailing notion of women
being “intellectually weaker to men because of their inability to control their emo-
tions, particularly their romantic drive” (Donaldson 2013, 148). Indeed, the protect-
ed male space of heroic identity and the belief, reinforced by the Code, that the
public sphere belonged to men and the domestic to women relegated the already
marginalized heroines to cooking, cleaning, sewing, decorating, planning wed-
dings, and raising children (Donaldson 2013, 151). In other words, their storylines
had them devoted to maintaining the heterosexual patriarchal order and set distinct
boundaries of ‘valuable’ femininity.
However, the anti-establishment phenomenon gaining momentum in the West-
ern world in the mid-1960s as well as social tensions drawing attention to the issues
of women’s rights, sexuality, modes of authority, and military build-up that coincid-
ed with the turn of the Silver and Bronze Ages of Comic Books, led to some main-
stream attempts to attract more diversified readers and, what is more noteworthy,
to the emergence of an underground comix scene rejecting the de facto censorship
by the CCA. Shocking in their explicit portrayal of sex (including non-heteronorma-
tive sex), diverse gender expressions, violence, and drug use, comix would often
engage with socially relevant issues such as societal norms, expectations, and bias-
es as well as sexism, sexual abuse, or abortion. While strong political messages
were more common in underground works having ties with feminist movements
and created by women (e. g. Trina Robbins, Diane Noomin, and Barbara “Willy”
Mendes publishing in Wimmen’s Comix), men’s stories did not shy from social com-
mentaries, either, though they were considered more controversial as many of them
relied on the glorification of violence and misogyny (e. g. Zap Comix with works by
Robert Crumb, Robert Williams, etc.) (↗2 History, Formats, Genres).
Though the 1970s are characterized not only by shifts in the desirability of story-
lines and plot elements but also the disappearance of some traditional genres and
224 Anna Oleszczuk
expansion of previously marginal formats and stories, the popularity of the superhe-
ro genre was safeguarded by the careful incorporation of socially relevant real-life
issues (e. g. cautionary tales about drug use), significant rise in the number of non-
white protagonists as well as strong, confident, and capable women (see Uncanny
X-Men written by Christopher S. Claremont in 1975–1991 for an example of comic
books with female superheroes performing alternative femininities and exploring
progressive ideas about racial and class categories). Furthermore, the number of
women working in the mainstream industry slowly started to increase. In the 1980s,
two titans of the industry, Marvel and DC Comics, acknowledged the gap in gender
representation among their creators and made some effort to improve female em-
ployment prospects in their companies, in particular by hiring women as editors
and writers (Robbins 1993, 108–109). However, despite the recognition of a shortage
of female creators (and readers) and an attempt to remedy the situation, the stereo-
typical gender-based views that had managed to take hold in the comic book indus-
try and explicitly favored men, made it difficult for women to win positions among
the leading writers and artists. In fact, as Robbins points out, some of them worked
under male pseudonyms, credited their work to male associates, partners, or hus-
bands, or created works that were altogether uncredited (1993, 113).
The Dark Age of Comic Books that followed the Bronze Age and is considered
to continue through the present day saw the rise of independent publishers and a
drastic increase in the popularity of artistic stories based on contemporary reality
tackling difficult social issues (↗9 Life Writing). This led to the expansion and diver-
sification of the market. While the beginnings of this period were plagued by the
hypersexualization of both feminine and masculine traits, this trend recently seems
to be on the decline, with gender stereotypes often undergoing explicit or implicit
deconstruction in the comic books of the 21st century. Furthermore, the connection
between gender and other categories of difference is getting progressively more visi-
ble in the stories published in mainstream, alternative, and independent comic
books regardless of their genre.
The case studies that follow focus on retracing the challenge to the patterns of
hegemonic male domination and explore the ways in which comic books go beyond
the traditional view of gender roles. The examples chosen to illustrate potential
relationships between comics and gender are by no means representative of all the
genres existing in the industry and their selection was driven mainly by their suit-
ability to the topic at hand as well as availability in the author’s region.
4 (Elf )quest Against Hegemonic Gender

Expectations
Elfquest, imagined by Wendy Pini and created by her and her husband, Richard,
occupies a significant place in the history of alternative comic books. Launched in
10 Gender 225
1978, the series had been published by the authors for 40 years through a number
of independent and mainstream companies and ended with the last issue released
by Dark Horse Comics in 2018. Its narrative is centered around a group of elves and
their wolf-pack who are forced into migration by humans and trolls and embark on
a “quest” in the course of which they discover that they are descendants of alien
colonists and have to learn to navigate their new-found identity in an increasingly
multiracial and multicultural world. The Pinis’ series is carefully planned, and the
details and scope of their world-building as well as the ability to flawlessly incorpo-
rate subtle shifts in storylines in response to the constant changes in the socio-
political space and time of its production have cultural and analytical value in
themselves.
Still, Elfquest is equally, if not more, remarkable for its interrogation of the inter-
play between gendered categories of difference, including sexuality, race, and class.
Yet the research potential of the series has gone largely unnoticed by both comics
studies and gender studies, with just a handful of scholarly publications. Guillaume
sees that as an extension of prejudices against female readers and creators in the
male-oriented industry and speculates that “the ‘prettiness’ of the drawings and the
fact that it serves a fantasy narrative addressing young people as well as adults may
seem to downplay the subversive potential of the work in the eyes of critics” (2016).
Nevertheless, there is no question that even without being a highly institutionalized
text, Elfquest is fully capable of questioning gender and offering insights into the
shifting nature of sexual practices and power structures. Set in the universe defined
by multidimensional diversities, it
sculpts a progressive future for an evolved humanity, one in which the pre-1968-era extreme
heteronormativity, rigid hierarchies and crushing monoculturalism [...] are dispatched in fa-
vour of a new world order based on sexual liberation, acceptance of divergent ideologies and
ethnic and social pluralism. (Saunders 2017, 2).
The progression of the relationship between seemingly heteronormative protago-

nists of the series, Leetah, a female healer, and Cutter, a male warrior, is a clear
illustration of this thesis. While such stereotypical division of tasks is common in
fantastic fiction, in Elfquest it is not predicated on gender, as individual choices
outweigh social conventions. Leetah’s profession is an expression of her prowess in
controlling life and death and she is by no means deprived of power. Furthermore,
while Cutter’s first attempt at winning her is originally grounded in the romanti-
cized violence against women, a subversive vision of male and female identities
follows: the warrior is revealed to lack both knowledge and ability to keep her im-
prisoned and the healer is given the sole agency over her fate and is shown as
enabling the development of new social relations and transgressing the accepted
norms in choosing a partner of different race and caste “tainted” by wolf blood.
Wendy Pini’s unusual art style that hybridizes Japanese shoujo manga and an-
ime with mainstream American visual language characterized by Cohn as “Kirbyan”
226 Anna Oleszczuk
(2013, 139) allows for the production of new combinations of degendered traits: re-
gardless of their sex, Pini’s characters are often portrayed in dynamic poses aimed
to establish them as objects of desire and to convey their power and androgynous
beauty. Where Kirbyan language of comics draws “bodies [that] are often physically
exaggerated – men are more muscular, women are more curvy” (Cohn 2013, 140),
Pini consistently accentuates muscles, large eyes, and elaborate hair styles to indi-
cate the attractiveness of all her elves and free them from the limits circumscribed
by the gendered aspects of appearance, recognizing that it is the biological gender
dimorphism that constitutes “the most basic power dynamic in society, allowing
men to coerce women with their stronger bodies and dominance-driven behavior”
(Dvorsky and Hughes 2008, 1).
Nowhere is this condemnation of social norms more evident than in the treat-
ment of sexuality in the series: sex positivity functions as an essential part of elvish
identity and throughout the series the race goes from (mostly) heterosexual libera-
tion to omnisexuality as the default label. Expressions of desire and love are coded
quite fluidly and relationships are neither institutionalized, nor limited to two peo-
ple of different genders. Furthermore, Elfquest emphasizes the significance of con-
sent and freedom of choice both in relation to sexual acts and performances of
masculinities and femininities and uses narrative to explicitly stigmatize gender
stereotyping and prejudices and reveal them to be social constructs existing in par-
ticular cultures.
Unlike many other comics featuring action heroines inspired by American su-
perheroes, the series does not feature sexualized violence and purposefully decon-
structs the male/female hierarchy (as revealed by Wendy Pini in numerous inter-
views). In fact, a study of gender roles in Elfquest conducted in the 1990s revealed
that “female characters are actually less likely to need to be rescued than male
characters are and are about equally likely to be shown in the nude” (Russell 1987,
35). As for 40 years the series had been embracing diversity and emphasizing that
“enlightened individual choice must prevail over prejudice and restrictive cultural
codes” (Guillaume 2016, 8), one can only assume that this quantitative equality did
not diminish with time.
5 Compliant or Not? Gender Stratification of Bitch

Planet
If Elfquest offers a gentle and utopian vision of a society shaped by progressive
cultural and social values, Bitch Planet created in 2014 by writer Kelly Sue DeCon-
nick and artist Valentine De Landro is a dystopian feminist story characterized by
pessimism and rage. Its central plot is set in a reality in which human women who
are considered non-compliant are sent to an off-world prison called Auxiliary Com-
10 Gender 227
pliance Outpost (or Bitch Planet). It is an explicitly intersectional feminist comic

series with a story that focuses primarily on the marginalized characters incarcerat-
ed on the Bitch Planet for crimes ranging from assault and murder to “follicular
mutilation” (in other words, shaving one’s hair), marital neglect, unauthorized
birth, irreversible ill-temper, a number of “aesthetic offenses” (like the so-called
“wanton obesity” or refusing to conform to various beauty standards), seduction
and emotional manipulation, gender falsification (i. e. being a transwoman), and
being queer.
The series flirts with the concept of the performativity of gender and sexual
identity with a number of characters who in the world of the comic cannot be cate-
gorized as neither male nor female due to their non-compliance with the sexist and
patriarchal social norms. While all of these characters identify as women, the out-
side world refuses to see them as such and strips them of their citizen rights. Thus,
their non-binary status is external as it is the society (run by the group of older men
called the “Fathers”) that does not see them as females and tries to find causes
(e. g. hormonal imbalance) of their failure to fit in the community based on perform-
ing socially acceptable roles that fit into the binary categories of masculine and
feminine within the heterosexual framework. People whose self-identification goes
beyond intelligible genders (in other words, women who do not maintain the heter-
osexual, male dominant relations and transgender women) experience severe social
consequences culminating in incarceration. In some, this heightens sensitivity to
the patterns of sociocultural inequalities. As Kirkpatrick points out “oppression so
conceived enables consideration of identity as non-hierarchical and provides a valu-
able opportunity to challenge and destabilise binary thinking” (2017, 137).
The series’ disruption of traditional gender assumptions and an emphasis on
gender performativity are cemented by the introduction of a transgender character,
Muenda “Morowa” Kogo, who is one of the inmates on Bitch Planet joining the
revolutionary forces of non-compliant women. By portraying the destruction of “the
supposedly ‘human’ utopian future that would deny a place for those who don’t
meet its narrow identity categories” (Haslam 2015, 224), this still unfinished series
centers around the position of women of various ethnicities, classes, social stand-
ing, and sexualities as either the rebels (openly embracing the differences) or the
exploited (trying to navigate the masculine-dominated world outside).
The creators of this series intentionally use it to engage in the discussions of
privilege, power, as well as hypersexualization and archetypes of women in science
fiction. Each issue of Bitch Planet features a meta-commentary on the present times,
including advertisement pages satirizing modern day sexism and featuring essays
on feminism and the body image. Thus, both Bitch Planet and Bitch Planet become
“powerful sites of resistance where disempowered women (fictional and real) find
power in seeing each other, seeing difference, and seeing resistance” (Kirkpatrick
2017, 140).
228 Anna Oleszczuk
6 Making Gender Trouble or Gender Troubling the

Makers?
Ultimately, the arguments that this chapter has made are that gender, intersected
with other categories of difference, is a powerful construct that has had a significant
impact on comic books since the very beginnings and that noticing its importance
can offer new ways of both reading and creating comics. The discussion of two,
otherwise rather different, series showed that public awareness of the diversity of
femininities and masculinities and their representation in various comic genres has
been evolving: at first, rather slowly but over the last decade quite rapidly. This is
connected with the increase in the number of female creators operating within the
mainstream genres who choose to challenge the patterns of hegemonic male domi-
nation and go beyond the traditional view of gender roles. Furthermore, modern
technologies enabled the development of webcomics that can and often are used by
the disempowered groups to facilitate representation and ensure inclusivity. Emerg-
ing on the intersection of participatory and convergence cultures and utilizing the
potential of the Internet for deconstructing many of the traditional boundaries and
creating web collectives for the underrepresented groups, webcomics provide a
space for the non-male fans and creators and often become “weapons of interven-
tion in the gender and comics debate” (Scott 2012). While some are unsuccessful at
making gender trouble due to their inability to completely dissociate gender from
sex, others, like Rain started in 2010 by the transgender woman artist and writer
Jocelyn Samara, push at the boundaries of what is possible and allowed to create
(and think) when it comes to the areas of gender and sexuality.
7 Bibliography
7.1 Works Cited

Brown, Jeffrey A. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2000.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,
1990.
Sequential Images. London: A&C Black, 2013.
Donaldson, Thomas C. “Ineffectual Lass Among the Legions of Superheroes: The Marginalization
and Domestication of Female Superheroes, 1955–1970.” Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men. Ed.
Julian C. Chambliss et. al. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 139–
152.
Dvorsky, George and James Hughes. “Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary.” IEET
Monograph Series. 2008.
10 Gender 229
Finn, Michelle R. “William Marston’s Feminist Agenda.” The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on
the Amazon Princess in Changing Times. Ed. Joseph J. Darowski. Jefferson: McFarland &
Company, 2013. 7–21.
Gardner, Jeanne E. “She Got Her Man, But Could She Keep Him? Love and Marriage in American
Romance Comics, 1947–1954.” The Journal of American Culture 36 (2013): 16–24.
Guillaume, Isabelle L. “Women W.a.R.P.Ing Gender in Comics: Wendy Pini’s Elfquest as Mixed
Power Fantasy.” Revue de Recherche En Civilisation Américaine 6 (Dec. 2016).
https://journals.openedition.org/rrca/755.
Haslam, Jason. Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction: Reflections on Fantastic Identities.
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of
Race.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17. 2 (1992): 251–274.
Kareithi, Peter J. “Hegemonic Masculinity in Media Contents.” Media and Gender a Scholarly
Agenda for the Global Alliance on Media and Gender. Ed. Aimée Vega Montiel. UNESCO,
2014. 34–39.
Keenan, Deirdre. “Race, Gender, and Other Differences in Feminist Theory.” The Handbook of
Language and Gender. Ed. Miriam Meyerhoff and Janet Holmes. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2003. 110–128.
Kirkpatrick, Ellen. “‘You Need to Learn to See Yourself through the Fathers’ Eyes’: Feminism,
Representation, and the Dystopian Space of Bitch Planet.” Feminist Review 116.1 (2017): 134–
142.
Lavin, Michael R. “Women in Comic Books.” Serials Review 24.2 (1998): 93–100.
McElhinny, Bonnie. “Theorizing Gender in Sociolinguistic Anthropology.” The Handbook of
Language and Gender. Ed. Miriam Meyerhoff and Janet Holmes. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2003. 69–97.
Meyerhoff, Miriam, and Janet Holmes, eds. The Handbook of Language and Gender. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
Pecora, Norma. “Superman/Superboys/Supermen.” Men, Masculinity and the Media. Edited by
Steve Craig. London: SAGE, 1992, 61–77.
Phillips, Nickie D., and Staci Strobl. Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way. New
York: NYU Press, 2013.
Risman, Barbara J., and Georgiann Davis. “From Sex Roles to Gender Structure.” Current
Sociology 61.5–6 (2013): 733–755.
Saunders, Robert A. “The Identity Politics of Elfquest at 40: Moving Beyond Race, Class and
Gender?” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2017): 1–25.
Scott, Suzanne. “Fangirls in Refrigerators: The Politics of (in)Visibility in Comic Book Culture.”
Transformative Works and Cultures, 13, 2012. https://journal.transformativeworks.org/
index.php/twc/article/view/460/384.
Robbins, Trina. A Century of Women Cartoonists. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.
Russell, Robyn. The Women in Elfquest: The Fantasy and the Fandom. Fairbanks: University of
Alaska. 1987.
Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. London: Museum Press Ltd, 1955.
West, Candice, and Don H. Zimmerman. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1.2 (1987): 125–151.
Wood, Julia T. Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture. Boston: Cengage Learning,
2010.
230 Anna Oleszczuk
7.2 Further Reading

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,
1990.
Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia
Gomez, Betsy, editor. CBLDF Presents: She Changed Comics. Berkeley: Image Comics, 2016.
Kennedy, Martha H. Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists. Jackson:
Parson, Sean, and J. L. Schatz, editors. Superheroes and Masculinity: Unmasking the Gender
Performance of Heroism. Staten Island: Lexington Books, 2019.
Robbins, Trina. Pretty In Ink: Women Cartoonists 1896–2013. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013.
Robinson, Lillian. Wonder Women. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth. Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and
Anime. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015.
Wood, Julia T. Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture. Boston, MA: Cengage
Learning, 2010.
Kay Sohini
11 Queerness
Abstract: The graphic narrative is a mode of storytelling that is able to combine
the larger sociocultural context with individual accounts by juxtaposing words and
pictures. Hillary Chute posits that the “form calls attention to what we as readers
see and do not see of the subject: the legibility of the subject as a literal – that is to
say, readable issue to encounter” (2010, 142). In that vein, I contend that comics,
by using the pictorial space, enable their subjects to perform their liminal identities,
which facilitates the investigation of complex issues that defy conventional repre-
sentation. In essence, author-protagonists are able to make tangible their sense of
cultural/emotional homelessness, of feeling in-between spaces due to their (inter-
sections of) marginalized identities, such as being queer and/or disabled and/or a
person of color. Overall, this chapter looks at how intimate pictorial accounts of
individuals subvert dominant discourses that privilege heteronormativity, and how
queer comics contribute considerably and meaningfully in the visibility of LGBTQ
lives.
Key Terms: Comics, queerness, intersectionality, mental health, representation,

race, sexuality, gender
1 Introduction
In comics, creators do not describe sound in words. Instead of writing “the crash
emanated an ear-splitting noise,” the verbal signifier of the sound made by the
event – such as “boom” or “pow pow” – is enclosed in jagged speech bubbles.
Similarly, a moving object’s speed is not indicated by means of verbal description,
but by drawing horizontal lines extending across the length of the object and a little
beyond – termed “motion lines” by Scott McCloud in his formative work on comic
theory Understanding Comics, or as “speed lines” by Eisner in Comics and Sequential
Art. As Eisner points out, the nature of the frame of the page, panels, and speech
bubbles can be utilized “to convey something of the dimension of sound and emo-
tional climate in which action occurs, as well as contributing to the atmosphere of
the page as a whole” (2008, 46). In essence, the versatility of the form allows the
author to transmit information to the reader in the form of sensory images, or her-
meneutic images, i. e., images that evoke the senses, and those that directly address
the reader, and/or provide a commentary on the story, instead of being part of the
story itself. Through visual footnotes, overlapping panels, shifts in color tone, words
that function as images and vice versa; each page in comics can contain a wealth
of information, simplified by means of a range of visual rhetorical devices. Although
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-012
232 Kay Sohini
as medium, comics make use of a specialized language to make meaning and read-
ers are not necessarily trained in the rules of its syntax, there is a universal quality
to its language owing to the form’s intuitive simplicity. Even when it comes to con-
texts that are culturally or geographically specific, by evoking emotions through
“commonality of [human] experience,” comics are able to communicate affectively
with the reader (Eisner 2008, 13).
More importantly, the medium enables form and content to come together to
articulate complex identities that fall at the intersection of multiple marginalities,
such as being queer and a person of color, queer and disabled, queer and an immi-
grant, etc. By materializing the characters’ or the author-protagonist’s story on the
page through associations as well as disassociations, the visual makes present what
is absent. In other words, in using a host of universally recognizable symbols, comic
books find a way to “represent the invisible” (McCloud 1994, 129), rendering the
comic creators and its readers “partners in the invisible creating something out of
nothing time and again” (205). In this chapter, a thorough examination of a range
of queer comics supports my claim that the graphic narrative form is exceptionally
well suited for articulating liminal, marginalized, and intersectional identities
through its hybrid form, which accommodates perspectives and nuances that fall
outside the potential of purely textual forms and allows for pluralistic representa-
tion.
In the first section, I cover the rise of queer comics, the underground comix
movement, and its contribution to queer representation in pop culture. I begin with
a brief review of Bechdel’s pathbreaking Dykes to Watch Out For (↗26 Alison Bech-
del, Dykes to Watch Out For) followed by more contemporary, young adult specula-
tive fiction – Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam, and Beldan Sezen’s Snapshots of a Girl,
a memoir about coming out in a Muslim and immigrant culture. Following a review
of the contemporary queer comics scene, I then move to detailed analyses of three
sub-genres of queer comics, to elaborate how comics creators use the medium to
articulate their marginal, liminal and often intersectional identities. The first text I
focus on is Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home – an ‘autofictionalbiography’ (a term coined
by Lynda Barry in One Hundred Demons), where the author-protagonist reorders her
memories in a way that that reveals a greater “emotional truth” (Gloeckner et. al.
2014, 193; ↗9 Life Writing). The second is Amruta Patil’s Kari – a South Asian work
of partially surrealist queer fiction that draws on eco-critical elements and environ-
mental pollution as a metaphor for how queer people feel claustrophobic due to
conventional love laws. The last text I look at is Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania,
Depression, Michelangelo and Me – a comic that has been largely categorized as a
‘graphic medicine’ memoir, where Forney, a queer comic artist, uses the image-
textual space to explicate the intersection of mental illness and her sexuality.
11 Queerness 233
2 The Rise of Queer Comics: A Brief Review

In 2017, Hillary Chute, declared LGBT comics the fastest growing sub-genre in the
field (Paris Review). The rise in queer comics was likely begun by Bechdel in 1983,
with Dykes to Watch Out For – a serialized comic about a countercultural, sex posi-
tive, lesbian/bisexual group of women. in a city speculated to be Minneapolis
(↗26 Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For). The comic ran until 2008 in the form
of comic strips in Funny Times and a host of other alternate newspapers, and it has
been collected in several award-winning volumes over the years. Dykes not only
worked to normalize queer identities, but it also served as social commentary on
pressing issues of the time by means of the politically conscious band of friends.
The series contributed majorly to the visibility of lesbian lives through its relatable
narratives of the complexity of romantic love, uncertainty of careers, familial crises,
etc. As Etelka Lehoczky writes,
In depicting the characters’ emotional storms, Bechdel is constantly thinking about what com-
ics can express that they haven’t before. She treads pensively back and forth between cartoony
distillation and vulnerable realism. Approaching every strip like a formal problem, she tinkers
continually with composition and pacing, layering in nuances of feeling so that each 10- or
12-panel episode feels longer than it is. Her best strips overflow with movement and texture.
(2017)
Bechdel uses the comic form’s ability to represent narratives in a temporal manner –
where stories appear to unfold in real time – to solicit a greater affective response
from her readers, resulting in them becoming a part of the main characters’ lives,
instead of merely spectators to it. While this is not uncommon in most comics, Dykes
was able to heighten the temporal effect as it spanned over more than a decade,
facilitating a deeper bond between the characters and the readers who aged togeth-
er. It also introduced the concept of the “Bechdel Test,” which has become a univer-
sally recognized measure for examining the gender dynamics in any given work
of entertainment, especially following Feminist Frequency’s video blogging on the
subject. Although some argue that, in the wake of the critical acclaim received by
Bechdel’s later works, Dykes never entirely got its due, what it did spectacularly
was resonate across high and low cultures, especially in the North American comic
scene. On the motivation behind Dykes, Bechdel said that while she did not neces-
sarily think of herself as an activist, she “felt the vital importance of seeing an accu-
rate reflection of [her] and [her community] in the cultural mirror, so [she] decided
to create one” (qtd. in Thurman 2018). Furthermore, Dykes, being a foundational
work in queer comics, paved the way for a diverse range of up-and-coming queer
artists to manifest their own accounts of gender, sexuality and marginalization in
the comic form. Through a host of relatable characters, including Mo, who is loosely
based on Bechdel herself, and their compelling stories about life, same-sex love and
resistance politics, Dykes “translat[ed] the everyday realities of a certain slice of
234 Kay Sohini
queer life to the page” (Chute 2010, 366). The relatability of the characters along
with the work’s serial format made it an interactive project as Bechdel was able to
solicit reader responses after the publication of every installment and work them
into the following issues.
The success of Dykes eventually led to Fun Home in 2006 and Are You My Moth-
er? in 2012, both of which are full-length graphic memoirs in which Bechdel revisits
her childhood and analyzes her familial dynamics in an effort to make sense of her
ambiguous sense of (queer) Self. The first is about Bechdel’s coming out as well as
her relationship with her closeted gay father; while the sequel is concerned with
processing her unmetabolized trauma via what Lisa Diedrich aptly terms “graphic
analysis” – which is defined as “a long and difficult therapeutic and creative pro-
cess of doing and undoing the self in words and images” (2014, 183). Alongside
Bechdel, a number of other queer comic artists, such as – Samuel Delany (Bread
and Wine, 1999), Tristane Crane (How Loathsome, 2003), Dylan Edwards (Trans-
poses 2012) – gained prominence, leading to queer comics finding their way into
the mainstream with a growing number of independent comics. Since the early
2000s, likely owing to more progressive attitudes and legalization of same-sex mar-
riages in several countries, there has been an avalanche of queer comics, culminat-
ing in the increasing popularity and visibility of the genre. Queer comics have since
then expanded to sub-genres that have historically been dominated by cis-gendered
heterosexual men, such as speculative fiction, anime, and even superhero comics,
with works such as My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness (2016), Bitch Planet
(2017), and Midnighter (2015).
Recently, Tillie Walden, a twenty-three year old queer comic artist and thus far,
the youngest winner of an Eisner Award, has made a name for herself in the art of
making young adult comics that focus on the themes of women empowerment, fe-
male friendships, and queer identities. Walden’s On a Sunbeam – originally pub-
lished as a webcomic, and then in print in 2018 – takes the reader into a bittersweet
journey through space with a group of queer, non-binary, young people who restore
lost civilizations. On a Sunbeam is primarily composed of images, inasmuch as
words are used only in speech bubbles as dialogues. Since there is no omniscient
textual narration, the scene – the location, the context, the period – is set entirely
through its visual vocabulary. Moreover, the visual component aids in connecting
the dual narrative that Sunbeam comprises: the first narrative takes place in the
textual present, and it is about a group of queer space explorers, and the latter is a
flashback to the protagonist’s, Mia’s, boarding school days, where she had first met
Grace, her former partner. The characters’ non-heteronormative sexualities exist as
a seamless part of their lives, unquestioned; i. e., there is no need for coming out in
Walden’s alternate world, as there is no stigma against other sexualities resulting
in the subversion of heteronormativity being implicit but forceful in its conviction
of alterity.
When Mia, the protagonist meets Grace after a gap of five years, despite Mia
still having strong feelings for Grace, neither party makes assumptions about the
11 Queerness 235
other. The mutual respect and nuanced understanding of consent between two
young adults is Walden’s way of rewriting toxic heterosexual representations of love
often found in YA and popular culture at large. Furthermore, although the narrative
is primarily made up of women characters (except Elliot, who identifies as gender-
fluid), Walden provides no discernable reason for her choice of depiction – instead,
“the social and cultural milieu of the text is given on faith or as an obvious fact”
(Mandello). Like queerness, race too is unremarkable in Walden’s narrative, despite
two of the primary characters being women of color. However, neither queerness
nor race is invisible – it is not that the characters in the comic do not see sexuality
or color, but that they do so in ways that are equitable, indicating that humans in
their alternate world far into the future have finally transcended such differences,
by moving past definitions that thrive on exclusionary politics.
Beldan Sezen’s memoir Snapshots of a Girl is set in a reality closer to our own
that is much harsher than Sunbeam’s – where queerness is understood in terms of
difference and exclusion. In the text-heavy comic about coming out as lesbian to
her family (and to herself) as a Muslim, Turkish immigrant in Western Europe, Sez-
en writes that it is not about “fixing her[self] but about claiming a space in the
present so that [she] and [her] kind can have a past and a future” (2016, 8). Instead
of a linear narrative that eventually culminates in a closing resolution, Sezen uses
the comic form’s ability to jump across space and time without appearing disjoint-
ed, to focus on pivotal moments or ‘snapshots’ from her life that, in retrospect, led
to her discovering and coming to terms with her sexuality. The narrative resembles
an illustrated story where the text and the verbal components do not enmesh as
much as the latter exists to emphasize the effect of the former. Through a unison
(as opposed to conflation) of words and images, Sezen guides her readers through
her journey of processing her sexuality and coming to terms with her queerness
after years of denial. The first time she has sex with a woman, she writes that she
“didn’t know what to do with it” (28) and that “the excitement [she] felt in [her]
heart remained inaccessible to [her] mind” (41).
Despite the certainty of her physical attraction to women, she is compelled to go
back to dating men, because of the influence of deep-seated cultural conditioning
or “ayip” – the Turkish concept of shame (85) – that guilts young people into con-
forming, instead of being true to who they are. After years of dating men, she did
not feel emotional attachment to, and feeling suffocated in heterosexual relation-
ships, she decides to “come out” to her mother – only to be met with her disapprov-
al. However, a feminist group that she was involved with, and which “raised aware-
ness about sexism and fascism through art” (74), eventually helps Sezen confront
her sexuality and teaches her to let go of her inhibitions. She writes that after “three
days full of positive and assertive female energy,” she was finally able to voice out
her “innermost longing” and admit to her peers that she was attracted to women
(75). With her first girlfriend, who “ran away from ‘home’ and built her own” (85),
and with other lesbians of color, she finally finds the closeness and belonging that
236 Kay Sohini
was missing all her life due to a combination of having to hide her queerness, and
her liminality, resulting from “being ‘Turkish’ but not enough” and “being ‘German’
but not enough” (85). She narrates how, despite the initial discouraging disapproval
from her mother, her very religious Muslim aunt as well as her father accepted her
queer sexuality without hesitation.
This compelling anecdote reveals that even if homophobia is the predominant
approach in their culture, not all individuals abide to such oppressive ideologies.
Essentially, Sezen’s nuanced take on the subject avoids painting the entire commu-
nity as an indistinguishable mass without any individual variation or agency. She
also illustrates how the acceptance from various members of her somewhat ortho-
dox family enables her to stop feeling at odds with her cultural heritage. Overall,
through Sezen’s succinct visual prose, she is able to perceptively illustrate how “be-
ing gay is not the issue … [but] fitting into the structures of the society [is]” (113).
Sezen’s comic essentially argues that the reason heterosexuality is seen as normal –
whereas homosexuality, bisexuality, and pansexuality are seen as aberrant – is not
because one is more inherently natural than the other. Rather, since one occurs
more frequently than the others do, it (i. e. heterosexuality) has been, albeit unfairly,
established as the accepted social convention.
Although Sunbeam and Snapshots embody different kinds of representation of
queerness in comics, both are necessary inasmuch as the former reverses essential-
ist representations of queerness while the latter emphasizes the importance of real-
life first-person narratives by queer people. The comic form accommodates and en-
ables both forms of storytelling, making space for a diverse range of genres and
creators.
3 Being Female, Queer, Suicidal and South Asian

Despite the rise of queer comics in the West, there is definitely a gap in the genre
outside North America and Europe. It is not that there are fewer queer people/artists
in non-Western cultures, but that both queerness and its representation in popular
culture is often discouraged (and even materially risky) due to certain societal
norms that privileges heteronormativity above all else. In India for example, homo-
sexuality was a criminal offence until early 2019. Not only does this legislation mani-
fest in the form of social marginalization of queer individuals, but it also means a
noticeable systemic erasure and absence of queer narratives in literature and other
forms of popular culture. Amruta Patil’s Kari (2008) was the first long-form comic
with a lesbian protagonist to be published in India. Patil’s painterly prose and illus-
trations begins with a vivid description of a double suicide of a lesbian couple.
Following the prologue, the narrative briefly goes back to the beginning, when
Kari, the protagonist had first met Ruth, and fallen in love with her. Seamlessly
alternating between the past and the present, the narrative follows the protagonist –
11 Queerness 237
a somewhat suicidal and most certainly queer woman in her twenties – through
one of the more liberal cities in India. Interestingly, the city is not identified explicit-
ly until the second half of the narrative, where Patil presents us with a detailed map
of Mumbai. Until then, overcrowded trains, railway stations that are only familiar
to the local readership, and scattered references to Bollywood characterize the city
somewhat vaguely. Even the names of Patil’s characters (such as Lazarus/Ruth/An-
gel) elude identification in their non-South Asian-ness. While they would have been
seen as cultural erasure in another context, the indistinctly anglicized names in Kari
serve as a rhetorical strategy to further situate the book here, there, and every-
where – to universalize Kari’s experience as an asocial, queer woman. The genre of
Kari is hard to determine; as it falls at the intersection of queer, disability and eco-
gothic lit.
However, the thematic ambiguity becomes its strength inasmuch as it contrib-
utes to not reducing Kari’s personhood to her queer identity. Patil writes, “Kari does
her own thing without being missionary, mercenary or political about it” (Patil, qtd.
in Menezes 2012, 42). Queerness, while an indispensable part of Kari’s being, is not
her only identity or the sole subject of her narrative. Her queerness exists within
the larger narrative of navigating life, death, love, work, and everything in between.
While it is the first long-form comic in India about a lesbian protagonist, it is not
just a queer comic; while it encompasses issues of suicide, trauma, mental illness,
and cancer, it is also not quite a graphic medicine text, for it does not dwell on any
of those issues at length or exclusively. However, it makes up for its lack of depth in
terms of breadth: it consistently and consciously critiques sexist micro-aggressions,
whether it manifests through Lazarus’s entitlement on being turned down by Kari,
or the internalized misogyny amongst her female friends and how they imply that
they are not threatened by Kari due her lack of conventional femininity (Patil 2008,
23).
It also broaches the subject of domestic abuse through Delna and her dynamic
with her cis-het male partners, as well as makes a case for women’s right to safe
abortions. Kari also merges its discourse on queerness with a poignant criticism of
voyeuristic visual art forms that feeds on the misery of the underprivileged (77). It
explicates how illness, especially fatal diseases, are often fetishized, which is exhib-
ited by Kari’s own response to Angel (36), who was dying of cancer. Furthermore,
by shedding light on how homosexuality is often considered a passing phase by
some – as demonstrated by Kari’s parents (29) – and how queer people are often
forced to hide their identities for their safety, Patil’s graphic narrative serves as a
topical in-depth commentary on India’s societal attitude to its queer citizens.
Most importantly, and in a manner that is facilitated exclusively by the comic
form, Patil links the environmental crisis in Mumbai with the struggle she faces
because of being queer in a society that fears Otherness. The scattered images from
the over-crowded, over-polluted smog city serve to embody the claustrophobia that
Kari feels due to constantly being surrounded by oppressive heteronormativity. She
238 Kay Sohini
Fig. 11.1: Kari, Page 90. Making Associations.
writes that people “who travel this route every day stop smelling the sewer over the
years” (41) – a metaphor for how people become complacent to injustices faced by
minorities. Kari, on the other hand, being a deviation from the norm, finds her
canoe “cracked … in half” by the same sewer water (56). Expanding on the meta-
phor and anthropomorphizing the city, she writes:
The day I hauled myself out of the sewer – the day of the double suicide – I promised the
water I’d return her favor. That I’d unclog her sewers when she couldn’t breathe.
I earned me a boat that night.
As a boatman, you learn to row clean through the darkest water. (Patil 2008, 31)
Following this revelation, the narrative follows Kari through three pages of wordless
landscape where she purges the city’s clogged sewer with her bare hands, followed
by a cleansing shower. The lack of verbal interjection produces a “sense of timeless-
ness.” As McCloud posits, “Because of its unresolved nature, such a panel may lin-
ger in the reader’s mind. And its presence may be felt in the panels that follow it”
(1994, 102). Consequently, the boatman then, becomes a visually compelling meta-
phor for coping with her depression after the traumatic event of the failed suicide
and her former lover, Ruth, leaving her.
Throughout the narrative, with the help of spatial details that render the verbal
imagery almost tangible, Patil is able to give a readable form to Kari’s mental state
as a marginalized character, such as when the image of an isolated wrist clutching
the bedsheet vividly illustrates the urgency of her anxiety attack (2008, 90). The
sparse dialogue in the panel serves to emphasize on the “images drawn from com-
mon experience” (Eisner 2008, 16), creating meaning through association. In turn,
the reader-viewer is able to inhabit Kari’s headspace by stepping into Patil’s image-
textual rendition of trauma (fig. 11.1).
11 Queerness 239
Kari, through its evocative storytelling, demonstrates that the narrative power
of graphic narratives lie not just in their compelling visuals, but also in the empathy
they solicit by using their multi-modal medium to cover both the larger crisis and
its intimate details in equal measure. However, in a quintessentially post-modernist
manner, the narrative ends without any resolution in sight. Its structure is almost
stream-of-consciousness, depicting life as it is, unadorned by manufactured endings
or detailed plotlines. Spanning many themes – same-sex love, illness, the environ-
ment, self-absorbed lives that make us complicit in not preventing domestic abuse
even as it happens in our vicinity – the narrative ultimately culminates in a tale of
survival. At the very beginning, in two of the introductory panels, we see Ruth tee-
tering on the edge of a building and Kari freefalling, heading for the sewers (4–5).
On the final pages, we see Kari, standing on the edge of a building once again in
her PVC outfit – still in love with the woman who left her, still cynical, but no longer
teetering and no longer willing to jump off ledges for anybody (115). While there is
no certain indication of her wholly overcoming her trauma, there is definitely some
sort of transcendence in how Kari, defying the judgmental hairstylist and societal
conventions, buzzes her hair entirely to finally be at peace with her mirror image
(60) and in how she walks over to the edge and retreats (115).
4 Bisexuality, Bipolarity and a Non-Reductionist

Queer Protagonist
In Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me, Ellen Forney uses the graphic
space to illustrate the process of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and what
followed in the years after the diagnosis. Some queer comics are solely about com-
ing out of the closet. They are exclusively about queer identities (as discussed above
in Snapshots), while others are about the protagonists’ lives at large. There is a need
for both types in the genre as they each serve a distinct purpose, catering to the
needs of two different kinds of readership. In Marbles, the author-protagonist’s
queer identity is embedded in the narrative seamlessly alongside the issue of her
mental health, given that her manic and depressive episodes directly mediate her
sexual desire (or its lack). She draws her sexual encounters with both men and
women at the peak of her manic episodes, illustrating how she was “constantly
vibrating with sexual energy” (Forney 2012, 21) due to chemical imbalances in her
brain.
Representations of bisexuality as found in Marbles are necessary because they
subvert the essentialist representation of queer lives often found in popular media,
where queer characters and their sexuality are used as forms of tokenism. Forney’s
intersectional approach to representing her mental health and her sexuality defies
such reductionist representation, thereby providing a safe space for both young
240 Kay Sohini
adults and older readers in similar circumstances to find solidarity – to find their
selves mirrored in literary characters that are relatable and wholly fleshed out. For-
ney implicitly points out the importance of literary/cultural representation through
her own reliance on a host of artists, such as Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and
Virginia Woolf. Comparing herself with these famous troubled artists helped Forney
cope; she writes that “the sense of heaviness” that came with the diagnosis “was
alleviated by a back-handed sense of cred” (20).
Moreover, Forney was strongly influenced by what she later describes as “ro-
mantic preconceptions about what being a crazy artist meant” (21). She reflects on
how these (mis)conceptions had real consequences for her mental health as they
made her terrified to take lithium for fear of being rendered dull or losing her crea-
tivity. Utterly convinced by the stereotype of “the crazy artist,” she tried to justify
her resistance to medication by citing late artists who were not on medication (39).
However, over time, she learned to question and even challenge the stereotype, and
eventually agreed to be on medication – which leads to recovery from her depress-
ive phase with her creativity and artistry intact. Despite being an intimate memoir
about her personal experience with bipolar disorder, Forney’s work includes a
wealth of information about mental health and depression at large, which actively
debunks harmful stereotypes about madness and creative pursuits, that tend to in-
fluence young artists.
One of the primary reasons the comic form is indispensable to Forney’s narra-
tive is the simultaneity of threads of thought in her work (22). What is illustrated in
an orderly and engaging fashion in the comic form could easily have been lost to a
rambling stream-of-consciousness in a purely text-based medium. Since Marbles is
a text-heavy narrative, the textual is integral to it, but the text is made more legible
by the comic form – by speech bubbles, spatial organization, figures, and visual
footnotes. Content and form come together to demonstrate the full extent of the
disorder and her experience of it (49–53). They demonstrate how her “unbridled
energy” is not always a blessing but a crisis, by illustrating how the ascending cha-
os of her ideas get in the way of her being able to streamline them into real action.
The visual demonstration of her diagnosis, how the interiority of her mind feels like
too many ideas occurring to her simultaneously – “pop[ping] like popcorn” (7) –
makes palpable the urgency of her panic attacks.
Forney’s strategic placement of words as images in close proximity to each
other, crowding the page in conjunction with jagged line work and variously deviat-
ing typefaces, further demonstrates her mood disorder in the form of visual anec-
dotes. In the first half of the narrative during her manic phase, the constant unquiet
in her mind is depicted by the use of multiple speech bubbles crowded together on
a single page in a rather overwhelming manner, bordering on pandemonium. As
Eisner contends in Comics and Sequential Art, the shape of speech bubbles as well
as the lettering it encloses is “symptomatic of the artist’s own personality as well as
the character speaking” (27). Forney is both author and protagonist; the surplus of
11 Queerness 241
Fig. 11.2: Marbles, Forney. Page 14–15. Comic-ing Diagnosis.
images on the page mirroring the restless state of her mind. She recounts how she
enjoyed the sudden bursts of happiness at simple things in the early days of experi-
encing the disorder, such as walking through snowed-in Seattle at night (11).
Through her intricate illustrations, she indicates how the feeling was not ordi-
nary – it was dangerously more than normal happiness in its “exponen[tial] per-
fect[ion]” (11) – which leads to her therapist referring her to a psychiatrist immedi-
ately. Subsequently, once she descends into her depressive phase, the pages start
looking more and more bare. The clutter is replaced with minimal textual detail
and single, isolated illustrations, such as Forney curled up on the couch, almost
indistinguishable from the background, in various sedentary states (Chapter 4). As
Bechdel aptly points out, “her drawings evoke the neuron-crackling high of mania
and the schematic bleakness of depression with deft immediacy” (qtd. in Forney
2012). Eventually, Forney states that “it was really my sketchbook where I could
face my emotional demons in a wholly personal way” (92).
Drawing about her illness becomes a way of working from denial to eventual
acceptance of her diagnosis; by illustrating a listicle of symptoms of bipolar disorder
on the left and her corresponding symptoms enclosed in comic bubbles on the right
(Figure 2), she turns the clinical nature of her diagnosis into an understandable,
palpable crisis to fight and cope with. Forney’s journey to recovery starts with draw-
ing –’ comic-ing’ – about her illness. She writes that being able to “nail her feelings
down” (96) on paper in the form of drawings gave her some sort of relief. In fact,
after a series of photographs from her sketchbook incorporated into her graphic
memoir as individual self-contained pages, we eventually see the depression lifting
off her pictorial self. In the end, Forney points out that artists often aggressively
turn to pain for inspiration because there is a strong cultural obligation to do so.
She actively takes on the misconception, and subverts it by not only dismantling
the “tortured artist” ideal, but by using comic art to alleviate her pain and proving
that one does not have to be suffering to create great art.
242 Kay Sohini
5 Queerness, Familial Dynamics and Literature

Growing up as a product of a loveless marriage, Bechdel describes her childhood
Self as alternating between being emotionally stunted and craving attention from
her parents. What remained constant during these years was that she suspected her
father of some sort of ethical digression, even before she found out that he was gay.
She describes with the help of images the lengths to which her father went to con-
vert their home into what looked like a Victorian period mansion and how “he used
his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they
were not” (16). When she caught her father using a bronzing stick, she writes that –
“My father began to seem morally suspect to me long before I knew he actually had
a dark secret” (Bechdel 2007, 16).
The dark secret was that Bruce Bechdel was involved in sexual activity with an
underage boy – a secret that eventually tore their family apart even before his actual
death, which the author-protagonist describes as “a queer business – queer in every
sense of the multi-valent word” (57). What perhaps connects Bechdel inextricably
to her father’s suicide was that she had come out to her parents four months prior
to the devastating event. Although her father had seemingly been more accepting
than her determinedly disapproving mother, it was not hard for Bechdel to wonder
if her coming out triggered her father’s demise, considering that he had never been
good at accepting his own queerness, let alone his daughter’s. It was not simply
that Bruce Bechdel was appalled by his affairs with multiple men because he was
married. His inability to come to terms with his homosexuality was not about being
unfaithful in his marriage, as much as it was his abhorrence for any deviation from
conventional gender roles at large, as is evident from him trying to force young
Alison into frilly frocks and reprimanding her for being too boyish.
Being a story that “hinges more on characterization than cold plot,” (McCloud
1994, 132), Bechdel’s narrative seems more like a problem-solving quest (the kind
of investigative, auto-ethnographic writing that she further uses in Are You My
Mother?) than a straightforward recalling of memories. Instead, she mentally walks
through her past, picking up strands that best serve to demonstrate the familial
crisis. Upon pictorial dissection, these moments result in a clarity of thought that
was unavailable to her before the reordering of memories or “reiterative observa-
tion” (Cutter and Schlund-Vials 2017, 4–5). The restructuring of memory in this man-
ner gives her the opportunity “to transmit [her] anguish to the page” (78) tangibly,
leading to a sort of catharsis that helps in processing her trauma. As Hillary Chute
writes,
Bechdel often describes comics as a form of touch, explaining that drawing a person for her
can be like touching that person. The paper is like skin, she has pointed out. “It’s a figurative
stroke, because obviously the only thing I’m really making contact with is the pen and paper,
but that contact – of the nib and the ink on the paper – is very literal and sensual.” In Fun
Home – and in the later Are You My Mother? – touch is also an explicit theme of the book: if
11 Queerness 243
as a child Bechdel felt cut off from touch, and was further, irrevocably cut off from her father
because of his early death, drawing images of her father is a way to touch him and reencounter
him, to be close to him. (Chute 2017, 381)
Furthermore, aided by the unrestrictive visuals, associations flow freely both for the
readers as well as for Bechdel. She writes in Are You My Mother? that she felt the
compulsive need to reenact the memories she planned to draw, posing sometimes
as herself, and at other times as her mother/father/therapist. Besides acquiring a
reference photo from the arrangement, the reenactment enables her to re-live the
memory she was comic-ing about, first in real life during the staging, and secondly
on paper during the drawing procedure, which she describes as “literal and sensu-
al” (qtd in Chute, Outside the Box 166).
In Fun Home, she writes that when she realized that she could draw her fanta-
sies – that of being “flat-chested, slim-hipped” – she was “filled with an omni-
potence that was in itself erotic” (Bechdel 2007, 170). Drawing, first becomes a way
to find a “release from [her] own increasing burden of flesh” (170), and later a way
to conduct ‘graphic analysis’ and retrace the steps that led to her being over-
whelmed by emotional homelessness. During the narrative analysis, Bechdel also
discovers that while there was “a certain emotional expedience to claiming [her
father] as a tragic victim of homophobia” (196), it did not provide any relief. If her
father was less prone to self-abasement or if he inhabited a society that had made
it easier for him to come out, the outcome posed an existential crisis for Bechdel.
She wonders where it would leave her if her father had been able to come out
in his youth and, as a result, had not married her mother. She confesses that one
of the reasons she is not keen on believing, despite some scattered evidence, that
her father timed his suicide to mirror Fitzgerald’s in a sort of “deranged tribute” to
a beloved author, was that it would then mean that his death had nothing to do
with her; she was “reluctant to let go of that last tenuous bond” (Bechdel 2007, 86).
The graphic space, by enabling her thoughts to meander, to travel to and fro across
time, and yet converge as and when needed, allows her to make sense of the un-
chartered territory of how her father’s and her queerness affected each other’s lives.
As Mitchell writes, “by drawing separate scenes from her childhood, adolescence
and young adulthood, Bechdel finds patterns, patterns the reader can then recon-
struct by moving around the narrative in a flexible, non-linear manner.” Conse-
quently, the rapid, often abrupt movement across spatial and temporal boundaries
is made possible by the pictorial form as it facilitates seamless transitions. Further-
more, as Hillary Chute contends in Graphic Women,
Images in comics, appear in fragments, just as they do in actual recollection; this fragmenta-
tion, in particular, is a prominent feature of traumatic memory. The art of crafting words and
pictures together into a narrative punctuated by pause or absence, as in comics, also mimics
the procedure of memory. (2010, 4)
By mimicking this “procedure of memory,” where the past and the present are repre-
sented simultaneously, Bechdel is able to figure out how her familial past mediates
244 Kay Sohini
her present. But, while she tries to understand her queerness in tandem with her
father’s, the dissection of memory retroactively reveals that her father and herself
“were inversions of one another” (Bechdel’s play on Proust’s antiquated term for
homosexuals, “inverts”), as they consistently tried to compensate for the “unman-
ly” and the “unfeminine” in their respective selves, by imposing it on the other. In
Bechdel’s words “it was a war of cross-purposes” (2007, 98).
When Bechdel came out to her parents, her father for the first time partially
revealed his sexual identity to her, positing that “taking sides is rather heroic, and
I am not a hero” (230). However, it was their shared love for literature – specifically,
an exchange of Collette’s Earthly Paradise – that finally led to a moment of resolu-
tion and transcendence in their troubled relationship, with each acknowledging the
other’s innermost desires, as found in the the double spread on Page 220–221.
6 Representation Matters: Cultural Visibility

of Queerness
Apart from the scene depicted on Pages 220–221, throughout the length of the narra-
tive Bechdel constantly refers to literary texts, starting from Kate Millett to Joyce’s
Ulysses to Nancy and Casey Adair’s Word is Out: a book that “creates a domino
effect of altering moments in Bechdel’s life – acknowledging her sexuality, falling
in love with Joan, and coming out to her parents” (Centre Theater Group). In one
such instance of drawing on literary figures, she reenacts a sex scene between Joan
and herself with a verbal narrative that entirely relies on Odysseus’s journey to
Polymphemus’s cave (Bechdel 2007, 214). Unlike Forney, who used literary heroes
and artists to draw inspiration during her struggle with bipolar disorder, Bechdel
actively makes affordances of several works of literature, not just for inspiration,
but to compare, analyze, and make sense of her own life and sexuality through the
lens of relatable literature. By doing so, like Forney, she implicitly emphasizes the
need for representation of queer lives in literature and in other forms of popular
culture to normalize, humanize, and de-Otherize queerness.
In the same way, Amruta Patil posits that Kari’s biggest success is in how how
it gave “androgynous young women a local reference point”; she also adds that it
is a “precious thing; giving people room to be what they are, even if it looks odd to
the majority” (qtd. in Menezes 2012, 42). Essentially, queer comics bring visibility to
the lives of those who have been both historically and systemically marginalized.
These comics by and about queer people provide relatable stories to those in similar
circumstances. Susan Sontag contends that “Images that mobilize are always linked
to a given historical situation. The more general they are the less likely they are to
be effective” (12). Nevertheless, comics take two points of contention in her argu-
ment and turn them around so that, despite being linked to a specific socio-histori-
11 Queerness 245
cal moment, it retains its affective quality. Unlike photographs, comics reproduce
images in a way that renders them optimally specific – i. e. enough to retain its
individual narrative – but not so specific that it resists projection from those en-
countering it. This aspect of the medium makes it easier for the reader to juxtapose
their own stories of marginalization with the image-textual narrative, and to find
empathy through familiarization.
7 Bibliography
7.1 Works Cited
Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. Boston: Mariner Books, 2013.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Tragicomic. Boston: Mariner Books, 2007.
Center Theatre Group. “The ‘Fun Home’ Reading List.” Center Theatre Group, 7 Mar. 2017,
www.centertheatregroup.org/news-and-blogs/news/2017/march/the-fun-home-reading-list/.
Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia
Chute, Hillary L. “The Rise of Queer Comics.” The Paris Review, 11 Dec. 2017,
www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/12/11/rise-queer-comics/.
Chute, Hillary L. Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists. Chicago: University of
Chute, Hillary L. Why Comics? From Underground to Mainstream. Toronto, HarperCollins Canada:
2017.
Cutter, Martha J., and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. Redrawing the Historical Past History, Memory, and
Multiethnic Graphic Novels. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2017.
Diedrich, Lisa. “Graphic Analysis: Transitional Phenomena in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My
Mother?” Configurations, vol. 22, no. 2 (2014). 183–203. doi:10.1353/con.2014.0014.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Forney, Ellen, and Micol Beltramini. Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me. New York:
Avery, 2012.
Gloeckner, Phoebe, Justin Green, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Carol Tyler. “Panel: Comics and
Autobiography.” Critical Inquiry: A Special Issue. Ed. Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 191–223.
Lehoczky, Etelka. “A Favorite in Waiting: Alison Bechdel’s ‘Dykes To Watch Out For.’” NPR, 14 July
2017, www.npr.org/2017/07/14/537052343/a-favorite-in-waiting-alison-bechdel-s-dykes-to-
watch-out-for.
Mandelo, Brit. “Growing Older, Growing Wiser: On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden.” Tor.com, 4 Oct.
2018, www.tor.com/2018/10/02/book-reviews-on-a-sunbeam-by-tillie-walden/.
McCloud, Scott. The Invisible Art Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins Publishers,
1994.
Menezes, Vivek. “A Woman Lives to Tell Her Tale.” ART India: The Art News Magazine of India.
16.4 (April 2012): 40–43.
Mitchell, Adrielle. “Spectral Memory, Sexuality and Inversion: An Arthrological Study of Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v4_3/mitchell/.
Patil, Amruta. Kari. New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2012.
Sezen, Beldan. Snapshots of a Girl: Beldan Sezen. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016.
246 Kay Sohini
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin Classics, 2014.

Thurman, Judith. “Drawn from Life.” The New Yorker, 25 May 2018, www.newyorker.com/
magazine/2012/04/23/drawn-from-life.
Walden, Tillie. On a Sunbeam. New York: First Second, 2018.
7.2 Further Reading

Bechdel, Alison. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2008.
Edwards, Dylan. Transposes. Seattle: Northwest Press, 2012.
Fawaz, Ramzi and Darieck Scott. “Introduction: Queer About Comics.” American Literature 90.2
(June 2018): 197–219.
Heer, Jeet and Kent Worcester. A Comics Studies Reader. Jackson: Mississippi University Press,
2008.
Kabi, Nagata. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness. Los Angeles: Seven Seas, 2017.
Panetta, Kevin. Bloom. New York: First Second Books, 2019.
Wang, Jen. The Prince and the Dressmaker. New York: First Second Books, 2018.
Heike Elisabeth Jüngst
12 Science Comics
Abstract: Science plays an important part in many comics. Scientific topics appear
in educational comics for the interested public or for school use as well as in narra-
tive comics like science fiction comics or biographies. In all these cases, the comics
format plays an important role in rendering the scientific facts. The boundaries be-
tween the genres are to some extent permeable: patterns from superhero comics
may be used in educational comics in order to make the topic more palatable; scien-
tists’ biographies use typical patterns from biographical comics in general, from
hagiographies and biopics.
Key Terms: educational comics, non-fiction, scientist’s hagiography, fantastic sci-

ence, superheroes, doctor-patient communication
1 Introduction
If we think of “comics and science,” what comes to mind first is probably superhero
stories with mad scientists and amazing technological miracles such as time travel.
However, there is also an increasing number of non-fiction comics that deal with
scientific topics, including scientists’ biographies that often resemble Hollywood
biopics or even saints’ hagiographies. This chapter will first deal with educational
or information comics with a scientific content and then give a short introduction
to biographies (↗9 Life Writing). The last part provides a necessarily short overview
of science as presented in fiction comics; more information about these will be
found in the chapter on Superhero Comics (↗15 Superheroes).
2 Educational and Information Comics

Educational comics come under a variety of denominations and are also known as
“information comics” or “non-fiction comics”. These terms overlap to a certain ex-
tent, as they all refer to comics with the primary purpose of knowledge transfer, not
entertainment, even though entertaining elements may well contribute to the ap-
peal. Definitions can be found in Rifas (1988 and 2010), Schodt (1997, 152–153), Eis-
ner (2001a, 144, 2001b, 24–25), McCloud (2000, 41), Jüngst (2008a; 2010, 20) and
Hangartner et. al. (2013). The term “science comic” is used for a sub-group of these
comics, i. e. those dealing with topics from the natural sciences and mathematics.
In this chapter, the extensive definition of educational comics by Rifas is used
as the basis for discussion; however, the term “information comics” will be given
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-013
248 Heike Elisabeth Jüngst
preference over the term “educational comics” in order to avoid the misleading as-
sociation with Maxwell Charles Gaines’ publishing house of the same name in the
1930s and 40s, specializing in retelling American history or stories from the Bible
in comic format, and to exclude adaptations of world literature in comics:
A definition of educational comics as simply those comics that deal in “facts” instead of “fic-
tion” only goes so far, as comics have combined factual and fictional elements in many ways.
People recognize even a comic that retells a well-known work of fiction as educational if the
comic attempts to reliably convey the essence of that earlier work. In the clearest case, the
distinguishing features of an educational comic include certain didactic purposes of the indi-
viduals and institutions that created and distributed it; the presence of specific textual cues
that enable readers to recognize these publications as both educational and as comics; and
the particular uses which those who buy and those who read these comics make of them.
(Rifas 2010, 161)
Information comics in this sense have a primarily informative content, but, if we

apply Karl Bühler’s organon model of language (1982, 28) to their analysis, we also
find a strong expressive or artistic side in many of them; moreover, there is ample
evidence of Bühler’s category of appeal, i. e. the effort to rouse the reader’s interest
in the topic presented or even to make readers act (Jüngst 2010, 6–8).
The comics presented in this chapter show the variety and breadth of science
comics. They include a comic which appeared as part of a research article in a
peer-reviewed scientific journal, a comic showing the set-up of an experiment in a
chemistry classroom (drawn by German high-school students), a comic about biolo-
gists on a field trip produced and distributed by a research center and museum, a
biography of Charles Darwin, and a comic about viruses aimed at a teen-age reader-
ship. Further examples and extensive lists of primary sources, combined with some
background information and analyses of the comics, can be found in Hangartner
et. al. (2013), Tatalovic (2009), Jüngst (2010) and Meier (2012) as well as in the older
bibliographies by Lent (1991).
The idea of using comics as a means of information transfer is in fact quite old
(↗2 History, Formats, Genres), as are examples of actual information comics (Anon.
1911; see Sones 1944 for early reflections on the phenomenon). Still, Spiegel et. al.
(2013) assume as late as 2013 that science comics constitute an “unconventional
approach”, which may indicate that although these comics have existed for quite
some time, they may not have reached their audience. Today, we find numerous
information comics of varying quality on virtually every conceivable topic (e. g. Ta-
talovic 2009, 4), and the number of science comics seems to increase exponentially,
particularly on the Internet. Internet series with science content include Selenia
(physics), Adventures in Synthetic Biology, the Nagoya University manga about cli-
mate and space and World of Viruses, a superhero-style series about the most threat-
ening viruses humankind is faced with today.
At the same time, research about science comics prospers, with different aspects
of the comics in focus. A large group of research articles deals with possible didactic
uses of these comics inside or outside the classroom. Many authors discuss the
question why comics are chosen as vehicles for information transfer (e. g. Hangart-
ner 2013) and how they may contribute to involve learners, especially unmotivated
learners (e. g. Nagata 1999; Sieve and Prechtl 2013a). Even though information com-
ics are not always well designed and not everyone in need of information about
complex scientific facts enjoys reading comics, the medium seems to be rather effec-
tive for knowledge transfer. Rota and Izquierdo (2003), for example, report on a
science comics project in Brazilian primary schools with positive results (Rota and
Izquierdo 2003, 88) and have a very optimistic view of comics’ teaching potential:
Nobody needs formal education to understand the message. It is almost instantaneous. In

addition, another characteristic very peculiar to the comics is the fact that the space between
the pictures is where the reader imagination captures two different images and transforms
them in [sic] a single idea. (Rota and Izquierdo 2003, 87)
These results are supported by research by Hosler and Boomer, where
on the postinstruction instrument, nonmajors’ content scores and attitudes showed a statisti-
cally significant improvement after using the comics book […]. The improvement in attitudes
about biology was correlated to attitudes about comics, suggesting that the comic may have
played a role in engaging and shaping student attitudes in a positive way. (Hosler and Boomer
2011, 309)
A comparatively early preference for science comics could be found among chemists
(Carraher 1975; Carter 1988, 1999; Starkey 1995; Tayyab 1994; Prechtl 2013; Prechtl
and Sieve 2013a, 2013b; Gölz and Prechtl 2016; Szafran; Pike and Singh 1994), and
today, biochemistry is still a highly popular topic, followed by science comics about
space.
The target groups for such comics vary considerably, although, at least in West-
ern countries, most are meant for a young audience. However, there are notable
exceptions, and one of them shall be presented here. It has all the characteristics
of a science comic but was published in a rather atypical medium. In 2006, MD
Rainer Spanagel published science comics in a peer-reviewed research journal (San-
chis-Segura and Spanagel 2006). As of now, no one has followed his example, which
is surprising, as these comics were received enthusiastically by medical and phar-
maceutical specialists and journalists alike and were extensively reported on by the
media. The comics are integrated into a ‘proper’ scientific article about psychophar-
macology and depict experiments conducted by Spanagel and his team. The charac-
ters shown are rodents, the prototypical heroes of science and comics alike, who
are used as laboratory animals in the experiments. There is hardly any text, which
makes these comics a good case for globalized audiences – readers from various
cultures should be able to understand the content. The depictions of the series of
experiments resemble one another quite closely, which may produce some confu-
sion, but otherwise the comics succeed in providing emotionalized information.
Fig. 12.1: An Experiment in Psychopharmacology

(Sanchis-Segura and Spanagel 2006, 22,
reprinted by permission of the artist, Walter Hollenstein).
Published in a scientific journal, they worked as successful eye-catchers and addi-

tions to the dry academic content (fig. 12.1).
These comics can be readily identified as science comics, starting with the topic.
This leads to the question whether there is a typical design of science comics. Du-
puis claims that there are two basic strategies, one of which fails while the other
has the potential to attract its audience and to facilitate the transfer of information:
The first is basically transforming a boring, stilted, text-heavy textbook into a boring, stilted,
illustration- and text-heavy graphic novel. In other words, the producers think that anything
in graphic novel format will by definition be more interesting and engaging than something
that’s purely text-based. The second involves taking advantage of the strengths of the graphic
novel format to re-imagine how scientific knowledge can be presented to an interested audi-
ence. (Dupuis 2011)
There is no single formula for the perfect science comic, but there are certain prefer-
ences when it comes to designing them. Most information comics, and most science
comics, organize the factual content into a storyline (Stein speaks of comics as a
medium of “visual-verbal storytelling”, 2015, 420). This is part of the attraction and
allows for a variety of choices to support information transfer, as Jay Hosler states
in an interview with Meier:
Comics also make it possible to tell and illustrate stories about the science. Scientists, animals,
plants, even cells and molecules can become characters. This provides a human connection to
the material. I think a little anthropomorphization works because talking DNA is so thoroughly
ridiculous. All of this acts to draw the reader more deeply into the material and engage them
personally. (Meier 2012, 663)
In another article, Hosler and Boomer suggest that:
comic book stories can play a significant role in conveying content in a coherent manner and,
in the process, improve the attitudes that non-science majors have toward biology. The com-
plex interplay of words and images in comics has the potential to go beyond the traditional
Fig. 12.2: The Student as Artist (Prechtl 2013, 11,

reprinted by permission) The two children talk about
an experiment: Tea-lights are put under a beaker
and go out due to lack of oxygen.
textbook by weaving text and images into a story that can help generate coherence and context
for the information. (Hosler and Boomer 2011, 309–310)
Stories can be remembered more easily than other kinds of texts (see the literature
qtd. in Hosler and Boomer 2011, 315, with Negrete and Lartigue 2004 as a very good
example). The storyline may be overt or covert, but even the sequence of a scientific
experiment is a kind of narrative with an outset, a quest and an ending, as can be
seen in Spanagel’s already quoted articles or Prechtl’s efforts to turn experimental
protocols into comics or fotonovelas, thus involving students and turning them from
fact consumers into creators of knowledge (Gölz and Prechtl 2016). Although the
example is in German, the idea of involving the readers in the production of science
comics is international (Tatalovic 2013, 12 on Battle for Planet Science).
In both examples discussed so far, the use of a narrative or storyline and of
actors presented no problem. Textbooks tend to have neither, comics tend to have
both, but storylines and actors can easily be added when a textbook is transformed
into a comic. In addition to bringing a storyline to life, the students in figure 12.2
invite reader identification. This kind of learner is rather common, particularly in
non-fiction for children, and often resembles members of the target group; often,
we find a boy and a girl or children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds (Jüngst
2010, 78). Sometimes, however, the learners chosen for identification are quite exot-
ic: Jay Hosler’s The Sandwalk Adventures (2003) presents the reader with a mite in
Darwin’s eyebrow who discusses evolutionary theory with him (see below for a
more detailed analysis). Apart from learning from the expert(s) or from experience,
the role of figures can vary considerably, which is particularly obvious where active
or passive behavior is concerned. They can be part of the action and interact with
the experts; they can also be silent observers (very common in time-travel story-
lines) or they can simply read about the facts the comic deals with, while the reader
is looking over their shoulder (Jüngst 2010, 81–83). Although no experts appear in
figure 12.1 and figure 12.2, they are a staple element of science comics and are often
Fig. 12.3: The Friendly Scientist from Next Door (Vongy 2016, n. pag., reprinted by permission).
shown in interaction with the learners intended for reader identification (Jüngst
2010, 74–88).
In many science comics, these experts are scientists or teachers, which, unfortu-
nately, can turn the whole comic into the worst kind of didactics with a teacher
delivering a monologue while the students are forced to either listen or daydream,
without the slightest chance at interaction. In other cases, there are less traditional
experts with different credentials or scientific backgrounds. Michelin used to hand
out information comics with a strong commercial bias in which the company mascot
Bibendum explains the physics of car tires (Bibendum présente: La juste pression). In
The Weather Genie, the authors try to combine a superhero story (with the Weather
Genie as superhero-cum-expert and a counteracting mad scientist) with information
about meteorology; superheroes and supervillains also appear in worldofviruses.
unl.edu (see below).
Science comics which focus exclusively on experts or researchers and their
work have become more common in the past years, as will be shown in the section
on scientists’ biographies. However, these are the biographies of eminent scientists
whose names are known throughout the world. The Senckenberg Society has recent-
ly published a comic for children about research on the continental drift where the
reader follows a group of scientists on their field trips – none of them famous out-
side their respective fields, but nevertheless experts with an air of scientific authori-
ty (fig 12.3).
This comic introduces children to a very specific area of research in botany and
zoology. The protagonists are a group of friendly and enthusiastic experts, all of
them drawn true to life. The adventures and work of the research party form one
storyline; a second storyline is centered around a group of insects who, while being
the subject of the researchers’ work, go on their own little adventures.
This leads to the question of typical storylines. Educational comics use donor
genres, that is, they use genres which normally appear outside the comics format
and are adapted to it (Jüngst 2010, 239–299). Donor genres facilitate knowledge
transfer, as the reader is already familiar with them and can thus follow the content
more easily. The scientific experiment is the donor genre both for Sanchis-Segura
and Spanagel (2006) and Prechtl (2013), although the comic focuses on different
aspects. Donor genres may be oral (e. g. teacher-student dialogues) or written (e. g.
experimental protocols), but they need not be informative genres. Having said that,
the scientific lecture has gained ground over the past ten years as a donor genre for
science comics aimed at an adult target group. Die große Transformation, for exam-
ple, a German comic about climate change, dedicates each chapter to a scientist
delivering a lecture about an aspect of the problem. Some of the pictures show the
lecture, with students listening, but not interacting with the speaker. Other pictures
illustrate the content of the lectures, similar to a power point presentation. Russell
in Logicomix basically tells the story of his life in a narrative framed as a public
speech; in addition, the comic also includes lecture-like passages about Russell’s
mathematical research. Conversations between scientists are in fact quite rare, if we
expect a conversation to be well-balanced. Rather, one scientist talks, and the
others listen or offer him cues for further lecturing. This is typical e. g. of the conver-
sations in The Imitation Game, which deals with Alan Turing’s life and research.
In science comics for children, the situation is slightly different. The fantastic
journey, for example, is a popular donor genre for children’s science comics as it
offers a variety of options how to present worlds outside the human perception, e. g.
microscopic worlds, historical epochs long past or worlds in space. A good example
is One Green Tree, in which a teacher and a group of students are shrunk to the size
of beetles and explore a leaf. Comics can accommodate genres we find in various
media like print, the movies or TV. The use of donor genres in science comics corre-
sponds to Rajewsky’s definition of a specific kind of intermediality, “media transpo-
sition”:
[the comics] thrive on exchanges with other media (film, radio, television, literature, painting);
and they practice intermedial referencing, evoking (and provoking) literary styles, imitating
(and influencing) cinematic techniques, or suggesting sound. (qtd. in Stein 2015, 421)
However, the case of donor genres is more specific, as the medium, e. g. film, as
well as the genre, e. g. animal documentary, are both adapted to the comic. Conven-
tions we associate with the donor genre, e. g. the specific narratives and camera
perspectives of the TV animal documentary, now appear in the comics format. Cer-
tain changes are inevitable: a film will be reduced to certain key frames, a fantastic
journey will be designed to offer a maximum of information alongside the adventur-
ous content. Moreover, donor genres may undergo further transformation, e. g. they
may be subjected to parody.
Apart from the donor genre, which provides a frame for the overall design of
the comic in question, pictures and text are both used for the advancement of the
narrative as well as for knowledge transfer. In science, the scientific illustration is

the typical pictorial form by which knowledge is transferred. Scientific illustrations
appear frequently in science comics but are adapted to the specific styles and story-
lines (Jüngst 2010, 186–199). They may appear as pictures within the pictures, e. g.
as a poster which the expert explains to the focalizer. They may also become part
of the story, e. g. as a scientific illustration representing the world of microbes as
seen through a microscope which the heroes travel to on a fantastic journey. Very
rarely, scientific illustrations appear in special boxes which interrupt the comic’s
narrative flow. This need not be negative; Hosler and Boomer describe a successful
case in point:
Interleaved with the comic stories are fully illustrated, traditional text pieces that provide stu-
dents and instructors with a more in-depth exploration of the biology introduced in the imme-
diately preceding comics story. (Hosler and Boomer 2011, 310)
Words are equally important in all aspects of storytelling as well as in knowledge

transfer. If knowledge is communicated verbally (despite the picture-dominated
character of comics, this happens frequently), the words can be spoken by a charac-
ter, but also appear in neutral boxes or printed in some kind of medium within the
comic – newspapers, scientific posters, etc. In the first case, the knowledge trans-
ferred must fit the respective characters who may be credible sources of knowledge,
but also learners who ask intelligent questions. Notably, female scientists appear as
often as male scientists (at least in the USA and in Europe) and have done so since
the 1990s. But then the sources of knowledge may also be the objects of the informa-
tion transfer, e. g. the animals or microbes that are studied. In an example from a
schoolbook on English for Engineers, a red blood cell or erythrocyte talks about the
human blood circuit (“Pumping Systems”). It is part of the action and serves as a
kind of cicerone for the reader. In addition, there is an arrow in the blood vessel
which points out in which direction the blood is flowing, as this cannot be inferred
from the shape of the blood cells (they might be moving up or down). This arrow has
been borrowed from less emotive and personalized technical or scientific drawings.
Well into the 1990s, information comics tended to be solitary publications.
There were hardly any specific series in this area before the Internet, though three
have to be mentioned. Anselm Lanturlu is an early series, created in the 1980s by
the French physicist Jean-Pierre Petit. Originally, it was published in print and also
translated into English (as Archibald Higgins), German (as Anselm Wüsstegern) and
Finnish. In the 2000s, however, Petit began to offer the albums as downloads on
the website savoir-sans-frontieres.com. Integrated is a crowdsourcing translation
project for these comic books, which led to Anselm being translated into a huge
variety of languages.
Another often-quoted series of information comics with a scientific content is
The Cartoon Guide-series by Larry Gonick and various collaborators. The first vol-
umes were published in the 1980s and the series is still continued. There are cartoon
guides to statistics, chemistry, physics, algebra, calculus, the environment and

others. Some volumes have been translated into French and German. For the most
part, the donor genre used is school textbooks. However, it must be stated that this
series shows characteristics of a hybrid between text-only and comics, although the
lengthy texts are hand-lettered and thus carry the aesthetic appeal of a comic book.
The third example is a series of books published under varying labels such as …
for Beginners / Graphic Guide / Introducing … It was first published in the 1990s. The
topics dealt with in this series range from politics and philosophy (e. g. feminism)
to science (e. g. relativity). Although these books are often classified as comics, they
use long stretches of text between the pictures which gives them an even more
hybrid look-and-feel than the aforementioned Cartoon Guides. These texts are not
hand-lettered, and often the technique used is collage rather than comic. The books
are written by varying teams of authors and illustrators and have been translated
into various languages.
In the Anselm series, Anselm and his friend Sophie often become part of the
scientific phenomenon explained. The fantastic worlds which they enter often re-
semble everyday spaces. For example, in L’informagique, Anselm is sucked into a
computer program (https://www.savoir-sans-frontieres.com/JPP/telechargeables/
Francais/informagique.htm). Inside, the program resembles an office. All actions
are carried out by administrative officers, in this case not humans but little devils
wearing sleeve guards. These devils stick to the rules and are highly inflexible in
what they do – an element of parody which adds to the entertainment value of the
comic and also helps the reader memorize the facts. These varied examples show
that science comics, like information comics in general, are by no means homo-
geneous. Further experiments with topics, characters and storylines are to be ex-
pected.
However, most of these science comics serve to teach facts for the sake of im-
proving the readers’ knowledge about the respective subject. The one science which
takes a different approach to comics is medicine, as there is a strong focus on hu-
man interaction as well as on behavioural change. Comics may play an important
role in doctor-patient communication and in the education of medical students.
Green and Myers (2010, 574) speak of “graphic pathographies – illness narratives
in graphic form.” These comics deal with medical content, often in autobiographical
form. Science comics with medical topics may also come in the shape of educational
pamphlets, e. g. about disease prevention. This kind of science comic is most com-
monly found in fieldwork in developing countries and in teenage education.
One more project needs to be mentioned in this context, Jens Harder’s works
on natural and human history Alpha … directions, and Beta … civilizations, vol. 1.
Alpha tells the history of the universe since the Big Bang 14 billion years ago in
highly complex images, often based on scientific sources, but with very few words.
These pictures are interwoven with images from world mythologies and, in particu-
lar, creation myths. The iconic mythological imagery seems to reinforce the visual
scientific narrative, and the book is unquestionably an affirmation of evolutionary

theory. Alpha ends with the appearance of the early hominids, and Beta vol. 1 takes
up the thread and tells our history from the Pleistocene to the beginning of the
Christian era However, these books extend the definition of what makes a comic a
comic as they might well be classified as a series of visuals, in contrast to most
other comics dealt with in this chapter. Comics that deal with scientific content
often seek to make this content easy to understand and more palatable to the read-
ers, whereas Harder’s focus is on an artistic rendering of scientific and other con-
tent.
3 Scientists’ Biographies
Biographies are a popular sub-genre of information comics. Unsurprisingly, this in-
cludes scientists’ biographies which have seen a boom in the past ten years. The
most famous of these are probably Feynman, based on the autobiographies of the
renowned physicist, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, a graphic novel about the
struggle to establish the foundations of mathematics in the early 20th century in-
cluding the biography of the ‘narrator’ Bertrand Russell, and The Imitation Game:
Alan Turing Resolved. Both Feynman and The Imitation Game were written by Jim
Ottaviani, a writer cooperating with various artists, whose science comics have
made the bestselling lists. Generally, the scientists chosen as heroes for comics biog-
raphies also led interesting lives quite apart from their scientific discoveries and
their importance within their respective fields. This leads to a problem concerning
the transfer of the specific knowledge: The biographical ‘human interest’ narrative
can eclipse the scientific content which may only be quickly scanned. The afore-
mentioned comic about Turing is a case in point as the mathematical content is
difficult to understand and the comic format hardly helps to improve that.
The boom in scientists’ biographies is recent, and now they can be found in
American, European and Asian comics alike. In a world-wide “best of”-list of the
most popular heroes of scientist biography comics, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein
would occupy the first rank. Both Curie and Einstein are, of course, outstanding in
every respect and represent the “ideal scientist”. Moreover, they were both not only
eminent scientific minds, but also politically active; they lived interesting lives,
quite apart from their scientific discoveries, and these lives are connected to histori-
cal events the reader may know and be interested in. The comics are drawn in cul-
ture-specific styles; for example, Japanese scientists’ biographies tend to use a shō-
jo-manga-style frequently found in schoolbook manga. Examples can be found in
two manga biographies of Marie Curie, both from the 1990s, which render the scien-
tist, in real life a fairly average-looking person, as a doe-eyed beauty. In one of
them, she has turned blonde and blue-eyed.
Fig. 12.4: The Scientist and the Audience (Hosler 2003, 113,
reprinted by permission).
Scientists’ biographies tend to be rather hagiographic. They typically do not offer a

detached and critical perspective but represent the scientists as exemplary heroes
whom the readers may try to follow, although they will of course never reach that
level of perfection. A convincing and refreshing exception to this rule is Jay Hosler’s
The Sandwalk Adventures, which deals with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
from an unusual point of view: A little mite who lives in Darwin’s eyebrow is inter-
ested in this theory and manages to discuss it with the master himself. The Darwin
we find in this comic is not the ideal flawless hero but rather a funny little man
plagued by doubts – and by the curious mite (fig 12.4).
This creative idea allows Hosler to present the theory of evolution not as a mon-
ologue but as a discussion with counter-arguments. This panel also shows the use
of icons, in this case the question mark, in comics specific format which would not
lend itself to other textual media.
In most scientist biographies, the readers are assumed to be beginners who
have to be introduced to scientific concepts along with the scientist’s life. This
means that most scientist biographies are intended or at least suitable for a young
readership. But there are exceptions, some of them quite surprising. In 2003, the
Deutsches Ärzteblatt, a specialist journal for medical doctors, carried two series
about exceptional doctors and their fate: Herbert Lewin and Käte Frankenthal. The
audience were specialists in their field, and the medium chosen for the publication
was a highly respected journal.
All life’s a stage, as we well know, and the kind of natural storyline represented
by a person’s life makes it easy to structure biographies. There is a natural start and
a natural ending, and things seem to happen in order on a timeline. The authors of
biographies can include events in the outside world that may be familiar to the
readers and thus anchor the story in time and space. Many people who appear in
biographies will be real, too, and what they say in the comic may be quotations
from real life. It must be added that there is also a good deal of invented dialogue
or that there may be censorship – biographies are often a kind of fiction rather than
historically accurate (Heilbrun 1993), and comics biographies are no exception. An
even more typical problem scientists present to their biographers is the task of keep-
ing the balance between information about their lives and information about their
work. Often, it is difficult to render the scientific content in the comics format
whereas the life story as a kind of narration does not present too many problems.
On the contrary – an adventurous life, love interests and conflicts unrelated to the
scientific accomplishments may seem far more interesting and captivating than the
most momentous scientific discoveries. Most scientists’ lives unfortunately do not
offer this kind of distraction.
4 Mad, Bad, Superhero or Other: Science in Fiction

Comics
It is not only in educational comics where scientists appear and play a dominant
role. Readers of various comics genres, e. g. detective, science fiction and superhero
comics, are likely to be confronted with the types of scientific genius either siding
with the heroes (ranging from Professeur Tryphon Tournesol in Tintin to Professor
Charles Francis Xavier in X-Men), or in league with the villains (e. g. Zorglub in
Spirou et Fantasio or Dr. Freeze in Batman). These scientists tend to be male, and
they are frequently shown in their labs with white coats, glasses, and test tubes,
but also with oversized computers or similar iconic markers of science (see Vander-
beke 2019). The Mad Scientist has become a prototype and has made his way from
film and comic into everyday language.
Particularly in publications for younger audiences, Mad Scientists are character-
ized by standard patterns of behavior: they tend to stare in a manic, often threaten-
ing way, and some will repeatedly claim their right to rule the world. Mad Scientists
live in their own limited world, which does not stop them from aspiring to world
dominance. In fact, most of them are rather boring and predictable characters, but
they do shape the audience’s expectations what scientists in comics behave like.
However, the representation of science is not restricted to the representation of
scientists, be they mad or sane. There is research about the role of science in super-
hero comics by Kakalios (2006), but the topic also plays a role in Prechtl (2013c).
Both Kakalios and Prechtl are university teachers in the natural sciences. Kakalios
teaches physics and uses pictures and storylines from superhero comics to explain
laws of physics. Prechtl teaches chemistry, and although his focus is on lessons
where students draw comics, he also does research on the role chemistry plays in
comics and on the quality and factual correctness of the chemical issues mentioned
in comics. Höhne, a historian, provides research about comics as a source of infor-
mation of technology and science, with a focus on science-fiction comics (2003).
His research interest is the history of technology and science and the question
whether comics can be used as reliable sources on the state of technology and sci-
ence for the time when they were published.
Not every scientist that appears in fiction comics is necessarily the archetypal
scientific genius. Recent research shows that the role of science and scientists in
comics can be seen in a more balanced and sophisticated way. Locke, for instance,
states that “Science, or its representation, is central to the constitution of the fanta-
sy worlds (“universes”) that super-heroes inhabit.” (Locke 2005, 26) and draws at-
tention to the fact that the changes scientific facts undergo in these comics are
particularly interesting (Locke 2005, 31) and that “as much as technology is repre-
sented as a source of wonderment, so also – and often at the same time – is it
represented as a source of worry” (Locke 2005, 37). This means that the representa-
tion of science (and scientists) is ambiguous, or, to put it less negatively, balanced.
If science was in earlier comics usually presented as a motor of progress and the
promise of a glorious future, this has changed with the generally more critical per-
spective of recent decades. In consequence, elements of dystopia do exist alongside
descriptions of Elysian utopias, and fights against unwanted effects of scientific or
technological developments also play a role.
An important point Locke makes is that “these are ways of thinking about sci-
ence – this is as true of the world of popular culture as it is of the academic world.”
(Locke 2005, 42). Authors and readers are not passive consumers, sedated by the
promises of science and technology. Telling stories and creating ‘as if’-scenarios,
are ways of dealing with these phenomena – and this requires independent and
unbiased minds, although political and commercial pressures have to be taken into
account.
These comics often feature fantastic science patter, a pseudo-scientific jargon
about “science facts” which only exist within the boundaries of the given fictional
world (“Kryptonite” is a well-known example). There is, however, also a surprising
number of comics with fictional content which nevertheless provide accurate infor-
mation about scientific facts as testified by Carter’s research on chemistry in comics
(Carter 1988, 1989; see also Höhne 2003 and Tatalovic 2009). Admittedly, it is often
difficult for the inexperienced readers to decide if they can trust the scientific facts
(or “facts”) presented in the comic they are reading. The “specialists’” knowledge
in science comics is necessarily restricted to that of the authors, so some mistakes
are common. For example, Höhne (2003, 112) points out that many authors find it
difficult to distinguish between nuclear energy and radioactivity. Only rarely are
comics authors specialists in scientific fields; an exception would be the physician
and the pharmacist turned manga artists quoted by Nagata (1999, 200). Usually,
comics authors will have to rely on external sources for factual information.
While science in comics may take on a dystopian as well as a utopian role, it
also responds to historical conditions and problems. According to Kakalios (2006),
many factors contributed to an increase of scientific content in superhero comics
since the 1950s (also summed up in Prechtl 2013, 8): e. g. the Sputnik shock or the
nuclear arms race, and the Comics Code favourably mentioned the educational po-
tential of comics – moreover, writers were paid by the word, which encouraged
them to include digressions about scientific facts (Kakalios 2006, 10–14). Höhne
(2003, 23) argues that until 1968, technology was predominantly presented as a
promise in superhero comics, in accordance with the general perception of technol-
ogy and progress in contemporary societies. As mentioned before, the superhero as
well as the science fiction genres have since diversified, science and technology
have lost their universal appeal, and critical perspectives have gained considerable
ground. As in all works of popular fiction, science fiction and superhero comics are,
ultimately, closely linked to the audience’s hopes, fears and, not least, tastes.
A final point needs to be mentioned in this chapter: Scientific facts may turn
up where no-one expects them and scientific background knowledge can turn out
useful in the strangest places such as Sailor Moon, a shōjo-manga, chiefly intended
for an adolescent female audience:
The panel depicts the scene in which sailor soldiers and others were trapped in the enantiomer
of the Crystal Palace, and the enemies, Chiral and Achiral, appeared. As the manga only bor-
rowed the biochemical terms, the explanation was so far-fetched that biochemistry was a pre-
requisite for understanding Sailor Moon. (Nagata 1999, 200–201)
5 Conclusion
As we have seen, science in comics may play many roles and may be communicated
in different ways and with different purposes in mind. Although science comics
have existed for several decades, they have proliferated recently and have diversi-
fied in content and style. The Internet has simplified the production and distribu-
tion of colored comics, an asset if natural colors are needed for information transfer
or if the use of colors makes it easier for the reader to distinguish between small
elements in the pictures, and many institutions such as research institutes have
taken to offering high-quality comics as PDF downloads. This is in marked contrast
to the situation only twenty years ago, when educational comics were invariably
paper-based and often dismissed as throwaways.
Comics offer specific possibilities of dealing with scientific content. Drawing
style, characters, storylines and donor genres may be combined into a seemingly
endless variety of science comics. An example which shows the possibilities and
potentials of such approaches is the combination of superhero features with an edu-
cational content. Here we are faced with the beautiful, feminine, self-confident and
extremely dangerous Human Papilloma Virus. Superhero elements and structures
are combined with well-researched and up-to-date informative content. The im-
mune system – the good guys – is trying to hunt down and trap the virus – the
Fig. 12.5: The Virus is a Villain (World of Viruses,

HPV, reprinted by permission).
villain. The roles of science in comics, educational and fantastic, are used to enter-
tain and inform the reader (fig. 12.5).
Science and comics form a strong bond. Whereas educational science comics
focus on facts and learning, superhero and sci-fi comics need science or pseudo-
science as background for their stories. In all these cases, the unique word-picture-
structure of the comic and the need for narrative structures shape the character of
science representations in comics and offer a wealth of texts and topics.
6 Bibliography
6.1 Works Cited
Anon. “Make ‘Comics’ Educational.” The Survey. Vol. XXVI (Apr 1911–Sep 1911): 103.
Bühler, Karl. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache [1934]. Frankfurt: Ullstein,
1982.
Carraher, Charles E. “Comic Books – Another Visual Aid in Teaching Chemistry.” Journal of
Chemical Education 52.10 (1975): 654.
Carter, Henry A. “Chemistry in the Comics: Part 1. A Survey of the Comic Book Literature.” Journal
of Chemical Education 65.12 (1988): 1029–1035.
Carter, Henry A. “Chemistry in the Comics: Part 2. Classic Chemistry.” Journal of Chemical
Education 66.2 (1989): 118–127.
Dupuis, J. Reading Diary: Evolution: The story of life on Earth : Confessions of a Science Librarian
http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2011/02/reading_diary_evolution_the_st.php. 2011.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac: Poorhouse Press, 2001a [1985].
Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. Tamarac: Poorhouse Press, 2001b [1996].
Gölz, P. and Markus Prechtl. „Wie bediene ich einen Rotationsverdampfer? Eine informative und
gendersensible Foto-Story.” Naturwissenschaften im Unterricht – Chemie 27.151 (2016): 35–
38.
Green, Michael J. “Comics and Medicine: Peering Into the Process of Professional Identity
Formation.” Academic Medicine 90.6 (2015): 1–6.
Green, Micheal J. and Kimberly R. Myers. “Graphic Medicine: Use of Comics in Medical Education
and Patient Care.” BMJ 340 (2010). https://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c863.
Green, Michael J. “Teaching with Comics: A Course for Fourth-Year Medical Students.” Journal of
Medical Humanities 34.4 (2013): 471–476.
Hangartner, Urs, Felix Keller and Dorothea Oechslin (eds.). Wissen durch Bilder. Sachcomics als
Medien von Bildung und Information. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013.
Hangartner, Urs. “Sequential art to teach something specific: Sachcomics − Definitorisches,
Historisches, Aktuelles.” Wissen durch Bilder. Eds. Urs Hangartner, Felix Keller and Dorothea
Oechslin (2013). 13–42.
Heilbrun, Carolyn. “Is Biography Fiction?” Soundings 76.1–3 (1993): 295–304.
Höhne, Wolfgang. Technikdarstellung im Comic. Der Comic als Spiegel technischer Wünsche und
Utopien der modernen Industriegesellschaft. Karlsruhe: Universität Karlsruhe, 2002.
digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/documents/2681.
Hosler, Jay and K. B. Boomer. “Are Comic Books an Effective Way to Engage Nonmajors in
Learning and Appreciating Science?” CBI – Life Sciences Education 10 (2011): 309–317.
Jones, William B. Classics Illustrated. Jefferson: McFarland, 2002.
Jüngst, Heike Elisabeth. Information Comics. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2010.
Kakalios, James. The Physics of Superheroes. London: Duckworth, 2006.
Lent, John A. Comic Books and Comic Strips in the United States: an international bibliography.
Westport: Greenwood, 1994a.
Lent, John A. Comic Art of Europe: an international, comprehensive bibliography. Westport:
Greenwood, 1994b.
Lent, John A. Comic Art in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America: a comprehensive international
bibliography. Westport: Greenwood, 1994c.
Locke, Simon. “Fantastically reasonable: ambivalence in the representation of science and
technology in super-hero comics.” Public Understanding of Science 14.1 (2005): 25–46.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Meier, John J. “Science Graphic Novels for Academic Libraries.” College & Research Libraries
News 73.11 (2012): 662–665.
Nagata, Ryoichi. “Learning Biochemistry through Manga – Helping Students Learn and
Remember, and Making Lectures More Exciting.” Biochemical Education 27 (1999): 200–203.
Negrete, Aquiles and Cecilia Lartigue. “Learning from Education to Communicate Science as a
Good Story.” Endeavour 28.3 (2004): 120–124.
Prechtl, Markus. “Chemie-Foto-Story – Ein Methodenwerkzeug auf dem Weg.” Chimica 33.100
(2007): 109–127.
Prechtl, Markus. “Protokolle als sequenzielle Kunst. Schülerinnen und Schüler erstellen
gezeichnete Foto-Stories.” Naturwissenschaften im Unterricht – Physik 19.107 (2008): 42–44.
Prechtl, Markus. “Diagnostizieren mit Chemie-Foto-Storys.” Naturwissenschaften im Unterricht –
Chemie 23.124/125 (2011): 48–51.
Prechtl, Markus. “Didaktische Gedankensplitter zur Integration naturwissenschaftlicher Inhalte im
Comic.” Sachcomics. Ein Manual für die Praxis. Ed. Urs Hangartner, Felix Keller and Dorothea
Oechslin. Luzern: Hochschule Luzern Design & Kunst, 2012. 23–49.
Prechtl, Markus. “Bewusst hinsehen – prägnant darstellen. Comic-Techniken in

Vertretungsstunden lernen.” Naturwissenschaften im Unterricht – Chemie 24.133 (2013a):
27–29.
Prechtl, Markus.: “Gebildet durch Bilder. Sachcomics lesen – Chemie-Foto-Storys gestalten.”
Naturwissenschaften im Unterricht – Chemie 24.133 (2013b): 8–12.
Prechtl, Markus. “Potenziale der sequenziellen Kunst: Bildergeschichten und Comics im
naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht.” Wissen durch Bilder. Sachcomics als Medien von
Bildung und Information. Ed. Urs Hangartner, Felix Keller and Dorothea Oechslin. Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2013. 271–300.
Rifas, Leonard: “Educational Comics: A Message in a Bubble.” Print 42.6 (1988): 145–157, 203–
204.
Rifas, Leonard: “Educational Comics.” Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels.
Ed. M. Keith Booker. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2010. 160–169.
Rota, Gladis and Juan Izquierdo. “Comics as a tool for teaching biotechnology in primary
schools.” Electronic Journal of Biotechnology 6.2 (2003) http://www.ejbiotechnology.info/
content/vol6/issue2/issues/2. (31 October 2016)
Sanchis-Segura, Carles and Rainer Spanagel. “Behavioural assessment of drug reinforcement and
addictive features in rodents: an overview.” Addiction Biology 11.1 (2006): 2–38.
Schodt, Frederik. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press,
1996.
Schodt, Frederik. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997 [1983].
Sieve, B. and Markus Prechtl. “Comics und Bildergeschichten – Chancen für den
Chemieunterricht.” Naturwissenschaften im Unterricht – Chemie 24.133 (2013a): 2–7.
Sieve, B. and Markus Prechtl. “Kernenergie und Atomzeitalter. Beispiele für Unterrichtseinstiege
mit Comics.” Naturwissenschaften im Unterricht – Chemie 24.133 (2013): 19–21.
Sones, W.W.D. “The Comics and Instructional Method.” Journal of Educational Sociology 18
(1944): 232–240.
Spiegel, Amy N., Julia McQuillan, Peter Halpin, Camillia Matuk and Judy Diamond. “Engaging
Teenagers with Science Through Comics.” Res Sci Educ 43.6 (2013): 2309–2326.
Starkey, Ronald. “Resonance Analogy Using Cartoon Characters.” Journal of Chemical Education
72.6 (1995): 542.
Stein, Daniel. “Comics and Graphic Novels.” Handbook of Intermediality. Ed. Gabriele Rippl.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 420–438.
Szafran, Zvi, Ronald M. Pike and Mono M. Singh. “Microscale Chemistry in the Comics.” Journal
of Chemical Education 71.6 (1994): A151.
Takayama-Wichter, Taeko “Comic-Elemente im Text-Bild-Ensemble beim Wissenstransfer – am
Beispiel der japanischen Textsorte Beipackzettel.” Theorie, Steuerung und Medien des
Wissenstransfers. Ed. Sigurd Wichter and Oliver Stenschke. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2004,
321–345.
Tatalovic, Mico. “Science comics as tools for science education and communication: a brief,
exploratory study.” Jcom 8.4 (2009): A02.
Tayyab, Saad. “Biochemical Education in Leisure.” Biochemical Education 22.1 (1994): 21–23.
Vanderbeke, Dirk. “Gezeichnetes Wissen / Erzähltes Wissen. Wie sich Comics der Wissenschaft
annähern.” Comics und Naturwissenschaft. Ed. Clemens Heydenreich. Berlin: Christian A.
Bachmann Verlag, 2019, 149–165.
Zielinska, Edyta. “Pass the Comics – No, the Science Ones.” https://www.the-scientist.com/
?articles.view/articleNo/25322/title/Pass-the-comics----No--the-science-ones/. 2007.
6.2 Further Reading

Aoki, Kunio, Daisuke Inoue and Makoto Sugita. Kagaku no sekai. [The World of Natural Science.]
Tokyo: Shueisha, 1989.
Aoyama, Tsuyomasa, Ōta Masaru, Ekoda Detectives and Morito Miyauchi. Detective Conan Science
Trick Book 1. Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2001.
Aoyama, Tsuyomasa, Ōta Masaru, Ekoda Detectives and Morito Miyauchi. Detective Conan Science
Trick Book 2. Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2003.
Baumann, Rüdeger and Ulrich Bachmann. Abenteuer in Basic. [Adventures in Basic.] Stuttgart:
Ernst Klett, 1985.
Benton, Mike, Scott Deschaine and June Brigman. Clean Water Team. Austin: Custom Comic
Services, 2000.
Deschaine, Scott and Jim Woodring. One Green Tree. Doylestown: Custom Comic Services, 1998.
Deschaine, Scott and Jim Woodring. Search for Soil. Doylestown: Discovery Comics, 2000.
Doxiades, Apostolos, Christos H. Papadimitrou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna.
Logicomics. An Epic Search for Truth. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Jüngst, Heike Elisabeth. “Die Oberflächengestaltung von Comics als Problem der
Wissensvermittlung im Sachcomic.” Qualität fachsprachlicher Kommunikation. Ed. Susanne
Göpferich and Jan Engberg Tübingen: Narr, 2004. 69–80.
Jüngst, Heike Elisabeth. “Translating Educational Comics.” Comics in Translation. Ed. Zanettin,
Federico. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2008b. 172–199.
Gonick, Larry and Art Huffman. The Cartoon Guide to Physics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.
Gonick, Larry and Mark Wheelis. The Cartoon Guide to Genetics. New York: Harper Perennial,
1991.
Hamann, Alexandra, Claudia Zea-Schmidt, Reinhold Leinfelder, Jörg Hartmann, Jörg Hülsmann,
Robert Nippoldt and Iris Ugurel. Die große Transformation. [The Great Transformation.]
Berlin: Jacoby & Stuart, 2013.
Harder, Jens. Alpha … directions. Hamburg: Carlsen, 2010.
Harder, Jens. Beta … civilizations volume 1. Hamburg: Carlsen, 2014.
Hosler, Jay. Clan Apis. Columbus, OH: Active Synapse, 2000.
Hosler, Jay. The Sandwalk Adventures. Columbus, OH: Active Synapse, 2003.
Hübner, Gert, Siegfried Süßbier and Darja Süßbier. Das verrückte Mathe-Comic-Buch. [The Crazy
Comics Maths Book.] Berlin: Springer, 2012.
Hutchinson, Tomas and Alan Waters. Interface: English for Technical Communication. Student’s
Book. Harlow: Longman, 1984.
Keller, Michael and Josh Neufeld. Fare Game. New York: Al Jazeera America, 2015.
Keller, Michael and Josh Neufeld. Terms of Service. New York: Al Jazeera America, 2014.
Ottaviani, Jim and Leland Purvis. The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded. New York: Abrams
Comics Arts, 2016.
Ottaviani, Jim, Leland Myrick and Hilary Sycamore. Feynman. New York: First Second, 2011.
Rifas, Leonard. All-Atomic Comics. San Francisco: EduComics, rev. ed. 1980.
Takeuchi, Hitoshi, Sayori Abe, and Megumi Sukihara. Kyurī Fujin. [Madame Curie.] Tokyo:
Shogakukan, 1996.
Xu, Paul and James Laurie. The Weather Genie. Los Angeles: Nature Publishing House, 1998.
Sandra Heinen
13 Postcolonial Perspectives
Abstract: In the last two decades, a significant number of graphic narratives have
been published that can be classified as postcolonial, either because they originate
in postcolonial societies or because they address topics associated with postcoloni-
alism. This chapter discusses the implications of the label ‘postcolonial’ before out-
lining recurring themes and typical representational techniques found in the cor-
pus. What many of these comics have in common is a political impetus, reflected
in a commitment to shaping the cultures from which they emerge, and an aesthetic
self-positioning in relation to various local and global (visual) cultures. In the final
section of this chapter, the conditions of production in postcolonial spaces will be
considered, which can differ significantly from the situation in Europe or North
America and which might be seen as having an influence on what kind of texts are
produced, and thus on how the postcolonial comic is perceived as a genre as well.
Key Terms: Postcolonial comics, African comics, Indian comics, cultural identity,
migration, interculurality
1 Introduction: Postcolonial Studies

and Graphic Narrative
During the last few decades, Postcolonial Studies has undeniably become a signifi-
cant presence in the social sciences and humanities, with ‘Postcolonial Studies’
serving as an umbrella term for a multi-disciplinary endeavor to investigate a wide
assortment of phenomena more or less closely connected to the effects of Western
colonialism. These phenomena range from social practices, institutions and repre-
sentations of the colonial period to repercussions of colonialism and imperialism
for the societies of formerly colonized countries as well as those of former coloniz-
ers, the impact of migration and multiculturalism, conflicts inherited from or
shaped by the colonial past in currently politically contested regions (e. g. the Mid-
dle East, Africa and Asia, and consolidated postcolonial societies of the Global
North and the Global South), and contemporary forms of oppression and exploita-
tion, and means to maintain asymmetrical power relationships through various
manifestations of globalization (e. g. trade agreements, multi-national corporations,
Americanization/Westernization of cultures). What unifies the heterogeneous field
of Postcolonial Studies, irrespective of its diverse research questions and methodol-
ogies, is its political agenda, its struggle against social injustice in its various guises.
With respect to comics, ‘postcolonial perspectives’ can refer to two different
phenomena, namely research on comics informed by postcolonial theory and con-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-014
266 Sandra Heinen
cerns, or postcolonial comics themselves. This chapter will focus on the latter, but
it should at least be mentioned that a number of recent studies, including Fredrik
Strömberg’s Black Images in the Comics (2003), William H. Foster III’s Looking for a
Face like Mine (2005), and Michael A. Sheyahshe’s Native Americans in Comic Books
(2008), have investigated the history of representing non-whites in American main-
stream comics and pointed out the pervasiveness of racial caricature. In the Franco-
phone context, the works of the Belgian artist Hergé – which are both critically
acclaimed and commercially successful – have been particularly subjected to criti-
cal postcolonial readings, which elucidate the ways in which the texts bear witness
to the historical context from which they emerged. For example, Hugo Frey (2008)
shows that not only the comics produced by Hergé during the German occupation,
but also some of his later works, testify to his anti-Semitic convictions, while Pascal
Lefèvre (2008) situates Hergé’s Tintin au Congo (1930–31), his most controversial
comic book, which was publicly criticized for its racism by the British Commission
for Racial Equality (McKinney 2008, 4), in the context of other graphic representa-
tions of the Belgian colony of that time that similarly echo colonialist propaganda
(↗8 World-Building).
Such critical readings of canonical comics from a postcolonial perspective have
not only created an awareness that adventure genres are particularly prone to in-
cluding reductively portrayed representatives of other cultures, who function as
challenges that the white hero has to overcome (Miller 2007, 258), but they have
also revealed that the comics medium has in the past readily participated in the
circulation of denigrating ethnic stereotypes, which served as one means by which
a favorable Western identity was constituted. This frequent occurrence of stereotypi-
cal representations of other cultures can be explained by taking into account the
medium’s orientation towards a mass audience, or the medium’s specific features,
namely its tendency to visually attribute a limited number of easily recognizable
features to a character. According to Will Eisner, the stereotype is “a fact of life in
the comics medium. It is an accursed necessity – a tool of communication that is
an inescapable ingredient in most cartoons” (Eisner 2008, 11). The “all-too-real dan-
ger of negative stereotype and caricature, which strips others of any unique identity
and dehumanizes by means of reductive iconography” (Royal 2007, 8), which is
always present in comics, is arguably most problematic with regard to those sub-
genres that primarily address children and adolescents. This assumption also ap-
pears to be at the basis of the book retailer Borders’ 2007 decision to move Hergé’s
Tintin in the Congo to their adult section after the Commission for Racial Equality’s
condemnation.
Needless to say, critical scrutiny of the comics tradition is not restricted to aca-
demic research and political initiatives, but also takes place in the medium itself
and is one of the recurring concerns of postcolonial graphic narratives. For exam-
ple, Hergé’s representation of Black Africans is satirized by the South African car-
toonist Anton Kannemeyer (Tyson 2012), while Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel
American Born Chinese critically engages racist cartoon depictions of Asians (Gard-
ner 2010). However, the scope of topics tackled in postcolonial comics extends far
beyond exposing colonialist and racist tendencies in metropolitan artists’ works. As
is the case with postcolonial literature proper, migration, intercultural encounter
and cultural identity are recurring themes of postcolonial comics, themes which are
negotiated in a variety of fictional and non-fictional genres. Since the emergence of
postcolonial comics as a cohesive body of work, a distinct strand of graphic narra-
tives, is a relatively recent phenomenon, no comprehensive survey of postcolonial
comics exists to date, although a first step in that direction has been undertaken by
Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji (2015). A truly comprehensive survey would have to
face a number of specific challenges, such as dealing with the ever-changing nature
of the field, which is still expanding and which so far lacks a stable canon, or the
restricted availability of parts of the corpus (as only some of the texts have been
distributed internationally). In addition, there is the linguistic diversity of the texts.
The most vibrant comics scenes outside Europe, North America and Japan are, argu-
ably, currently located in India and Francophone Africa, two regions characterized
by the co-existence of various global and local languages, which are used in the
graphic narratives produced there. In the following, such a broad survey will not
be attempted; instead the focus will be on Anglophone comics. This means that, for
example, African comics, many of which are written in French or a local language,
will be referred to here only in passing.
Section 2 will outline some of the questions and complications that arise when
trying to define what a ‘postcolonial comic’ might be. Subsequently, the field of
postcolonial comics will be charted, first with regard to prominent themes (sec-
tion 3) and then with regard to distinct representational strategies (section 4). The
conditions of production, which in some regions differ markedly from Europe and
the US, will be discussed in the concluding section.
2 What is a Postcolonial Comic?

Despite innumerable attempts to specify its meaning – Graham Huggan speaks in
this context of the existence of a “formidable definition industry” (2001, 236) – the
term ‘postcolonial’ is notorious for its “semantic vagueness” (2001, 1), resulting in
an “endless terminological confusion in ‘postcolonial’ debates” (Schulze-Engler
2007, 21). What ‘postcolonial’ means can therefore vary considerably from one
speaker to the next:
The plenitude of signification is such that ‘postcolonial’ can indicate a historical transition, an
achieved epoch, a cultural location, a theoretical stance – indeed, in the spirit of mastery
favored by Humpty Dumpty in his dealings with language, whatever an author chooses it to
mean. (Parry 2004, 66)
268 Sandra Heinen
Notwithstanding its defeatist undertone, Parry’s pointed remark is helpful because

it identifies the criteria that are most commonly used to arrive at a definition of
the postcolonial: the temporal dimension (postcolonialism as a time that follows
colonialism, either conceived of as a transition phase or a more permanent state),
the spatial dimension (postcolonialism as the condition of formerly colonized coun-
tries after decolonization) as well as the ideological dimension (the postcolonial as
counter-discourse to the hegemonic). In the same way in which they are applied to
verbal postcolonial literatures, these criteria can be used to approach a definition
of postcolonial graphic narratives, meaning that any comic that meets one or more
of these criteria can be classified as a postcolonial comic.
The application of the label ‘postcolonial’ to some graphic narratives has a
number of benefits: First and foremost, it generates visibility for the comics. Despite
the aforementioned conceptual disputes regarding the term, the postcolonial is an
established category. As such, it demands attention. To consider a phenomenon
such as graphic narratives and not pay attention to the postcolonial would, in the
current academic climate, likely be perceived as a severe oversight. Thus, many
graphic narratives produced outside Europe, the US and Japan only catch the atten-
tion of Westerners (both readers and critics) because they can be tagged as postcolo-
nial. Secondly, the label ‘postcolonial’ provides institutional homes for the research
on, and teaching of, the texts in question. The development of English departments
in Germany can illustrate this point. Today many English departments in Germany
have moved beyond the British/American binary to include an additional postcolo-
nial branch, which provides a space where scholarship on postcolonial texts of all
genres can flourish. In addition, the label ‘postcolonial’ positively valorizes the texts
it is affixed to. In other words, texts labelled ʻpostcolonialʼ are ascribed a particular
social and global value which is rooted in their political orientation, in the sense
that they provide (or are assumed to provide) an alternative perspective to hege-
monic discourses like colonialism, neo-imperialism, Eurocentrism.
Although the label ‘postcolonial’ is likely to increase both the number of readers
and the amount of critical attention a comic attracts, it can also be perceived as a
means of control and marginalization. The Congolese cartoonist Asimba Bathy, for
example, has raised such concerns about the classification of his works as ‘African
comics’ (one of the main ‘subgenres’ of the postcolonial comic), a classification
which he perceives as an expression of the “Western will to keep artists of African
origin from participating fully in the contemporary art scene” (Repetti 2007, 34).
Along the same lines, Asian-American cartoonist Adrian Tomine is known for his
“resistance to racially positioning his work” (Oh 2007, 135), a resistance which mani-
fests itself in his drawing of racially neutral characters, an aesthetic choice which
allows his work “to enter the realm of the ‘universal’” (Oh 2007, 132). For Bathy,
Tomine and others, the identification of texts as postcolonial or multicultural is
based on the juxtaposition of ‘standard’ Western works and ‘other,’ non-standard
postcolonial forms of expression, a problem which persists today (Aldama 2010, 2).
Labels such as ‘postcolonial,’ ‘multicultural’ and ‘ethnic’ can thus work to perpetuate
colonial patterns of discourse which establish anything Western as the norm and
anything non-Western as a deviation. Mehta and Mukherji warn their readers against
defining postcolonial comics relative to established (Western) narrative genres:
the framing of the postcolonial argument exclusively within a relative, comparative, or parallel
field that includes mainstream comics studies and postcolonial writing introduces a metropoli-
tan/regional binary and thus assumes a Western priority, authority, and determination in its
conception of postcolonial projects of reading, writing, or political practice. (2015, 12)
To bypass the perceived pitfalls of a comparative approach, Mehta and Mukherji

(2015, 7) suggest examining postcolonial comics mainly in relation to the context
from which they emerge and thus focus on their regional rootedness. Such a meth-
odology might work well for some postcolonial comics; with regard to many others,
however, focusing primarily on regional origin would mean neglecting essential fea-
tures of the texts and their production, not least because many of the artists in
question move between cultures in their lives as well as in their art. Frequent trans-
national co-operation between comic writers and artists likewise undermines the
idea of a text being at home in just one culture.
The idea that Western and postcolonial comic cultures can be juxtaposed – and
thus that postcolonial comics can be clearly demarcated – is further undermined by
the many cases in which a text tackles postcolonial concerns, although its author
is not a member of the “non-white groups and minorities” that “postcolonial studies
have generally focused on” (Dony 2014, 12), but instead a representative of white
Western culture. Are the comics of Kannemeyer, which thematize race relationships
in post-apartheid South Africa, postcolonial comics, although he speaks from within
the dominant white culture? Are there different degrees of ‘being postcolonial,’ and
does a reader’s assessment of a text’s ʻpostcolonialnessʼ depend on the author’s
ethnicity? Are the travel narratives of Franco-Canadian Guy Delisle, which recount
the author’s experiences in China, North Korea, Israel and Myanmar, more or less
postcolonial than Maltese-American Joe Sacco’s graphic journalism from Palestine,
Gaza and Bosnia? What about white American Jessica Abel’s graphic novel La Perdi-
da, which depicts a Mexican-American woman’s search for identity? In fact, the
genre of the multicultural comic (Aldama 2010), which Abel’s text belongs to, can
in itself be regarded as undermining the binary opposition between Western and
postcolonial texts, since this genre has emerged from the societies of the Global
North and typically deals with multicultural issues that are features of these socie-
ties. Thus, the transition from monocultural to multicultural graphic narratives is
as seamless as the transition from multicultural to postcolonial ones.
Even when comics authors indisputably come from a postcolonial space, such
as India or Africa, they are under no obligation to address postcolonial topics in their
texts, such as colonial history and its repercussions in the contemporary world,
ethnic identity, multiculturalism, migration or neo-colonialism. Amruta Patil’s Kari
270 Sandra Heinen
(2008), for instance, might be set in Mumbai, but its story about “a homosexual
woman in a heteronormative culture” (Dogra 2015, 154), which “focuses on how a
member of a sexual minority copes with her isolation in an urban landscape” (Mehta
2010, 179), is hardly specific to postcolonialism. Similarly, Sudershan (Chimpanzee)
(2012), a story by Rajesh Devraj and Meren Imchen about various forms of exploita-
tion in Bollywood, can easily be related to entertainment industries elsewhere. The
potential meaning of such texts is unreasonably limited if they are regarded primari-
ly as postcolonial narratives, because readings of texts as postcolonial, i. e. readings
informed by postcolonial theory, tend to privilege certain kinds of questions at the
cost of others. Jared Gardner’s comment on Tomine’s graphic narratives without
Asian characters demonstrates this: Gardner insists that “we would be wrong to as-
sume that those stories have nothing to say about the experience of being Asian
American” (Gardner 2010, 143).
If the label ‘postcolonial’ is retained in this chapter, this is mainly done to pro-
vide visibility for a group of texts that otherwise might be overlooked, although they
are a rapidly growing presence on the global graphic narrative scene. At the cost of
definitional precision, this label is used here in a wide sense – including multicul-
tural graphic novels from the Global North – in order to do justice to the broad
thematic and formal spectrum of comics dealing with postcolonial concerns and the
interrelations between texts of different origins. ‘Postcolonial’ in this sense refers
to comics embedded in a transnational network of graphic narratives, non-graphic
narratives, and visual cultures.
3 The ‘What’: Subject Areas

One topic that is common in other genres of Anglophone postcolonial literature,
and could therefore be expected to also be of particular relevance for postcolonial
comics, is colonialism. Contrary to expectations, however, it plays only a minor role.
To be sure, the colonial period is referred to in a number of postcolonial comics,
such as Parismita Singh’s The Hotel at the End of the World (2009) and Malik Sajad’s
Munnu (2015), which recapitulate successive conflicts in specific regions, but the
colonial past is seldom the main topic. The Rabbits (1998), a picture book for chil-
dren by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, which tells the Australian history of settler
colonialism from the perspective of the Aborigines, is a notable exception. One rea-
son for the scarcity of comic books addressing the colonial past in such a straight-
forward manner might be the genre’s recent emergence: most postcolonial comic
books are from the last two decades, which means they were written at a time when
the colonial past had already been dealt with extensively in other literary and non-
literary genres, and the comics creators are generally from a generation that has no
real-life experience of the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism.
Thus, recently the focus in postcolonial writing – in comics as well as in other

genres – has shifted “beyond the ‘post’ of postcolonialism” (Mehta 2010, 186), away
from the past and away from stories of nation-building, to more contemporary and
local concerns. Accordingly, if colonialism occurs as a topic in comics, this is usual-
ly with a strong emphasis on its effect on the present, as for example in the graphic
novel The Outside Circle (2015) by Patti LaBoucane-Benson and Kelly Mellings. The
Outside Circle tells the story of an indigenous Canadian involved in various crimes,
who after a spell in prison escapes from his old life through a healing program that
supports its participants in connecting to their indigenous identity in a positive way,
and thus coming to terms with the historical trauma of colonialism. The Outside
Circle’s focus on the present situation of indigenous people has a didactic impetus:
the graphic novel sets out to provide factual information about the colonial past
and its legacy in order to explain the contemporary situation in Canada, as well as
to inform readers about healing centers, which point the way to a life without drug
addiction, criminality and violence.
Sarnath Banerjee’s depiction of the colonial period in The Barn Owl’s Wondrous
Capers (2007), a complex narrative with multiple plotlines set in different continents
and periods, is much more playful and ironic. In one of the stories, the Jewish mer-
chant Abravanel informs the reader about social scandals in eighteenth-century co-
lonial Calcutta. Since the excessive and eccentric decadence of both the British and
the Bengali upper-classes are satirized, colonizer and colonized are not juxtaposed
but jointly become the target of ridicule. The inclusion of episodes from the colonial
period is therefore less an expression of a critical engagement with colonialism than
a means to introduce more general reflections on history, historicity and historiogra-
phy. Through the plotline situated in colonial Calcutta, the graphic novel uncovers
the historical layers that constitute the contemporary urban space (Sandten 2011).
Furthermore, Abravanel’s selective, manipulative and unreliable report draws atten-
tion to the constructedness and partiality of any historical account.
Instead of dealing with the colonial past, many postcolonial comics address
issues that are immediately relevant for the present. These issues largely fall into
one of two dominant subject areas: migration and multiculturality, and sites of con-
flict in post-independence postcolonial societies. The way the topics are treated de-
pends not only on aesthetic preferences, but also on the targeted audience, which
can be local or international, and which can include children, adolescents, and
adults. The main intention may be to entertain or bring aesthetic pleasure; more
often, however, a more specific communicative intention is noticeable. Postcolonial
comics frequently set out to examine a social phenomenon, to present an experience
otherwise marginalized, or to remind its readers of a historical event or person con-
sidered to be relevant for the present. In other words, postcolonial comics are fre-
quently conceived of as interventions – interventions in political debates, in the
constitution of cultural memory, in the defense of minorities.
Stories of migration, and the resultant intercultural encounters, are frequently
the topic of postcolonial graphic narratives. The obvious reason for their prevalence
272 Sandra Heinen
is their topicality; how to deal with an increasing number of refugees is being heat-
edly debated at the moment, not only in Europe, but also in the USA and Australia.
In comics, this topic is represented in a variety of ways: in fictional and non-fiction-
al narratives, with a focus on the migrant generation or on their children; as repre-
sentation of a historically and culturally specific constellation; or in an abstract
fashion. Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) and Joe Sacco’s “The Unwanted” (2012),
two graphic narratives dealing with the experience of migration, can illustrate such
differences in approach.
The Arrival (2006) is a graphic novel that tells the story of a young man leaving
his wife and daughter behind to seek a better life in another country. After a time,
during which he struggles with the new, unfamiliar world, he settles in and is even-
tually joined by his family. The plot’s limited complexity seems to be at least in part
a by-product of the author’s decision to produce a wordless graphic novel. The lack
of historical specificity, however, is clearly intended. The fact that the images are
sepia-tinted (in a manner evocative of yellowed photographs) suggests that we are
being told a story from the past rather than from the present; however, the futuristic
world entered by the protagonist points in the opposite direction. And although the
panels that show the immigrant processing station the protagonist has to pass
through are reminiscent of Ellis Island, the country of destination itself bears little
semblance to the United States. The Arrival, therefore, is not an account of a specific
episode in the history of migration, but rather sets out to tell a universal tale about
the experience of migrants. Embedded narratives in which other refugees tell the
story of their immigration to the protagonist provide a representative variety of rea-
sons for leaving one’s home country (poverty, war, ethnic cleansing, forced labor)
and thus add to this sense of generalization. The Arrival’s degree of abstraction
leaves it to the reader to connect the story to specific cultural contexts. Thus, Boat-
right (2010) is able to read The Arrival as a re-telling of the American Dream, while
Dalmaso and Madella (2016) relate the story to present-day Australia, Tan’s home
country.
A number of narrative strategies encourage the reader of The Arrival to adopt
the protagonist’s perspective. The images visualize the immigrant’s point of view by
showing his home country in a realist fashion, while his new host country is a
surreal place, full of fantastical machines, futuristic buildings, unreadable signs in
a strange script, and bizarre animals and plants. The reader is thus likely to share
the migrant’s amazement as well as his disorientation. The character is shown in
situations anyone can easily relate to: at home with his family, on the street trying
to find his way around, during his morning routine, in different work environments,
in conversation with people he encounters. His inner life is – partly because of the
absence of words – limited to feelings familiar to everyone, such as love, loneliness,
astonishment, curiosity, fear and joy. The protagonist’s “association with Western
European immigrants” (Boatright 2010, 470) through the allusion to Ellis Island and
the skirting of ethnic markers that would indicate any other origin further facilitates
the readers’ identification with the protagonist. More specifically, it facilitates the
identification of Western readers, who seem to be the intended audience. Thus, the
book counters critical perceptions of refugees by presenting its readers with a model
migrant, who is likable, not very different from them, willing to assimilate, and (at
the end of the story) successfully integrated into the new culture. In the interest of
this aim, The Arrival glosses over many problematic aspects of the reality of migra-
tion. The obstacles this immigrant has to overcome in his new host country do not
include racism and xenophobia; and the portrayal of the migrant’s smooth integra-
tion is so optimistic that it can also be regarded critically as “reinforcing the coloni-
alist discourse of a cohesive multiculturalism” (Dalmaso und Madella 2016, 75).
Joe Sacco’s representation of migration in “The Unwanted” (2012) is in many
ways fundamentally different from Tan’s. As the title already suggests, “The Un-
wanted” presents a disharmonious picture of the arrival of migrants. Another strik-
ing difference between “The Unwanted” and The Arrival is the former text’s focus
on a specific historical moment in a specific cultural context, namely contemporary
Malta, the country of Sacco’s birth. Because it is situated on the sea route from
Libya to Italy, many African refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean become
stranded on the small island. As in his other works of comics journalism, Sacco
approaches the situation as a reporter, collecting comments on the situation from
all the people involved (the Maltese population, politicians, local government offi-
cials, people who work with the refugees, and the refugees themselves); these sub-
jective opinions are contextualized by factual information which appears in certain
panels. It is clear from the beginning that the situation is laden with conflict. The
Maltese population perceives the refugees mainly as a threat to social order and
security and only wants them gone. The institutions processing the illegal immi-
grants are shown to be ill-equipped for the large number of people arriving, which
results in prolonged procedures and humiliating treatment. The Africans, in turn,
would like nothing better than to leave the hostile island for mainland Europe, yet
they are prevented from doing so by European institutions and immigration laws.
Although Sacco refrains from explicitly evaluating these conflicting perspec-
tives, he does not pretend to be a neutral observer but reveals himself to be both
an insider and an outsider by telling the reader that he was born in Malta, but
left the country as a child. The author’s own experience as a migrant establishes a
connection to the refugees, but also functions to highlight their differences, since
Sacco’s family, being “white-faced Europeans,” were welcome in Australia. The con-
trast between the author’s own experience and the treatment of present-day African
migrants exposes the racism at the basis of the Maltese hostility towards the refu-
gees. Through the inclusion of multiple perspectives, Sacco reflects the complexity
of the situation (Shay 2015, 252), while guiding the readers’ sympathies by orches-
trating how and when these different perspectives are represented. At the beginning
of “The Unwanted,” the Maltese perspective is privileged, but after about a quarter
of the text, the refugees’ perspective gains prominence. By focusing on one exem-
274 Sandra Heinen
plary immigrant, John, who tells his own story in some detail, the migrant experi-
ence is personalized. If the Maltese rejection of the refugees might be understand-
able at the beginning of “The Unwanted,” it seems utterly inappropriate in light of
the ordeal John has suffered in his home country and on his journey to Malta. The
comic thus invites the reader to take the refugees’ perspective. While this is similar
to The Arrival, both the tone and outlook of the narratives are strikingly different:
Whereas The Arrival provides reassurance to the reader, “The Unwanted” draws
attention to a conflict that is unlikely to be resolved in the near future since a recon-
ciliation of the divergent interests of refugees and host country populations is no-
where in sight.
Migration affects not only the generation which relocates to another country
but also their children, especially if they don’t blend seamlessly into the majority
culture visually. Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) and Tomine’s Shortcomings
(2007) are two graphic novels that address the question of what it means to be
Asian-American and challenge notions of “post-ethnicity and melting-pot multicul-
turalism” (Møllegaard 2015, 277), albeit in a complimentary way. American Born Chi-
nese is a coming-of-age story for young adult readers. It is printed in bright colors,
which accentuate the characters’ ethnic identities. The story is carefully plotted to
highlight thematic parallels between the three story lines, which merge at the end
of the graphic novel. In all three stories the characters have to learn to embrace
who they are, which means (at least for the human characters) accepting their eth-
nic identity. Although already thirty, Ben Tanaka, the protagonist of Shortcomings,
also struggles with his Asian-American identity. Ben repeatedly voices his refusal to
consider race to be relevant for his life in any way, yet the narrative shows that his
sexual desire is far from colour blind; indeed, it “depends on interracial fantasy”
(Sheffer 2014, 126). In contrast to American Born Chinese, however, Shortcomings
offers no resolution to this conflict, and the reader is likely to have an ambivalent
attitude toward the protagonist. On the one hand, Tomine encourages sympathy for
Ben through “a web of cultural references that are easily recognizable for a specific
kind of reader, building the impression of a shared cultural background” (Schneider
2012, 63) and by “constantly engag[ing] the readers with Ben’s emotional state”
(Park 2010, 103). On the other hand, identification is undermined by Ben’s charac-
terization as condescending, self-absorbed and unsympathetic to others. In this
way, Shortcomings brings up various aspects of a complex problem without prescrib-
ing a solution.
It is no coincidence that the comics referred to above have all emerged from
countries of the Global North. It is here that migration and multiculturality have
become especially topical. In contrast, many of the comics produced outside of Eu-
rope, the US and Australia broach topics which are of more immediate relevance to
their local context. Kannemeyer, for example, has written several short autobio-
graphical comics which deal with race relations in South Africa, both during and
after apartheid. In “My Nelson Mandela. A Short Political History of a White South
African in Rotten English,” he relates how he became aware of various aspects of

apartheid, not in his home country, where public communication was strictly cen-
sored, but during a stay in Europe in the 1980s; “Die Taal” and “Black” explicitly
discuss the role of language in oppression, both during apartheid and today, and
present the reader with a view of the ‘New South Africa,’ in which interracial coex-
istence is still heavily burdened by the past. In Karlien de Villiers’ graphic memoir
Meine Mutter war eine schöne Frau (2006), the author’s personal memories of her
childhood and adolescence in South Africa are interwoven with the country’s na-
tional history in a similar way. Kannemeyer, born in 1967, and de Villiers, born in
1975, are of a generation that has no direct responsibility for the apartheid regime,
but that has a distinct memory of it nevertheless. Their narratives express shame
with regard to the past and an awareness of the social inequality that persists. In
particular, Kannemeyer insists on the importance of the white population remem-
bering and taking responsibility.
In India, a wide assortment of culturally and socially relevant issues have been
addressed in graphic narratives, ranging from religious extremism (PP and Sengup-
ta: The Believers, 2006), caste discrimination (Bhimayana; Natarajan and Ninan: A
Gardener in the Wasteland, 2012), homosexuality (Kari) and gender relations (Arni
and Chitrakar: Sita’s Ramayana, 2011), to the transformation of the media landscape
since the 1980s (Prasad and Kumar: Tinker.Solder.Tap, 2009), the underbelly of In-
dia’s film industry (Sudershan), sustainability (Banerjee: All Quiet in Vikaspuri, 2015;
Prasad: The Water Cookbook, 2011) and the impact of modernization and technologi-
cal progress on the environment (Our Toxic World).
River of Stories (1994) by Orijit Sen, often referred to as India’s first graphic
novel, is concerned with the social and ecological cost of large-scale modernization
and development programs in India. Sen pays particular attention to the perspective
of the adavasi, indigenous tribes whose traditional way of living is being violently
disrupted by deforestation, road building and the damming of rivers. River of Stories
criticizes the exploitation of nature and of indigenous people alike and makes a
plea for the fair distribution of resources and an economic system that – in line with
the values of the adavasi – privileges social responsibility and sustainability over
profit. Social inequality is also addressed in Bhimayana (2011), a collaboration be-
tween the artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam and the writers Srividya Nata-
rajan and S. Anand. Bhimayana, literally (and in analogy to the ancient Indian epic
poem Ramayana) ‘the journey of Bhim,’ is a graphic biography of Bhimrao Ramji
Ambedkar (1891–1956), an Indian politician and social reformer who fought against
the discrimination of ‘untouchables.’ By integrating the story of Ambedkar’s life into
a present-day frame story, the creators accentuate the persistence of caste discrimi-
nation. (Observations to the same effect are also made by Sacco in his piece “Kushi-
nagar,” Sacco 2012.)
There are a number of historical graphic novels looking back at moments of
political crisis in India’s recent past. Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm (2010), for ex-
276 Sandra Heinen
ample, is a fictional memoir on the Indian Emergency under prime minister Indira
Gandhi in the 1970s. Ghosh visualizes the “horrors of political oppression and the
decay of democracy” (Nayar 2015, 132) in sepia-toned images. As in The Arrival, the
coloring suggests faded paper and thus functions as a visual “metaphor for memo-
ry” (Holmberg 2013). More recently, Ghosh has edited the anthology This Side, That
Side (2013), which assembles 28 graphic narratives concerned with the Partition of
India. This Side, That Side is not so much a book about the historical events, the
unparalleled bloodshed and displacement of 1947, than a book about how people
today relate to the traumatic past. The contributors to the volume are too young to
have experienced the Partition themselves; thus, they provide perspectives on the
past and the present that are informed, on the one hand, by memory cultures that
have over the years developed in the countries in question and, on the other hand,
by the lives they themselves lead. In bringing together artists and writers from In-
dia, Pakistan and Bangladesh for this collaboration, the anthology not only presents
a multiplicity of voices, styles and genres, but is itself an exercise in cross-border
communication.
One of the sites of conflict inherited from Partition is the dispute over the
Kashmir region, about which two graphic novels have already been published.
Naseer Ahmed and Saurabh Singh’s Kashmir Pending (2007) has recently been
joined by Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015). Kashmir Pending pursues its
pedagogic aim openly: its homodiegetic narrator is a repentant freedom fighter
who warns of the cost of violent resistance. While Ahmed’s comic thus “arguably
reinforces a liberal colonialist ideology regarding Indian control over Kashmir”
(Hogan 2014, 108), Sajad’s memoir of his childhood in war-torn Kashmir paints a
different picture of the conflict. Like Kashmir Pending, Munnu criticizes violence,
but its portrayal of the Kashmiri resistance to the Indian occupation is much more
sympathetic. This is mainly achieved by questioning the political legitimacy of the
Indian presence in Kashmir and showing the people of Kashmir as victims of Indi-
an persecution and brutality. This view of the conflict finds its aesthetic expression
in the visual depiction of the Kashmiris as hangul deer, unmistakably an echo of
Art Spiegelman’s metaphoric representation of Jewish Holocaust victims as mice
(↗22 Art Spiegelman, Maus). The hangul deer, the reader is informed towards the
end of the graphic novel, is not only a fitting image for the Kashmiri because it is
a local species and the “national animal of Kashmir,” but also because it is “en-
dangered because its habitat’s been wrecked by the army and deforestation” (Sa-
jad 2015, 333). The image therefore “emphasises the extreme vulnerability of the
Kashmiri” (Bharat 2016, 121). Yet although the author-narrator of the memoir
clearly sides with the Kashmiri, he does not idealize them. The inclusion of scenes
showing (some) Kashmiri as perpetrators, persecuting the Hindu minority and
committing sexual assault, contributes to a rendition of the conflict that is much
more complex than Kashmir Pending’s unequivocal appeal to Kashmiri militants
to relinquish violence.
4 The ‘How’: Representational Strategies

As is to be expected, postcolonial comics – which are independently produced in
various cultural contexts with a wide range of technical tools – feature a diversity
of styles which defies generalization. Different formal features fulfil specific func-
tions in the immediate textual context in which they occur, but a straightforward
form-to-function mapping for all postcolonial comics could not be anything but an
oversimplification. There are, however, some features that can be found in several
postcolonial comics and which can be linked to postcolonial textual politics em-
ployed in other genres. These features are therefore not necessarily unique to post-
colonial comics, but might nevertheless be important characteristics of the genre.
A case in point is the explicit anchoring of many texts in the real world (Heinen
2019). The majority of postcolonial comics sets out to provide information about,
shape opinions on, or come to terms with a specific cultural or historical phenom-
enon. For this purpose, many of these comics emphasize that the intratextual story-
world is linked to the extratextual reality. In non-fictional genres, such as the mem-
oir, biography or journalistic report, a mimetic relationship between intratextual
and extratextual worlds is taken for granted (↗9 Life Writing). In the case of fiction-
al narratives, however, the assumption of representational truth is, by convention,
suspended. If, in spite of the ‘contract of fictionality,’ a truth claim is meant to be
made, this has to be indicated explicitly either within the narrative or in the para-
text. As in fictional texts of other genres, claims to representational accuracy can be
signaled in comics by identifying a specific time and setting of action. The images of
Delhi Calm, for example, repeatedly show calendar sheets providing the information
necessary to situate the events historically.
In addition to such devices not unique to comics, graphic narratives can link
their stories with the real world in medium-specific ways. One technique to achieve
this linkage is the integration of photographs. Although it is common knowledge
today that photographs can easily be manipulated, they are – due to their assumed
indexicality – still perceived as depicting reality accurately. Hence, they “transcend
the threshold of paratext and the narrative’s […] diegesis” (Howell 2015, 73). For
example, in The Outside Circle and The Boat, reproductions of real photographs are
inserted into the narratives at crucial moments to testify to the veracity of the ac-
counts given of the conditions in Canadian residential schools for indigenous chil-
dren and Malaysian refugee camps, respectively. At the same time, the photographs
turn the characters of the stories into representatives of a group, consisting of all
those people who have gone through the same institutions. Our Toxic World, a
guidebook to sustainable living in the guise of a graphic narrative, includes widely
known photographs of the Bhopal disaster to underline its call for stricter safety
regulations in chemical factories (Sen Gupta und Kuriyan 2010, 46).
Like the reproduction of photographs, replications of maps and newspaper arti-
cles can strengthen a graphic novel’s truth claims. While maps in non-fictional nar-
278 Sandra Heinen
ratives (e. g. in Sacco’s “The Unwanted” or “Kushinagar”) are mainly used to pro-
vide spatial orientation for the reader, they function differently in fictional
narratives, such as Delhi Calm, Kari and The Water Cookbook, in which the repro-
duction of authentic map material symbolically signals that the graphic novels refer
to historical events or real places. Reproductions of newspaper clippings fulfil a
similar function in Delhi Calm and River of Stories. (Their effect in the non-fictional
Bhimayana is slightly different, though not unrelated: Authentic excerpts from re-
cent newspapers here serve to highlight the ongoing topicality of caste discrimina-
tion.)
The multimodal form of the medium allows comics not only to reproduce photo-
graphs or maps, but also to visually quote, or allude to, other comics. This form of
inter-pictoriality (Isekenmeier 2013) is often used to acknowledge artistic influence
and occurs particularly often in self-referential comics with author-characters. Corri-
dor, for example, whose protagonist is revealed to be its (fictionalized) author to-
wards the end of the narrative, recycles images from The Phantom and The Adven-
tures of Tintin, and the fact that Sajad represents Kashmiris as animals in Munnu
signposts his indebtedness to Spiegelman’s Maus. Like other forms of intertextuali-
ty, inter-pictoriality can not only be used to align a text with a pretext, a genre or a
tradition, but it can also mark critical engagement. This is most notably the case in
Yang’s American Born Chinese, whose protagonist is visited by a cousin from China,
who, with his slanted eyes, protruding front teeth, yellow skin color, traditional
Chinese clothes and queue hair style, is “a monstrously exaggerated concatenation
of every popular cultural stereotype of Asians and Asian Americans” (Gardner 2010,
139). Yang redeploys these stereotypes to satirically expose their racism. In Kanne-
meyer’s short comic strips “Congo Parody,” “The Devil of the Equator” and “Pappa
and the Black Hands” inter-pictoriality is employed to similar ends: the three comics
consist entirely of panels taken from Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo (2005), which have
been modified and rearranged by Kannemeyer to caricature both the racism inher-
ent in Hergé’s comic and race relations in post-apartheid South Africa.
Of particular interest to postcolonial literary studies and, by extension, to the
study of postcolonial comics, is the question whether postcolonial texts have devel-
oped specific means of expression, whether there is “something intrinsically postco-
lonial about certain kinds of writing qua form” (Boehmer 2010, 170). With regard to
monomodal (verbal) texts, this question has been answered by pointing out a num-
ber of recurring literary devices which are understood as counter-discursive prac-
tices questioning the authority of Eurocentric cultural models. Three of these devi-
ces in particular can also be found in several of the comics at hand: the use of
foreign linguistic elements, the imitation of orality, and the deployment of non-
realist modes of representation.
Languages other than English appear in many Anglophone postcolonial comics,
mainly because they reflect the world inhabited by the characters. In the diegesis
they occur in spoken or written form, although both can, of course, only be repre-
sented in writing in the medium. Non-English script located on the level of the sto-
ry – for example, on shop signs or documents – is frequently reproduced mimetical-
ly without translation, thus bringing attention to the setting of a story and locating
its characters culturally. Speech acts in a non-English language, however, are usual-
ly rendered in translation so that the story remains intelligible. Such a translation,
metaphorically referred to as ‘dubbing’ by Reichl (2002, 101), can occur without
further comment or can be marked, as in American Born Chinese, in which a foot-
note informs the reader that all dialogue in angle brackets is “[t]ranslated from Man-
darin Chinese” (Yang 2006, 23). In Kannemeyer’s “Die Taal” the author-narrator
addresses the reader in English; in situations from the past which he recalls, how-
ever, the characters’ Afrikaans dialogue is reproduced in the original. The main
point seems to be to accurately represent the linguistic practices under the apart-
heid regime, which are revealed to have been in and of themselves a means of
control. Readers unfamiliar with Afrikaans can still understand “Die Taal” because
footnotes provide verbatim English translations of the Afrikaans dialogue. As Mari-
on Gymnich (2002, 68) has pointed out, such footnotes – like the glossary appended
to de Villiers’ Meine Mutter war eine schöne Frau – not only aid comprehension, but
also highlight the author’s or narrator’s role as cultural mediator, thus emphasizing
the alterity of the culture presented.
It is no coincidence that the two authors who present themselves most clearly
as cultural mediators are white South Africans and that the language they translate
is Afrikaans, the language of the oppressor, not that of the oppressed – for transla-
tions of indigenous languages have frequently been criticized in Postcolonial Stud-
ies as upholding colonialist hierarchies between center and periphery. “The transla-
tion of foreign elements – no matter how it is achieved – tends to privilege the
language and the culture of the ‘centre,’” Gymnich argues, “because it implies an
orientation towards the ‘centre,’ which provides the target language” (Gymnich
2002, 68). Foreign linguistic elements that remain untranslated are, in contrast, con-
sidered by Ashcroft et. al. (2000, 122, 123) “the most subtle form of abrogation” (i. e.
rejection of the colonizer’s claim to normativity), because they emphasize difference
rather than trying to overcome it. This is the case in Tomine’s Shortcomings, in
which the characters occasionally switch from English to their Asian mother
tongues. The utterances in Korean or Japanese remain untranslated so that any
reader unfamiliar with the Asian languages is barred from following the conversa-
tion. In addition to practicing this exclusion, the narrative also explicitly addresses
it when the Japanese-American protagonist cannot understand a heated conversa-
tion his Korean-American friend is having with her parents, possibly about him; the
friend later refuses to tell him (and the reader) what they were arguing about. While
the exclusion in Shortcomings is momentary, and thus not a real obstacle for readers
not fluent in Korean, the characters in Sudershan (Chimpanzee) switch continuously
between English and Hindi. This not only mirrors the bilingual world of Hindu cine-
ma in which the story is set, but also signals to the reader that the target audience
is Indian, not international.
280 Sandra Heinen
Oral storytelling, which questions “Euro-centric notions of civilization, as well

as the view of writing as the vehicle of authority and truth” (Ashcroft et. al. 2000,
151), enters postcolonial graphic narratives in various guises. In both The Hotel at
the End of the World and River of Stories, significant space is given to the representa-
tion of oral storytelling, albeit in the context of different arguments. ‘The hotel at
the end of the world’ in Singh’s graphic novel is a place where a group of characters
spend the night telling each other stories. The frame narrative, which connects the
embedded stories, highlights the social and interactional aspect of oral storytelling
and suggests that it has more importance than the question of a story’s truth. In
River of Stories, in contrast, oral storytelling is connected to traditional knowledge
that should be heard: the mythological stories about the creation of the world
voiced by a legendary bard represent an ancient wisdom that is in danger of being
lost in the modern (over)rationalized world. Patil’s graphic novel Adi Parva, a retell-
ing of the Indian epic Mahabharata, also depicts the telling of traditional stories as
a means to preserve and communicate received knowledge.
The creation myth recounted in River of Stories can, like some of the tales that
constitute The Hotel at the End of the World, also exemplify the third device fre-
quently found in postcolonial literatures, namely the use of non-realist modes of
representation. There are two such modes primarily used in (postcolonial) graphic
novels, the first of which is the magic realist mode, which merges fantastical and
realist elements. The tales of The Hotel at the End of the World, for example, make
mention of a floating island, spirits and human beings with supernatural attributes;
one of the characters in The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, to take another example,
is the legendary wandering Jew who lives through the centuries and thus connects
the past and the present. In Kari, Patil relies on evocative “fairytale references”
and “mythic subversions” (Mukherji 2015, 158) to tell a lesbian coming-of-age story.
Another non-realist mode employed by postcolonial graphic novels concerns the
recounting of traditional culture-specific myths and legends, either in shorter epi-
sodes embedded in a larger narrative context (e. g. in River of Stories, Munnu and
American Born Chinese), or as book-length retellings (Sita’s Ramayana, Adi Parva).
Like the imitation of orality, this reworking of myths and legends can be regarded
as a means to “recuperate the pre-colonial culture” (see Ashcroft et. al. 2000, 119).
Local traditions also frequently influence the images of postcolonial graphic
narratives. Numerous postcolonial comics feature a drawing style indebted to indig-
enous visual cultures, thus ‘indigenizing the comic book medium’ and expanding
the pool of aesthetic tools available to its practitioners. The incorporation of tradi-
tional styles can be connected to specific episodes, as in American Born Chinese, in
which the images of the mythological story line are based on representations in
traditional Chinese drawings, or in River of Stories, which uses Warli painting, an
Indian tribal art form, to represent a creation myth (Sen 1994, 12). In some cases,
indigenous visual traditions inform a whole graphic novel or an artist’s personal
style. In Munnu, Sajad imitates the style of Kashmiri woodblock printing, a craft
that is also explicitly identified as a formative influence within the narrative; more-
over, aspects of Ghosh’s comic art have been compared to Bengali Kalighat paint-
ings (Holmberg 2013), whereas Matt Huynh’s drawing style is influenced by East
Asian ink wash painting.
While Sajad, Ghosh and Huynh understand themselves as comic book artists
influenced by local traditions, projects such as Sita’s Ramayana, Lie: A Traditional
Tale of Modern India and Bhimayana bring visual traditions to comics through col-
laboration with local visual artists who are new to the medium. In all cases the
aesthetics of the graphic narratives are expressive of a political agenda which is
explained in the paratexts. For example, Tara Books, the publisher of Sita’s Ramaya-
na, sets out to connect “Indian picture storytelling traditions with a contemporary
reader’s sensibility” (Arni and Chitrakar, 152). In this endeavor, the visual art of
Patua scroll artist Moyna Chitrakar is given precedence, while the verbal aspect of
the text is secondary, since “Sita’s Ramayana was painted before it was written”
(Arni and Chitrakar, 150). Lie is drawn by “miniaturist artists from Rajasthan” in
order to “satirise the current state of affairs within the country using a traditional
form of expression” (Bhatia 2010). In Bhimayana, substantial modifications of the
visual conventions of comics are the result of a conscious decision on the part of
the Pardhan Gond artists, who scrutinized “the books of the masters of the graphic
book genre,” only to “defy the conventional grammar of graphic books” (Anand
2011, 100) in their own work (Heinen 2013). A variation on such appropriations of
the medium can be found in the works of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, a Canadian
First Nations artist who popularized the so-called Haida Manga, which builds on
Haida art and storytelling traditions and combines them with manga elements (Har-
rison 2016). For Yahgulanaas, the turn to Japanese graphic storytelling is a program-
matic turn away from settler culture.
However, not all postcolonial comics seek to recover pre-colonial culture or to
provide marked alternatives to Western aesthetic traditions. A large number of art-
ists clearly see themselves as contributing to a transnational genre shaped by a
diversity of traditions. In Banerjee’s first graphic novel Corridor, for example, the
author uses inter-pictoriality self-reflexively in order to position himself in relation
to, and in continuation of, various cultural traditions. Apart from the already men-
tioned references to The Phantom and Tintin, there are also, for example, panels
which re-use images of Hindu deities, posters of film stars from both Hollywood
and Bollywood, and extracts from Indian educational charts. A similar embracing
of diverse cultural influences characterizes not only Banerjee’s second graphic nov-
el, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, but also Singh’s Hotel at the End of the World,
which refers to British Commando war comics and Buddhist art alike; according to
Repetti (2007, 16), such a “creolization” is also a wide-spread phenomenon in Afri-
can comics. The display of cultural hybridity in such comics stands in contrast to
the programmatic recovery and revitalization of indigenous traditions described
above. Arguably, however, it more adequately reflects the postcolonial condition in
an age of transnational media circulation.
282 Sandra Heinen
5 The Impact of the Conditions of Production

The conditions under which artists produce and publish comics vary greatly in dif-
ferent parts of the world. In many parts of Africa, the artists’ creativity is impeded
by censorship, either enforced by the government or self-imposed (Repetti 2007, 26).
In 2015, three editors of the Lebanese comics anthology Samandal were brought
before a court and found guilty of “inciting sectarian strife,” “defamation and slan-
der,” “denigrating religion,” and “publishing false news” (Dueben 2015). Apart from
political and legal means of control, the production of comics can also be hindered
by a lack of financial and institutional support. Postcolonial comics produced in the
Global North can economically benefit from the established publishing institutions
and their distribution channels. They can reach a sizable international readership,
particularly if larger international publishing houses are involved, many of which
now have a graphic novel department. Some comics artists from outside Europe and
North America have also succeeded in striking deals with publishers which operate
internationally. Such artists include India’s most prominent graphic novelist Sar-
nath Banerjee, who has published with Penguin and HarperCollins, and Malik Sa-
jad, whose graphic memoir Munnu appeared under the Fourth Estate imprint of
HarperCollins. A curious case in this regard is de Villiers’ Meine Mutter war eine
schöne Frau, which was first published in Switzerland and then translated into
French, Spanish and Italian – but has not yet been published in English or Afri-
kaans. Consequently, the graphic memoir has found readers in various European
countries, but is not available in the author’s own home country of South Africa.
Even if a book finds a publisher, that does not mean it will break even financial-
ly. In the case of South Asia and Africa, this can only happen if a graphic novel
finds an international audience, since only a very small number of local readers
within these regions can afford a pricy graphic novel (Nayar 2016, 7; Repetti 2007,
31). Many of the more ambitious publications discussed here were made possible
through grants and fellowships from Western cultural institutions such as the Mai-
son des auteurs in Angoulême (Patil’s Adi Parva and Sauptik), the MacArthur Foun-
dation in Chicago (Banerjee’s Corridor), and the Goethe Institute (Ghosh’s This Side,
That Side). Other projects were commissioned by publishing houses with a socio-
political agenda and a corresponding interest in a certain style or topic. For instance,
Tara Books, the publisher of Sita’s Ramayama, specialises in books created in collab-
oration with Indian folk artists, while Navayana, the publisher of Bhimayana, is dedi-
cated to the struggle against the caste system. Other important sources of funding
are international development programs and non-governmental organizations, which
use the medium to promote a specific cause. The publication of Tinker.Solder.Tap, for
example, was funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre,
River of Stories and Our Toxic World by environmental NGOs, and Priya’s Mirror and
Priya’s Shakti by an NGO which addresses women’s rights.
It seems safe to assume that how a publication is funded has an impact on its
form and content. In itself, this is not problematic. However, in the context of a
survey of a field – such as this survey of postcolonial comics – this issue deserves
to be considered for at least two reasons. Firstly, this question of funding causes
the topics and techniques identified above as recurring features of the genre to ap-
pear in a slightly different light. A correlation between the institutional structures
promoting comics and the agenda of many postcolonial comics – the struggle
against social injustice or the effort to preserve or recover indigenous culture – sug-
gests itself. This does not necessarily mean that authors write and draw comics they
do not want to produce, but rather that those comics that fit the interests of the
investing institutions are more likely to be produced than those that do not. An
example of a comic book which is manifestly the product of its funding is the an-
thology When Kulbhushan met Stöckli (Anindya 2009), which was initiated and fi-
nanced by the Swiss Arts Council; this anthology assembles twelve short graphic
narratives about real or imagined intercultural encounters between people from In-
dia and Switzerland. As it is not surprising that the Swiss Arts Council would want
to foreground such intercultural encounters, this example illustrates how the field
of postcolonial comics is prefigured by the conditions of their production.
Secondly, as the case of the Swiss-Indian anthology demonstrates, this prefigur-
ing affects not only the comics’ politics, but also their cultural position. Dony main-
tains that “a postcolonial approach to comics will need to take into account the
ways in which the numerous processes of transfer animating comics production on
a global scale can challenge the theoretical assumptions as to what a postcolonial
comic can be or do” (2014, 12). If books are financed in the context of intercultural
and international collaborations, or if comics authors spend a considerable amount
of time abroad during the process of creation – because of a fellowship in a Western
cultural institution – the question arises to what extent the resultant product can
still be regarded as being specific to, and expressive of, a non-Western local culture,
something that labels like ‘African,’ ‘Indian’ or ‘postcolonial comic’ still imply. In
the case of African comics, the impact of Europe is most apparent in the fact that
many artists have decided to settle in Europe permanently in order to benefit from
the considerably better working conditions. Contrary to this trend, there are also
local forms of production and circulation in Africa and South Asia which operate
independently of international collaboration (Repetti 2007, 30). The comics pro-
duced in this way, however, usually remain below the radar of international readers
and scholars.
6 Bibliography
6.1 Works Cited
Ahmed, Naseer, and Saurabh Singh. Kashmir Pending. New Delhi: Phantomville, 2007.
Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Multicultural Comics Today: A Brief Introduction.” Multicultural Comics:
From “Zap” to “Blue Beetle.” Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: University of Texas Press,
2010. 1–25.
284 Sandra Heinen
Anand, S. “A Digna for Bhim.” Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability. Ed. Durgabai Vyam,
Subhash Vyam, Srividya Natarajan, and S. Anand. New Delhi: Nayayana, 2011. 100–104.
Anindya, Roy. When Kulbhushan met Stöckli. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2009.
Arni, Samhita, and Moyna Chitrakar. Sita’s Ramayana. New Delhi: Tara Books, 2011.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Banerjee, Sarnath. All Quiet in Vikaspuri. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2015.
Banerjee, Sarnath. Corridor: A Graphic Novel. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004.
Banerjee, Sarnath. The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2007.
Bharat, Meenakshi. Troubled Testimonies: Terrorism and the English Novel in India. New Delhi:
Routledge, 2016.
Bhatia, Gautam. Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India. Chennai: Tranquebar Press, 2010.
Boatright, Michael D. “Graphic Journeys: Graphic Novels’ Representations of Immigrant
Experiences.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 53.6 (2010): 468–476.
Boehmer, Elleke. “A Postcolonial Aesthetic: Repeating upon the Present.” Rerouting the
Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millenium. Ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru and
Sarah Lawson Welsh. London & New York: Routledge, 2010. 170–181.
Dalmaso, Renata L., and Madella Thayse. “Postcolonial Issues and Colonial Closures: Portrayals
of Ambivalence in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.” Ilha do Desterro 69.2 (2016): 63–75.
Devineni, Ram, Vikas K. Menon, and Dan Goldman. Priya’s Shakti. http://www.priyashakti.com.
New York: Rattapallax, 2014.
Devraj, Rajesh and Meren Imchen. Sudershan (Chimpanzee). Gurgaon: Hachette, 2012.
Dogra, Sakshi. “Sex(uality) and the City: Queering Amrita Patil’s Kari.” The Appolinian 2.2 (2015):
154–160.
Dony, Christophe. “What is a Postcolonial Comic?” Chronique de Littérature Internationale. 7
November 2014. 12–13.
Dueben, Alex. “An Interview with Samandal.” The Comics Journal, 18 Dec. 2015. http://
www.tcj.com/an-interview-with-samandal/.
Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the
Legendary Cartoonist. New York: Norton, 2008 [1996].
Frey, Hugo. “Trapped in the Past: Anti-Semitism in Hergé’s Flight 714.” History and Politics in
French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels. Ed. Mark McKinney. Jackson: The University
Press of Mississippi, 2008. 27–43.
Gardner, Jared. “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine,
and Derek Kirk Kim.” Multicultural Comics: From “Zap” to “Blue Beetle.” Ed. Frederick Luis
Aldama. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010. 132–147.
Ghosh, Vishwajyoti. Delhi Calm. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2010.
Ghosh, Vishwajyoti. This Side, That Side: Restoring Partition: Graphic Narratives from Pakistan,
India, Bangladesh. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013.
Gymnich, Marion. “Linguistics and Narratology: The Relevance of Linguistic Criteria to
Postcolonial Narratology.” Literature and Linguistics: Approaches, Models, and Applications.
Ed. Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning, and Vera Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2002. 61–76.
Harrison, Richard. “Seeing and Nothingness: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Haida Manga, and a
Critique of the Gutter.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de
Littérature Comparée 43.1 (2016): 51–74.
Heinen, Sandra. “‘Indigenizing the Comic Book Medium’: Techniques of Storytelling in Indian
Graphic Novels.” Anglistentag 2012 Potsdam: Proceedings. Ed. Katrin Röder and Ilse Wischer.
Trier: WVT, 2013. 269–283.
Heinen, Sandra. “Fact, Fiction, and Everything in-between: Strategies of Reader Activation in
Postcolonial Graphic Narratives.” Narrative in Culture. Ed. Astrid Erll and Roy Sommer.
Berlin: de Gruyter 2019, 109–128.
Hergé. Tintin in the Congo. London: Egmont, 2005.

Hergé. Tintin in the Congo. London: Sundancer, 1991.
Hogan, Patrick C. “Kashmir Pending: Narrative Ideology in a Graphic Novel.” Narrative Works 4.2
(2014): 108–129.
Holmberg, Ryan. “Inverted Calm: An Interview with Vishwajyoti Ghosh.” The Comics Journal.
23 October 2013. http://www.tcj.com/inverted-calm-an-interview-with-vishwajyoti-ghosh/
Howell, Jennifer. The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and
Subjectivity. London: Lexington Books, 2015.
Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001.
Huynh, Matt. MA. http://www.matthuynh.com/galleryma.
Isekenmeier Guido, ed. Interpiktorialität. Theorie und Geschichte der Bild-Bild-Bezüge. Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2013
Kannemeyer, Anton. “Black.” Pappa in Doubt. Auckland Park: Janaca, 2015. 54–59.
Kannemeyer, Anton. “Congo Parody (with apologies to Hergé).” Pappa in Afrika. Auckland Park:
Janaca, 2010. 7.
Kannemeyer, Anton. “Die Taal.” Pappa in Doubt. Auckland Park: Janaca, 2014. 30–34.
Kannemeyer, Anton. “My Nelson Mandela: A Short Political History of a White South African in
Rotten English.” Pappa in Doubt. Auckland Park: Janaca, 2015. 3–9.
Kannemeyer, Anton. “Pappa and the Black Hands.” Pappa in Afrika. Auckland Park: Janaca, 2010.
52–53.
Kannemeyer, Anton. “The Devil of the Equator.” Pappa in Afrika. Auckland Park: Janaca, 2010. 11.
Karlien de Villiers. Meine Mutter war eine schöne Frau. Zürich: Arache Coeur, 2006.
LaBoucane-Benson, Patti and Kelly Mellings. The Outside Circle. Toronto: Anansi, 2015.
Le, Nam, and Matt Huynh. The Boat. http://www.sbs.com.au/theboat/.
Lefèvre, Pascal. “The Congo Drawn in Belgium.” History and Politics in French-language Comics
and Graphic Novels. Ed. Mark McKinney. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
166–185.
Marsden, John, and Shaun Tan. The Rabbits. Sydney: Hachette, 1998.
McKinney, Mark. “Graphic Novels: An Introduction.” History and Politics in French-Language
Comics and Graphic Novels. Ed. Mark McKinney. Jackson: The University Press of
Mehta, Binita, and Pia Mukherji. Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities. London: Routledge,
2015.
Mehta, Suhaan. “Wondrous Capers: The Graphic Novel in India.” Multicultural Comics: From
“Zap” to “Blue Beetle.” Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.
173–188.
Miller, Ann. “Postcolonial Identities.” International Journal of Comic Art 9.2 (2007): 258–274.
Møllegaard, Kirsten. “Chasing the American Dream: Gender, Race, and Identity in American Born
Chinese and Shortcomings.” International Journal of Comic Art 17. 2 (2015): 275–294.
Mukherji, Pia. “Graphic Écriture: Gender and Magic Iconography in Kari.” Postcolonial Comics:
Texts, Events, Identities. Ed. Binita Mehta. New York: Routledge, 2015. 157–167.
Natarajan, Srividya, and Aparajita Ninan. A Gardener in the Wasteland: Jotiba Phule’s Fight for
Liberty. New Delhi: Navayana, 2012.
Nayar, Pramod K. “Postcolonial Demo-graphics: Traumatic Realism in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi
Calm.” Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities. Ed. Binita Mehta. New York: Routledge,
2015. 131–142.
Nayar, Pramod K. “Towards a Postcolonial Critical Literacy: Bhimayana and the Indian Graphic
Novel.” Studies in South Asian Film and Media 3.1 (2011): 3–21.
Nayar, Pramod K. The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique. Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2016.
286 Sandra Heinen
Oh, Sandra. “Sight Unseen: Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve and the Politics of Recognition.” Melus
32.3 (2007): 129–151.
Park, Hye Su. “Lost in the Gutters: Ethnic Imaginings in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings.” Image
and Narrative 11.2 (2010): 100–110.
Parry, Benita. “The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies.” The Cambridge Companion to
Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2004. 66–80.
Patil, Amruta. Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2012.
Patil, Amruta. Kari. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2008.
Patil, Amruta. Sauptik: Blood and Flowers. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2016.
PP, Abdul Sultan and Partha Sengupta. The Believers. New Delhi: Phantomville, 2006.
Prasad, Bhagwati, and Amitabh Kumar. Tinker.Solder.Tap: A Graphic Novel.
http://archive.sarai.net/files/original/9913bf753536c419becc8fe8f5216a9a.pdf. New Delhi:
CSDS, 2009 (8 February 2017).
Prasad, Bhagwati. The Water Cookbook. http://archive.sarai.net/items/show/9. New Delhi: CSDS,
2011 (1 February 2017).
Reichl, Susanne. Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature. Trier:
WVT, 2002.
Repetti, Massimo. “African Wave: Specificity and Cosmopolitanism in African Comics.” African
Arts 40.2 (2007): 16–35.
Royal, Derek Parker. “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic
Narrative.” Melus 32.3 (2007): 7–22.
Sacco, Joe. “Kushinagar.”Journalism. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012. 160–190.
Sacco, Joe. “The Unwanted.” Journalism. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012. 109–157.
Sajad, Malik. Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir. London: Fourth Estate, 2015.
Sandten, Cecile. “Intermedial Fictions of the ‘New’ Metropolis: Calcutta, Delhi and Cairo in the
Graphic Novels of Sarnath Banerjee and G. Willow Wilson.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing
47.5 (2011): 510–522.
Schneider, Greice. “Lost Gazes, Detached Minds: Strategies of Disengagement in the Work of
Adrian Tomine.” Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art 1.2 (2012): 60–81.
Schulze-Engler, Frank. “Theoretical Perspectives: From Postcolonialism to Transcultural World
Literature.” English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion. Ed. Lars Eckstein. Paderborn:
Fink, 2007. 20–32.
Sen Gupta, Aniruddha, and Priya Kuriyan. Our Toxic World: A Guide to Hazardous Substances in
Our Everyday Lives. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2010.
Sen, Orijit. River of Stories. New Delhi: Kalpavriksha, 1994.
Shay, Maureen. “What Washes Up onto the Shore: Contamination and Containment in ‘The
Unwanted.’” The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World. Ed. Daniel Worden.
Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2015. 239–255.
Sheffer, Jolie A. “The Optics of Interracial Sexuality in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and
Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” College Literature 41.1
(2014): 119–148.
Singh, Parismita. The Hotel at the End of the World. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009.
Tan, Shaun. The Arrival. Sydney: Hachette, 2006.
Tomine, Adrian. Shortcomings. London: Faber and Faber, 2007.
Tyson, John. “Anton Kannemeyer’s Tactics of Translation as Critical Lens.” Synthesis 4 (2012):
121–148.
Vohra, Paromita, Ram Devineni, and Dan Goldman. Priya’s Mirror. New York: Rattapallax, 2014.
Vyam, Durgabai, Subhash Vyam, Srividya Natarajan, and S. Anand. Bhimayana: Experiences of
Untouchability. New Delhi: Navayana, 2011.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: Square Fish, 2006.
6.2 Further Reading

Aldama, Frederick Luis, ed. Multicultural Comics: From “Zap” to “Blue Beetle.” Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2010.
Creekmur, Corey K. “The Indian Graphic Novel.” A History of the Indian Novel in English. Ed. Ulka
Anjaria. New York: The University Press of Cambridge, 2015. 348–358.
Dawson Varughese, Emma. Visuality and Identity in Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives.
London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017.
Foster, William H. III. Looking for a Face like Mine: The History of African Americans in Comics.
Waterbury: Fine Tooth Press, 2005.
Khanduri, Ritu G. “Comicology: Comic Books as Culture in India.” Journal of Graphic Novels and
Comics 1.2 (2010): 171–191.
McKinney, Mark, ed. History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels.
Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
Sheyahshe, Michael A. Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study. Jefferson: McFarland,
2008.
Strömberg, Frederik. Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003.
Marie Vanderbeke
14 DocuComics in the Classroom
Abstract: With the increasing popularity of graphic non-fiction works, like graphic
(auto-) biographies or graphic documentaries, more and more scholars recommend
using these comics in class. Especially graphic biographies like Art Spiegelman’s
Maus or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis are often suggested teaching material. Graphic
documentaries, however, are less frequently discussed. Furthermore, explicit sug-
gestions for classroom exercises are rare. This article will therefore take a closer
look at how graphic documentaries could be used to foster students’ critical and
visual literacy. The article will first describe the genre of graphic documentary, dis-
cussing its relation to other genres like graphic biographies and graphic journalism,
before reviewing reasons why graphic documentaries could be beneficial for stu-
dents’ literacy development. Taking Josh Neufeld’s A. D.: New Orleans After the Del-
uge as an example, some pre-, while- and post-reading exercises are suggested,
employing a combination of analytical and product-process-oriented approaches.
Key Terms: Graphic documentaries, classroom, visual literacy, critical literacy, A. D.:
New Orleans After the Deluge
1 Defining Graphic Documentaries

Comics have a long history of reporting and documenting historic events. Woodcuts
depicting lurid news stories were common in the broadsides and catchpennies
printed from the 16th century up until the mid-19th century (↗2 History, Formats,
Genres). With the rise of photography in the late 19th century, drawn pictures and
woodcuts disappeared from news outlets, as photography seemed to be more au-
thentic in its representation of reality. Furthermore, comics gained a reputation as
a childish medium, read by kids for entertainment, not as serious literature. Al-
though some scholars seriously considered comics as instructional tools as early as
the 1940s (e. g. Matsner Gruenberg 1944; Sones 1944; Hutchinson 1949), the use of
comics in classrooms was mostly aimed at motivating students to learn something
not directly associated with the medium itself. This trend is still noticeable today as
didactic articles often stress the motivational potential of comics in the classroom
(e. g. McTaggart 2008, 29; Boerman-Cornell 2013, 73; Öz and Efecioğlu 2015, 76).
Nevertheless, the perspective of comics as an immature, distracting medium,
confronting children with unsavory narratives – famously put forward in Wertham’s
Seduction of the Innocent (1954) – and assaulting their effect on literacy as well as
moral development, has been increasingly challenged, acknowledging comic books
as a sophisticated art form that addresses not only highly imaginative, fictional
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-015
290 Marie Vanderbeke
worlds but also social and political realities. The postmodern critique of filmic or
photographic representation of reality and its claim to authenticity contributed to
the re-establishment of graphic non-fiction (Vanderbeke 2010, 73). Here, the con-
structedness of the representation of reality in film and photography was fore-
grounded, with discussions on selectivity, composition and stylistic devices chal-
lenging photography’s claims of objectivity. In a comparison between photographs
and Goya’s series of war depictions The Disasters of War, Sontag summarizes this
view as follows:
Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya’s and photo-
graphs by the convention that artists ‘make’ drawings and paintings while photographers
‘take’ photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a
construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of
something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to
frame, and to frame is to exclude. Moreover, fiddling with pictures long antedates the era of
digital photography and Photoshop manipulations: it has always been possible for a photo-
graph to misrepresent. (Sontag 2003, 41–42)
As Sontag points out, the seemingly endless possibilities to manipulate photo-

graphs using technological means – what Brooke Gladstone (2009) calls ‘photo-
shopification’ – further calls into question photographic evidence as a trustworthy
source of information. Thus, the audience’s confidence in the authenticity of photo-
graphs and filmic representations of reality dwindled, as did its faith in convention-
al news outlets in general (for the US: see e. g. Pew Research Center 2009).
Taking some cues from New Journalism, graphic non-fiction countered the me-
dia’s loss of trust in its representation of reality through an “emphasis on experi-
ence and subjective perspective, rather than realism or factuality” (Vanderbeke
2010, 74; see also Schack 2014, 116). The autobiographical comic, first established
in the underground comix movement of the mid-20th century, experimented with
boundaries in narrative and visuals, self-reflexively departing from realistic depic-
tions of sometimes unthinkable events. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (↗22 Art Spiegel-
man, Maus), for example, was first serially published in the underground comics
magazine RAW. The trend gained renewed traction towards the end of the 20th and
into the beginning of the 21st century with authors like Joe Sacco (Palestine, Safe
Area Goražde, The Fixer, Footnotes on Gaza) or Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, Poulet
aux prunes) (Lefèvre 2013, 51; ↗30 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis). Instead of polished
photographs and detached, seemingly unbiased news prose, graphic non-fiction
flaunts its own artificiality, freely admitting to its own subjectivity (Chute 2008;
Vanderbeke 2010; Dyer Hoefer 2012; Lefèvre 2013). Here, as in many internet-based
news media, “transparency is the new objectivity” (Weinberger 2009, cited from
Gladstone 2009, 113). Through participatory reporting, the authors not only docu-
ment the experiences of contemporary witnesses and their data collection process,
but also their own struggles with their working conditions, their role as journalist,
their biases, backgrounds and opinion-forming processes.
With these new works of graphic non-fiction, the question of definition and
categorization came to the fore. However, distinguishing between the different
terms of ‘graphic journalism,’ ‘graphic documentary’ or ‘graphic biographies’ is not
straightforward. I will try to distinguish the terms from one another and explain
why I decided to use the term ‘graphic documentaries’ in this chapter. Obviously,
all of these genres can be subsumed under the more general genre of graphic non-
fiction and Life Writing (↗9 Life Writing). They all cover real events, whether per-
sonal, familial or collective, using a comic’s framework, i. e., sequential art com-
bining images and text (McCloud 1993, 9). Here, a first distinctive quality helps us
to distinguish graphic documentaries from graphic biographies or memoirs. Like
graphic journalism, graphic documentaries cover local and foreign affairs with the
author acting as an information gatherer. Memoirs, on the other hand, deal with
one’s own history, like for example Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My
Mother? (see also Schack 2014, 109).
However, the line between biography and documentary is not easily drawn
when looking at graphic novels such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow
of No Towers or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. These graphic novels deal with histori-
cal events that have entered collective memory (i. e., the Holocaust, 9/11 and the
Islamic Revolution in Iran), but discuss them from a highly subjective viewpoint.
To categorize these graphic novels as unambiguously either biographical or graphic
documentary is therefore fraught with difficulties, as both genres foreground the
subjective experience of collectively relevant historical events. It might be easier to
classify parts of Persepolis, Maus or In the Shadow of No Towers as leaning more
towards documentaries, e. g., when Satrapi details how torture was used in prison.
Then again, other parts are purely biographical, for example, when the young Sa-
trapi re-enacts the stories of torture in her childhood play.
This balancing act grows even more complicated when considering Woo’s
(2010) perspective on documentaries as communicating the subjective experiences
people had at certain events. Graphic documentaries thus by definition include a
certain subjectivity, which can also be found in biographies as well as comics jour-
nalism. For example, the works of Joe Sacco – one of the pioneers in the genre –
represent the history of his witnesses and he includes himself in the narrative in a
self-reflexive manner, discussing his role as journalist, his experiences in the often
war-torn locations and his data-gathering process. He thus also embeds aspects of
his personal life into his narratives. In his graphic novel Palestine, for example, he
closely records the Palestinian side after the first Intifada, and mentions his support
of a two-state solution for Israel, Gaza and the West Bank (2015, 7). Nonetheless,
when he meets two Israeli women, they offer him an interview, which initiates a
reflection in the comic: “And standing there with the two girls from Tel Aviv, it
occurs to me that I have seen the Israelis, but through Palestinian eyes – that Israe-
lis were mainly soldiers and settlers to me now, too” (2015, 256). By expressing his
partiality, Sacco invites the reader to come to their own conclusions concerning the
credibility of his accounts.
However, this subjectivity of comics journalism makes it even harder to distin-

guish between genres. As Williams points out: “[comics journalism’s] inherent sub-
jectivity contrasts sharply with the newsroom’s dispassionate prose” (2005, 52).
Woo therefore argues that these forms of graphic journalism should rather be sum-
marized under the term of graphic documentaries, as the documentary genre also
represents evidence, the perspective of witnesses and the events, but engages more
openly with its own partiality (2010, 171). Thus, it forges its claims to authenticity
from its juxtaposition and reflection of subjective perspectives rather than the jour-
nalistic communication of strictly verifiable facts (Woo 2010, 171). Furthermore, as
Lefèvre points out, comics journalism is also often “slow journalism” (2013, 52) as
the production of a graphic novel is very time-consuming. Consequently, these
graphic novels often do not cover current events, but deal with past or ongoing
social and political controversies instead. For example, Art Spiegelman’s In the
Shadow of No Towers was first published in various European newspapers and jour-
nals one year after the attacks of 9/11; Josh Neufeld’s A. D.: New Orleans After the
Deluge was released three years after Hurricane Katrina in 2008. Because of these
reasons – the strong reliance on communicating subjective experiences and the de-
tachedness from current events – I will also use the term ‘graphic documentary‘
when talking about graphic novels that cover non-fiction events dealing with collec-
tive history.
Relying on subjective perspectives, graphic documentaries can offer alternative
narratives and imagery to the traditional news outlets (i. e. Vanderbeke 2010). For
example, in In the Shadow of No Towers Spiegelman claims that, although he never
wanted to be a political cartoonists, one of the reasons for writing the graphic novel
was 9/11 being “hijacked by the Bush cabal that reduced it all to a recruitment
poster” (2004, Introduction). His graphic novel provided him with a means to ex-
press how he had experienced the collapse of the World Trade Center by graphically
reproducing the images he associated with the catastrophe and his own trauma,
but which were neither printed nor broadcast by the national news media.
This ‘visual bias’ of conventional news outlets is also discussed in Brooke Glad-
stone’s The Influencing Machine (2009). Her graphic novel, drawn by Josh Neufeld,
discusses the changing role of the media in the US, its reputation with its audience
as well as its difficulties with credibility and accuracy. In one instance, Gladstone
details how the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Al-Firdos Square on
April 9th, 2003, took place and how it was represented in the news. By visually
depicting both the images shown in the news and – using a wider angle – an illus-
tration of the complete square, she demonstrates how exaggerated the news photo-
graphs and filmic evidence had been (Gladstone 2009, 67–68). Her use of the comics
medium thus enabled her to show the audience how picture composition and fram-
ing influence news stories, and how these images then enter the public conscious-
ness.
Nonetheless, visual bias does not only imply that the same (sometimes mislead-
ing) images are used over and over by news outlets until they become saturated
and iconic and thus part of our cultural memory (Sontag 2003). It also points to a
general cognitive bias to respond faster and often on a more emotional level when
confronted with images instead of words. Graphic documentaries work with this
cognitive bias as well, creating emotional immediacy through a recreation of the
visual details and atmospheric elements of an event (Chute 2008, 457; Schack 2014,
115), thereby making them highly effective in communicating the intensity of per-
sonal experience. The imagery in graphic documentaries ranges from realistic depic-
tions of an event to highly subjective or even surreal imagery and narratives. On
one side of the spectrum, we have artists like Joe Sacco or Josh Neufeld, whose
drawing style can be seen as a more or less lifelike depiction of the events and
persons in question and even though Joe Sacco often portrays himself in an exag-
gerated or cartoonish manner, he himself points out that:
each face is individualized and that was important to me. I didn’t want to show a mass of
people in the sense that they all look like a bunch of ants or something. To me, they’re all
individuals who have suffered enormously, and even though none of those faces might be true
to any particular individual, the point, I think, is coming across. The essential truth, as I said,
comes across. (Sacco 2002)
Furthermore, the inclusion of external pictorial material, e. g. maps, charts or even

photographs, and iconic images is common in these texts, as it aids readers in un-
derstanding complex political and historical contexts. In Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Go-
ražde, which covers the Bosnian War, maps illustrate the provinces of the Yugoslav
republic after World War II and the line of conflict in the Drina Valley in Bosnia
between the Serbs and the Muslims. But the addition of external images also seeks
to underline the journalistic authenticity of these graphic novels, as the added infor-
mation corroborates their depiction of the events. More specifically, the reader’s
acceptance of the ‘accuracy’ or ‘truthfulness’ of technical visualisations like maps,
charts and diagrams, may be more likely to affirm the author’s epistemic authority
(Adams 2008, 174). In addition, the recreation of iconic imagery, which is part of a
public consciousness, evokes direct links between the reader’s pre-existing knowl-
edge concerning the events and the illustrations.
As an example, Josh Neufeld’s A. D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (2009) depicts
the highly mediatized event of Hurricane Katrina and its effects on New Orleans,
with the author making extensive use of photographs in his portrayal of Katrina’s
landfall, the flood and the events at the Convention Center in New Orleans. In a
blog entry, Neufeld details his working process as follows: “I’m using a lot of photo-
graphic reference for this project – especially for the prologue. About half the imag-
es are directly from photos, while the others use photos as a resource, but the angle
(and many details) come out of my head” (Neufeld 2007). As most of these photo-
graphs were also shown in the news at the time of Hurricane Katrina (Dyer Hoefer
2012, 293), Neufeld’s readers surely recognized some of these images. The corre-
spondence between the news images and the visual references in the graphic novel
intends to demonstrate the author’s reliability as an eyewitness and/or scrupulous

investigative journalist.
Continuing along the spectrum of visual possibilities, some graphic novels use
more simplistic drawing styles to address the discrepancy between the illustrated
comic’s account and the actual event, emphasizing a lack of information due to
unreliable memories and questionable witness accounts (Adams 2008, 59). Marjane
Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003) can serve as an example here, as its drawing style could
be called sparse or even childlike. Of course, this is very fitting as a form of perform-
ative reporting, by which the adult Satrapi reconstructs her childhood during the
Islamic Revolution in Iran (Lefèvre 2013, 57). Nevertheless, the omission of spatial
or facial details also underlines the absence of information. This becomes especially
apparent in the scenes that deal with torture. At one point, the young Satrapi acci-
dentally listens to a friend of her parents recounting his experiences in an Iranian
prison. The torture methods are depicted in disconnected pictures and end in a
single panel showing a dismembered body. However, the body is drawn like a pup-
pet that has to be reassembled; no blood is shown, just the terrified face of the
victim. This demonstrates how alien these practices were to a young Satrapi, whose
imagination could not yet conceive of the horrors of torture.
The portrayal of horrific events and especially trauma raises the question how
one can adequately and ethically depict horrors that go so far beyond our imagina-
tion that our minds cannot cope with them. Vanderbeke argues that the incorpora-
tion of fantastic elements in a form of magical realism could be used to better con-
front these grotesque realities: “The departure from the realistic mode is then a
way to deal with a world that resists representation not only for the well-rehearsed
theoretical reasons but also because its horrors have become ineffable” (2010, 74).
Examples of the use of fantastic elements in comics are Alan Moore’s and Bill Sien-
kiewicz’s Brought to Light, in which a drunken eagle recounts the cruel and unimag-
inable history of the CIA, or Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.
Spiegelman’s narratives alternate between collective history and life stories, por-
traying both the extensive devastation of the Holocaust and the 9/11 attacks as well
as the individual traumas that these experiences caused him and his parents. Using
visual metaphors as well as intertextual references, Spiegelman manages to record
the process of human thought more closely than would have been possible with
just the text, “capturing the essence of traumatic experiences” (Dony and van Lin-
thout 2010, 186). For example, when Spiegelman describes in Maus how successful
the first part of his comic turned out to be, and how different editors approached
him for a TV special or a movie, we see him sitting at his drawing desk. The desk
in turn stands on top of a pile of Auschwitz victims (2003, 201). The traumatic nature
of the Holocaust thereby invades his private life, signified also by the mouse mask
that he is wearing.
Another such example is the burning north tower of the WTC in In the Shadow
of No Towers. In his introduction, Spiegelman writes that “the pivotal image from
my 9/11 morning – one that didn’t get photographed or videotaped into public mem-
ory but still remains burned onto the inside of my eyelids several years later – was
the image of the looming north tower’s glowing bones just before it vaporized”
(Spiegelman 2004, Introduction). This image is referenced in all of the ten plates
comprising the graphic novel, its repetition marking the cyclical nature and re-
working of the trauma and the impossibility of a full recovery. Spiegelman also
includes intertextual references to famous early New York cartoon characters, like
Little Nemo in Slumberland (↗18 Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland), The
Yellow Kid (↗16 Richard F. Outcault, The Yellow Kid), and The Katzenjammer Kids,
not only showcasing his identification with New York City’s comic strip history and
personal meaning-making process (Espiritu 2006, 181), but also demonstrating how
the 9/11 attacks shook New York to the core, for instance by depicting the Katzen-
jammer Kids, representing the twin towers, being lit on fire and Uncle Sam unsuc-
cessfully trying to extinguish the fire with oil (Spiegelman 2004, 5).
The communication and depiction of these events in graphic documentaries
also serves an educational impulse, making them more accessible to a contempo-
rary audience. A textual layer contextualizes the events, helping readers not only
to immediately see the story unfold and feel the atmospheric tensions conveyed by
the pictures, but also to understand the historical, political and social conditions
which led to the images (Chute 2008; Schack 2014). Schack calls this the “mnemonic
value of combining text and image” (2014, 115), as comics documentaries’ use of
elaborative layers of encoding makes them highly effective in terms of meaning-
making as well as information transfer.
Nevertheless, for the “visual pedagogy” (Adams 2008, 66) to work, readers have
to be able to decode and comprehend intertextualities and references employed in
the graphic novels. They have to be able to interpret and critically analyze iconicity,
informational relations between the picture and the text as well as the visual meta-
phors, symbolism and rhetorical devices used to fully engage with and assess the
graphic novel’s informational potential. As Scott McCloud (1993) summarizes, the
comics medium always requires a considerable degree of reader participation, not
just in the act of closure, but also by understanding the specific rules and codes
that accompany this art form. Hence, it is no wonder that Gillenwater’s study of
visual and comic literacy showed that “formal instruction in visual literacy is neces-
sary to help students engage with images beyond the superficial” (Gillenwater 2014,
252).
2 Graphic Documentaries as a Means to Foster

Visual and Critical Literacy
Since Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954), comics have come a long way in
education. Originally regarded as an art form for the illiterate, comics and graphic
novels are now increasingly discussed as beneficial for literacy development (e. g.
Bitz 2004, 2008; McTaggart 2008, 32–35; Boerman-Cornell 2013, 73; Gillenwater
2014) and schoolbook publishers even distribute annotated comics including teach-
er supplements to advance children’s literacy and language development, for exam-
ple the graphic novel Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty by Greg Neri
printed by the German Klett Verlag (2016). The multimodality of comic books seems
to correspond with the students’ current needs to decode and understand a combi-
nation of image and text on a daily basis (Schwarz 2002, 262; Carter 2007, 11; Mills
2011, 75), e. g. when reading internet articles, advertisements or electronic instant
messages. Students should not only be able to interpret visual elements in these
texts but also analyze the credibility of the sources, the perspective they present,
and the rhetorical elements used to convey the message. Thus, they require a cer-
tain degree of visual and critical literacy in their daily encounters with texts to be
able to assess them and respond adequately.
The New London Group incorporated this finding into its ‘multiliteracy’ con-
cept, put forward in the 1996 paper A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies. This approach to
teaching stresses the importance of developing a sensibility for and understanding
of (a) linguistic diversity and (b) multimodal forms of information transfer using a
wide range of media to include alternate representational forms in the curriculum
and further students’ understanding of diverse text forms and cultural expressions
(New London Group 1996; Mills 2011). Graphic documentaries would be ideal to
introduce a multiliteracy approach to the classroom, as they are multimodal texts,
which often include alternative representations of historic events and could there-
fore enhance visual and critical literacy skills in students.
Visual literacy is defined by the International Visual Literacy Association (2012)
as:
a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time
having and integrating other sensory experiences. The development of these competencies is
fundamental to normal human learning. When developed, they enable a visually literate per-
son to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made,
that he encounters in his environment. Through the creative use of these competencies, he is
able to communicate with others. Through the appreciative use of these competencies, he is
able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of visual communication.
In short, visual literacy is the “act of meaning-making using still or moving images”
(Frey and Fisher 2008, 1) to interpret visual cues, determine their importance and
assess their informational value.
This is no trivial matter, as Gillenwater (2014) discovered in his study. Working
with three graphic novels in high school English classrooms, he used structured
observations, interviews as well as think-aloud tasks to gauge students’ developing
ability to analyze and interpret the graphic novels using textual as well as visual
literacy over the course of the lessons. His results show that the use of comics in
the classroom does indeed stimulate and refine students’ visual literacy (Gillenwa-
ter 2014, 261). The difficulties in interpreting comics using ‘traditional literacy’ seem
to stem from the double-coded plot-structure the medium presents, in which the
textual and the visual layers of text have to be related to one another to decode the
graphic novel’s narrative. As Chute points out, comics’ visual and verbal layers of-
ten not simply illustrate one another, but are “rather prone to present the two non-
synchronously” (Chute 2008, 452). Chute also addresses a second problem comic
book readers might face, namely that comics reception is an active reading process,
in which one has to close the gaps between the single panels. This process of cogni-
tive closure allows us to weave the individual panels into a coherent story and thus
participate in the narrative’s construction (McCloud 1993, 66–69).
To be able to make sense of these transitions, one has to be acquainted with the
cultural conventions of the medium. For example, the iconography and transitions
between panels vary substantially between Japanese manga and traditional Western
comic books (McCloud 1993, 77–81). Although these two issues might present a chal-
lenge for unaccustomed or casual comic book readers, they also provide teachers
with an ideal opportunity to discuss with students how multimodal media function.
In films, cuts fulfil a similar function as the gutters in comics. However, they are
often too fast-paced to be noticed consciously and are thus harder to analyze in a
classroom. Comics, on the other hand, can be studied at a reader’s own pace, often
demanding to first visually absorb the page’s panel layout and graphic outline and
then slowly read the text and reflect on the comic book’s visual details. Thus, the
single images and their iconography as well as the different layers of visual and
verbal input can be analyzed in-depth and students can thus be introduced to pos-
sible interactions and relations between different multimodal forms of meaning-
making.
As graphic documentaries include wide ranges of styles in which pictures often
add meaning to the textual layer of story-telling, they of course also qualify for the
introduction of comics conventions, namely the process of closure as well as the
interpretation of different visual styles in relation to the comic’s textual content.
However, as mentioned in the previous section, graphic documentaries often also
play with interpretative or ambiguous visualizations. Students could thus be intro-
duced to a rhetorical use of visuals and learn to assess how visuals can influence
readers by evoking prior knowledge and associations as well as emotional respons-
es. In addition, the inclusion of external pictorial evidence like maps, photographs
or charts in these graphic novels can also serve as an interesting point for discus-
sion, as it addresses the orchestration and constructedness of images in general. As
Dyer Hoefer puts it, “[while] a photograph might obscure its own artifice as an his-
torical record, a panel from a graphic novel is more obviously a product of artistic
creation. [… The] juxtaposition of the two reveals the artifice of them both” (Dyer
Hoefer 2012, 303). Hence, the use of graphic documentaries in the classroom could
well entail a more general conversation on the nature of visual representation in
the media.
Here, we enter the realm of critical literacy. Critical literacy is defined as the
competency which enables someone to analyze how a text is constructed to fit or
contradict a particular viewpoint, taking into consideration power relations, issues
of marginalization as well as cultural or political discourses (e. g. Frey and Fisher
2008, 2; Arizpe and Styles 2008, 366). Using graphic documentaries to engage in a
discussion on how graphic novels represent realities and events in comparison with
other news outlets or non-fiction works furthers students’ understanding of how
every text takes a certain perspective concerning social, political and historical dis-
courses and has to be assessed and evaluated accordingly. As graphic documenta-
ries are often argumentative texts, students can learn how they use narrative and
visual elements to shape an argument and to what extent the different layers and
the double coding of information work to influence the reader’s conceptions. More-
over, as many graphic documentaries involve either very personal accounts from
eyewitnesses or the authors themselves, teachers can use graphic documentaries to
discuss how the comics deal with power struggles, marginalization, and perspec-
tive. Students learn to critically respond to and engage with culturally significant
depictions of collectively relevant historical events (Fisher and Frey 2007, 27). The
following section will demonstrate how the use of graphic documentaries can
achieve an increase in the competencies of visual and critical literacy by providing
specific activities and discussion points for classrooms.
3 Implementing Graphic Documentaries

in the Classroom: Neufeld’s A. D.:
New Orleans After the Deluge
Graphic documentaries can be utilized in the classroom with concrete activities for
the pre-, while- and post-reading phases. Although this chapter focuses specifically
on Neufeld’s A. D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, the larger aim is to show how
graphic documentaries in general can be implemented in classrooms. A. D. serves
only as an example to concretize the activities, as it falls into the category of graphic
documentary and includes prevalent aspects of the genre, thus providing a good
anchor point for a discussion of potential realizations.
A. D. was first published online by SMITH Magazine between September 2007
and August 2008 (Neufeld 2007). In episodic form, the graphic novel chronicles the
experiences of six New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the
city. In 2009, Pantheon books released a slightly expanded version of A. D. But the
online publication is still accessible and includes numerous hyperlinks, blogs, pod-
casted interviews, YouTube videos and articles, to back up the account and encour-
age its readership to use available resources to not only form their own impression
of the events presented in A. D. but also move beyond the particular stories of the
characters presented in A. D. to the broader causes and results of Hurricane Katrina.

A strong pedagogical motivation therefore pervades A. D., because it provides its
audience with all the means to learn and understand more about the tragedy that
devastated the city of New Orleans. “These links are not simply web-based foot-
notes; rather they are part of a broader strategy to compel the reader to more active-
ly and critically approach the public record and the popular memory of post-Katrina
New Orleans” (Dyer Hoefer 2012, 299). Furthermore, a forum section on the comic’s
website invites the audience to participate in discussion threads with the protago-
nists. The podcasts available on the website also show how Neufeld interviewed his
witnesses from their evacuation until three years after the storm. This interviewing
process is depicted in the comic, showing Neufeld conducting follow-up telephone
interviews with his eyewitnesses while the stories of these six protagonists are illus-
trated using in-scene dramatization.
Neufeld, personally familiar with the aftermath of Katrina from his time as a
volunteer in Biloxi, Mississippi, discusses themes of loss, friendship and heroism,
marginalization, community, trauma and recovery as he depicts the struggles of the
six New Orleanians. First offering an overview of the events from the Hurricane’s
formation over the Atlantic Ocean to its flooding of New Orleans in the chapter titled
“The Storm,” the comic then follows Neufeld’s interview partners from the days
leading up to the flood (“The City”) to the flood itself, the immediate repercussions
of the Hurricane (“The Diaspora”) and finally their lives three years after Katrina
(“The Return”). The inclusion of dates in the form of a calendar at the top of each
page, as well as the change in color scheme mark the transition through time and
separate the single chapters rather than the different plot strands, thus creating an
overarching atmosphere for the six different narratives.
The six color-coded storylines stress the diversity of people living in New Or-
leans as well as their differing experiences during and after the storm. Neufeld’s six
subjects vary in every possible way from race, age, class, educational background,
to their language register. The graphic novel follows Leo, a white comic book collec-
tor in his mid-twenties, evacuating with his girlfriend and returning to New Orleans
after Katrina to find his apartment and all his material possessions destroyed. We
get to know Dr. Brobson Lutz, a well-off New Orleanian, who remains in his house
in the French Quarter during the storm among friends, suffering little damage to his
property. Kwame, an African-American high school student, also evacuates with his
family, but, as his school is completely demolished by Katrina, has to relocate to
California to finish school. Abbas, who stays behind during the flood with his friend
Mansell to protect his successful business, also suffers huge damages to his shop
and has to be rescued as the temperatures rise and he faces health hazards from
the foul waters. Finally, Denise serves as the most prominent figure throughout the
text. Her family has lived in New Orleans for six generations and she, her mother
as well as her niece Cydney with her little daughter R’nae, decide to endure the
storm as their mother is a surgical technician in Memorial Baptist hospital and can-
not leave. First trying to remain in her apartment, Denise then moves to the hospital
and is later evacuated to one of the shelters of last resort – the Central Business
District’s Convention Centre. With these characters serving as focal points, A. D. also
touches on the struggles of other New Orleans residents with the storm, as they
interact with the main characters, and thereby broadens its depiction of experiences
in the course of the Hurricane and the flood.
A. D. is drawn in a rather conventional style, which allows the comic to balance
between the recreation of iconic pictures (see also Dyer Hoefer 2012) and personal
eyewitness accounts without a change in aesthetics. Alternating between the iconic
and the particular, A. D. is not only able to convey the emotional impact of Hurri-
cane Katrina, focusing on both the grand-scale suffering and the specific trauma of
the comic’s six protagonists, but also challenges the visuals used and the claim to
an objective representation by the media. “A. D. seeks to visually represent events
that are already highly visually mediated; in doing so, it recalls, recreates, and re-
vives images that have become part of the public consciousness” (Dyer Hoefer 2012,
300). Using zooming techniques and different panel sizes, Neufeld closes in on the
dramatic experiences of his six protagonists or shows wide-shots of the city to hint
at the vastness of devastation and the scope of suffering caused by Katrina. Further-
more, the monochromatic color palette adds to the emotional impact of the graphic
novel as it fits the prevalent mood the individual narratives convey, matching colors
to text. For example, a greyish green dominates the scenes when the flood hits New
Orleans. Later in the comic, yellows and burned orange depict the heat in which
the remaining citizens had to endure the wait for government aid. This monochro-
matic color scheme is abandoned at the end of A. D. when Neufeld shows the lives
of his six subjects in the aftermath of the flood. Here the characters are colored
using the opponent color to the background shading, setting them apart from the
destroyed New Orleans and thus alienating them from their surroundings and their
lives after Katrina.
As with other examples of graphic documentaries, when implementing A. D.:
New Orleans After the Deluge in a high-school or college classroom, a combination
of analytical and product-process-oriented teaching methods seems to be the most
fitting. This combination fosters both a close understanding and critical interpreta-
tion of the text and its representation of reality as well as a personal connection
through the creative work of the students. In the following sections, I will discuss
some possible classroom activities, which will mainly focus on A. D., but are also
suitable for other graphic documentaries.
3.1 Pre-Reading Activities
Contrary to popular opinion, studies by Norton and Vanderheyden (2004) as well

as Leber-Cook and Leber (2013) show that students often do not read comic books
in their free time and do not see them as serious texts. Students must therefore first
become acquainted with the medium. Introducing comics’ specific vocabulary, like
gutters, speech balloons and splash panels, can help students talk competently
about the specific comics text and thus facilitate in-class discussions. Mills states
in her work on multiliteracies in the classroom that meta-language has to be taught
explicitly to enable students to talk about the characteristics of different media and
genres (Mills 2011, 132). Moreover, a meta-study by Arizpe and Styles (2008, 369)
concludes that students work better with comics when they are familiar with the
specific terms they can use for discussions. A simple overview or example of a com-
ic’s page annotated with the most important vocabulary will generally suffice and
help students as an anchor point for their own thoughts and utterances.
Although students often do not seem to read comic books in their spare time,
most of them will have some prior knowledge of or opinions on the medium. Stu-
dents might be familiar with different comic genres, by either looking at the funnies
in newspapers, watching anime shows or superhero movies or reading comics, man-
ga and graphic novels. It is therefore important to gain an overview of students’
prior knowledge concerning comics. Using a mind-mapping activity, one can not
only gain insights into the experiences students have had with the medium, but
also get a glimpse of their pre-formed conceptions and opinions. As graphic docu-
mentaries are quite different from fictional comic books, students should also be-
come acquainted with the genre, for example through a research activity combined
with a brainstorming session on what aspects constitute ‘journalism,’ ‘reports’ and
‘documentaries.’
Working with graphic documentaries in the classroom also often means that
the text first has to be contextualized to further student understanding of the com-
ics’ narrative. Reading Joe Sacco’s Palestine without some knowledge of the Middle
East conflict and the Intifada or discussing Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis while never
having heard of the Islamic revolution in Iran can still be very informative, but
might also disturb and confuse students. The same holds true for A. D. Despite the
fact that many high school and college students will probably have some recollec-
tions of Hurricane Katrina, for students in their late teens and early twenties 2005
is already a long time ago. To educate them on the historical facts, students could
bring news articles, web articles, reports and photographs concerning Hurricane
Katrina to class. This could also serve as preparatory work for a comparison be-
tween mainstream media reports and A. D. as an example for graphic documentary
later on in class. Furthermore, for students unfamiliar with the geography of the
Mississippi area and the surroundings of New Orleans, a look at a map showing the
levees, the canal system, the different neighborhoods and Lake Pontchartrain will
further their understanding of the geographical statements made in A. D., especially
on how New Orleans came to be flooded after Katrina made land.
3.2 While-Reading Activities
After preparing the students for the graphic novel they are going to engage with,
the while-reading activities should focus on (a) cultivating an understanding for the
events depicted in the comic and (b) closely analyzing and interpreting the way in
which these events and the main characters are portrayed. Additionally, attention
should be drawn to the constructedness of the comic’s story due to its creation and
composition through a third party and its resulting limitations concerning represen-
tation of reality. Therefore, a textual analysis loosely following work with historical
documents seems to be suitable, as this approach would answer questions about
the informational significance of the graphic novel, its linguistic presentation, the
events the graphic novel covers, the sources included in the comic, its representa-
tion of the data collection process, and its (anticipated) effect on readers. This ap-
proach would not only advance text comprehension but also critical literacy. Stu-
dents are prompted to deal with the visual and rhetorical elements of a graphic
novel which influence readers’ opinions and emotions and the reliability of the
sources in the graphic novel as well as the possible agenda behind incorporating
and omitting certain information.
As graphic documentaries are often highly self-reflexive with respect to the data
collection process, the genre provides a good entry point for raising awareness in
students regarding the research economy in journalism and documentaries in gen-
eral. For example, Joe Sacco discusses at length why he came to his conclusions
when researching and writing his graphic novel Palestine and which role he plays
as a reporter in communicating information to a broader public. Josh Neufeld’s A. D.
follows a similar, albeit not as openly self-reflexive approach as Sacco. The inter-
view process with the six main characters of A. D. is clearly depicted in the final two
chapters of the graphic novel. Moreover, the web version provides the reader with
a rich database, linking its events to external sources and thus not only verifying
them but also including further information for anyone who is interested in the
creation process of the comic and Hurricane Katrina. Students can use these exter-
nal sources as well as their own research to assess the credibility of the information
given and the creative decisions made to present the story. I would suggest estab-
lishing a timeline while studying the comic, on one level including the events de-
scribed in the comic and on another level stating external information (with an
exact citation) corroborating or shedding a different light on presentations of specif-
ic events. Creating this timeline on a poster or a roll of wallpaper and placing it in
the classroom during the reading process might also lead to continuous student
involvement with this task and a steady growth of informational density.
Additionally, while reading A. D., students may keep a reading diary, which fur-
thers their involvement with the text and their close-reading abilities, while also
benefiting in-class discussions of specific scenes and the graphic novel’s visuals. In
this reading diary, students could first describe and analyze significant visual el-
ements of A. D., like regular patterns and deviations in their use. Important aspects
to focus on are the color scheme, panel sizes, and close-ups. Secondly, students
could describe their impressions of the protagonists and their characterization
throughout the novel. Despite the fact that A. D. gives a short survey of its most
important characters prior to its first chapter in a “Who is Who,” Dyer Hoefer (2012)
points out that many important aspects concerning these people are given indirectly
in the text or have to be inferred through corroborating the references with external
information. For example, Kwame’s short introduction indicates that he lives in New
Orleans East, which was a prosperous neighborhood for black middle- and upper-
class families before Hurricane Katrina hit. Denise on the other hand lives in Mid-
City, one of the poorest districts of New Orleans. As Dyer Hoefer states, “This will-
ingness to let the evidence of identity and position emerge through the narrative,
rather than explicitly detailing it, implicitly recognizes the complexities of race and
ethnicity – and of class within race” (Dyer Hoefer 2012, 318). The people who suf-
fered most because of Hurricane Katrina were predominantly black and/or poor,
and the political controversies that ensued after the government’s failure to deal
with the aftermath of Katrina and provide relief to its victims raised questions con-
cerning racial discrimination and marginalization. Therefore, engaging with A. D.
should include a closer look at its characters’ differing identities and backgrounds
to better assess their positions and responses to the Hurricane.
Besides these ongoing exercises, in-depth analyses and discussions of certain
key scenes in the comic, like the events at the convention center depicted from
Denise’s point of view, should be carried out during the course of instruction. This
pivotal scene not only demonstrates how the victims of Katrina had to deal with
inhumane conditions while desperately waiting for some form of government relief;
it also encompasses themes like the madness of crowds, disenfranchisement and
marginalization, as well as kindness and community. Furthermore, the scene touch-
es on the discourse of racial discrimination by referencing the Gretna controversy.
The city of Gretna lies on the Westbank of the Mississippi river and is connected to
New Orleans by the Crescent City Connection Bridge. When homeless and severely
dehydrated survivors tried to cross this bridge trying to escape New Orleans in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, they were turned back at gunpoint by the local
police, who had set up roadblocks. Brinkley (2006) estimates that approximately
95 % of the people attempting to cross the bridge were black. These survivors were
told, “there would be no disorder in Gretna” (Brinkley 2006, 470). The web comic
provides further information on the incident in the form of a 60 Minutes article by
correspondent Carol Kopp (2005).
In this scene, discussions should focus on how the fear and terror of the survi-
vors trapped at the Convention Center is conveyed in A. D. and how Denise’s emo-
tional changes are shown to develop from doubtful optimism to rage, resignation,
and finally despair. To illustrate how the comic visually draws attention to the panic
of the Katrina survivors, one could compare the images in A. D. with some of the
photographs from the Convention Center and discuss the constructedness of repre-
sentation in these two media. As a source for these photographs, teachers could use
either the Times-Picayune Katrina-archive (http://www.nola.com/katrina/) or the
pictures by Ted Jackson Katrina: Then and Now (http://lenscratch.com/2015/08/ted-
jackson/).
Another point for discussion when engaging with A. D. and other comics from
the genre (e. g. Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde) is their depiction of loss. In A. D., differ-
ent kinds of loss are depicted, ranging from material loss to the loss of security,
faith and the loss of life. Neufeld uses visual metaphors as well as close-ups and
coloring techniques to represent the characters’ internal responses when confronted
with loss. For example, a two-page splash panel shows Leo in a maelstrom drown-
ing along with his comics after he heard that his apartment as well as his valued
collection has been destroyed by the flood (Neufeld 2009, 116–117). In another story-
line, Denise is shown without any backdrop, when she states, “a big part of me was
swept away in that hurricane” (Neufeld 2009, 177). Discussing these pictures with
students could demonstrate how the comic builds emotional rapport with its audi-
ence by visually depicting the subjective realities of its protagonists.
Using these while-readings activities not only furthers the students’ text com-
prehension; they are also confronted with questions regarding visual interpretation
and critical analyses of the graphic novel’s way of representing the events of Hurri-
cane Katrina. Therefore, these exercises foster the students’ visual and critical litera-
cy and pave the way for the following post-reading tasks.
3.3 Post-Reading Activities
In the post-reading phase, discussion strands from the pre- and while-reading pha-
ses concerning the constructedness of journalism and the adequate representation
of events should be summarized in a final debate, giving students the chance to
consider the different arguments already set forth in prior classroom conversations.
In light of the recent ‘Fake News’ debates, it is important to raise questions about
what constitutes quality reporting. Should journalism or documentaries include per-
sonal opinions or subjective perspectives? Is it even possible to exclude them? Here,
the self-reflexive style of graphic documentaries is considered against the backdrop
of more traditional news outlets, hopefully demonstrating the compositional and
mediated nature of both. Furthermore, the close examination of the images in A. D.
and its comparison with photographic evidence from the events of Hurricane Katri-
na could also spark a classroom discussion on how people’s suffering and trauma
can be represented adequately and ethically by the media.
Besides comparing the graphic novel with more conventional news outlets, a
juxtaposition with the events’ representation in film could also demonstrate how
certain images and narratives concerning Katrina or other highly mediated events
like 9/11 found their way into public consciousness and how diverging media deal
creatively with this discourse. Juxtaposing films with comics seems especially re-
warding, as the two media offer some striking similarities – both relying heavily on
their visual imageries – but also some obvious differences, e. g., the additional el-
ement of sound and movement in film, which can be productive for classroom dis-
cussion and might help students sharpen their visual analyses in both media. When
looking for films to compare with A. D., the TV series Treme, Spike Lee’s When the
Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern
Wild or Beyoncé’s music video to her song Formation are just some examples of
filmic approaches to Katrina that could provide interesting discussion material for
a high school or college classroom.
Finally, a product-process oriented approach could benefit students’ compre-
hension of the comic medium and the events of Hurricane Katrina through their
own creative process. Writing and drawing comics themselves, students engage
with comics-specific conventions and are thereby sensitized to (a) the composition
process in comic creation and (b) the rhetorical elements (both visual and textual)
used to convey a certain narrative. Political cartoons serve as a good genre for
creative writing endeavors after an encounter with graphic documentaries, as they
also focus on themes of power relations, political causes and consequences as
well as group dynamics and hegemonies, using symbols, iconic images, visual
metaphors, and cultural references to argue their point (DeVere Wolsey 2008, 115–
116). Additionally, they condense their argument into one image or, alternatively,
into short strips of three to four panels focussing on sharp humor and pointed
summaries of current events. Producing a political cartoon could therefore help
students understand different visual possibilities in comics creation, the power
and cultural significance of certain images, as well as the difficulties in conveying
an argument in only a few panels. To prepare students for their own creative un-
dertaking, it might be helpful to show them some examples of political cartoons.
Databases like politicalcartoons.com or caglecartoons.com can provide useful in-
sights into the genre and additionally offer a wide range of editorial cartoons on
Hurricane Katrina. In addition, teachers could use the link on the SMITH Magazine
homepage to the YouTube video “Pulp Secret: How A. D. Got Made” to gain insight
into the creative process of A. D. Afterwards, students could be prompted to draw
a political cartoon themselves, concerned with (a) the direct events and effects of
Katrina or (b) its relevance today (approximately fifteen years after Katrina). Stu-
dents could work cooperatively and later present the results in class, explaining
their motives and creative choices.
4 Conclusion
The importance of enabling students to critically examine and analyze multimodal
representations of information becomes increasingly important against the current
background of rising numbers in online, non-traditional news outlets as well as the

discussions about fake news. Graphic documentaries could be used in classrooms to
further critical and visual literacy. As self-reflexive representations of non-fictional
events, they often use their visuals to great effect, creating emotional immediacy
and communicating atmospheric elements of the events as well as experiences and
trauma. Moreover, as graphic documentaries often make use of participatory report-
ing, they represent the author’s data collection process. Hence, they often dwell on
topics of inclusion and exclusion as well as the role of reporters and standards of
reporting, thereby providing their audience with more alternative viewpoints and
pictures than conventional news outlets. They thus offer highly interesting points
for classroom discussions on the subjects of ethically representing the suffering of
others, the constructedness of representations of reality through imagery and story-
telling, as well as biases of conventional news outlets concerning the re-use of cer-
tain images and restricted perspectives to convey information. Moreover, the multi-
modality of graphic documentaries can also serve as an anchor point for teachers
to prepare students to evaluate other multimodal texts critically.
Thus, using graphic documentaries, students not only become acquainted with
the conventions of this genre, but can also extend their knowledge to other media,
like, for example, film or web articles, which also often work with a combination of
text and images. By merging an analytical approach with product-process oriented
teaching methods, students will reach a deeper understanding of how graphic docu-
mentaries work, since the different conventions, iconography and rhetorical el-
ements are not only discussed, but students also interact with them and use them
to produce their own short comics. Following the course of graphic documentary
production – doing research, deciding on what to include and exclude, creating the
pictures and framing speech balloons – students will gain a deeper understanding
of the inner workings of the production of a graphic documentary and other news
outlets.
5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited
Adams, Jeff. Documentary graphic novels and social realism. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008.
Arizpe, Evelyn; Styles, Morag. “A Critical Review of Research into Children’s Responses to
Mulitmodal Texts.” Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative
and visual arts. Ed. James Flood, Shirley Brice Heath and Diane Lapp. London: Routledge,
2008. 363–373.
Bitz, Michael. “The Comic Book Project. FORGING Alternative Pathways to Literacy.” Journal of
Adolescent and Adult Literacy 47.7, 2004: 574–586.
Bitz, Michael. “The Comic Book Project: Literacy Outside (and Inside) the Box.” Handbook of
research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts. Ed. James Flood,
Shirley Brice Heath and Diane Lapp. London: Routledge, 2008. 229–236.
Boerman-Cornell, Bill. “More Than Comic Books.” Educational Leadership 70.6 (2013): 73–77.
Brinkley, Douglas. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf
Coast. New York: William Morrow, 2006.
Carter, James Bucky. “Carving a Niche: Graphic Novels in the English Language Arts Classroom.”
Building literacy connections with graphic novels. Page by page, panel by panel. Ed. James
Bucky Carter. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2007. 1–25.
DeVere Wolsey, Thomas. “That’s Funny: Political Cartoons in the Classroom.” Teaching visual
literacy. Using comic books, graphic novels, anime, cartoons, and more to develop
comprehension and thinking skills. Ed. Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher. Thousand Oaks:
Corwin Press, 2008. 113–129.
Dony, Christophe and Caroline van Linthout. “Comics, Trauma and Cultural Memory(ies) of 9/11.”
The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. Ed. Joyce
Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 178–187.
Dyer Hoefer, Anthony. “A Re-vision of the Record – The Demands of Reading Josh Neufeld’s A. D.:
New Orleans After the Deluge.” Comics and the US South. Ed. Brannon Costello and Qiana J.
Whitted. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 293–323.
Espiritu, Karen. “‘Putting Grief into Boxes’: Trauma and the Crisis of Democracy in Art
Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Tower.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural
Studies 28 (2006): 179–201.
Fisher, Douglas and Nancy Frey. “Altering English: Re-examining the Whole Class Novel and
Making Room for Graphic Novels and More.” Building literacy connections with graphic
novels. Page by page, panel by panel. Ed. James Bucky Carter. Urbana: National Council of
Teachers of English, 2007. 26–37.
Fisher, Douglas; Frey, Nancy. “Introduction.” Teaching visual literacy. Using comic books, graphic
novels, anime, cartoons, and more to develop comprehension and thinking skills. Ed. Nancy
Frey and Douglas Fisher. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press, 2008. 1–4.
Gillenwater, Cary. “Reading Images: The Phenomenon of Intertextuality and How It May
Contribute to Developing Visual Literacy with Advanced Placement English/Language Arts
Students.” Journal of Ethnographic & Qualitative Research 8 (2014): 251–263.
Gladstone, Brooke and Josh Neufeld. The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media.
New York: Norton, 2009.
Hutchinson, Katharine. “An experiment in the use of comics as instructional material.” Journal of
Educational Sociology 23.4 (1949): 236–245.
International Visual Literacy Association. What is “Visual Literacy”? 14 August 2012. http://
ivla.org/new/what-is-visual-literacy-2/.
Kopp, Carol. The Bridge to Gretna: Why Did Police Block Desperate Refugees From New Orleans?
15 December 2005. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-bridge-to-gretna/.
Leber-Cook, Alice and Roy T. Cook. “Stigmatization, Multimodality and Metaphor.” Graphic novels
and comics in the classroom. Essays on the educational power of sequential art. Ed. Carrye
Kay Syma and Robert G. Weiner. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. 23–34.
Lefèvre, Pascal. “The Modes of Documentary Comics.” Der Dokumentarische Comic: Reportage
und Biografie. 6. Wissenschaftstagung der Gesellschaft für Comicforschung (ComFor).
Ed. Dietrich Grünewald. Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag, 2013. 50–60.
Matsner Gruenberg, Sidonie. “The Comics as a Social Force.” In: Journal of Educational Sociology.
American Sociological Association 18.4 (1944): 204–213.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
McTaggart, Jacquelyn. “Graphic Novels: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Teaching visual literacy.
Using comic books, graphic novels, anime, cartoons, and more to develop comprehension
and thinking skills. Ed. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press, 2008.
27–46.
Mills, Kathy A. The Multiliteracies Classroom. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 2011.

Moore, Alan, Joyce Brabner, Bill Sienkiewicz, Tom Yeates, and Paul Mavrides. Brought to Light.
Forestville: Eclipse Books, 1989.
New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard
Educational Review 66.1 (1996): 60–92.
Neufeld, Josh. A. D. New Orleans after the Deluge. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009.
Neufeld, Josh. A. D. New Orleans after the Deluge – Prologue. Smithmag, 2007.
http://www.smithmag.net/afterthedeluge/2007/01/01/prologue-1/3/.
Norton, Bonny and Karen Vanderheyden. “Comic Book Culture and Second Language Learners.”
Critical pedagogies and language learning. Ed. Bonny Norton and Kelleen Toohey.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 201–221.
Öz, Hüseyin and Emine Efecioğlu. “Graphic novels: An alternative approach to teach English as a
foreign language.” Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies 11.1 (2015): 75–90.
Pew Research Center. “Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two-Decade Low: Public Evaluations of the
News Media: 1985–2009.” 12 September 2009. http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-
pdf/543.pdf.
PulpSecret. Comic Book News and Reviews:Pulp Secret Report. 15 May 2007.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdMpxlgE0ic.
Sacco, Joe. “Presentation from 2002 UF Comics Conference.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics
Studies 1.1 (2004).
Sacco, Joe. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004.
Sacco, Joe. Safe Area Goražde. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007.
Sacco, Joe. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010.
Sacco, Joe. Palestine. 16th Ed. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2015.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. London: Vintage Books, 2008.
Satrapi, Marjane. Poulet aux Prunes. Paris: L’Association, 2012.
Schack, Todd. “A failure of language: Achieving layers of meaning in graphic journalism”.
Journalism 15.1 (2014): 109–127.
Schwarz, Gretchen E. “Graphic novels for multiple literacies.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult
Literacy 46:3 (2002): 262–265.
Simon, David and Eric Overmyer. Treme. With Steve Zahn, Wendell Pierce, John Goodman, Kim
Dickens and Khandi Alexander. WHV, 2011.
Sones, W. W. D. “The comics and instructional method.” Journal of Educational Sociology 18.4
(1944): 232–240.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.
Vanderbeke, Dirk. “In the Art of the Beholder: Comics as Political Journalism.” Comics as a nexus
of cultures. Essays on the interplay of media, disciplines and international perspectives.
Ed. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 70–81.
Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954.
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Dir. Spike Lee. With Darleen Asevedo, Jay
Asevedo, Shelton Shakespear Alexander. 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 2006.
Williams, Kristian. “The Case for Comics Journalism: Artist-Reporters Leap Tall Conventions in a
Single Bound.” Columbia Journalism Review 43.6 (2005): 51–55.
Woo, Benjamin. “Reconsidering Comics Journalism: Information and Experience in Joe Sacco’s
Palestine.” The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the
Form. Ed. Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 166–177.
Zeitlin, Benh. Beasts of The Southern Wild. With Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry. Fox
Searchlight Pictures, 2012.
5.2 Further Reading

Brown, Don. Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2015.
Elsner, Daniela, Sissy Helff and Britta Viebrock, eds. Films, Graphic Novels & Visuals. Developing
Multiliteracies in Foreign Language Education – An Interdisciplinary Approach. Münster: LIT,
2013.
Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. March: Book I. Marietta: Top Shelf Production, 2013.
Syma, Carrye Kay and Robert G. Weiner, eds. Graphic novels and comics in the classroom. Essays
on the educational power of sequential art. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013.
Wilson, Sari. A. D.: After the Deluge – Random House Teacher’s Guide. 28 July 2017. http://
www.randomhouse.com/highschool/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375714887&view=tg.
15 Superheroes
Dan Hassler-Forest
15.1 Historical Overview
1
Superheroes occupy a unique place in comic book history. In the American comic
book industry, the success of superhero comics from the late 1930s onward over-
shadowed all other genres, and it has remained the dominant genre in the American
comic book industry up to the present day. While comics readership has declined
strongly from its heyday as a truly mass medium in the mid-twentieth century,
mainstream American comic book publishers continue to focus primarily on serial-
ized superhero narratives, while the genre has also held a prominent position in
alternative or ‘indie’ comic books. So totalizing is its presence in comic book culture
that even explicitly literary graphic novels obsessively gravitate toward its lingering
presence, hovering like a specter over the medium (↗27 Chris Ware, Jimmy Corri-
gan). And while popular interest in superheroes in the twenty-first century has
largely shifted over to other popular media, their primary association with comics
continues to resonate culturally.
The history of superheroes in American comics is commonly divided into three
distinct eras: the Golden Age begins with the phenomenal success of late-1930s com-
ic book characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America,
and extends into the 1950s, when the American moral panic surrounding comic
books caused the industry to intervene and dedicate superhero comics entirely to a
young audience (↗2 History, Formats, Genres). The Silver Age was marked above
all by the ascent of Marvel Comics in the 1960s, which successfully appealed to
the burgeoning teenage market and pioneered the creation of a narrative ‘universe’
(↗8 World-Building), co-inhabited by the many characters with their own dedicated
comic book series, as well as their many various team-ups and crossovers (Wright
2001, 218). This Silver Age in superhero comics extends roughly to 1970, when the
medium underwent many transformations as it tried to keep pace with the swiftly-
developing culture shocks that buffeted American culture and society in this period.
The Bronze Age then begins in the early 1970s, as a new generation of British and
American writers and artists rejuvenate the genre, and the industry ultimately be-
gan to focus on direct marketing via specialized comic book stores, catering explicit-
ly to a more adult audience with collector’s editions, limited series, and increasingly
relaxed standards concerning depictions of violence (Wright 2001, 254–281). And
finally, the Dark Age (or ‘Iron Age’) commences in the late 1980s into the early
twenty-first century, and is marked by a proliferation of re-launches, reboots, and
other attempts to make the growing complexity of serialized superhero narratives
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-016
manageable to a variety of audiences, even as mainstream comics readership con-

tinues to decrease in overall numbers.
While these distinctions between historical eras are not precise and obviously
generalize about an almost indescribably prolific comics genre, they have still be-
come a commonly-used and practical form of shorthand to identify a number of
historically, aesthetically, and industrially specific characteristics. Thus, the Golden
Age was a period in which superhero comics burst into American popular culture,
as the enormous commercial success of perennially iconic characters like Super-
man, Batman, and Wonder Woman became ubiquitous figures not only in the garish
pages of serialized comic books, but also proliferated rapidly into other mass media,
such as radio, film serials, television, and a formidable onslaught of merchandising
products (Gordon 1998, 131–134). The period not only established superheroes as
the most prominent signifier of American comic books and an enduring icon of
mass-produced popular culture, but it also cemented a lasting relationship between
superhero characters and American geopolitical identity: first through the emphatic
attempts by the (predominantly Jewish) comic book creators to campaign for the
US entering World War II, and from 1942 onwards as icons of government-sponsored
war propaganda (see Dittmer 2012). This direct association between superhero fig-
ures and American imperial power has continued throughout the twentieth century
and into the twenty-first, where the superhero movie genre’s cultural and industrial
hegemony offered an uncanny reflection of the United States’ post-9/11 War on Ter-
ror (see Hassler-Forest 2013 and McSweeney 2014).
But while certain elements of superhero comics were firmly established in the
Golden Age, many crucial additions and transformations can be attributed to the
creative, social, and industrial changes that occurred during the genre’s Silver Age
(approx. 1956–1970). While Golden Age superhero comics had catered to a remark-
ably wide demographic, Silver Age comic books developed an enduring love affair
between superhero characters and the youth market. The moment of transition from
Golden to Silver Age is commonly marked in 1956 because it is the year in which
the Comics Code Authority was established (↗2 History, Formats, Genres), and
American comics committed themselves collectively to a form of self-censorship that
made their publications’ contents explicitly ‘child-friendly.’ But while this transfor-
mation certainly impeded comic books’ development as a burgeoning art form, it
also created new opportunities for creative innovations in comics authorship. For
as American youth culture became an increasingly lucrative market from the mid-
1950s onward, the ongoing social and cultural transformations provided the basis
for Marvel Comics’ challenge of DC Comics’ industrial hegemony.
The publisher’s development of a ‘Marvel Universe’ throughout the 1960s, with
the proliferating cast of characters all inhabiting a shared storyworld centered on a
fictionalized parallel version of New York City, resulted in a new type of superhero
that appealed strongly to teenage sensibilities in that era. Iconic characters like the
Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and the highly diverse cast of the
X-Men series were designed to be more vulnerable, more ambiguous, and therefore
more ‘realistic’ than the Golden Age’s various two-dimensional strong-man arche-
types. And while the Marvel Universe world-building concept obviously created
many new commercial opportunities for promotional events, crossovers, and team-
ups, the increasingly byzantine forms of complexly serialized narrative would later
become the basic template for Marvel’s twenty-first-century Cinematic Universe fran-
chise.
Marvel’s effective rejuvenation of the genre and its enduring resonance with
the youth market then took another turn in the early 1970s, when the Bronze Age
transformations saw superhero comics invest even further in their ongoing dialogue
with American culture and politics. The beginning of this era is generally seen in
the appearance of Green Arrow, a character designed to voice contemporary con-
cerns about the environment, social justice, and anti-authoritarianism. The contro-
versies surrounding this character ushered in an era in which superhero comics
increasingly included references to ongoing social and political debates, commonly
taking a politically moderate but decidedly liberal stance in relation to civil rights,
American geopolitics, nationalism, substance abuse, violence, and many other
more ‘adult’ themes (Wright 2001, 229–231).
This development intensified in the early 1980s, as American comics publishers
effectively abandoned the Comics Code Authority seal and gave authors more and
more latitude in terms of the themes and narratives they were allowed to address.
Frank Miller’s run on the Marvel character Daredevil established a previously-un-
known degree of graphic violence in mainstream superhero comics, while the work
of British authors like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman pioneered superhero narratives
with an unusual degree of literary complexity and sophistication. These changes
bolstered Marvel and DC’s cultural status, as a wave of interest from the mainstream
press – further strengthened by the impact of Maus (↗22 Art Spiegelman, Maus) –
generated a new surge of public interest and commercial success.
This reached its peak as superhero comics entered its Dark Age (or ‘Iron Age’)
in the second half of the 1980s, when mainstream superhero comics authored by
Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman became bestselling titles that received
unprecedented critical acclaim: Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, Batman: Year
One, The Dark Knight Returns, and the revived Sandman series each contributed
greatly to the perception of a sea tide in comics publishing, spurring hopes among
publishers and fans that superhero comics sales figures might once more begin to
approximate those of the Silver Age, or even return to Golden Age cultural ubiquity.
Due to a variety of factors, most notably the industry’s short-sighted strategy of
focusing entirely on direct sales and the collector’s market, this cultural shift never
fully materialized, and American comic books returned to the niche audience do-
main that it has continued to occupy in the first two decades of the twenty-first
century. While a lively and diverse global community of comic book readership has
remained, the superhero’s greatest cultural visibility in the later years of the Bronze
Age has been as licensed and branded intellectual property in other media like film,
television, and videogames. The most discerning characteristic of late-Iron Age main-
stream superhero comics is how diversity has become a much more prominent force,
both in the cast of characters (with far more presence for women and minority groups
in superhero roles) and in the production process (with far more female and minority
authors contributing creative work to new and ongoing series) (↗10 Gender).
The three following sections of this thematic chapter provide in-depth analyses
of superhero characters/series that in many ways typify the respective historical
‘Ages’ from which they emerged. In the first part, Matt Yockey explains how the
origins of the Batman character can be understood from the historical Golden Age
context of specific themes the series came to embody, discussing how the subse-
quent development of an entire “Bat-family” articulates not just the longevity of the
character, but the way it forms the basis for an entire franchise that has continued
to fascinate audiences for over eight decades. In the second section, Matthew Boyd
Smith places the Nick Fury character at the center of Marvel’s complex narrative
universe and the emergence of Silver Age comics, showing how the development
of this relatively coherent storyworld expressed the complex cultural and political
dynamics of the Cold War culture in the 1960s and into the 1970s Bronze Age years.
Finally, William Proctor examines three of the key superhero comics that largely
defined the cultural impact of the Dark Age (or ‘Iron Age’) superheroes, detailing
first how increasing narrative and aesthetic complexity helped superhero comics
find new audiences and new prestige, only to crumble under the weight of its own
ambitions shortly thereafter with Crisis on Infinite Earths.
2 Bibliography
2.1 Works Cited
Dittmer, Jason. Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives and
Geopolitics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.
Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics.
Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890–1945. Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1998.
Hassler-Forest, Dan. Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age. Hants: Zero
Books, 2012.
McSweeney, Terence. The ‘War on Terror’ and American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
2.2 Further Reading

Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics.
McSweeney, Terence. Avengers Assemble! Critical Perspectives on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
London: Wallflower Press, 2017.
Matt Yockey
15.2 The Golden Age: Batman
Abstract: This chapter considers how the traumatic nature of Batman’s origin has
informed an affective bond with readers. At the heart of this conflation of character
and reader subjectivities is a utopian desire to recover a permanently lost child-
hood. In this way, Batman texts have proven powerfully resonant and meaningful
for audiences for over 80 years across a number of media platforms and different
iterations of the character.
Key Terms: Trauma, affect, nostalgia, utopia, childhood
1 Bat-Tropes: Trauma, Utopian Desire, and Batman

The first serial comic books were published in 1934, and for the first four years were
typically reprints of newspaper comic strips, such as humor series like Mutt and Jeff
and adventure titles like Terry and the Pirates. Shortly after the first appearance of
Superman in 1938 the superhero quickly became the dominant type in Golden Age
comic books, so much so that the medium and genre have been inextricably linked
for some eighty years. Superman’s debut in Action Comics number 1 (cover dated
June 1938) was an instant sensation, and within a year Detective Comics, Inc. (DC)
coupled Superman’s regular appearances in Action Comics with his own title. Ac-
cording to Bradford W. Wright, “[a]t a time when most comic book titles sold be-
tween 200,000 and 400,000 copies per issue, each issue of Action Comics … regular-
ly sold about 900,000 copies per month. Each bimonthly issue of the Superman
title, devoted entirely to the character, sold an average of 1,300,000 copies” (2001,
13).
Superman’s success attracted new publishers to the comic book field and imita-
tions, such as Fox’s Wonder Man, quickly appeared on newsstands (Wright 2001,
14), most of them just as quickly fading into obscurity (or sued out of existence by
DC on the grounds of copyright infringement, as was the case with Wonder Man).
DC was also eager to cash in on the success of their super-powered crime-fighter in
tights. Their follow-up character, Batman (co-created by artist Bob Kane and writer
Bill Finger), appearing regularly in Detective Comics (beginning with issue number
27, May 1939) and in his own title beginning in Spring 1940, rapidly proved to be
nearly as popular as the Man of Steel. Furthermore, both characters were featured
in separate stories in World’s Finest Comics, which debuted in Spring 1941 as World’s
Best Comics before the title changed with the second issue, and always appeared
together on the covers. Superman and Batman teamed up in World’s Finest stories
beginning with number 71 (July 1954) and ending with number 323 (January 1986),
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-017
318 Matt Yockey
when the title was cancelled. That Batman and Superman have remained DC’s flag-
ship characters is confirmed by the success of the feature film Batman v Superman:
Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016), which took in over $873 million in global box
office receipts (“Box Office Mojo”).
The title of that film is telling, however; while Superman and Batman are un-
questionably DC’s most popular and enduring characters, they have typically been
considered to occupy virtually opposing sides of the superhero spectrum. In his
way, each character embodies the utopian desire at the heart of the superhero gen-
re, with Superman – the morally and physically superior alien – representing an
achieved utopian ideal, and Batman – the emotionally fraught product of childhood
trauma – always performing utopian aspirations. If Superman inspires an upward
gaze that imagines a better tomorrow, then Batman provokes an inward reflection
that remembers a happier yesterday. In this context utopia is necessarily a vaguely
defined, affective impulse embedded in superhero narrative conventions of “good
vs. evil.” These conventions paper over the inherent contradictions of utopia, either
in the form of an unachievable future ideal or unrecoverable romanticized past,
both of which guarantee that superhero narratives will always resist utopian clo-
sure; this dichotomy is exemplified by the fundamental differences between Super-
man and Batman. Consider that, as Scott Bukatman observes, “Superman is the
hero without a mask, his ‘true’ faced revealed to the world” (2003, 214), while Bat-
man’s mask and costume, which covers nearly his entire body, signifies a “rebirth
into the symbolic” (2003, 55). Kryptonian Kal-El arrives on Earth as an infant and
instantly becomes super-powered; young Bruce Wayne witnesses the murder of his
parents and begins a lifelong struggle to overcome this trauma so that the “rebirth”
indicated by the mask is ongoing. Superman is open to the world, while Batman’s
mask “protect(s) the self by placing a barrier between subject and world” (Bukat-
man 2003, 55). Superman’s social position is secured by his superior Kryptonian
heritage and morally pure upbringing by Jonathan and Martha Kent. As Batman,
Bruce Wayne’s place within the social is perpetually confirmed as unstable, requir-
ing constant management as he ritualistically re-enacts the loss of his parents by
fighting criminals.
Ilsa J. Bick writes that “because trauma is a violence to the psyche, the traumat-
ic event […] becomes an eternal, irreconcilable referent” (1999, 319). By transforming
himself into Batman, a symbol of this primary trauma, Bruce renders the trauma a
referent in Bick’s terms. As the product of trauma, Bruce Wayne is suspended in
time, constantly reliving the death of his parents through his perpetual encounters
with criminals and his invariable invocation of that primal moment via the persona
of Batman, a product and symbol of that event. The Batman persona becomes his
way to confront and contain his trauma without ever banishing it. By becoming
Batman, Bruce Wayne asserts the potential for a new society that is grounded in a
utopian vision of the past. The transformative potential of society, explicitly articu-
lated as tumultuous and violent, is reflected by Bruce’s transformative body that is
itself marked as the simultaneous source and recipient of violence. Importantly,

physical suffering becomes an essential component of his transformation into Bat-
man. He must undergo rigorous training to fight criminals and then submit himself
to the ongoing physical punishments that are an inevitable part of fighting in the
attempt to restore that which cannot be recovered. Thus, Batman is defined by the
unrealizable desire for utopia.
Utopian desire is fundamentally affective and consequently the attempt to rep-
resent it is fraught with contradictions that strongly inform the superhero genre.
Regarding the inherent incongruities of utopian representation, Fredric Jameson ar-
gues, “[i]t is not a matter of solving this dilemma […] but rather of producing new
versions of those tensions” (2007, 214). In this light, Batman’s long history as a pop
culture icon in various permutations and media confirms Jameson’s contention that
utopia “is no longer the exhibit of an achieved Utopian construct, but rather the
story of its production and of the very process of construction as such” (2007, 217).
This is the story revealed by the long textual history of Batman, one that resonates
with the central conceit of the character as a figure defined by a perpetual utopian
yearning in his response to childhood loss. As someone steeped in trauma and most
typically represented as a grim, nocturnal vigilante, Batman’s history offers a fasci-
nating study of a character whose shifting subjectivity and appearance are defined
by a utopian desire that is an essential trope of the superhero genre. While Super-
man, who has traditionally been depicted as a one-dimensional paragon of virtue,
embodies a fully established utopian ideal, Batman performs an ongoing attempt to
achieve it, informing the character’s longevity and fluidity, so that after over 80 years
in comics, newspaper strips, television shows, and films, and in a variety of often
seemingly contradictory iterations (from the goofily paternalistic Batman of the
1950s comic books to the saturnine middle-aged “Dark Knight” created by Frank
Miller), Batman’s emotional scars seem to provide a road map for our collective
utopian desire to recover a lost childhood innocence.
2 A History of Violence: The Trans-Textual Mastery

of Trauma
In the 2003 comic book Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth (written by Warren Ellis
and illustrated by John Cassaday), the Planetary team (a group of “Archaeologists
of the Impossible” whose stories exist separately from the primary DC universe of
superheroes) travels to Gotham City to track down a killer, a genetically enhanced
man named John Black. When they find him, they discover that he has the ability
to “rotate through the multiverse,” causing the Planetary crew to encounter various
iterations of Batman, including a 1939-era gun-toting Batman, writer Denny O’Neil
and artist Neal Adams’ early 1970s version, Miller’s Dark Knight, and even Adam
320 Matt Yockey
West’s Caped Crusader from the 1960s television series. At its most obvious, the
self-reflexivity of the story confirms what Henry Jenkins has argued is a shift offered
by twenty-first-century superhero comic books in which “principles of multiplicity
are felt at least as powerfully as those of continuity” (↗31 Grant Morrison, Flex
Mentallo). Clearly the appeal of the story depends considerably on readers’ recogni-
tion of the various references to Batman’s long history as a pop culture icon, a
history that has increasingly been referenced within the very texts that contribute
to it. Consider Eileen Meehan’s contention that Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film
ricochets back in cultural memory to Bob Kane’s original version of a caped vigilante, then up
to the more recent dystopian Dark Knight Returns, with ironic reference to the camped Crusader
of television and all the intervening Bat-texts. This web of cross-references creates an intertext
into which we fit ourselves […] positioning the film and its intertext to suit our own particular
purposes. (Meehan 1991, 47–48)
Meehan’s identification of a return first to the roots (the original comic books associ-
ated with Bob Kane) and then to later iterations implicitly conflates audience and
producer subjectivities: we collectively recall the original Batman and recount our
memories from that point forward. No matter whether a reader has even read any
of the early Batman comic books produced by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, the pres-
ence of an original Batman is confirmed by the tacit knowledge of how Batman
came to be. Of course, this recall of origin points is inherent to Batman as a charac-
ter, whose very existence embodies Bruce Wayne’s traumatic memory of his parents’
murders and whose crime-fighting is a ritualistic recapitulation of that tragic event,
the trauma symbolically revisited and mastered. This aspect of the character is
made explicit in Night on Earth: Batman hands over John Black to the Planetary
team only when he discovers that Black witnessed the murder of his own parents.
Thus, the affective link between superhero and antagonist is confirmed in Batman’s
recognition of compatible traumatic memories, a maneuver that suggests that
Black’s homicidal spree is the obverse response to trauma to Bruce Wayne’s resolve
to fight all crime.
Consequently, any evocation of the character’s origin (which is suggested by
every version of Batman) links the reader to the character himself, since the memory
of trauma is actualized by Bruce Wayne for himself (and, by extension, readers)
every time he dons cape and cowl. This confirms what Sara Ahmed regards as the
affective power of memory when she observes that a “memory can be the object of
[…] feelings in both senses: the feeling is shaped by contact with the memory, and
also involves an orientation towards what is remembered” (2014, 7). One of the most
iconic images associated with the comic book origin of Batman appears in Detective
Comics number 33 (November 1939): a young Bruce Wayne, in prayerful supplica-
tion, dedicates his life to waging war on crime. Kneeling at his bedside, a tear-
stained cheek illuminated by the faint glow of a candle, young Bruce vows, “I swear
by the spirit of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life
warring on all criminals.”
As might be expected, the entire direction of Bruce’s life has been altered by
the murder of his parents. However, he responds to this trauma by taking the highly
unusual step of declaring war on all criminals, not just finding the man who shot
his mother and father. He then realizes that goal by becoming a “master scientist,”
training his body to “physical perfection,” and adopting the guise of Batman. This
character’s creation is predicated on a conversion in response to a personal tragedy,
leading to his radical self-transformation into a costumed figure dedicated to fight-
ing all criminality. He therefore integrates his personal narrative into a larger one,
equating his individual loss with broader social issues. According to Ahmed, the
act of “witnessing” pain elevates the experience of pain by both subject and witness
to “the status of an event, a happening in the world” (29), and this is exactly the
work that is done through this depiction of a grief-stricken Bruce Wayne. In their
“witnessing” of Batman as the materialization of grief and socially-inscribed ven-
geance, readers are aligned with Bruce, the only surviving witness to his parents’
murders.
In his large-scale war on crime, Bruce Wayne’s trauma is ours, just as he empa-
thizes with the trauma of all Gothamites, an affective exchange that also implicates
readers in the dual process of identification with Batman as both victim and hero.
The social body and a collective subjectivity are reflected in the superheroic body
and subjectivity of Bruce Wayne as Batman. To better understand how this subjec-
tivity inhabits every iteration of Batman, it is useful to consider Ahmed’s contention
that “emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the
sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation […], the more signs
circulate, the more affective they become” (2014, 45). Consequently, it is essential
to appreciate the degree to which Batman’s textual history is defined by a profound
investment in narratives of trauma, all of which lead back to that one-page origin
story in Detective Comics number 33. The emotionality inherent to Batman texts –
the primary spectacle of which is the affective performance of Batman by Bruce
Wayne – relates to the “very public nature of emotion” and “the emotive nature of
publics” (Ahmed 2014, 14). The affectivity of Batman texts serves as a bridge be-
tween individual and collective. It materializes and asserts emotional ties that bind.
The complex nature of this emotional bond is indicative of the enduring popu-
larity of Batman, for in his bizarre guise he is a figure designed to evoke the trau-
matic as a means of social mastery over trauma, another way in which character
and reader subjectivities are conflated. For example, in his pursuit of the villain
known as the Monk in Detective Comics number 31 (September 1939), Batman glides
over Gotham at night in his Batgyro, while a crowd of onlookers panics below. An
elderly man exclaims: “The end of the world! We are attacked by Martians!” This
oblique reference to Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of
the Worlds is made more explicit in Batman number 1 (Spring 1940). Upon hearing
the Joker announce over the radio that he will kill a millionaire and steal a famous
diamond, a man proclaims, “That’s just a gag – like that fellow who scared every-
322 Matt Yockey
body with that story about Mars the last time!” Needless to say, the Joker proves
good on his promise and shortly “newspapers [and] radios all scream the story of
the ruthless, cunning criminal the Joker!” The association of both Batman and the
Joker with Welles’ infamous radio adaptation is significant, for it indicates the pri-
mary way by which readers are meant to understand Batman: as a liminal figure
who employs the same psychological techniques as his enemies but in order to fight
rather than commit crime. The inevitable byproduct of this is that Batman himself
sometimes unintentionally terrorizes the populace in these early tales. He is a bor-
derline figure who is characterized in Batman number 3 (Fall 1940) as “a dread
figure of night – a figure that seems to materialize out of the darkness like a fantas-
tic demon.”
This apparitional quality of Batman clearly marks him as an id figure emerging
out of a collective unconscious in a way similar to the often grotesque villains he
contends with. This speaks in part to the character’s various influences and his
manifestation as an overdetermined intertextual fever dream of popular culture.
Kane and Finger specifically drew on the pulp and radio versions of the Shadow, the
eerie crime film The Bat Whispers (Roland West, 1930), Douglas Fairbanks’ action-
adventure film The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920), Lee Falk’s Phantom newspaper
strip, D’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers, and Sherlock Holmes (Daniels, 18–23).
Further, Kane offered that Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) “contributed to the dark,
mysterioso atmosphere I tried to evoke in Batman […]. The first year […] was heavily
influenced by horror films, and emulated a Dracula look” (Kane, 41). If, as Ahmed
says, “the object of fear is over-determined” (62), so too, in the case of Batman, is
the response to that fear, confirming her observation that “fear works to secure the
relationship between […] bodies” (63). In his first year, Batman occasionally mur-
ders in his pursuit of justice, marking him as being as violent as his adversaries. In
that first appearance in Detective Comics # 27, Batman, described as a “menacing
figure,” punches a criminal with such force he sends the man falling to his death
into a vat of acid (“A fitting ending for his kind,” Batman asserts).
In Batman number 1, the Caped Crusader mitigates his actions by briefly reflect-
ing on the gravity of killing criminals. He concludes: “Much as I hate to take human
life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary!” before shooting two hoods. However, this
reflection is brief, as later comics continue to demonstrate his killing prowess. Bat-
man kills an unsuspecting criminal in Detective Comics number 29 (July 1939) by
coming up behind him and breaking his neck with a yank of his rope. A similar fate
is meted out to a thug in the following issue. As Batman swoops down on the man,
“there is a sickening snap as the cossack’s neck breaks under the mighty pressure
of the Batman’s foot.” All of these moments make good on the promise offered by
the cover of Detective Comics #27, in which we see Batman throttling a criminal in
mid-air. More than simply a crime-fighter, Batman is in these early stories rather
akin to an angel of death, a violent menace to the criminal underworld.
Batman’s appearance and very nature are predicated on his ability to inspire
fear in criminals. Given that Finger took much of his inspiration for the character
from pulp fiction characters such as the Shadow – in fact, the plot of the very first
Batman story is taken directly from a story in The Shadow pulp magazine (Scivally
2011, 7) – it is not surprising that Batman is so strongly cast in menacing shades.
Kane recalls that when he presented his idea of a costumed character called the
Bat-Man to Finger, the young writer advised Kane to “make him look more like a
bat and put a hood on him, and take the eyeballs out and just put slits for eyes to
make him look more mysterious” (Kane 1990, 41). Like the Shadow’s, one of Bat-
man’s primary weapons is psychological: the use of fear to manipulate his enemies.
In this way, Batman, an “eerie figure of the night,” (Detective Comics #29, July 1939)
shares a number of features with many of the villains he fights in those early adven-
tures, including the “grim” Doctor Death (Detective Comics number 29), the Monk,
a “strange creature” with the “powers of Satan” (Detective Comics number 31, Sep-
tember 1939), and the “diabolical” and “ghastly” Joker (Batman number 1). Batman,
in fact, is as grotesque and strange a “creature of the night” (Detective Comics num-
ber 33, November 1939) as the gallery of villains he has battled throughout the
years.
Importantly, the evolution of Batman is marked by a subsequent turn away from
this initial use of fatal violence, suggesting the governing power of the superego
had reined in the impulses of the id. The “darkness” of Batman that so many fans
and critics celebrate is in large part based on atmosphere and mood (for example,
an early story placed Batman in Europe, fighting vampires), and the ever-present
reminder of the character’s origin in trauma. After the first year of the comics’ exis-
tence, depictions of murder in Batman narratives diminished and ultimately disap-
peared completely, thereby foregrounding the significance of the murders of Thom-
as and Martha Wayne. In this way, homicidal violence is a trope of the criminal
underworld, one that Batman explicitly disavows. He is defined in large part then
by his unwillingness to kill, and murder is strictly the province of criminals.
Death remained a narrative preoccupation in Batman comics, however, despite
the popular belief that Batman stories immediately became lighter in tone upon the
introduction of Robin in Detective Comics number 38 (April 1940). For example, in
Detective Comics number 42 (August 1940), Batman and Robin investigate a series
of murders (a stabbing, a poisoning, and a hanging) and when the Dynamic Duo
eventually apprehend the culprit, he breaks free from Batman’s grip and shoots
himself in the head. By this point in the character’s history traumatic acts of vio-
lence are associated strictly with criminals, while Batman and Robin, along with
readers, serve as affectively-bonded witnesses. Thus, throughout the 1940s Batman
acquired an ever-growing rogues’ gallery of the grotesque and monstrous, including
an early version of Catwoman, who wore a life-like cat mask, and the disfigured
and psychologically damaged Two-Face. And even as explicit depictions of murder
faded away, the oneiric quality of Batman’s world was advanced by covers and sto-
rylines that featured the Dynamic Duo contending with criminals amidst giant-sized
props that suggested that the boundaries of reality (and one’s place within it) were
constantly unstable.
324 Matt Yockey
According to Kane, the addition of Robin, the young Dick Grayson who, after
he too witnesses the murder of his parents, is taken in by Bruce Wayne as ward and
sidekick, was motivated by his editors’ desire “to get away from Batman’s vigilan-
teism [sic] and to bring him over to the side of the law” (Kane 1990, 45). Jerry Robin-
son, who joined Kane and Finger first as a letterer and inker in 1939 and quickly
graduated to penciling many of Batman’s adventures (and designed the Art Deco-
style logo of the Batman title) recalled that “Bill Finger came up with the idea of
the boy” to give young readers somebody to identify with (Kane 1990, 37). In the
spirit of Batman’s own intertextuality, Robinson derived the sidekick’s name from
Robin Hood and his costume from a painting of Robin Hood by N. C. Wyeth, explain-
ing, “Robin was more human, a real boy’s name, rather than one that implied some
powers” (Couch 2010, 38).
This humanity and Dick Grayson’s own traumatic past that mirrored Bruce
Wayne’s, placed Wayne/Batman in a paternal role that is suggestive of his own
desire to recuperate from the loss of his father. In fact, the addition of the Boy
Wonder is the final, necessary component in the development of Batman’s psyche
and his governing moral ethos as a character. In catalyzing Bruce Wayne’s synthesis
of orphan and father, the presence of Robin compels Batman’s edict against killing;
in order to master trauma, Bruce must always perform the difference to the traumat-
ic event, not duplicate it. His young ward’s presence serves as another, different
reminder of Bruce Wayne’s trauma. In taking Dick in and training him as a superhe-
ro, Bruce ritualistically rehearses his own response to trauma as a means of master-
ing it. That Robin resonated with readers is confirmed by the fact that after his
introduction, sales of Batman comic books doubled (Daniels 1999, 37), and his func-
tion as a point of identification for readers should at least partly be understood in
the way in which he is both a subject of trauma and a means of overcoming it. As
Bukatman argues regarding Batman as both an orphan and father-figure, “displace-
ment and condensation are the real super-powers” (1999, 185).
3 Family Matters: Managing Trauma in the 1950s

and Beyond
While, as Will Brooker notes, there has been “a quite fundamental and long-running
distinction between the two opposing visions of Batman as dark loner and Batman
as benevolent father-figure” (2000, 59), the affective continuity between these two
iterations is more pronounced than is typically acknowledged, so that it is more
useful to regard them as different points on a continuum rather than as distinct
figures sharply divided by time, attitude, and purpose. Certainly Batman comic
books throughout the 1940s and 1950s became more “family friendly” as outside
pressures mounted against the “corrupting” influences of comic books, such as a
widely reprinted 1940 newspaper editorial titled “A National Disgrace” and the
1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who famously
wrote that Batman and Robin’s relationship was “a wish dream of two homosexuals
living together” (1954, 190; ↗7 Politics). Mark Best observes that in response to Wer-
tham’s claim “the genre used the innovation of the ‘superhero family’ to satisfy the
need for conformity to the heterosexual status quo” (1954, 81). That is, the paternal-
ism that informs Bruce Wayne’s tutelage of Dick Grayson is enhanced by the addi-
tion of characters who reinforce Batman’s function as a role model: Kathy Kane as
Batwoman – introduced in 1956 – and her niece Betty Kane as Bat-Girl – who first
appeared in 1961 and only shares her superhero name with the later iteration of
Barbara Gordon as Batgirl.
Further, Bruce Wayne’s romantic interest in Kathy Kane and Betty Kane’s teen-
age crush on Robin potentially negate the homosexual undertones that Wertham
identified in the Batman/Robin relationship. In the story “Bat-Mite Meets Bat-Girl”
(Batman number 144 (December 1961)), Robin explains to Betty that he cannot re-
turn her affection because “Batman has often told me that his crime-fighting career
is a full-time job, and that he can’t risk a big romance now – not until he’s ready to
retire! If Batman can make that kind of sacrifice, I guess I’m man enough to do it,
too!” In other words, the work of fighting crime as a response to the traumatic loss
of family necessarily requires the perpetual deferment of reconstituting an actual
biological family, enhancing the symbolic value of this “Bat-family.” Meanwhile,
Robin’s “sacrifice” reinforces his masculinity, another rhetorical strategy that shores
up his heterosexuality per the sexual politics of the era. This symbolic family is
centered on Batman as the embodied response to trauma, reinforcing affect as a
circulating commodity sign for readers; it was echoed by the title of the comic book
series Batman Family (1975–1978) that featured Batman, Robin, and Batgirl.
In Batwoman’s origin story, readers learn that circus acrobat Kathy Kane has
used a fortune that she inherited from an uncle to realize her greatest dream, to “be
like Batman, the greatest acrobat of all! … I can use my skills as Batman does! I,
too, will fight crime – I’ll be a Batwoman!” Significantly, unlike Dick Grayson, who
is recruited by Bruce Wayne, Kathy Kane already possesses the desire to be like
Batman. If Robin was created in part to foster (likely male) reader identification,
Kathy Kane exists in part to appeal to female readers but also to confirm female
reader identification with both Batman and Robin, while containing the trauma that
defines them; like Bruce, Kathy inherits her wealth but from an uncle who presum-
ably was not murdered. Her costume’s red and yellow color scheme echoes Robin’s,
but the design with bat-eared cowl and knee-length scalloped cape more closely
resembles Batman’s. Her use of a Bat-Cycle and her own Bat-Cave further link her
with Batman, confirming Ahmed’s notion regarding the affective power of circulat-
ing signs. The bat insignia is determined by its roots in trauma, whether the bearer
of this icon is overtly understood as traumatized or not. In fact, the bat symbol
indicates that all subjectivities are defined by loss and in its extra-diegetic associa-
tion with childhood, confirms a collective nostalgia.
326 Matt Yockey
Thus, this ‘Bat-Family’ affectively includes the readers of Batman comics, an

immersive reading strategy reinforced by one-page comic book stories sponsored
by “the Advertising Council and leading national social welfare and youth-serving
organizations” featuring Batman warning America’s youth against social ills such
as religious and ethnic prejudice. The affective bond between Batman and readers
is even more evident in the character of Bat-Mite, “a mischievous mite from another
dimension” who resembles, as Robin puts it, “an elf dressed in a crazy-looking Bat-
man costume!” Bat-Mite first appeared in Detective Comics number 267 (May 1959),
during a period in which Batman comics leaned heavily on science fiction B-movie
tropes, often featuring robots and aliens in stories such as “The Interplanetary Bat-
man” (Batman number 128, December 1959) and “Captives of the Alien Zoo” (Detec-
tive Comics number 326, April 1964), a development which then-editor Jack Schiff
termed DC’s “monster craze” (Eury 2009, 7).
As a child-like devotee of the Caped Crusader who possesses seemingly magical
powers, this visitor from the fifth dimension is the crystallization of child-like fanta-
sy: he models his appearance after Batman and does everything he can to be like
him, even as he constantly falls short of that goal. In other words, Bat-Mite is the
embodiment of the utopian desires at the heart of the superhero genre. This is cap-
tured expertly in his design first drawn by Sheldon Moldoff: the pointed booties,
the webbed, four-fingered gloves, the bat-shorts, and the mask with the triangular
eye holes and bent bat-ear all connote a child’s home-made approximation of a
Batman costume. The design’s most vivid selling points, however, are the yellow
utility belt, with its constantly wagging tongue, and the chest emblem, a cartoon-
like reconstruction of the bat icon that in its gestural simplicity reduces the bat-
emblem to a purely affective expression of joy. Bat-Mite is perhaps the most subver-
sive response to Batman’s trauma ever depicted in the comic books, for in his child-
like appearance (he tells Batman and Robin where he is from “all men are my size”)
he suggests a conflation of the adult Batman and the young Bruce Wayne who
willed him into existence. And, as an outsider who has “observed and admired [Bat-
man’s] exploits for years,” he is a stand-in for younger readers and an embodiment
of older readers’ nostalgic memories of their earliest stages of readership.
Bat-Mite pointedly represents the intersection of utopia and trauma in the su-
perhero genre and he signals that the mastery over trauma is an essential step to-
ward realizing a utopian ideal. His home in the ‘fifth dimension’ and his magical
powers locate Bat-Mite in the utopian realm, yet he turns to Batman as his ideal,
suggesting that contact with trauma is in fact indispensable to the expression of a
utopian desire. This informs all iterations of Batman, whether in the ostensibly trivi-
al form of Bat-Mite, generally regarded as a silly 1950s footnote in Batman’s textual
history, or in the return to Batman’s roots as a more serious detective, beginning
with the “new look” Batman introduced in Detective Comics number 327 (May 1964)
that explicitly turned away from the science fiction themes dominating Batman
comics over the previous five years. Although the popularity of ABC’s Batman televi-
sion series (1966–1968) prompted a move toward camp in the comic books, after the
show’s demise Batman comic books again assumed a more serious tone, leading to
the celebrated work of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams on the character in the early
1970s. According to inker Dick Giordano, “We went back to a grimmer, darker Bat-
man, and I think that’s why those stories did well. Even today we’re still using
Neal’s Batman with the long flowing cape and the pointy ears” (Daniels 1999, 140).
The team also restored the Joker’s murderous side in “The Joker’s Five-Way Re-
venge” (Batman number 251, September 1973), albeit in a qualified manner: his vic-
tims are all former members of his gang, not innocent Gothamites; Batman himself,
however, maintained his code against killing.
Yet, even within the narrower definition of Batman that has prevailed since
O’Neil and Adams’ work, the character’s inherent malleability has been exploited
by a number of writers and artists who have advanced Batman’s textual history
while also drawing from it. Consider, for example, writer Steve Englehart and artist
Marshall Rogers’ brief but highly lauded collaboration in Detective Comics numbers
471 to 476 (August 1977–March/April 1978), in which Professor Hugo Strange, previ-
ously only seen in Batman comic books in 1940, is reintroduced, and the Joker is
depicted as a homicidal maniac on par with his portrayal in his first appearances
in Batman numbers 1 and 2 (Summer 1940) and Detective Comics number 45 (No-
vember 1940).
In 1987 writer Frank Miller and artist David Mazzucchelli created a deep back-
story for Batman’s origin in a four-issue run of Batman, later collected as a graphic
novel titled Batman: Year One. Editor Denny O’Neil explained in the introduction to
the graphic novel that the project was inspired by an interest in improving Batman’s
origin story: “It could be given depth, complexity, a wider context […]. Bruce Wayne’s
struggle to become the thing he was trying to create, the Batman, could be drama-
tized” (Miller and Mazzucchelli 2005, n. pag.). If Bruce Wayne’s post-traumatic re-
birth is ongoing, so too is its representation. Batman: Year One inspired Batman:
The Long Halloween (1996–1997) by writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale, a further
exploration of Batman’s early years, highlighting canonical Golden Age Batman vil-
lain Two-Face, with appearances by 1940s era villains Scarecrow, and Mad Hatter,
among others. Finally, writer Grant Morrison and artist Tony Daniel’s “Batman
R.I.P.” story arc that ran from Batman numbers 676 to 681 (June 2008–December
2008) is distinguished by a high degree of self-reflexivity. Morrison attempts to rec-
oncile the tonal and narrative inconsistencies in some of Batman’s textual history
by drawing on two Silver Age stories: in “Robin Dies at Dawn” (Batman number
156, June 1963), Batman, underwent sensory deprivation as part of a test for the
space program and was traumatized to such a degree by a dream in which Robin
dies that he considered retiring from crime-fighting and finally recovered when Rob-
in’s life was actually threatened by criminals; in “Batman – The Superman of Planet
X” (Batman number 113, February 1958), Batman was transported to the planet Zur-
En-Arrh by an alien who idolized the Caped Crusader and wore a red, yellow, and
purple variation of Batman’s costume.
328 Matt Yockey
In Morrison’s “retconning” of these stories, Batman’s memories of Zur-En-Arrh

are induced by a gas from Professor Milo, an obscure antagonist who first appeared
in Detective Comics number 247 (September 1957). Doctor Hurt, the previously un-
named doctor overseeing the sleep deprivation experiment in Batman number 156,
uses the name “Zur-En-Arrh” as “a hypnotic trigger” to control Batman. However,
Batman subverts this plan by willing himself to become “the Batman of Zur-En-
Arrh,” a dangerously violent counterpart to the Batman id-persona, no longer gov-
erned by the super-ego. Morrison’s turn to Silver Age Batman stories that are gener-
ally regarded as slight and even inferior by most fans underscores that memory and
trauma have always been the underpinning and defining conceits throughout this
character’s history (↗31 Grant Morrison, Flex Mentallo).
In Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986), a fifty-year old Bruce Wayne
has been in seclusion, his Batman persona retired following the death ten years
earlier of Jason Todd, Dick Grayson’s successor to the Robin mantle. In his absence,
Gotham has become overrun with crime and when a violent gang called “the Mu-
tants” begins terrorizing Gotham City, Batman comes out of retirement and defeats
the Mutants’ leader, effectively destroying the gang. Some of the gang members
regroup as a violent vigilante gang called “The Sons of Batman,” actualizing the
cycle of redemptive violence signaled by the Caped Crusader. In a Freudian return
of the repressed, Batman’s reappearance provokes the Joker, who is in a catatonic
state at Arkham Asylum, to escape and he murders hundreds of people before Bat-
man can stop him.
In the climactic battle between Batman and his arch-nemesis, the Joker breaks
his own spine in a suicidal attempt to frame Batman for his apparent murder. Joker’s
final act of self-directed violence emphasizes the fact that Batman refuses to kill
but, at the same time, exploits Batman’s inherent ambiguity as a social subject. The
Dark Knight Returns is significant for the ways in which it projects a dystopian future
for Batman that recapitulates trauma as an interminable experience for Batman.
Yet, of equal importance is the fact that despite recursive trauma, Batman persists,
an ever-hopeful figure whose very existence, like the “deconstructionist” text in
which he appears here, is actually a reconstruction of the affective hopefulness that
has defined him from the beginning.
Fredric Jameson notes that the narrative problem with utopia is that it promises
the end of history (2007, xiv). With Batman it is the intertwined affects of fear and
desire that keep history open and flowing. As Sara Ahmed offers, “fear projects us
from the present into a future” (2014, 65) and it is just this dynamic which informs
the essential utopian impulses of Batman comic books. And the various, seemingly
contradictory iterations of the character only serve to prove Jameson’s contention
that the utopian impulse inevitably produces contradictions. In this light, we can be
assured of an ever-growing universe of Batmen who, in the end, operate according
to the rhythms of Bruce Wayne’s heart as he kneeled at his bedside in a “curious and
strange scene” and vowed to devote his life to making the world, and himself, better.
4 Bibliography
4.1 Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Batman Archives, Volume One. New York: DC Comics, 1990.
Batman in the Fifties. New York: DC Comics, 2002.
Batman in the Sixties. New York: DC Comics, 1999.
Batman: The Dark Knight Archives, Volume One. New York: DC Comics, 1992.
“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” Box Office Mojo. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/
?id=superman2015.htm
Best, Mark. “Domesticity, Homosociality, and Male Power in Superhero Comics of the 1950s.”
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (spring 2005): 80–99.
Bick, Ilsa J. “The Trauma is Out There: Historical Disjunctions and the Postraumatic Narrative as
Process in The X-Files.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Christopher Sharrett,
ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. 319–344.
Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. New York: Continuum, 2000.
Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003.
Couch, N. C. Christopher. Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics. New York: Abrams, 2010.
Daniels, Les. Batman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999.
Ellis, Warren and John Cassaday. Planetary: Crossing Worlds. New York: DC Comics, 2012.
Eury, Michael and Michael Kronenberg. The Batman Companion. Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing,
2009.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science
Fictions. London: Verso, 2007.
Jenkins, Henry. “‘Just Men in Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an Age of Multiplicity.” The
Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Ed. Angela Ndalianis. New York: Routledge, 2009. 16–
43.
Kane, Bob. Batman & Me. Forestville, CA: Eclipse Books, 1989.
Kane, Bob. Batman Archives Volume One. New York: DC Comics, 1990.
Loeb, Jeph and Tim Sale. Batman: The Long Halloween. New York: DC Comics, 1998.
Meehan, Eileen. “‘Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!’: The Political Economy of a Commercial
Intertext.” The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media.
Ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio. New York: Routledge, 1991. 47–65.
Miller, Frank, with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC
Comics, 1997.
Miller, Frank and David Mazzucchelli. Batman: Year One. New York: DC Comics, 2005.
Morrison, Grant, Andy Kubert, J. H. Williams III and Tony Daniel. Batman: Batman and Son.
New York: DC Comics, 2014.
Morrison, Grant and Tony Daniel. Batman R.I.P. New York: DC Comics, 2010.
Scivally, Bruce. Billion Dollar Batman: A History of the Caped Crusader on Film, Radio and
Television from 10¢ Comic Book to Global Icon. Wilmette: Henry Gray Publishing, 2011.
Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001.
330 Matt Yockey
4.2 Further Reading

Brooker, Will. Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman. London: I. B. Tauris. 2012.
Brown, Jeffrey A. Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity: The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero
as Cultural Nexus. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Pearson, Roberta E., William Uricchio, and Will Brooker eds. Many More Lives of the Batman.
London: BFI, 2015.
Matt Boyd Smith
15.3 The Silver Age: Nick Fury
Abstract: Building on the work of various media scholars and cultural historians,
this chapter argues that Fury’s place of centrality in the earliest stages of the Marvel
Universe provides a unique lens through which to view the convergent threads of
the American comic book industry, Marvel Comics, the transition from World War
II to the Cold War, and the place of espionage in popular culture of the 1960s. This
is due not only to his own transitional moment from Army sergeant during the war
to super spy in charge of S.H.I.E.L.D. – but also his status as a fulcrum within the
Marvel Universe, bridging the sci-fi/fantasy worlds of superheroics with real-world
geopolitics of the Cold War in ways that sync with popular media more broadly.
Through a reading of this transitional moment for Fury and the Marvel Universe in
Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Strange Tales, and appearances alongside
Captain America, this chapter serves as an example of how to read the textual el-
ements of superhero comics in relation to multivalent histories and engage with
scholarship both within and outside of comics studies.
Key Terms: Superheroes, The Cold War, World War II, Marvel Comics, war comics,
transfictionality
1 Introduction
While Nick Fury may seem like a bit player in the history of Marvel Comics, his role
as an agent and the eventual leader of the spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D. often places
him and his on-the-ground, non-super-powered stories at the center of Marvel Uni-
verse’s complex storytelling. Over the past fifty years S.H.I.E.L.D. has played an
increasingly important role in the books which comprise the shared Marvel Uni-
verse, and from almost the beginning has directly and indirectly influenced the
stories told in other titles. This is especially true of Fury’s greatest enemies, the
global terrorist organizations Hydra and A.I.M., which have served as constant vil-
lains in the Marvel Universe since their introduction in the pages of Strange Tales.
Yet despite this centrality to the birth of the Marvel Universe, Fury’s transformation
into a secret agent in the 1960s has largely been neglected in the study of Marvel
Comics and the American comic book industry overall.
With regard to American comics, Fury and the books in which he appeared
provide scholars occasion to examine the shift away from the popular genres of the
1940s and 1950s – war, crime, and horror – back to superheroes, which had been
popular before World War II. As Fury transitions from a World War II Army sergeant
to a super spy interacting heavily with the super powered heroes of this period, he
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-018
332 Matt Boyd Smith
serves as a lynchpin between multiple foundational moments of the interconnected

Marvel Universe, the history of the American comic book industry, and the cultural
history of the Cold War. Taking off on the popularity of the James Bond film series
as well as numerous television programs of the decade, the S.H.I.E.L.D. stories of
the 1960s and early 1970s focus on the new realities of ‘combat,’ which is fought
indirectly between national intelligence services and spy agencies, who compete
with one another on a global field for greater geopolitical influence. In this way,
Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. provide a lens through which to view Marvel’s perspec-
tive on the Cold War culture in terms of the war itself and how it was conducted,
not just the abstract concerns of the family unit, the post-war crisis of masculinity,
and the anxieties of the Atomic Age that have appeared in much comics scholar-
ship, including Bradford W. Wright (2001) and Jean-Paul Gabillet’s (2010) studies of
American comic book culture.
This chapter examines the character of Nick Fury in the context of several tran-
sitional moments in the 1960s. At Marvel, he represents a company strategy to
ground superhero comics in a sense of realism that their primary competition DC
Comics approached more obliquely. Both Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos and
Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. rooted the adventures of Marvel’s space age superhe-
roes in earth-bound conflicts and provided historical continuity between resurrect-
ed wartime hero Captain America, WWII, and the ideological warfare of the Cold
War. By turning a combat title’s hero into a participant in the superhero-driven
Marvel Universe, Marvel could provide further real-world context and rationale to
its storylines. In the history of American comic books, Fury allows us to examine
the transition from war comics, one of the most popular genres of the previous two
decades, to a resurgent interest in superhero books, one of the previous decades’
least popular genres. And in terms of the cultural history of the Cold War, Nick Fury
and the spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D. are directly connected to the interest in tales
of espionage that took over popular media of the 1960s, including novels, films,
television shows, and even magazine profiles. In its argumentation and methodolo-
gy, this chapter is indebted to the work of Gabillet and Wright, both of whom argue
that comic books must be treated as both textual and cultural products which are
actively engaged with and informed by popular culture and the historical circum-
stances of their creation.
2 War Comics and The Marvel Age

The American comic book industry of the 1960s was a vastly different landscape
from that of the previous two decades. Throughout World War II and the post-war
period, the popularity of superhero comics declined. Crime, horror, romance, and
war comics were the popular genres of the 1940s and 1950s as booming sales –
driven by the US Army, which shipped comics to troops overseas – turned comic
books into a popular medium. In the mid 1950s, the American industry was faltering
as it came under intense scrutiny following several high-profile Senate hearings
on juvenile delinquency in relation to comics and the publication of Frederic
Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (Wright 2001, 155–172). Following the intro-
duction of the Comics Code in 1954, an attempt by the industry itself to set stan-
dards of publishing and dissuade further criticism of the medium, many compa-
nies left comics publishing altogether, including one of the most popular outfits
of the 40s and 50s, EC Comics (Wright 2001, 176–177). Following a revamp of DC
Comics’ Golden Age characters The Flash and Green Lantern, which placed them
in a shared continuity with Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, superhero
comics regained popularity. The success of DC’s line of titles led to the introduc-
tion of the team-up book The Justice League in 1960, which featured all of DC’s
superheroes and signaled a major shift away from other genres in the company’s
output (Wright 2001, 183).
At the behest of Marvel’s publisher Martin Goodman, writer Stan Lee and Jack
Kirby created The Fantastic Four in 1961 to capitalize on the renewed interest in
superheroes and the success of The Justice League (see Gabillet 2010, 54; Wright
2001, 204). For Marvel, which was only publishing a total of eight titles by the end
of the 1950s, the series was a turning point (Wright, 201). Between 1961 and 1963,
Lee, Kirby, and artist Steve Ditko created some of the most popular superheroes of
all time, including the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, the Mighty Thor, and the Amazing
Spider-Man. According to Bradford Wright, Marvel’s superhero comics of the 1960s
“introduced ambiguity into the vocabulary of the comic book superhero [fusing] the
disorientation of adolescence and the anxieties of Cold War culture into a compel-
ling narrative formula” (2001, 215). Robert Genter has likewise argued that Marvel’s
characters were embodiments of different components of the Cold War era, includ-
ing the many anxieties surrounding the nuclear family, the crisis of postwar mascu-
linity, the military-industrial complex, and teenage culture (2007).
Nick Fury made his debut in 1963 as a no-nonsense military man in Sgt. Fury
and His Howling Commandos, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Lee and Kirby
made frequent references to their own veteran status in the book, and many early
issues featured charts and renderings of common rifle models, military insignia,
and other diagrams explaining the tools of warfare to the book’s audience. The sto-
ries themselves were action-driven, focusing on the encounters between the Howl-
ers and the Nazi forces in Europe. In many ways, the series was a throwback to
older war comics, which had been extremely popular in the US during World War II
and the Korean War. But by the 1960s, the genre was in decline due to changing
public sentiment caused by the increased involvement of the United States in Viet-
nam (Conroy 2009, 11–13). Major companies Dell and Charlton continued publishing
combat titles well into the 1970s, including Jungle War Stories, Fightin’ Army and
Fightin’ Marines, all of which were muscularly propagandistic, but they failed to
gain a lasting audience (Wright 2001, 193–199).
334 Matt Boyd Smith
Meanwhile, DC Comics continued to publish Joe Kubert’s extremely popular Sgt.

Rock stories in Our Army At War, but even Kubert had taken to signing off the stories
with the phrase “Make War No More”‘ at the end of each issue (Conroy 2009, 13).
DC’s other war titles, edited by Kubert, increasingly shied away from realistic war-
fare and instead strongly featured elements of science fiction and fantasy.
In contrast to these industry-wide shifts in tone and sales, Sgt. Fury and the
Howling Commandos reveled in the glories of warfare and combat. The stories told
by Lee and Kirby were filled to the brim with high-stakes action, featured a tough-
as-nails attitude from Fury, and contained plenty of the witty rapport that had made
their other titles into massive hits. The Howlers themselves were representative of
the racial makeup of the United States like combat units featured in classic war
films such as Bataan (Tay Garnett 1943), with the Commandos themselves carica-
tures of American ‘types.’ The group includes ‘Dum Dum’ Dugan, an Irish-American
from Boston, Izzy Cohen, a Jew from Brooklyn, Gabriel Jones, an African-American
soldier who plays jazz trumpet, ‘Rebel’ Ralston, a Southerner skilled in horseback
riding and lassoing, and so on. The group was positioned firmly within the success-
ful hero-antagonist framework the Marvel Universe had used for many of its super-
hero titles. While not a superhero book itself, it was not far from it, as Conroy points
out: “Lee, Kirby, and their successors depicted the Howlers as non-powered super-
heroes, even saddling them with their own Nazi counterparts in the shape of Baron
von Strucker and the Blitzkrieg Squad” (2009, 80). The portrayal of Strucker as
Fury’s arch-nemesis becomes central to the transformation of Fury into a super-
spy in the 1960s, when he begins interacting more centrally with Marvel’s other
characters.
In addition to the structural similarity of the hero/arch-villain structure of the
title, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos also uses Jack Kirby’s kinetic style to
emphasize the strength and virtual invulnerability of its heroes, with Fury himself
repeatedly escaping from situations that would easily kill any other human being.
The comic’s emphasis on high-stakes action is evident from the splash on the first
page of Howling Commandos #1, with Kirby posing the Howlers in the midst of an
offensive against an unseen enemy. Fury is featured most prominently, bare-chested
and firing a machine gun off-panel. Behind him is Dum Dum, cooking a grenade to
hurl into the battlefield. ‘Rebel’ Ralston is down front on the right, running directly
at the enemy, an expression of fearless rage on his face as he grips his rifle tightly.
The other Howlers are posed similarly, leaping into the fray. This image is emblem-
atic of Kirby’s style and the way he uses dynamic poses to convey movement, and
it lends itself naturally to action-oriented storytelling. As Charles Hatfield notes,
“Kirby’s graphic ferocity, the sheer, brawling kineticism of his style, calls to mind
combat: the slugfest, the siege, the riot, in sum the carnal indulgence of raw physi-
cality and untamed rage” (Hatfield 2009, 36). His intense focus on action was a
trademark of his creative work at Marvel, especially in his other collaborations with
Stan Lee, including The Fantastic Four, Thor, and The Incredible Hulk. In each book,
Kirby established a tone and style that would define Marvel Comics for the next
decade, and Nick Fury was true to this form, a really tough guy who never backs
down from a fight.
In their first encounter, Fury is lured to Strucker’s base alone and against or-
ders, where he engages in a one-on-one fight with the Baron in which he is drugged
and incapacitated. His defeat is filmed and used as propaganda. Across thirteen
panels, Kirby stages the fight in a series of dynamic poses, with Fury and Strucker
parrying back and forth with sabers. Each panel emphasizes the tension between
the static image and the kinetics of Kirby’s line work. After being defeated and then
released by Strucker, Fury returns to base and is demoted to the rank of private.
Later, on an infiltration mission, the Howlers encounter Strucker and his forces
again, and Fury has his chance for revenge. The second encounter between the two
men lasts a mere four panels, with Fury realizing Strucker’s trick and then sucker
punching him, calling him a crummy, low down rat. Fury is too tough for Strucker
to take on his own, and the shortened fight solidifies this idea. The Howlers, too
strong to be defeated without the aid of drugs and cheating, easily defeat the Blitz-
krieg Squad, just as any superhero finally overcomes their villainous rivals in sheer
displays of brute force and overwhelming strength.
Beyond the dynamics of Kirby’s art and his depiction of the seeming invulnera-
bility of the Howlers, Conroy’s assertion that the Howlers are treated by Marvel as
“non-powered superheroes” is further demonstrated by a guest appearance of Cap-
tain America in issue #13. After an introduction in which Fury intervenes in a bar
fight, Captain America and his sidekick Bucky head off on a mission behind enemy
lines in France. Before leaving, Cap tells Bucky that he has “found the man” they’re
looking for, a soldier capable of providing back-up and reinforcements should they
need it (5). In France, they of course encounter many Nazis and need reinforce-
ments. The Howlers are called in, and when they arrive, Fury and the squad assist
the two superheroes in combat against the Nazis. Over several pages, Fury and Cap
work in tandem to defeat their enemies before splitting up to finish their mission
and block the passage through a tunnel for the main Nazi forces. Before this battle,
Fury had considered Cap to be a ‘fancy-pants costumed clown,’ but at the end he
calls him “the most man I ever met” acknowledging Captain America’s toughness
and masculinity in combat, traits that Fury himself considers of utmost importance.
Their competence on the battlefield, their camaraderie, and the mutual respect be-
tween the two position them as equals; as brothers-in-arms. Despite Cap’s super-
powers, Fury is shown to be an excellent soldier capable of overcoming the odds
against him in much the same way, through cunning and savvy as much as through
brute strength.
Captain America was reintroduced in March 1964’s The Avengers #4, and by
October had been given his own solo feature in the split book Tales of Suspense,
alongside ‘Iron Man,’ beginning with issue #59. His inclusion in Sgt. Fury provides
a necessary narrative continuity between the book’s historical setting (as well as
336 Matt Boyd Smith
Captain America’s origin in the same period) and the contemporaneous setting of
the Cold War era that informed Marvel’s superhero stories. Nick Fury’s integration
into the Marvel Universe proper via connection with Captain America is particularly
significant in that it provides a clear path for the character to transition from war
hero to superhero. This would occur a year later, with Strange Tales #135, which sees
Nick Fury promoted to the rank of Colonel and taking over duties as the director of
S.H.I.E.L.D. in a solo feature appearing alongside Doctor Strange. It is in this role
that Fury becomes an integral figure to the continuity of the Marvel Universe, cen-
tralized as he is in his role at S.H.I.E.L.D. and how the stories told in the pages of
“Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” inform so many future arcs for Captain America
and the Avengers.
3 Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Super Spies

and the Cold War in 1960s Pop Culture
The Cold War was characterized not so much by traditional methods of warfare as
the extensive use of intelligence agencies and tactics of espionage between the
West – the US and Western European nations – and the USSR, China, and other
communist states in the East. The development of the nuclear bomb in the final
years of World War II necessitated significant changes to the way war was conduct-
ed in the mid-20th Century. The arms race between the US and the USSR was only
one component of a growing worldwide conflict whose wage was the very soul of
Western democracy. Indeed, the Cold War’s main battle was over the competing
ideologies of liberal democracy and Soviet communism, and it was fought using
propaganda and covert operations carried out by government agents, many of
whom also oversaw surrogate conflicts throughout Africa and Southeast Asia, and
the installation of friendly governments in numerous countries throughout the
world. In popular culture, the spy soon became a surrogate for the soldiers of com-
bat tales which had characterized the World War II and Korean War eras in the
United States and Great Britain. But this does not mean that the Cold War was
thought of as a divergence from those wars, or that the Vietnam war was not con-
ceived of as part and parcel of the ideological battle against the spread of commu-
nism. Traditional warfare was instead blended seamlessly into the Cold War narra-
tives prevalent in popular culture via the figure of the spy.
The Cold War was often presented and envisioned as a literal continuation of
World War II. Tales of military intelligence officers infiltrating spy rings or operating
behind enemy lines during wartime had long been the subject of radio dramas,
newsmagazine exposés, and films, including classics such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The
39 Steps (1935) and Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear (1945). As Michael Kackman ex-
plains: “[t]ales of World War II adventure permeated the press well into the 1950s,
and magazines ran serialized accounts of wartime espionage” (Kackman 2005, 6).
And early television shows focusing on spy craft were based on true stories about
the resistance in Western Europe and in the early days of the Cold War (Kackman
2005, 2). Both the spies themselves and the global terrorist organizations they op-
posed had their roots in the war. Many of the most prominent spies in 1960s pop
culture are military service veterans, including the era’s most famous spy, James
Bond, who was a Commander in the British Royal Navy. Likewise, as Kackman tells
us, the various terrorist organizations in these texts, including Bond’s S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
and The Man from Uncle’s T.H.R.USH., had their roots in the conflict and aftermath
of World War II, with organizational leaders tied to globalist expansion of the inter-
national order and the organizations themselves serving as fictional proxies for na-
tionalist agencies like the CIA, FBI, SSD, and KGB (2005, 82). This is especially true
of two Marvel Comics from this period, the new Strange Tales featuring Nick Fury,
and the resurrected Captain America featured in the pages of Tales of Suspense and
The Avengers. The terrorist organizations Hydra and A.I.M. are revealed to be run
by Baron von Strucker and the Red Skull, the arch-nemeses of Fury and Cap from
their campaigns during the war. The use of Nazis as continuing enemies of the West
in a Cold War context allowed for pop culture texts, including film, television, and
comic books, to depict a nebulous, non-physical, ideological form of warfare during
a war that was “fought not directly with troops so much as economics, technology,
politics, and ideology” (Costello 2009, 34).
The cultural anxieties of the Cold War – the proliferation and threat of nuclear
weapons, the arms race between the US and the USSR, the possibility of global mass
destruction, etc. – manifested itself in comic books in the rise of superhero stories
(see Costello 2009, 61; Hatfield 2012, 116; Gabillet 2010, 309). If the hope offered by
the 1950s and 60s in space exploration and scientific advancement was evident in
titles like The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk, its potential for catastrophe
was as well, and the Marvel heroes constantly fought against enemies both Earth-
bound and galactic, individual and collective. Fury’s promotion to an agent of the
spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D. in the pages of Strange Tales in 1965 deals almost ex-
clusively with the anxieties of the Cold War rather than its optimistic elements. The
enemies are not intergalactic, and though infused with science-fiction tropes – Fury
and Captain America both fight a seemingly endless number of androids, face off
against strange weaponry, and take on the scientists of A.I.M. out for world domina-
tion in this period – they are explicitly depicted as products of the Cold War’s politi-
cal realities, including the continuity of spycraft and the shifting methods of warfare
over the course of twenty years from 1945 to 1965. Matthew J. Costello has made
this point within the context of Marvel Comics explicitly, writing that “the continuity
between the Second World War and the Cold War is clearest in the characters of
Captain America and Nick Fury, both of whom are tied directly to World War II”
(Costello 2009, 59). In the murky ideological warfare of the Cold War, the super spy
and the superhero of the 1960s took the place of the combat veteran, fighting
338 Matt Boyd Smith
through subterfuge, wit, and technological dominance of his enemies rather than
simply defeating them on a battlefield in a display of brute strength.
Dressed in a blue suit, hat, and now sporting an unexplained eye-patch, Nick
Fury became an agent of the S.H.I.E.L.D. in issue #135 of Strange Tales, written and
drawn by the character’s original creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. In this new
iteration, Fury becomes fully integrated into the interconnected Marvel Universe as
he uses spycraft to defeat A.I.M. and Hydra alongside the likes of Captain America,
Iron Man, Thor, and the rest of the Avengers. But Fury was not alone; several other
Howlers, including “Dum Dum” Dugan, also make appearances in the new series.
And keeping in line with Marvel’s emphasis on continuity between titles and the
back stories of super spies in television and film who began their careers in military
service, the histories of these characters remained intact. Marvel editorial was thus
able to bring one of the remaining outliers in its titles, Sgt. Fury and His Howling
Commandos – an idiosyncratic book in the age of the superhero – into the fold.
In the very first “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” story, “The Man for the Job,”
Fury is constantly overwhelmed and bewildered by the scope of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s opera-
tions. In panel after panel he encounters some new technology that makes him feel
out of place, a man of action who is in over his head in the subtle world of spycraft.
But Fury is reassured that his entire life – at least the life that matters to the govern-
ment’s apparatus of ideological warfare – has qualified him for his new role as
director of the spy organization. When he saves a helicarrier from a bomb planted
by Hydra later in the same story, he is furious at the security breach that allowed
such a scheme to go undetected. The story ends with Fury telling Tony Stark (Iron
Man), who has been trying to convince him to take the job, “[l]ooks like somebody
has to smash Hydra!! So, it might as well be me!” (Strange Tales #135). In the follow-
ing issue, Strange Tales #136, Fury has taken to his new role quite well, and is
operating at the level of self-sufficiency he had during the war when he could get
away with almost any action against the Nazis with impunity. But his bravado, exist-
ing within an organizational super-structure like S.H.I.E.L.D., is secondary to the
service that Fury’s personal agency provided for the safety of the world at large –
and for Western culture more broadly – considering the growing menace of terrorist
organizations seeking to overthrow the West’s democratic ideals.
As the series got up and running, Nick Fury was increasingly connected to other
characters in the Marvel Universe. In June 1966, he appeared as a guest star in
“Captain America,” which ran as one half of Tales of Suspense. At this point, Fury
had been battling a secretive organization led by a character named The Druid for
a couple of issues. In “Them,” Nick Fury shows up at Avengers headquarters to
ask Captain America for help identifying a strange artificial brain that S.H.I.E.L.D.
captured from the mysterious group he had been fighting in his own title. But as
they are analyzing the strange artifact, a monstrous android who can change his
chemical composition (and thus his superpowers) on the fly appears and attacks
them. After defeating the chemical android, Fury and Captain America discuss the
secret organization again, and with Cap not knowing anything new about Them,
Fury gathers his things to head back to headquarters. The issue ends with Fury
giving Cap a S.H.I.E.L.D. badge and exclaiming, “[n]ext time ya wanna reach me –
it won’t be so hard to do!” Over the course of the next few issues of both Tales of
Suspense and Strange Tales, it is revealed that the organization heretofore called
‘Them’ is in fact A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics), a terrorist group comprised of
scientists using technological and scientific advancement to take over the world.
A.I.M. subsequently becomes a major enemy in several Avengers-related titles, in-
cluding The Invincible Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, bridging narrative gaps in
the creation of their shared continuity through villains just as Marvel had previously
done in their cosmic-oriented Avengers and Fantastic Four stories.
As with other Cold War espionage texts, the use of both Tony Stark and A.I.M.
in the S.H.I.E.L.D. stories point toward the emphasis in spy narratives and Cold
War culture on technological advancement and supremacy. During the Cold War,
technological superiority over the communist threat was a significant development
in the state security apparatus. As in traditional warfare, the side with the most
advanced weapons and strategic intelligence capabilities is most likely to out-ma-
neuver the opponent and win the war. In popular culture, super spies were identi-
fied as much by their dazzling array of weaponry as by the cunning of their intelli-
gence operations. By the mid-1960s, much of this weaponry was inflected with
tinges of science-fiction, more fantasy than reality. The growing emphasis on sci-
ence-fiction augmented technology is played up in many texts of the spy genre dur-
ing the mid-to-late 1960s, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible,
and the James Bond films. The influence of the Cold War and the space age con-
verged in stories which found super spies using increasingly unrealistic, futuristic
weaponry, a trope that was parodied often in reflexive texts like Get Smart, and
which converged with comic books in the 1966 Batman television series. Even texts
which started their lives in earnest such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the Bond
films became reflexive as the 1960s transitioned into parodic modes of representa-
tion and the influence of the pop art movement grew (Kackman YEAR, 90). The
Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. stories, for example, exhibit some of this reflexivity in their
editorial commentary. The first page of March 1966’s Strange Tales #142 exclaims,
“Look out, 007!” before listing the creative talent responsible for the issue. In April
1967’s “Death Trap,” the creator’s names are listed out in direct reference to other
spy tales: “Edited by: Stan Lee (Marvel’s James Bond), Written and Drawn by: Jim
Steranko (Marvel’s Man Flint), Lettered by: Sam Rosen (Marvel’s Secret Squirrel)”
(1967, n. pag.). The self-referential and parodic tone exhibited in the editorial com-
ments point to the intersections between Nick Fury and other pop culture super
spies as much as any of the other elements of Cold War culture which crop up from
time to time throughout the comics featuring the character between 1965 and 1971
when his series was cancelled.
340 Matt Boyd Smith
4 Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated how the character of Nick Fury can illuminate sepa-
rate yet interconnected aspects of the history of Marvel Comics, the American comic
book industry, and Cold War popular culture in the United States. In the 1960s,
Fury’s status as a somewhat liminal and marginalized character who began as a
World War II combat hero and became a Cold War super-spy serves as a useful lens
through which to examine the development of the Marvel Universe. By integrating
Fury into its superhero continuity and emphasizing the villainous organizations Hy-
dra and A.I.M. in a variety of its titles, Marvel Comics engaged with the political
tensions between the US and the USSR in the same abstracted way as many popular
spy thriller television programs and films of the 1960s. If we examine Fury’s current
role in the comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we can see him and the
stories about him continuing to engage in abstractions of real-world politics, putting
him and S.H.I.E.L.D. at the center of debates and tensions concerning the issues of
public versus private, corporate versus civic, and even the responses to globalized
terrorism and drone warfare. Using an integrated method of historical and textual
analysis, Nick Fury’s position in the history of Marvel Comics, comics history, and
popular culture allows for a multifaceted, fruitful examination of the intersections
between comic books and cultural history.
5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited
Bennett, Tony and Woollacott, Janet. Bond and beyond: the Political Career of a Popular Hero.
New York: Methuen, 1987.
Conroy, Mike. War Stories: A Graphic History. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Costello, Matthew J. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America.
New York: Continuum, 2009.
Gabillet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Trans.
B. Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Genter, Robert. ‘“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”: Cold War Culture and the Birth
of Marvel Comics,’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 40.6 (2007): 953–978.
Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012
Kackman, Michael. Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
5.2 Further Reading

Dittmer, Jason. Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and
Geopolitics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling. Stanford:
Jacobs, Will, and Gerard Jones. The Comic Book Heroes: From the Silver Age to the Present. New
York: Crown Publishers, 1985.
Klock, Geoff. How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. New York: Continuum, 2002.
Szasz, Ferenc Morton,. Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World. Reno: University of
Nevada Press, 2012.
York, Chris and Rafiel York, eds. Comic Books and the Cold War, 1946–1962: Essays on Graphic
Treatment of Communism, the Code, and Social Concerns. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012.
William Proctor
15.4 The Dark Age: Superheroes in the 1980s
Abstract: This chapter historicizes the 1980s superhero comic, a decade that is often
cited as a womb of revisionism (Klock 2002), and one that saw the maturation (see
Duncan and Smith 2009) of the genre, with the emergence of the so-called ‘graphic
novel’ announcing a brief but marked new-found respect for the comic book as a
medium, and as literature (Brooker 2012). Considering the work of seminal authors
and texts such as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) Alan Moore and
David Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986), and Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s Crisis on
Infinite Earths (1986), this chapter aims to query and describe the way in which the
1980s is often viewed as animating the Dark Age of superheroes through an “‘adult’
ethos” (Brooker 2011, 25) where ‘grim and gritty’ violence and ‘realism’ becomes
common-place in the decades after.
Key Terms: Revisionism, the dark age of comics, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Re-
turns, Crisis on Infinite Earths
1 An Origin Story: History, Context, Myths

The 1980s are most often viewed as a watershed moment in the history of superhero
comics. A series of seismic shifts marks the period as one of transformation and
transition, with comic books reportedly emerging from puberty and maturing into
adulthood, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Key texts such as Frank Miller’s Bat-
man: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986) are invari-
ably singled out as the flashpoint for this dark age of superhero comics, distin-
guished by a new kind of sensibility, an “‘adult’ ethos” (Brooker 2011, 25), which
had profound and lasting consequences for the genre – the impact of which is still
felt today. Whether or not it was Miller or Moore (or, most likely, a combination of
the two) that rattled the genre’s tone and tenor resulting in violent, “hard-hitting
vigilantism with an edge of political commentary” (Brooker 2007, 39) – closer to
cynical, vengeful cop ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan than the grand optimism of ‘men in
tights’ – the 1980s certainly became the proving ground for a new, critical phase as
the figure of the superhero entered uncharted territory.
For much of the 1970s, the superhero genre had seemed to be living on bor-
rowed time. The lingering after-effects of the so-called comic book scare of the
1950s, which resulted in the formation of the Comic Code Authority (CCA), contin-
ued to have a deleterious impact on the medium (↗2 History, Formats, Genres). As
Duncan and Smith explain, the implementation of the CCA “let parents know that
a comic had passed the censors, but its adoption meant that the industry began
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-019
344 William Proctor
pandering to juvenile content” (2009, 39). By the turn of the 1970s, however, adoles-
cent readership was shrinking rapidly. The core demographic for superhero publish-
ers had been historically anchored to the youth market, and it is within this context
that the CCA operated as moral guardian of content, fuelled largely by Fredric Wer-
tham’s highly publicized anxieties about the poisonous “effects” of comics on the
nation’s children, documented in the famous (and indeed, infamous) study Seduc-
tion of the Innocent (1954). Contrary to common-sense wisdom of comics as “opiate
of the nursery” (Parsons 1991, 72), however, superhero material no longer attracted
a mass audience of children and adolescent readers but, rather, increasingly be-
came the preserve of an adult fan subculture (Wright 2002, 253). Nevertheless, the
CCA’s “rigorous, conservative manifesto” (Sabin 1993, 161) successfully maintained
its stranglehold until a series of challenges in the 1970s functioned as an incubator
for the “grim and gritty” wave of superheroes to follow.
While there is little doubt that the 1980s ushered in a new era for superhero
comics that continues to resonate today, it would be imprudent to fully embrace the
historical record in simplistic terms. One of the overarching myths associated with
comic books is that the bulk of material was primarily “orientated as they are to-
wards the juvenile and uncritical” (Sabin 1993, 1), that they were “unreliable, silly
things – not to be taken seriously” (Barker 1989, 9). As Sabin emphasizes, “the first
comics in the world […] are generally acknowledged to have appeared in Britain
towards the end of the nineteenth century [and were] oriented not solely towards
children, but had a mixed market in mind, with white-collar male adults as their
target readership” (1993, 13). Titles such as Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (1884), and
Comic Cuts (1890), were aimed at a working-class adult readership. Taking this into
account, then, the idea that the 1980s became known as the era when comics had
finally managed to “grow up” – a common headline in broadsheet newspapers dur-
ing the period – is myopic, “a seductive interpretation,” as Sabin put it (1993, 1).
Even if one shifts viewpoint to see the 1980s as the decade when the superhero
genre approached maturity, as opposed to the medium in general terms, such a
perspective does not account for the welter of comics that were published through-
out the 1970s that tackled socio-political and cultural currents head-on. Indeed, the
striking amount of adult-oriented work done in alternative and underground ‘com-
ix’ from the late 1960s onwards strongly re-oriented the medium away from its long-
standing association with children’s entertainment – if primarily for a subcultural
audience (↗23 Robert Crumb). In fact, the New York Times Magazine ran an optimis-
tic appraisal of the comic book industry on May 2nd 1971 explaining that the super-
hero genre had evidently matured and “dealt with pressing issues such as the Viet-
nam War, civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism” (Wright 2002, 233).
At the behest of the United States department of Health Education, Stan Lee at
Marvel penned a three-part story for The Amazing Spider-Man (#96–98) that dealt
with Peter Parker’s best friend Harry Osborn battling drug addiction, which the CCA
refused to award its stamp of approval (Duncan and Smith 2009, 60). Over at DC,
Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ Green Arrow/Green Lantern series often baited the
CCA through its treatment of controversial issues, “from racism to exploited workers
to pollution” (Duncan and Smith 2009, 60), and even more pointedly in a 1971 story
that tackled the rising tide of heroin addiction and abuse (“Snowbirds Don’t Fly”).
Even more risky perhaps was the cover which depicted Green Arrow’s ward, Speedy,
grasping his arm as if he had just injected heroin, a hypodermic syringe displayed
in full view, with Green Arrow frozen exclaiming in shock: “MY WARD IS A JUNKIE!”
Both stories were made all the more controversial considering that the CCA prohibit-
ed any portrayal of drug use in comic books (Duncan and Smith 2009, 60). Other
titles to experiment with mature themes during the 1970s include Archie Goodwin
and Walt Simonson’s Manhunter (1973), Gil Kane’s Blackhawk (1974), and Don
McGregor’s politically charged Black Panther, especially the 13-part story “Panther’s
Rage” (1973–1975). Moreover, Marvel’s Iron Man – once an ideological container for
Cold War anxieties – was dramatically transformed into a mouthpiece against the
conflict in Vietnam, and “spoke out strongly against the right-wing establishment”
(Wright 2002, 241). In such a context, DC’s O’Neal and Adams, Marvel’s Stan Lee,
and an array of other creators, arguably started the trend for more “mature” super-
hero fare more than a decade prior to the publication of Watchmen and The Dark
Knight Returns.
By the same token, Sabin argues that the creation of the CCA did not have quite
the impact that historians and academics claim it to have had, and “there was a big
adult market post-1954, and still a considerable number of comics catering for it”
(1993, 163). Indeed, as Parsons (1991) points out, it was not the implementation of
the CCA that effectively killed off the demand for superhero comics (thus signaling
the end of the Golden Age), but the end of World War II and, later, the introduction
of television. Superhero comics were massively popular amongst soldiers in Army
training camps and, immediately following the cessation of hostilities, comic book
sales slumped into recession. This led directly to an inter-regnum period as superhe-
ro titles were culled from circulation due to poor sales, and only DC’s Trinity (Super-
man, Batman and Wonder Woman) managed to ward off the threat of looming can-
cellation. By the time of the comic book scare, then, the superhero was already an
endangered cultural species.
Only two years after the CCA’s draconian measures were introduced, DC’s Julius
Schwartz spearheaded a superhero renaissance, usually described as the beginning
of the Silver Age. In 1956, Schwartz rebooted The Flash, first in the pages of antholo-
gy comic, Showcase, and second, as an eponymous solo title, the success of which
led to the re-emergence and regeneration of other classic characters, such as Green
Lantern, Hawkman and, more importantly perhaps, the creation of superhero en-
semble team, the Justice League of America. In 1961, Martin Goodman, publisher of
Magazine Management Company, instructed Stan Lee to “steal this idea and create
a team of superheroes” (Howe 2012, 1). Thus, the publication of Lee and Jack Kirby’s
Fantastic Four #1 signaled the arrival of Marvel Comics as a serious contender and
346 William Proctor
provided the first solid challenge to DC’s hegemony since the late-1930s. Closely
followed by a new wave of “anti-establishment” superheroes (Wright 2002, 230),
such as Spider-Man, Thor, Daredevil and so forth, the 1960s effectively became a
healthy commercial climate for the genre as DC and Marvel tried to outsmart one
another. This competition became a productive relationship in many ways, and one
which continues to this day with each company playing a game of one-upmanship.
From this perspective, then, the formation of the CCA did not prevent the superhero
revival and boom of the 1960s – indeed, superhero comics flourished during the
period. However, by the turn of the 1970s, sales were in steep decline, and a constel-
lation of market forces brought the industry to the brink of collapse.
Both DC and Marvel attempted to soldier on through the recessionary mud, but
it was DC that felt the brunt of the impact. A fateful licensing coup between Marvel
and Lucasfilm provided grounds for “a new hope” (pun very much intended). By
first adapting filmmaker George Lucas’s forthcoming Star Wars – a film that was
largely expected to tank gloriously at the box office, not least of all by Lucas him-
self – and then expanding the adventures of Luke, Leia and Han in a comic series,
rapidly became a cash cow for the publisher and offered a temporary bulwark
against the forces of economic stagnation (see Proctor and Freeman 2016). Marvel
writer, Roy Thomas, rabidly pursued the licensing deal (even as Stan Lee doubted
the maneuver), a deal that awarded the keys to the Star Wars galaxy gratis, and
successfully guided the publisher back to extravagant sales figures that, following
the theatrical release of the film, accelerated into the millions.
DC, however, was not faring as well. Beginning in 1975, its new editor Jenette
Kahn sought to address the economic health of the company by substantially in-
creasing the number of titles over the next three years and lengthening the page
count (thereby increasing the price). Promoted as ‘The DC Explosion,’ the strategy
failed to ignite sales and, by the end of 1978, DC had cancelled thirty-one titles and
ended the decade clinging to the ropes as they fought for survival. But the fates, it
would seem, were stacked against them. The “combination of unsold stock, a gener-
al downturn in the US economy, and the poor quality of some of the new titles
prompted DC’s parent company [Warner Bros.] to dictate a trimming of the line”
(Duncan and Smith 2009, 63). Added to this, distribution headaches caused by hor-
rendous winter storms along the US East Coast “prevented many comic books from
ever making it to retail outlets” (Duncan and Smith 2009, 62).
But perhaps the most crucial of these shifts was not solely the wave of ‘grim
and gritty’ anti-heroics, but the emergence of the direct market. As Stephen Weiner
emphasizes:
the American comic landscape changed dramatically in the 1970s and the 1980s primarily
because of two factors: first, the creation of the ‘direct market,’ a system where publishers sold
comic books directly to speciality book stores, and, second, challenges to the Comics Code
Authority [CCA] that regulated the news stand comic industry. (Weiner 2010, 3)
The way the distribution system had traditionally operated was evidently no longer
viable as a business model. Comic publishers sold their fleet of titles to newsstands
and newsagents on a “sale or return” basis. In other words, publishers agreed to
buy back unsold items, which worked very well during the boom years of the 1940s
when over 70 % of print runs were purchased. But by the 1970s, this commercial
system was buckling.
It is within this context that the emergence of the direct market allowed publish-
ers to directly challenge the auspices of the CCA. Within the new system, publishers
would no longer be subjected to the spiraling losses caused by news vendors’ re-
turning a welter of unsold titles back up the supply chain. Instead, specialized com-
ic book stores would be offered titles at a discounted rate compared to “that offered
to the newsstands on the proviso that they could not be returned” (Weiner 2010, 3).
The shift to such a distribution system proved to be a nostrum for the struggling
industry, and by the mid-1980s, “the direct market was the dominant mode of com-
ics distribution” (Weiner 2010, 4).
Bypassing the newsstands, a tactic first employed by the adult “comix” publish-
ers (Sabin 1993), meant that the draconian restrictions of the CCA could effectively
be circumvented. Although the CCA would not be fully disbanded until 2011, it soon
became clear that the governing body was swiftly losing its iron-fisted grip on the
industry, and this was made possible because of the shift in the distribution model
that had lasted almost five decades (Williams and Lyons 2010; Weiner 2010; Round
2010; Sabin 1996). It is certainly ironic that the pioneering works of both Frank
Miller and Alan Moore first came to the attention of fans through, respectively, Mar-
vel’s Daredevil and DC’s The Saga of the Swamp Thing, titles which risked provoking
the ire of the CCA because of their affiliation with crime and horror, respectively.
Keeping in mind that the CCA “was a commercial disaster for American comics”
and genres were “virtually destroyed, particularly crime and horror” (Sabin 1993,
163), we can begin to see the way in which the shift to the direct market had also
provided a remarkable shift in the power dynamic between industry watchdog and
publisher.
2 The Dark Knight Returns

As a disciple of legendary comic auteur, Will Eisner (Wolk 2007, 173) and artist Neal
Adams, Frank Miller’s penchant for crime fiction (notably the hard-boiled tradition
of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson) inspired his unique
brand of superhero noir. Beginning as a filler artist on The Spectacular Spider-Man,
Miller saw enormous potential for experimentation and hybridization, between “the
look of noir fiction and the psychologically distorted world of German expression-
ism” (Wandtke 2015, 67–68). This sensibility would come to fruition in his tenure as
writer and artist on Daredevil, “a title perennially low-ranking in sales” (Wandtke
348 William Proctor
2015, 68). Daredevil provided Miller with the opportunity to test his approach, and
his blend of urban dystopia, realism, and hard-boiled narration prompted his emer-
gence as an accomplished comic book author. Following this, Miller then moved
over to DC and produced the samurai noir, Ronin (1983), but it was when he was
given free rein to impart his vision on Batman that the Dark Age really took off.
By the 1980s, Batman was still struggling to shrug off the camp associations of
the massively successful TV series (1966–1968). Comic fans might have known better,
especially those that religiously followed the character’s many variations and trans-
formations; but the figure of Adam West had become “the predominant image in the
mind of the general, non-comics reading public” (Brooker 2005, 171). Wertham’s
fears about the living arrangements at Wayne Manor (to him clearly signifying a
homosexual ménage à trois) were given new oxygen by the TV series’ camp aesthetic.
As Andy Medhurst convincingly argues, DC (and parent company, Warner Bros.) con-
sistently sought to whitewash history through strategies of containment and repres-
sion. By purging the genre’s embarrassing moments and viciously attacking the
1960s TV Batman as illegitimate and inauthentic – the “tricksy travesty [of] an ef-
feminizing cowled avenger” – Medhurst views the campaign as “the painstaking re-
heterosexualisation of Batman” (Medhurst 1991, 159), a campaign that reached new
heights with Miller’s “macho jackboot on the mythos” in The Dark Knight Returns
(Brooker 2007, 41).
Originally set outside of the “master-narrative” continuity – although later sub-
sumed into DC’s Elseworlds imprint of parallel world narratives and, even later, as
a legitimate and canonical alternative reality in Grant Morrison’s Multiversity series
(2014) – The Dark Knight Returns (DKR) features a grizzled, disillusioned and pen-
sionable Bruce Wayne taking up the cowl and cape once again following a decade
of inactivity. Here, there is no hint of the 1960s camp crusader: Batman is ferocious
and violent as the Dark Knight, “a profoundly obsessive, anti-establishment moral-
ist” (Wandtke 2007, 91) given to clipped, hardboiled internalizing. And, perhaps
most pointedly, assuredly heterosexual. DKR therefore
embodied the genre’s tightening up into a masculine, muscular form, perfect for the key mar-
ket of heterosexual teenage boys and young men who wanted superheroes they could finally
be proud to admire, comics they could read in public. It was a heavy-duty mother of a vehicle
itself, crushing the old jokes about caped crusaders and Boy Wonders, powering through ex-
pectations and prejudices, and planting a reinforced new Batman in the ruins, staring down
anyone who dared mention Adam West. (Brooker 2007, 41)
The impact of DKR, and indeed of Frank Miller, on superhero comics can hardly be
exaggerated, and its influence redefined the genre in many ways. Both DKR and
Watchmen inspired the turn to grim, gritty, sinister and, above all else perhaps,
violent material. This generic shift led to the emergence of Image Comics in the
early 1990s; to the popularity of adult non-superhero titles, such as DC’s adult-ori-
ented Vertigo imprint (Round 2010); and, arguably, to the twenty-first-century rise
of superhero cinema. Indeed, Miller’s DKR effectively served as a litmus test for a
“dark reinterpretation of Batman with an adult readership whose experience with

the character would include the camp crusader of the 1960s” (Meehan 1991, 53).
Concurrently, this treatment of Batman not only shifted perceptions of the su-
perhero figure during the period, but also the way in which the title was packaged
and marketed. The quality of comics publishing had certainly changed over the
years. For a considerable chunk of history, comics were “disposable, low-quality
pulp fiction,” cheaply produced on poor quality paper (Round 2010, 15). By compar-
ison, DKR was first published as a limited mini-series comprised of four single is-
sues, but was marked out as singular by packaging
that included extra pages, square binding, and glossy paper to show off the subtle water colors
added by artist Lynn Varley. American comics had never looked like this, but a new generation
of discriminating readers, served by a growing network of comic book specialty shops, sup-
ported the costly format. The Dark Knight Returns racked up impressive sales. (Daniels 1999,
148)
The fact that the limited series was self-contained was itself “a statement of literary
sophistication,” a key driver in the critical establishment’s fetishization of the for-
mat (Weiner 2010, 10). But when the series was collected as a hardcover edition,
swiftly published after the final installment and marketed as a “graphic novel,” the
mainstream media started to pay attention. As Sabin explains, the idea of the graph-
ic novel was an “invention of publishers’ public relations department” and meant
that they “could sell adult comics to a wider public by giving them another name:
specifically by associating them with novels, and dissociating them from comics”
(1993, 165).
On the one hand, the term allowed the industry to more easily promote DKR
and, by extension, others that followed, as grown up, sophisticated and evolved
material: “so it was that the industry began to solicit the mainstream press for re-
views, and to advertise outside the fan market” (Sabin 1993, 165). On the other
hand, the graphic novel “was not as new as the public relations people made out,”
and had “a respectable history stretching back to the 1940s” (Sabin 1993, 165) – and
even earlier (the aforementioned Ally Sloper had his first collected edition in the
1890s). The discourse surrounding the graphic novel was therefore a bid for cultural
legitimation for what was historically a maligned and often misunderstood medium.
In tandem with narrative, generic and marketing shifts during the period, Julia
Round argues that printing technologies “also affected the ways in which comics
are created, produced, and received,” with key factors such as “digital production
and computerized printing, expensive and permanent binding, distribution via
bookshops, pricing, franchising, and the repackaging and reissuing of previously
published work” (Round 2010, 15). Miller’s DKR was at the center of these key shifts,
as was Alan Moore’s Watchmen.
350 William Proctor
3 Watchmen
As with Miller, the influence of Alan Moore’s work in superhero comics has been
evident. During the 1980s, the writer migrated from working in UK comics, such as
Doctor Who, Warrior, and, most notably, 2000 AD, the latter being the proving
ground where many British writers first cut their teeth before being enticed to pitch
for the major US publishers. But when Moore was invited to take over writing duties
on DC’s The Saga of the Swamp Thing – a title that was re-launched in 1982 to
capitalize on Wes Craven’s film adaptation and swiftly heading towards cancella-
tion, as with Daredevil – that perception of comics began to shift. Indeed, the title
is significant as “the first mainstream comic for decades to consistently not be sub-
mitted for approval to the industry regulator,” the CCA (Little 2010, 143). The suc-
cess of the series certainly elevated Moore’s status as a writer with considerable
industrial status. But the 12-issue maxi-series Watchmen brought about considerable
changes in both the perception of superhero comics and the wave of violent vigilan-
tism that quickly became a dominant trend for the genre.
Because Watchmen was not burdened by decades of continuity – as with DKR,
the story is set outside the regular DC Universe continuity, although recent events
have subsumed the characters into current continuity through Geoff Johns’ Rebirth
(2016) and the twelve-issue sequel, Doomsday Clock (2017–2019) – the series operat-
ed as a deft examination and deconstruction of the superhero genre. Moore’s origi-
nal idea was to use characters from Charlton Comics that DC had acquired in 1983.
But given that the narrative would leave these characters in tatters (and perhaps
unusable in the future), Watchmen ended up, instead, featuring a cast of ana-
logues – so that Charlton characters such as Blue Beetle, Peacemaker, and The
Question became, in Moore’s hands, Nite-Owl, the Comedian and Rorschach. Inci-
dentally, each of those characters can be viewed as drawing tropes from perhaps
the most famous of the vigilante superheroes.
But in many ways, Moore managed to use these characters as amalgamations
of pre-established (and clichéd) generic conventions that are ultimately stretched
to breaking point. As Wandtke argues, “the Comedian not only resembles the Peace-
maker but Captain America and Nick Fury; Rorschach not only resembles the Ques-
tion but Batman and Wolverine, and so on” (2012, 173). That being said, Moore
forces the figure of the superhero to look in the mirror and confront the ambiguous
reflection of the genre’s absurdities, to the point that it becomes rather difficult to
actually view the characters as superheroes. For instance, The Comedian is a nasty,
murderous character who uses patriotism as a rationale to indulge in violence with
impunity, and is in his true element waging war against the enemy in Vietnam
(more Rambo than Captain America); Rorschach is a deranged sociopath with per-
haps the most disturbing origin story; and Superman analogue Dr. Manhattan is
simply too powerful to comprehend, a narcissistic demi-god burdened with emo-
tional and psychological anxieties.
A rather different universe than that populated by DC’s armada of staple charac-
ters – the story is set in an alternate America where Richard Nixon is still President
and the US won the Vietnam War – Watchmen is also a self-reflexive meta-commen-
tary on the history of superhero comics. Just as the CCA censored the content of
comic books, leading to the death knell of the golden age, the characters in Watch-
men are forced into retirement by the introduction of the Keene Act, a brand of Cold
War legislation that outlawed superheroes and rendered their vigilante activities
illegal.
The narrative is driven by a central mystery revolving around the death of The
Comedian, his grisly, violent murder captured in the opening pages of the story.
Following the character’s death, several costumed crime-fighters emerge from re-
tirement to solve the mystery, thereby paving the way to a catastrophic finale that
leaves the figure of the superhero in ruins. But while Watchmen performs open-
heart surgery on the superhero and reveals the moral cancer at the genre’s core, the
text would inspire a wave of grim and gritty superheroes that would follow in its
wake. From this perspective, Watchmen is often viewed as the Citizen Kane of super-
hero comics, and, along with DKR, as a landmark text that catapulted the genre
into the cultural mainstream, as emblematic of the turn to an adult ethos and the
rise of the Dark Age of superhero comics.
Swiftly re-packaged as a graphic novel the year after the completion of the
maxi-series, Watchmen is consistently referred to as not only a great work in the
comic book canon, but also as an exemplar of the form primarily because of its
ability to elevate the medium above stereotypes of the juvenile and ephemeral, of
playgrounds and sandpits, and towards its legitimation as mature, as intended for
adults, and, more pointedly, as literature (supported by its inclusion in Time’s list
of the 100 Best Novels for 2005, the only superhero comic to make the list). The fact
that Watchmen was designed as a self-contained limited series and would not be
extended further – a fact that has since been disavowed by DC’s ownership of the
characters and the production of multiple extensions and spin-offs – is one of the
key reasons that the text (and, by extension, DKR) stood at the vanguard of main-
stream legitimation “by bringing the graphic novel closer to the aesthetic of the
literary text” (Round 2010, 15). As Williams and Lyons attest, “the late 1980s mo-
ment of the graphic novel’s emergent visibility and its extensive publicizing (al-
though not its invention) represents a pivotal shift in the position of comics within
Anglophone culture more generally, and made the developments of the next twenty
years possible” (2010, xvi).
4 Crisis on Infinite Earths

After almost five decades, the DC Universe of the 1980s had grown increasingly
labyrinthine, so much so that, in Wolfman’s words, “old-time readers had no prob-
352 William Proctor
lem understanding DC continuity, [but] it proved off-putting to new readers who

suddenly discovered that there was not one but three Supermans, Wonder Womans,
Batmans, etc” (2000, 1). Indeed, even for loyal fans, the DCU had grown into “an
alphabet soup of letters and concepts that required readers to keep an encyclopaedic
amount of information in their heads” (Sacks 2013, 129). In order to appease DC’s
dedicated readers, however, the revisions that were to follow Crisis were justified as
a legitimate part of the story itself, a self-reflexive device that both commented on
DC continuity and its sprawling alternative realities, as an error in the story-system,
and one that ostensibly needed to be revised to appeal to a new generation of readers.
DC Comics took an unprecedented step with the “event-series,” Crisis on Infinite
Earths, created to address the continuing decline in readership by rebooting the
entire DC universe and to begin again from ground zero (see Proctor, forthcoming).
It was a Götterdämmerung that became the template for large-scale company cross-
overs, which have since become a ubiquitous element of superhero comic book cul-
ture. Marvel had already previously dabbled in larger scale crossovers, such as the
three-part Contest of Champions (1982) and, more notably, Secret Wars (1984),
wherein characters moved – or, in comics parlance, “crossed over” – from individu-
al solo titles into a collective narrative space, forming an ensemble of superheroes
banding together to ward off an evil threat of some kind. But while Crisis on Infinite
Earths may not have been the very first event-series of its kind, it has most certainly
become the most impactful and widely known.
The brainchild of writer Marv Wolfman, Crisis was a twelve-part maxi-series that
was both a marketing exercise used to redesign and rebrand DC Comics in order to
attract new readers, and a narrative strategy that “sought to revise and calibrate the
entire fictional universe in which DC superhero comics took place, streamlining the
company’s previously confusing parallel universes and multiple earths” (Booker
2010, 127). The idea was to make the DC Universe more reader friendly, or more
accurately, new reader friendly.
As with DKR and Watchmen, Crisis can be viewed as a “metafiction”; that is, a
text that “self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as arte-
fact” (Waugh 1984, 2). To illustrate, consider the ways in which Crisis provides an
arch-commentary about DC’s sprawling canvas of alternative worlds (more com-
monly known as “the multiverse,” a nexus of parallel worlds). As the story begins,
the multiverse is constructed as an anomaly, a cosmological accident that occurred
at the birth of time, whereby “a multiverse that should have been one, became many”
(Wolfman and Perez 2000, 11). In doing so, the narrative lays the blame for continui-
ty “snarls” squarely on the shoulders of DC’s bevy of alternative worlds expanded
over the years since first being introduced in the 1961 classic, “Flash of Two
Worlds.” By commenting on the multiverse in such bald terms within the text itself,
Crisis begins to address the burden of continuity as a “bad” object, which needed
rectifying by a new “good” object: a streamlined, single universe that could dampen
and contain such rampant multiplicity, rather than allow it to continue growing
wild and thus spiralling into further narrative chaos. In essence, Crisis seeks to undo
editor Julius Schwartz’s renaissance project of the 1950s and 1960s that created the
multiverse. This leitmotif is repeated throughout the series as readers, like the char-
acter Pariah in the story itself, are “forced to observe the death rattle of the multi-
verse” (Wolfman and Perez 2000, 13). In a metaphysical sense, continuity errors led
to the cosmic disorder that has resulted in reality coming undone.
As the story unfolds, many worlds are extinguished from the narrative and, by
extension, from the DC universe, by a white cloud of “antimatter,” which symboliz-
es the blank page and removal from the continuum. For example, on Earth-6, a
universe inhabited by a Royal Family of superheroes, Lord Volt and his world are
destroyed by the antimatter and literally erased from the pages with only white
space remaining. New stories and a new continuity can now be written onto this
blank slate. For the time being, Lord Volt, Lady Quark and Earth-6 are no more,
wiped from existence, and expunged from the narrative chronology as if they had
never been (although they return decades later in Grant Morrison’s Multiversity).
Entire universes are rendered obsolete by the encroaching blank page of erasure.
The “yin and yang” of the piece – the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor – are rather
like celestial editors battling each other for command of narrative existence and
oblivion. The Monitor represents matter, the page itself and the ontology of the
characters rendered in pencil and ink; while the Anti-Monitor is his binary opposite,
from the universe of Anti-Matter which spewed into existence with the multiverse.
The two characters are metaphorical constructs representing the dualism between
universe and multiverse, order and chaos, simplicity and multiplicity. The war with-
in the pages of Crisis is nothing less than a war for existence within the story and
the DC memory banks.
By the series’ dénouement, the multiverse is purged from continuity and the
universe once again becomes a single, hybrid unit. Supergirl is dead, removed from
the continuum, perhaps as a result of her waning popularity and the film adaptation
which failed to capitalize on the extraordinary success of the first Christopher Reeve
Superman films (although the editors claim that Superman’s extended family had
to be expunged so he could return to his position as “Last Son of Krypton”). More
pointedly, the Silver Age Flash, Barry Allen, is annihilated, perhaps as an editorial
punishment for discovering the multiverse in “The Flash of Two Worlds,” and a
further disavowal of the Schwartz era. These characters were not dead, however:
“they never existed in the first place” (Klock 2002, 21).
As the revisions take effect, the memories of the remaining characters are wiped
and the hyperdiegesis is reset, awaiting the construction of a new timeline. On the
final page, the character Psycho Pirate is depicted as the only one who remembers
the old continuity and, as the story concludes, he is seen in an asylum crying out
for those lost amidst the temporal collapse:
I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO REMEMBERS THE INFINITE EARTHS. YOU SEE, I KNOW THE TRUTH!
I REMEMBER ALL THAT HAPPENED, AND I’M NOT GOING TO FORGET. WORLDS LIVED,
WORLDS DIED. NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME. (Wolfman and Perez 2000, 364)
354 William Proctor
Naturally, hard-core fan readers also remember the “old” continuity, so it is perhaps
best to view this as a process of “forgetting,” which, as Colin B. Harvey explains,
illustrates that “memory traces are still apparent,” no matter what editorial gover-
nance insists upon (2016, 203). Over time, elements that had been ostensibly ex-
punged by Crisis crept back in, or were not quite erased in the first place, thus
leading to several further continuity upheavals since, including: Zero Hour: Crisis
in Time (1994); Infinite Crisis (2005) – which re-introduced the multiverse; Final Cri-
sis (2008); Flashpoint (2011); and, most recently, Rebirth. Reboots, retcons, regenera-
tions and reversions are thus a sine qua non of the superhero comic book. The series
concludes with a blank slate awaiting new stories, new continuities and new histo-
ries to be etched onto the tabula rasa, which began with the regeneration of Super-
man in John Byrne’s Man of Steel (1986) and continued with George Perez’s reboot
of Wonder Woman and, to a lesser extent, Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One (1986).
Crisis, however, was not to be a gateway for new readers, but for pre-existing,
and older, readers – indeed, the maxi-series demands an intertextual competence
that would certainly be almost unobtainable to readers unversed in the argot of
superhero continuity. From this position, then, Crisis was specifically designed for
“super readers” (Wolk 2007, 105); that is, fans who have no trouble navigating the
sprawling metropolis of DC continuity. It was the aforementioned reboots of the DC
Trinity that would function as a legitimate entry-point for new readers, a clear path
unfettered and uncluttered by the heft and weight of DC lore.
On the one hand, Crisis was a resounding commercial success. As Wolfman
himself explained, it “brought readers to DC Comics, and that was, of course, its
purpose” (1998, ii). In many ways, Crisis was also a “marketing gimmick, forcing
readers to buy all twelve issues to understand the changes being imposed on all
their favourite characters” (Klock 2002, 21). For super-readers, then, “any attempt
at simplifying continuity into something streamlined, clear, and direct […] only re-
sults in another layer of continuity” (Klock 2002, 21). For new readers, the path is
ostensibly cleared for a new continuity operation to begin (again). But on the other
hand, as a continuity operation, Crisis was a massive failure. Over the next few years,
characters would continue to remember events that had ostensibly been washed
away by Crisis and the DC Universe was therefore left even more chaotic than before.
Wolfman’s plan was to reboot all DC’s titles following the event-series, but he was
prevented from doing so by the dictates of the editorial body. Since then, DC has
been racked by a number of similar exercises without much in the way of stability
or success, at least at the level of continuity.
Crisis was certainly a “watershed moment in the history of superhero comics”
providing a template for the “endless series of ‘events’ and ‘crossovers’ in the de-
cades since” (Friedenthal 2011, 1). The annual event-series has since become the
comic book equivalent of a summer blockbuster, a perennial occurrence across the
superhero landscape. As a “revisionary superhero narrative” (Klock 2002), Crisis set
the stage for what was to follow in relation to the now ubiquitous “event-series,”
while the rhetoric of “revisionism” became a catch-all term for the way in which
authors like Frank Miller and Alan Moore placed the figure of the superhero under
microscopic scrutiny. Thus, the 1980s are often described as a period of intense
revisionism, a period marked by economic forces that threatened the stability, and
even the very existence of, the superhero comic book industry – although, inciden-
tally, Jenkins argues that describing superhero comics of the 1980s as revisionist
“makes no sense because there is not a moment in the history of the genre when
the superhero genre is not under active revision” (2009, 29).
5 Conclusion
The 1980s, then, ultimately became a kind of laboratory for the Iron Age: a dark
age of superhero comics as a series of forces coalesced and combined during the
decade following the radical gestation of the 1970s via the navigation of market
forces that plummeted the genre into almost permanent crisis. The brief period of
gentrification, led largely by the emergence of the graphic novel as both a marketing
instrument and an exercise in cultural legitimation, opened up the floodgates for
the anti-superhero to take flight and colonize the genre in unexpected ways. The
success of Alan Moore led both the “big two” publishers of superhero content to
gaze across the Atlantic and pluck other creators out of the British context, such as
Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, Bryan Talbot,
and so on (Little 2010; Murray 2010). Dubbed “the British Invasion,” thus drawing
parallels with the cultural impact of The Beatles and other British rock bands in the
1960s, “the most significant influence on American comics were the large number
of creators that left the UK to work on many of the titles that have come to be
considered the defining works of the period” (Little 2010, 140). The 1980s was there-
fore a pivotal era shaped and influenced by an array of constituting factors.
But it is perhaps more productive to view the ‘grim and gritty’ perspective with
a degree of suspicion. Of course, the impact of Miller and Moore led to darker
climes, with the formation of Image Comics, the British Invasion, and their influ-
ence on the rise of superhero cinema. But while these works together with films like
Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Trilogy” (2005–
2012), and Zak Snyder’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) were arguably
symptoms of the dark age, the genre has also had its moments of sunshine and
optimism. Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come (1996), for instance, would directly address
the grim and gritty turn as, within the story, classic DC characters, including the
Trinity, emerge from retirement to tackle the “next generation of violent, amoral
crimefighters” (Klock 2002, 94). Like all genres, then,
[t]he superhero genre […] isn’t only a static language that remains frozen in time; it’s a dynam-
ic, formal structure that plunges itself into repeated, ongoing conversations with its creators,
other creations, and its audiences across time. (Ndalianis, 2009, 285)
356 William Proctor
6 Bibliography
6.1 Works Cited
Barker, Martin. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1989.
Booker, Keith M. The Encyclopaedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Oxford: Greenwood,
2010.
Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analysing a Cultural Icon. London: Continuum, 2005.
Brooker, Will. “The Best Batman Story: Dark Knight Returns.” Beautiful Things in Popular Culture.
Ed. Alan McKee. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 33–48.
Brooker, Will. “Hero of the Beach: Flex-Mentallo at the End of Worlds.” Journal of Graphic Novels
and Comics 2.1 (2011): 25–37.
Daniels, Les. Batman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999.
Duncan, Randy and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History. Form and Culture. London:
Continuum, 2009.
Friedenthal, Andrew. “Monitoring the Past: DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths and the
Narrativization of Comic Book History.” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies 6.2 (2011).
Harvey, Colin B. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory across Science Fiction and
Fantasy Storyworlds. London: Palgrave, 2015.
Howe, Sean. Marvel: The Untold Story. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.
Jenkins, Henry. “Just Men in Tights: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an Era of Multiplicity.” The
Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Ed. Angela Ndalianis. London: Routledge, 2009. 16–
43.
Klock, Geoff. How to Read Superhero Comics. London: Continuum, 2002.
Little, Ben. “2000AD: Understanding the ‘British Invasion’ of American Comics.” Comics as a
Nexus of Cultures: Essays in the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International
Perspectives. Eds. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn. Jefferson: McFarland,
2010. 140–152.
Medhurst, Andy. “Batman, Deviance and Camp.” The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical
Approaches to a Superhero and his Media. Eds. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio.
London: Routledge, 1991. 149–163.
Meehan, Eileen. “‘Holy Commodity Fetish Batman!’: The Political Economy of a Commercial
Intertext.” The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media.
Eds. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio. London: Routledge, 1991. 47–56.
Miller, Frank et. al. The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics, 1986.
Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1986.
Murray, Chris. “Signals from Airstrip One: The British Invasion of Mainstream American Comics.”
The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Eds. Paul Williams and James
Lyons. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Parsons, Patrick. “Batman and His Audience: The Dialectics of Culture.” The Many Lives of the
Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media. Eds. Roberta E. Pearson and
William Uricchio. London: Routledge, 1991. 66–90.
Proctor, William and Matthew Freeman. “‘The First Step into a Smaller World’: The Transmedia
Economy of Star Wars.” Revisiting Imaginary Worlds. Ed. Mark J.P Wolf. London: Routledge,
2016. 221–244.
Round, Julia. “‘Is This a Book?’ DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s.” The Rise
of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons.
Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 14–30.
Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1993.
Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon Press,
1996.
Sacks, Jason. “Crisis and Creation.” American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1980s. Ed. Keith Dallas.
Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2013. 128–151.
Wandtke, Terrence R. “Frank Miller Strikes Again and Batman becomes a Postmodern Anti-Hero:
The Tragi(Comic) Reformulation of the Dark Knight.” The Amazing Transforming Superhero.
Ed. Terrence R. Wandtke. Jefferson: McFarland, 2007. 87–111.
Wandtke, Terrence R. The Dark Night Returns: The Contemporary Resurgence of Crime Comics.
New York: RIT Press, 2015.
Wandtke, Terrence R. The Meaning of Superhero Comic Books. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London:
Routledge, 1984.
Weaver, Tyler. Comics for Film, Games, and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your
Transmedia Storyworld. London: Focal Press, 2013.
Weiner, Stephen. “How the Graphic Novel Changed American Comics.” The Rise of the American
Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons. Mississippi:
Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rhineheart and Company, 1954.
Williams, Paul and Lyons, James. “Introduction: In the Year 3794.” The Rise of the American
Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons. Mississippi:
University Press of Mississippi, 2010. xi–xxiv.
Wolfman, Marv and Perez, George, et. al. Crisis on Infinite Earths. New York: DC Comics, 1986.
Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics and What They Mean. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007.
Part III: Close Readings
Christina Meyer
16 Richard F. Outcault: The Yellow Kid
Abstract: This chapter deals with one of the first popular comic figures in the late
nineteenth century, which originated in the Sunday colored comic supplements of
the American mass press: the Yellow Kid. It will provide contextual background
information about the comic figure’s emergence in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York newspaper The World, follow the Yellow Kid’s appearance in various –
and competing – comics series, and give a short overview of the comic figure’s
proliferations outside of the original carrier medium. The main part of this chapter
focuses on the reading options that are inscribed in the Yellow Kid comics, and
explains the consumption practices that are generated by the diverse modes of rep-
resentation. The final part offers perspectives on the impact and reception of the
Yellow Kid and the comics series the figure appeared in.
Key Terms: Yellow Kid, supplements, comic-tableaux, Outcault, Luks, seriality
1 Context: Author, Oeuvre, Moment

The final decade of the nineteenth century was a “fiercely competitive, and intoler-
ant time,” writes Joseph Campbell (2001, 8). Newspapers, the periodicals, and hu-
mor magazines competed not only against each other but also with artifacts and
practices from other cultural fields – first and foremost with the “entertainment
industry” and leisure time activities, “from nickelodeons to vaudeville shows to pro-
fessional sporting events” (Campbell 2001, 8). As Joseph Pulitzer’s biographer,
George Juergens, states, these “played a part by forcing the press to compete for the
time and money each family allocated for diversion” (1966, 48). So, if the newspa-
pers wanted to be able to compete with other products and media options from
other cultural fields and to make profit, they had to offer something new and differ-
ent to attract consumers. One important, if not the most important, development in
this regard was the introduction of ‘extras’ for the Sunday editions of city papers –
in color. The Inter Ocean (in Chicago) was among the first to introduce a colored
supplement. The Illustrated Supplement (launched in June 1892) presented a variety
of material to the reader such as, for instance, illustrations (especially of the forth-
coming world exhibition), feature stories, and comics (see West 2012). A year later,
on May 21, 1893, Pulitzer’s The World introduced a Colored Supplement; it was a 4-
page extra section filled with diverse illustrations, short human-interest stories and
prose miscellanea, and a few comics.
The Inter Ocean’s and The World’s Sunday color supplements were an immedi-
ate success, and they bred imitators – not only in New York and Chicago, but also
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-020
362 Christina Meyer
in other cities on the West and East Coast (see Meyer 2019). The Sunday supple-
ments boosted circulation, and they impacted the production and consumption of
reading material. As David Hadju summarizes, they “transformed Sunday in mil-
lions of American homes” (Hadju 2008, 13). Twenty years after their inception, the
journalist and economist and former managing editor of the San Francisco Chroni-
cle, John Philip Young, reflected on the impact of the extra sections in the newspa-
pers’ Sunday editions. He pointed out that it was quite common “to speak lightly”
of them “because [they were] not wholly made up of contributions which a fastidi-
ous literary taste could approve” (Young 1915, 154), but the popularity of the supple-
ments and the role they played in spreading ‘news,’ images, advertisements, and
all kinds of stories and other features, were, if not appreciated, widely recognized.
In 1893, literary critic and author William Dean Howells had indicated, for example,
that “it was the necessity of the Sunday edition […] to have material in abundance
[…and] to have it cheap” (1893, 440). They were filled with “interviews, personal
adventure, popular science, useful information, travel sketches, and short stories”
as well as comics (Howells 1893, 441).
Three years after Pulitzer had introduced the Colored Supplement, his newspa-
per had three different multi-page Sunday supplements, namely, the Woman’s
World, the Comic Weekly, and the Sunday Magazine. In the latter, readers would
find columns about actual or fictive scientific discoveries and technological inven-
tions and the possibilities they offered for society’s progress; depictions about the
social ‘400,’ including pictures of their homes and events they take part in; and,
the Sunday Magazine offered (illustrated) advice on how to behave correctly in all
kinds of social situations – some more serious than others. The pages were further-
more filled with articles about reptiles, insects and other ‘monstrous’ animals and
curiosities. Contests and puzzles were also commonly printed in the Sunday Maga-
zine.
The compartmentalized sections in the Sunday editions made the newspaper
more readable for the consumers. The Sunday World cost only 5 cents, and it was
widely available not only by subscription but also via street sales through newsboys
and newsstands, and it was available outside the city borders of New York. The
journalist George French wrote about Pulitzer’s World that his paper “was the only
really popular newspaper in New York. Every other one catered to some special
class or interest, and had so long and so assiduously labored to isolate itself from
the great mass of news-hungering people that it had succeeded in getting itself into
a very narrow niche, and its circulation limited to a select strata of business or
society.” Pulitzer’s World, by contrast, achieved to appeal “to all people” (French
1897, 52; emphasis added). Much of the paper’s success had to do with the Comic
Weekly and with the comics series established in this extra section; it measured
approximately 18 × 22 inches / 46 × 55 cm, and consisted of four, and later of eight,
pages of a huge variety of comics. One of the first popular series was Hogan’s Alley,
penned by the American cartoonist and illustrator Richard Felton Outcault (1863–
1928), in which the Yellow Kid, one of the first popular comic figures in America,
rose to fame. The Yellow Kid, whose official name was later established as Mickey
Dugan, advanced from an occasional Sunday feature to a regular, weekly feature in
a series titled Hogan’s Alley (see Meyer 2017).
A few months after the first episodes of the Hogan’s Alley series with the recur-
rent Yellow Kid comic figure had been printed in Pulitzer’s comic supplement, the
newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst – who had worked and lived in San
Francisco, and who had moved to New York in 1895 – hired Outcault to draw Yellow
Kid comics for the New York Journal, which he had bought from Pulitzer’s brother
Albert (Outcault continued to contribute comics to Pulitzer’s World but he stopping
working on the Hogan’s Alley series; see Meyer 2019). In the months and years to
come, Hearst lured other staff members of Pulitzer’s newspaper away to work for
his Journal, which initiated a story of serial outbidding between the two newspaper
barons and a serious fight over circulation numbers.
Shortly before Outcault started drawing Yellow Kids for Hearst’s Sunday comic
supplement (titled American Humorist), he had asked for copyright protection for
the “distinctly different […] little character” in a letter he sent to the librarian Ain-
sworth Rand Spofford at the Library of Congress on September 7, 1896 (Outcault
1896b, n.pag.; a copy of this letter is reprinted in Blackbeard 1995, 49). However,
Outcault did not “complete” the copyright of the specific “design” of the Yellow Kid
(see Library of Congress, Office of the Register of Copyrights 1899, 8–9; see also
Howell 1897, 363; on the legal context see Gordon 1998; Meyer 2019; van Gompel
2011; Winchester 1995a). In the end, there were two (at times, three) different Yellow
Kid comics series in two competing newspapers from October 1896 onwards. The
World printed Yellow Kid comics that carried the recurrent caption Hogan’s Alley,
and Hearst’s Journal showed the adventures of the Yellow Kid in a series titled
McFadden’s Row of Flats. This series was produced collaboratively: The author Ed-
ward Waterman Townsend – who was known for the Chimmie Fadden stories –
wrote narrative columns, which accompanied Outcault’s drawings (see Kibler 2008;
Blackbeard 1995, 64–65; 68). In Pulitzer’s paper, the Hogan’s Alley series was taken
over by the artist George Benjamin Luks. Luks had been a staff member of the news-
paper ever since he had left the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in early 1896 (for fur-
ther information on Luks’s employment at The World and his production of the Ho-
gan’s Alley series see Castelli 2010; Gambone 2009; Meyer 2019).
Together with Rudolph Edgar Block, editor of Hearst’s Sunday edition at that
time, Outcault created yet another comics series titled Around the World with the
Yellow Kid. This series shows the Yellow Kid and his entourage in a number of ad-
ventures abroad (see Outcault and Block 1897a, 4) – it ran for half a year from
January to May 1897. In Around the World, the Yellow Kid is not only the visual,
recurring protagonist in the drawings but also the narrating agency in the columns
by Block (see Outcault and Block 1897b, 4). The columns in Around the World con-
vey the Yellow Kid’s view of the days’ events and spectacular occurrences. He is the
364 Christina Meyer
author of his travel-story, who writes down and sends home his impressions of the
journey. The stream-of-consciousness-like mode of speech presentation serves not
only to imitate how the Yellow Kid speaks but also how he hears and understands
the words others speak (see Meyer 2019). While creating Around the World with the
Yellow Kid, Outcault also contributed colored Yellow Kid panel-sequences (usually
made of two tiers) for the Sunday supplement of Hearst’s Journal.
Apart from that, the Yellow Kid appeared weekdays in the editorial page of
Hearst’s newspaper in the form of serialized, illustrated “Leaflets from the Yellow
Kid’s Diary” (see Block and Outcault 1897, 6). The Yellow Kid served as an eye-
catching device on the otherwise text-laden column layout of the pages. A first diary
series began in October 1896 and ran until January 1897. This was produced collabo-
ratively by Outcault and Townsend. Another one was launched shortly afterwards.
The second diary series, drawn and written by Outcault and Block, served to accom-
pany the Around the World serial.
Hearst’s Journal furthermore printed sequential, unpaneled black and white
strips with the Yellow Kid at their center on weekdays or Saturdays, which referred
to scenes presented in past or future Sunday installments. Outcault also penned
half-page comic-tableaux and multi-panel comic strips with the Yellow Kid; these
were simply titled “The Yellow Kid,” followed by something like plays an instru-
ment, takes a golf lesson, goes hunting, inspects the streets of New York, and more.
And he drew a “Ryan’s Alley”/“Ryan’s Arcade” series with the Yellow Kid (the epi-
sodes appeared between September 1897 and January 1898, though not in a regular,
weekly rhythm). A few months later, in April 1898, Outcault worked on another
serialized graphic narrative with the Yellow Kid, which was titled The Huckleberry
Volunteers. This weekday series appeared in the editorial pages in Hearst’s New York
Evening Journal. Outcault’s illustrations in the respective episodes are accompanied
by text passages written by Paul West (see Outcault and West 1898, 12). For a short
time in 1898 Outcault worked for both Hearst and Pulitzer again; on May 1, 1898,
he finally stopped producing Yellow Kid comics and started working on new comics
series. Luks continued to draw Hogan’s Alley episodes regularly until September
1897; afterwards, Yellow Kid episodes appeared irregularly until the end of the year
(see Gambone 2009) – after the Yellow Kid comics series disappeared from the Sun-
day supplements the comic figure continued to exist; among other things he had
cameo appearances in a number of comics drawn by other artists (see Meyer 2019).
In brief, the Yellow Kid is a comic figure that originated in the Sunday supple-
ment of Pulitzer’s World, which then existed in two – and at times three – compet-
ing series in rival newspapers. Outcault may have originally penned the Yellow Kid,
but he soon lost control of his creation, which began a life of its own outside the
confines of the newspaper supplements in March 1896 (see Meyer 2019). The comic
figure quickly turned into an advertising tool and was used as promotional device
in smaller and larger advertisements inside as well as outside of the newspapers.
And the Yellow Kid turned into diverse consumer wares, purchasable and collecti-
ble in all kinds of forms (such as Yellow Kid candy, dolls, scrapbooks, souvenir
cards, and more; see Meyer 2019). Moreover, the Yellow Kid was appropriated for a
number of theater adaptations (see Winchester 1995b, 60–115), he adorned music
sheet covers and was celebrated in various songs, and served as a name-giver for
dance choreographies and sporting teams.
Outcault took notice of the many imitations of the Yellow Kid: in May 1898,
when he reflected on the creation of the comic figure and its rise to fame in an essay
titled “How the Yellow Kid Was Born,” he said that the Yellow Kid “loomed up in
spite of me” (Outcault 1898, 7). In other words, the Yellow Kid developed from a
recurrent, readily identifiable comic figure in the Sunday supplements to an uncon-
trollable, uncontainable ‘force’ outside of the newspaper pages. The Yellow Kid had
been invested with all kinds of meanings, and he offered different affordances in –
and across – different medial formats. Moreover, the Yellow Kid permeated through
consumer culture and infiltrated the public (recreational) space. What is important
is that the comic figure remained easily identifiable regardless of the medium he
appeared in. Against this backdrop, the next sections will explicate the iterative
function of the Yellow Kid more thoroughly, and explain the reading options in the
Yellow Kid comic-tableaux – the focus will be on the two competing series set in
New York.
2 Concrete Analysis of Primary Sources

The recurrent, immediately recognizable features of the Yellow Kid are: he has a
bald, round head and protruding ears and teeth; his teeth are visible because he
always smiles at the reader. Moreover, he appears bare foot, and the long yellow
shirt he wears carries words in vernacular language. The Yellow Kid is an orphaned
child, age unknown. Each week, readers would see him in the same – yet varied –
setting, namely, in an imagined tenement-house district in New York called Hogan’s
Alley. The incidents in the weekly installments range from sporting events such as
baseball, or American football, to diverse parades and celebrations, vaudeville acts
and other leisure time activities such as gambling, pool billiard, bowling, or ice
skating; most of the events take place in the city, but occasionally the crowd would
be shown visiting New Jersey or the Coney Island amusement park. The events are
printed in the form of half-page or full-page, colored and unpaneled comic-tableaux
(see Blackbeard 1995, 36). Similar to the living pictures performed on the theater
stage – forms of entertainment that had their heyday in the nineteenth century (see
Lewis 1988; Assael 2006) – the Yellow Kid comics in the newspaper capture a dy-
namic moment in time (see also Smolderen 2014, 141). They represent occurrences
in the life of the Yellow Kid in the form of what Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein
describe as excess of simultaneous events/action (Kelleter and Stein 2009, 95,
366 Christina Meyer
“überquellende[s] Simultangeschehen”). The only frames or constraints are the ma-

terial borders of the newspaper page.
Jared Gardner has claimed that the comics of the turn-of-the-century are “the
most important of the new vernacular modernisms [because they] diagram the serial
complexities of modern life and fix the fragments of modernity on the page […] [to
be] repeatedly viewed and analyzed” (2012, 7, 19; see also Gordon 1998). Both in the
McFadden’s Row and in the Hogan’s Alley series, the street settings function to nego-
tiate the conditions of urban modern life, in entertaining ways. The comics pages
address the transformations in late nineteenth-century American society, the social
and economic inequities, and the question of who is included in and who is excluded
from the city’s demography, from social practices, from indoor and outdoor events
(such as those taking place at Madison Square Garden), and from leisure activities.
In each episode, both George Luks and Richard Outcault, and the writer Edward
Townsend, inquire into the possibilities of access to, and forms of participation in,
modern urban life. They do this, however, without offering answers to how the ine-
qualities might be eradicated or, at least, reduced (see Meyer 2019).
In order to reach a mass audience, the newspaper comics (the Yellow Kid series
as well as other popular comics series at that time) relied on formulaic elements,
which readers would re-see/read every week, with only slight variations; the seriali-
ty of the comics is obviously also explained by the periodicity of the carrier medi-
um – the newspaper – which appears every week. With reference to Umberto Eco’s
aesthetics of seriality, i. e. the dialectic of scheme and innovation, Jared Gardner
has argued that the newspaper comics show “repeated [interactions] of fixed and
predictable ‘types’ within the new urban environment, bounded by a crowded vi-
sual plane and within a limited narrative time” (2012, 7; see also Eco 1985, 167–168;
Kelleter and Stein 2009, 103–104; Kelleter 2012, 13, see also Meyer 2017; Meyer 2019).
With regard to Hogan’s Alley as well as McFadden’s Row, it is first of all the Yellow
Kid who is, to use the wording of Eco, “continually rediscovered at different mo-
ments” (168). But it is not only the Yellow Kid who is the recurring, recognizable
feature in the comics series, but also his entourage of supporting characters and
animals. Among these regularly appearing characters are, for example, “little Molly
Brogan, whose face always wears an expression of astonishment” (Outcault 1896a,
27), Slippy Dempsey who always falls from a building but who never seems to hurt
himself, Kitty Dugan with her fancy dressing (especially her big hat with the help
of which she communicates with the reader), and Liz “whose beauty has captivated
the Dugan kid” (Outcault 1896a, 27). To make these and other surrounding charac-
ters recognizable for the readers, Outcault gave them specific traits such as recur-
rent facial expressions (as, for instance, Molly’s face), specific clothes (such as Kit-
ty’s big hat), or a particular position in the tableaux. Because of the simple outer
appearances of these “funny little people,” the reader of the Yellow Kid comic-tab-
leaux was able to find each of them in every episode “at a glance” (Outcault 1896a,
27). To refer to Eco again, it is the “pleasurable repetition of an already known
pattern” (161) that best describes the aesthetic serial principle of the Yellow Kid
series.
However, recyclability and simplification of form and content are not the only
structuring patterns of the weekly comic-tableaux. The Yellow Kid pages also oper-
ate with manifold areas of knowledge and interest to fulfill different reader needs
and tastes. These include, among other things, visual-verbal negotiations of current
events (political and social), and implicit/explicit references to popular entertain-
ment forms of that time, especially to vaudeville (the pages are filled with citations
from or allusions to popular songs, plays, or nursery rhymes, and references to
theater actors and actresses). Furthermore, visual and verbal humor in both Luks’s
and Outcault’s Yellow Kid series branches into different directions in order to serve
different ‘tastes.’ While the upper class is the predominant target for satire in both
Hogan’s Alley and the McFadden’s Row (so that lower classes may laugh at them),
there are other implied addressees (see Meyer 2019).
The Yellow Kid episodes are informed with class-inflected parodies, and mock-
ery points into different directions; however, while the Yellow Kid comic-tableaux
destabilize hierarchies they also work with categories of distinction, and they rein-
force hierarchies along the lines of class, gender, race, and ethnicity (see Wood
2004; Yaszek 1994; Meyer 2019). In the Yellow Kid comic-tableaux, humor is very
often formulaic, easily accessible, and understandable – very much in line with the
formulaic humor of vaudeville (see Kersten 1996, 10). In many, if not all, Yellow Kid
comics episodes, humor is based also on ethnic stereotyping, which resonates with
popular ethnic humor in that period. In addition to this, humor is also very often
evoked through parody of real-life people and also of fictional personas from theater
plays such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
In the final episode of McFadden’s Row, for example, in the top left corner, there
is a ‘second’ Yellow Kid placed next to the text columns, as a kind of visual-verbal
prologue to the narrative; this Yellow Kid imitates the famous ‘Yorick monologue’
in Act 5, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet instead of a skull he has a pumpkin in
his hands (with a face cut-out), and the words on his shirt read: “ALAS! POOR YORIK!
HE DIED OF DRINK” (Outcault and Townsend 1897b, 4; a digital copy of the page
is available at: https://cartoons.osu.edu/digital_albums/yellowkid/1897/1897.htm).
Obviously, parodies always imply some sort of familiarity with the ‘original’ that is
being parodied. However, for those not familiar with the specific monologue from
the Shakespeare play evoked in the visual-verbal representation, the drawing in the
top-left corner of the page still proves visually joyful because of the gesture of the
Yellow Kid, and because of the fact that a bald-headed, barefoot child in a long shirt
is conversing with a pumpkin. The visual modes (that is, a Yellow Kid, a pumpkin,
a specific gesture of the comic figure, and background props) and the verbal modes
(that is, the words printed on the yellow shirt, alluding to, while simultaneously
mutilating, a quotation from the Shakespeare play) cater to the demands of both
those familiar and unfamiliar with the evoked references.
368 Christina Meyer
It is not just the ambivalent humor in the comics but also the different narrative
techniques and the ways in which the contents of the columns by Edward Towns-
end complement and/or contradict Outcault’s drawings which awaken reader en-
gagement, as the episode titled “The Studio Party in McFadden’s Flats” shows
(a digital copy is available at: http://cartoons.osu.edu/digital_albums/yellowkid/
1897/1897.htm). Some paragraphs in the narration serve to complement, others
serve to supplement what is represented in Outcault’s drawing – the words thus
repeat what the images shows, e. g. when we read about what a character named
Tim McFadden sees: “He saw uncouth wooden figures with legs and arms in wild
disorder, […] old frames, rugs, outlandish tables and what not”; or, when the text
says that “the cat knocked a plaster figure over” (Outcault and Townsend 1897a,
4). These are details the readers can find in the illustration, too.
Other parts of Townsend’s story, however, do not resonate at all with what is
depicted, or ‘go beyond’ and add details that are not represented in Outcault’s draw-
ing. For those readers who invest in reading and viewing the episode, Townsend’s
verbal account of the “Studio Party” offers a bit of historical background, as well as
some embellishing details to give more depth and liveliness to the otherwise static
people in the picture. For readers who skip Townsend’s narrative and instead con-
centrate on Outcault’s illustration, the details in the tableau offer a number of inter-
esting visual choices: the “Studio Party” episode alludes to trompe-l’oeil artwork in
the words printed in boxes, banners, speech balloons, and in the pictorial parts of
the page, to watercolor and landscape paintings of the nineteenth century, and
makes explicit references to the Venus of Milo and Raphael’s cherubs; the comic-
tableau moreover includes representations of bust artworks (including a copy of the
Yellow Kid’s face in the form of a bust), alludes to the genres of self-portraits, por-
traits of an artist at work, and to child portraiture oil paintings. Meaning-making
in/of the “Studio Party” episode, then, is based on knowledge about art and litera-
ture (for further information on the knowledge hierarchies inscribed in the comics
series see Meyer 2019).
It is important to note at this point that readers of the Yellow Kid comics series
who did not follow the narrative columns were still able to get pleasure from the
respective episodes even without knowledge of previous installments. Each new
episode functioned, or made sense, independently from previous or future episodes.
Moreover, being unable to read was no impediment to enjoying newspaper comics.
The pages invite visual scanning without forcing consumers to reading the words.
Consumers with both visual and textual literacy could use the pages according to
their preferences and needs (see Yaszek 1994, 30; Blackbeard 1995, 72; see also Mey-
er 2017). Regular readers who followed both the visual parts and the columns,
would recognize that the artists strategically inserted cues that serve to refer back
to past episodes or to foreshadow an event in the next episode, which can be seen
in the final episode in the McFadden’s Row series (a digital copy is available at:
http://cartoons.osu.edu/digital_albums/yellowkid/1897/1897.htm).
The events take place inside a theater, and all Flatters perform a series of ac-
tions – dancing, singing and doing acrobatics, and more. While in the illustration
the various skits all take place simultaneously for the reader to peruse, the text
columns narrate the chronological order of the show. At one point in the narrative
the Yellow Kid remembers: “Liz sed she wuz gaw’n t’ sing Looziana Loo an’ Maggy
sed dat wuz jest wot she wuz gaw’n t’ sing. I sed it foist sed Liz but I wuz t’inkin’
uv it foist sed Maggy. […] Liz ye t’ink ye’re a Melba o I dunno sed Maggy you aint
no Kalvay” (Outcault and Townsend 1897b, 4; for a detailed discussion of this page
see Meyer 2019). First of all, in this passage laughter is aroused through the meto-
nymic references: “Kalvay” is a reference to Emma Calvé, a well-known French op-
era singer, who also performed in vaudeville shows, and “Melba” is a reference to
Dame Nellie Melba, an Australian born opera singer who performed in New York
during the mid-1890s. The young girls obviously attempt to imitate specific opera
singers without having the vocal skills as soloists to actually do so. Readers who do
not know the song or are not familiar with the opera stars can still find delight in
the way the fighting for attention is narrated, which is reminiscent of a slapstick
dialogue skit.
This narrative passage also refers back to previous McFadden’s Row install-
ments; there are cues that invite regular readers of the comics series to actualize
their knowledge. The name “Looziana Loo” mentioned in the text is a reference to
the musical song “Louisiana Lou,” which is a love song sung by a man to his belov-
ed in a dialect as strong as the comics. Here, it is the two girls Delia Dunnigan
(named Liz by the Yellow Kid) and Mary Ellen (abbreviated Maggy), both in love
with the Yellow Kid (as the regular and attentive readers of Townsend’s columns
would know), who argue about who is going to perform the song. Those who read
the columns in the McFadden’s Row installments regularly would remember the
recurrent fights between these two girls: In the episode titled “Receiving the Re-
turns” (Nov. 1, 1896), for example, Delia and Maggy are represented as jealous of
each other, and arguing about who really belongs to the Yellow Kid. (see Outcault
and Townsend 1896a, 4; Outcault and Townsend 1896c, 5). To recognize the multi-
layered irony in this passage one has to know the content of the song and the con-
tents of the narrative columns in the previous installments in the McFadden’s Row
series. For those readers not interested in the narrative columns or unable to read
them, the two young female characters in the illustration still evoke enjoyment
through the ways in which their individual postures, and especially the hands and
arms are depicted: Mary Ellen is performing as “ROSEMARY” stretching out her
arms and empty hands, a gesture conjuring up the image of someone begging for
money; and Liz is impersonating “YVETTE” (Gilbert), or rather imitating a posture
of the real-life performer.
One thing should be clear: The Yellow Kid comic-tableaux do not simply appeal
to a heterogeneous audience because of the series’ central and recurrent comic fig-
ure, the Yellow Kid; multiple readings and delight are also generated by means of
370 Christina Meyer
the serial stock characters, both in their visual and verbal modes of representation.
Each of the Flatters is endowed with a specific repertoire of traits in Townsend’s
narrative (that is, behaviors, habits, recurring idiomatic expressions), which is re-
peated each week. On the one hand, the formulaic repetitions in Townsend’s narra-
tive serve as memory cues for (literate) readers to actualize their knowledge about
the characters. On the other hand, or rather in addition to this, such formulaic el-
ements function as aids for those readers who were not yet familiar with the cast of
surrounding characters in the series – in other words, they help to acquaint them
with their typical behavior, their motives, states of mind, and looks (see Meyer
2019). The landlord Tim McFadden, for example, is drawn as a gray-haired, pipe-
smoking man and introduced to the readers as the “most excellent landlord” there
is, and “a man of means and substance” (Outcault and Townsend 1896g, 4; see also
Outcault and Townsend 1896f, 4); he does everything “for the benefit of the McFad-
den Flatters,” including the organization of leisure activities, Christmas celebra-
tions, and he is very generous when the tenants fail to pay their rent in time (Out-
cault and Townsend 1896f, 4). Moreover, he is the only one among the Flatters who
is able to converse in standard English.
Each new episode in the McFadden’s Row series gives, one might say, more
depth to the proprietor of the houses. However, the character development is avail-
able only to those readers of the comic-tableaux who follow the columns continu-
ously and pay close attention to the contents of the individual narratives. That both
Tim McFadden and the character of Mrs. Murphy are long-time New York residents
is an aspect that, again, becomes evident only to those readers of the series who
follow Townsend’s columns regularly. Mrs. Murphy is an elderly woman; she is a
widow, and the mother of one daughter, Mary Ellen. She is a running gag in Towns-
end’s text columns. In each of the chapters she is introduced with the same idiomat-
ic expressions that tell how thirsty she is (longing for beer), and she elicits humor
also because in each new episode she assures the reader that she is not interested
in alcoholic beverages but rather “likes teach much more betterer” (Outcault and
Townsend 1896e, 4; see also Meyer 2019).
The traits and specific habits of the surrounding characters, and the laughter
they may generate, do not become apparent immediately to those readers focusing
exclusively on Outcault’s drawings because in Outcault’s weekly illustrations the
only thing that one sees is an image of an elderly, grey-haired woman who drinks
something from a can (see Outcault and Townsend 1896a, 4; Outcault and Towns-
end 1896b, n.pag.). In one of Outcault’s drawings her drinking habit is made explicit
via a banner titled the “LIST OF RESOLUTIONS” for the upcoming year 1897, on
which each of the Flatters notes his or her promise for the next year, it is mentioned
that, “MRS MURPHY HAS SWORE OFF GOING THIRSTY WHEN BEER IS SO PLENTY
AN CREDIT IS GOOD” (Outcault and Townsend 1896g, 4). These elements appear in
writing and are thus not understandable to the illiterate reader (for further informa-
tion on the Flatters see Meyer 2019).
What these examples show is that the Yellow Kid comic-tableaux invite differ-
ent reader engagements and offer various forms of gratification. The Yellow Kid
comics could (and still can) be enjoyed as one-time installments and/or as weekly
episodes in a series. Pleasure can emerge through the reading options within and/
or between an episode in one series, and between the episodes of the competing
comics series. Steady readers of both series would have noticed that there is actually
a dialogue that takes place between Luks’s Hogan’s Alley and Outcault’s/Towns-
end’s McFadden’s Row series. Outcault and Luks regularly poked fun at each other
via the shirt of the Yellow Kid and by means of the supporting characters and ani-
mals and background elements (see Meyer 2019). For example, Luks inserted visual
parodies of Outcault in his comic-tableaux – some of them loom large in the pictures
(as for instance in the “Bargain Day in Hogan’s Alley” episode), some smaller (in
“The Great Prize Fight in Hogan’s Alley”), and some are so small that only a magni-
fying glass helps finding them (in “The Great Baby Show in Hogan’s Alley,”
“Thanksgiving in Hogan’s Alley,” or “President-Elect M’Kinley Visits Hogan’s Al-
ley,”). In one episode, the recurrent green parrot is shown with a mask; this mask
is a human-looking face, which upon closer inspection is a caricature of Outcault.
These visual elements were, however, only readable for and made sense to those
who knew how Outcault looked and who knew about the competitions.
3 Central Topics and Concerns

The Yellow Kid comics were not only consumed by New York residents but also by
readers living in other cities as diaries, biographies and letters of that time indicate
(see Meyer 2019). It did not take long until the cultural arbiters of taste reacted
to the omnipresence of the Yellow Kid. In the debates, which were printed in the
newspapers and magazines around the turn of the century, the Yellow Kid comic
figure and the mass appeal of the comics in the Sunday supplements were looked
at predominantly with contempt. In the 1906 essay for The Printing Art, Harvard
graduate, literary critic, and editor of the Boston Public Library, Lindsay Swift, con-
demned the “responsible corruptionists” for bringing to the market the supple-
ments. Swift despised “the artistic abominations which the Sunday artists pour
forth” on the mass audiences each week, and considered this an “anomaly” of mod-
ern newspaper craftsmanship (Swift 343–45).
According to Swift, the Sunday sheets are not only vulgar on the representation-
al level; they are furthermore absolutely “valueless” and “worthless” in terms of
artistry, and as such a “waste” of time, and thus objectionable. All the efforts, Swift
concluded, “to implant a knowledge of and stimulate a taste for better things [… get]
a weekly setback through these colored atrocities” (345). The Yellow Kid was consid-
ered one of the first “fatal” examples of “vulgarity” brought to the American reading
public (McDonnell 1907, 289). The comic figure was perceived with a critical eye
372 Christina Meyer
because of his quick and extensive dissemination outside of the original carrier me-
dium, his presence in all kinds of areas of public and private life, and because of
the infiltration of the Yellow Kid’s lowbrow voice into everyday life – people started
imitating the idiomatic expressions printed on the Yellow Kid’s long yellow dress in
the comic-tableaux, as editorial comments in the newspapers and magazines of that
time indicate (see Meyer 2019).
In regard to the question about the value and cultural significance of the Yellow
Kid and the newspaper comics series the figure appeared in for today’s readers of
comics – fans, critics and scholars alike – the answer may differ depending on who
is asked: Time and again, Art Spiegelman has reflected on the influence of the early
newspaper comics on his life as a comics artist and their continued relevance for
himself. For example, in the Comic Supplement, which he added to the graphic
narrative about the terrorist attacks in September 2001, In the Shadow of No Towers
(2004), he put together a collection of reprints of the early newspaper comics and
explains how those “cultural artifacts” helped him work through the trauma of
9/11: “[M]y mind kept wandering. I found no solace in music of any kind […] – it
seemed too obscenely exquisite. The only cultural artifacts that could get past my
eyes and brain with something other than images of burning towers were old comic
strips,” adding that these were, “vital, unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic
dawn of the 20th century,” and concluding that their instantaneousness, their mo-
ment of instant affect “gave them poignancy; they were just right for an end-of-the-
world-moment” (Spiegelman 2004, n.pag.).
In the concluding paragraphs of the supplement, Spiegelman ponders the “dai-
ly variations” of the comics artists George Herriman and his unparalleled ‘Krazy
Kat’ strips, claiming that “the ineffable beauty of Krazy Kat was that it was simply
about a Kat getting konked with a brick. It presented an open-ended metaphor that
could contain all stories simultaneously” (Spiegelman 2004, n.pag.). While Spiegel-
man values the solace old newspaper comics are able to offer in times of crisis,
others stress the lasting iconicity of some comic figures of the past. Just a few years
ago, in 2015, the international ComiCon in Naples, Italy, promoted the event through
posters that invoke the history of the Yellow Kid and the comic figure’s role and
significance for the evolution of the medium of comics. In the online description of
this poster, it is mentioned that the Italian artist Milo Manara had wanted to use
“un personaggio che gli appassionati di fumetto non possono non riconoscere,” and
Manara intended to use the space of the famous yellow dress to convey the over-
arching theme of the 2015 comic convention (Napoli ComiCon “Il Manifesto” 2015,
n.pag.).
In the scholarship on the history of comics, one expressive mode that is often
attributed to the Yellow Kid is the speech balloon (see Balzer and Wiesing 2010). To
say that Outcault invented this device is false, because word balloons and their tails
indicating the originator of a specific speech act had been in use before the Yellow
Kid took center stage in the 1890s (see Smolderen 137). But Outcault was one of the
newspaper cartoonists who began to regularize this form of speech presentation in

comics series such as Hogan’s Alley, and by so doing helped familiarize readers with
the particular mode of communication drawn on paper and its function to convey
a speech act by a character, an animal or an inanimate object. By the time Out-
cault’s even more popular comics series with the recurrent Buster Brown character
appeared in the newspapers in the early decades of the twentieth century, the
speech balloon had become a standardized device in the medium of comics. By
looking back at such comics series as Hogan’s Alley and McFadden’s Row we can
get a better understanding of a time period in which certain aesthetic devices we
now take for given began to form as “constants of the comics aesthetics” (Smolder-
en 2014, 5).
The Yellow Kid is certainly not the first comic figure in the history of the medi-
um of comics, even though many scholars still like to claim this. And, Outcault’s
Hogan’s Alley is not the first American comics series that is based on recurrent,
immediately recognizable, elements. For instance, the artist Charles Saalburg, be-
fore he moved to New York to work as head of the art department of Pulitzer’s The
World in 1895, had created a comics series in 1894 with recurring characters called
the Ting-Lings (a crowd of Asian stereotypes) for the Chicago based newspaper Inter
Ocean – the Ting-Lings had, however, never gained the popularity and had never
been as successful as the Yellow Kid in New York’s alleys and rows and the comic
figure’s serialized entourage of other characters and animals. Moreover, the Yellow
Kid’s life in the Sunday supplements of two competing newspapers was fairly short
in comparison with other popular comic figures that originated in the late 1890s,
as, for instance, Hans and Fritz, the protagonists in Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer
Kids series, which began in December 1897. But, the aesthetic mechanisms that are
operative in the Yellow Kid comics series (repetition, variation, and branching out),
and the comic figure’s many transmedial proliferations just briefly mentioned here,
prefigure some of the developments of comics and other forms of graphic narrative
as well as popular comic figures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (see also
Meyer 2016).
The emergence and development of the Yellow Kid comic figure in the supple-
ments of the press gives insight into the competitive media environment of capitalist
consumer culture, and allow for enhanced understanding of consumption practices
at a specific historical moment. In addition to that, comics series such as those
penned by Richard Outcault and George Luks help us understand the aesthetic prin-
ciples and structuring patterns of one among many media options at the turn of the
century. The Yellow Kid comic-tableaux were mass-produced, mass-distributed, and
mass-consumed expressive forms of late-nineteenth-century capitalist consumer
culture that offered to their heterogeneous and demographically diverse readerships
serial texts of fast, visual-verbal entertainment, mixed with satiric discussions of
serious social issues, politics and historical events. The Yellow Kid comics provided
a mixture of formulaic, iterative redundancy and innovative strategies. This aesthet-
374 Christina Meyer
ic principle of repetition and variation is what made the late-nineteenth-century

Yellow Kid comics so successful and enjoyable – another interesting strategy, not
covered in this chapter, is the comics’ marking of their own aesthetic operations,
both in words and by means of visual modes of representation, which serve as a
means of medial self-observation (see Kelleter and Stein 2009; Kelleter 2012; on the
implications see Meyer 2017). Besides the historic importance of the cultural work
they performed for the audiences of the 1890s, the ‘old’ newspaper comics can still
offer tremendous delight, if only because of their colorful spectacles and their hid-
den-object-like layout compositions; pleasure may also elicit from deciphering the
numerous references and word-text relations in the episodes and between the epi-
sodes of the competing Yellow Kid series. For literary and cultural studies students
and teachers alike the comics, to read and teach American culture with the help of
these – and other – newspaper comics of the turn of the century is an exciting,
stimulating, and thought-provoking process, and a process that is, as this conclu-
sion was meant to indicate, hopefully to be continued.
4 Bibliography
4.1 Works Cited

Assael, Brenda. “Art or Indecency? Tableaux Vivants on the London Stage and the Failure of Late
Victorian Moral Reform.” Journal of British Studies 45.4 (2006): 744–758.
Balzer, Jens, and Lambert Wiesing. Die Erfindung des Comic. Bochum: Ch. Bachmann, 2010.
Blackbeard, Bill. R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started
the Comics. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995.
Block, Rudolph Edgar, and Richard Felton Outcault. “A Leaflet from the Yellow Kid’s Diary.”
New York Journal, 23 Jan. 1897: 6.
Campbell, Joseph W. Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies. Westport:
Praeger, 2001.
Castelli, Alfredo, ed. L’Altro Yellow Kid, 1896–1898: La Produzione dimenticata di George B. Luks.
Naples: Comicon, 2010.
Eco, Umberto. “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics.”
Daedalus 134.4 (2005): 191–207.
Frahm, Ole. “Every Window Tells a Story: Remarks on the Urbanity of Early Comic Strips.” Comics
and the City. Ed. Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling. New York: Continuum, 2010. 31–44.
French, George. “Along Newspaper Row.” The Printer and Bookmaker 24.2 (1897): 50–53.
Gambone, Robert L. Life on the Press: The Popular Art and Illustrations of George Benjamin Luks.
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of 21st-Century Storytelling. Palo Alto:
Gompel, Van Stef. Formalities in Copyright Law. An Analysis of their History, Rationales and
Possible Future. Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer Law International, 2011.
Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945. Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1998.
Hadju, David. The Ten-Cent Plague – The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.
New York: Picador, 2008.
Howell, William B. “‘Yellow Kid’ Copyright.” Synopsis of Decisions of the Treasury Department and
Board of US General Appraisers on the Construction of Tariff, Immigration, and Other Laws,
for the Year Ending December 31, 1897. Ed. Lyman J. Gage, Secretary of the Treasury.
Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1898. 363.
Howells, William Dean. “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business.” Scribner’s Magazine 14.4
(October 1893): 429–445.
Juergens, George. Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1966.
Kelleter, Frank. “Populäre Serialität. Eine Einführung.” Populäre Serialität: Narration—Evolution—
Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2012. 11–46.
Kelleter, Frank and Daniel Stein. “Great, Mad, New. Populärkultur, serielle Ästhetik und der frühe
amerikanische Zeitungscomic.” Comics. Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen
Mediums. Ed. Stephan Ditschke, Katerina Kroucheva, and Daniel Stein. Bielefeld: Transcript,
2009. 81–117.
Kersten, Holger. “Using the Immigrant’s Voice: Humor and Pathos in Nineteenth Century ‘Dutch’
Dialect Texts.” MELUS 21.4 (1996): 3–17.
Kibler, M. Alison. “Pigs, Green Whiskers, and Drunken Widows: Irish Nationalists and the
‘Practical Censorship’ of McFadden’s Row of Flats in 1902 and 1903.” Journal of American
Studies 42.3 (2008): 489–514.
Lewis, Robert M. “Tableaux vivants: Parlor Theatricals in Victorian America.” Revue française
d’études américaines 36 (1988): 280–291.
Library of Congress, Office of the Register of Copyrights. Directions for Securing Copyrights,
Bulletin No. 2. Ed. Thorvald Solberg. Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1899.
Library of Congress, Office of the Register of Copyrights. Copyright Enactments. Laws Passed in
the United States Since 1783, Relating to Copyright. Bulletin No. 3. Revised. Washington,
D. C.: no pub, 1963.
McDonnell, Pearl. “Library Meetings – Washington.” Public Libraries. A Monthly Review of Library
Matters and Methods 12 (1907): 288–289.
Meyer, Christina. Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2019.
Meyer, Christina. “Serial Entertainment / Serial Pleasure.” Media of Serial Narratives. Ed. Frank
Kelleter. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 74–89.
Meyer, Christina. “Medial Transgressions: Sheet Music – Theater – Advertising.” Journal of
Graphic Novels and Comics 7.3 (2016): 293–305.
Napoli Comicon. “Il Manifesto 2015 di Milo Manara.” Comicon.it. 2 April 2015
http://www.comicon.it/il-manifesto-2015-di-milo-manara.
Outcault, Richard Felton. “The Sunday World’s Hogan’s Alley Folk on the Stage at Weber &
Fields’s Broadway Music Hall.” The World, 6 Sept. 1896a. Sunday Magazine: 27.
Outcault, Richard Felton. “The Yellow Dugan Kid.” Letter sent to Ainsworth Rand Spofford,
Copyright Office, Library of Congress. Washington, D. C., 7 Sep. 1896b.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/acd1996005 836/PP.
Outcault, Richard Felton. “A Christmas Festival in Ryan’s Arcade.” New York Journal and
Advertiser, 5 Dec. 1897. American Humorist: 7.
Outcault, Richard Felton. “How the Yellow Kid Was Born. The Man Who Created It Tells for the
First Time.” The World, 1 May 1898. Comic Weekly: 7.
Outcault, Richard Felton, and Edward Waterman Townsend. “McFadden’s Row of Flats—Receiving
the Returns in McFadden’s Row on Election Night.” New York Journal, 1 Nov. 1896a. American
Humorist: 4.
376 Christina Meyer
Outcault, Richard Felton and Edward Waterman Townsend (1896b): “McFadden’s Row of Flats–The
Season Opens with the Horse Show in McFadden’s Row of Flats.” New York Journal, 8 Nov.
1896b. American Humorist: n. pag.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Edward Waterman Townsend. “McFadden’s Row of Flats—
Inauguration of the Football Season in McFadden’s Row.” New York Journal, 15 Nov. 1896c.
American Humorist: 5.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Edward Waterman Townsend. “McFadden’s Row of Flats—A Turkey
Raffle in Which the Yellow Kid Exhibits Skills with the Dice.” New York Journal, 22 Nov.
1896d. American Humorist: 4.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Edward Waterman Townsend. “McFadden’s Row of Flats—McFadden’s
Flatters’ Skating and Tobogganing Expedition.” New York Journal, 6 Dec. 1896e. American
Humorist: 4.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Edward Waterman Townsend. “McFadden’s Row of Flats—A Merry
Christmas in McFadden’s Flats.” New York Journal, 13 Dec. 1896 f. American Humorist: 4.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Edward Waterman Townsend. “McFadden’s Row of Flats—The New
Year’s Fancy Dress Ball in McFadden’s Flats.” New York Journal, 27 Dec. 1896g. American
Humorist: 4.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Edward Waterman Townsend. “McFadden’s Row of Flats—The Studio
Party in McFadden’s Flats.” New York Journal, 3 Jan. 1897a. American Humorist: 4.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Edward Waterman Townsend. “McFadden’s Row of Flats.” New York
Journal, 10 Jan. 1897b. American Humorist: 4.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Paul West. “The Huckleberry Volunteers – An Old Acquaintance
meets them in Cuba and Assumes Charge.” New York Evening Journal, 16 April 1898: 12.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Rudolph Edgar Block. “Around the World with the Yellow Kid. Off for
Europe—Where They Won’t Do a Thing to the Effete Monarchies.” New York Journal, 17 Jan.
1897a. American Humorist: 4.
Outcault, Richard Felton and Rudolph Edgar Block. “Around the World with the Yellow Kid. High
Life in Paris—The Yellow Kid (L’enfant Jaune) Takes an Airing.” New York Journal, 21 Feb.
1897b. American Humorist: 4.
Smolderen, Thierry The Origins of Comics. From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. [Naissances de
la bande dessinée, 2000]. Transl. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2004.
Soper, Kerry David. “From Rowdy, Urban Carnival to Middle-Class Pastime: Reading Richard
Outcault’s The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown.” The Columbia Journal of American Studies 4.1
(2000): 143–67.
Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
Swift, Lindsay. “Atrocities of Color Supplements.” The Printing Art 6.6 (1906): 343–345.
West, Richard Samuel. “Secret Origins of the Sunday Funnies. How the Comics Supplement was
Born.” Society is Nix. Gleeful Anarchy of the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, 1895–1915.
Ed. Peter Maresca. Palo Alto: Sunday Press Books, 2012. 11.
Winchester, Mark David. “Litigation and Early Comic Strips: The Lawsuits of Outcault, Dirks and
Fisher.” Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies 2.2 (1995a): 16–25.
Winchester, Mark David. Cartoon Theatricals from 1896 to 1927: Gus Hill’s Cartoon Shows for the
American Road Theatre. Diss. 1995b. Ohio State University.
Wood, Mary. “The Yellow Kid on the Paper Stage.” Xroads.Virginia.edu. 2004.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma04/wood/ykid/yellowkid.htm. (20 Oct. 2011).
Yaszek, Lisa. “‘Them Damn Pictures’: Americanization and the Comic Strip in the Progressive Era.”
Journal of American Studies 28.1 (1994): 23–38.
Young, John Philip. Journalism in California. Pacific Coast and Exposition Biographies.
San Francisco: Chronicle Publishing Company, 1915.
4.2 Further Reading

Allen, Rob, and Thijs van der Berg, eds. Serialization in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge,
2014.
Baker, Nicholson, and Margaret Brentano. The World on Sunday. Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s
Newspaper (1898–1911). New York & Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2005.
Barker, Kenneth. “The Comic Series of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Sunday World.” Inks: Cartoon
and Comic Art Studies 2.1 (1995): 26–32.
De Haven, Tom. Funny Papers. New York: Viking, 1985.
Heer, Jeet, and Kent Worcester, eds. A Comic Studies Reader. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2009.
Maresca, Peter, ed. Society is Nix. Gleeful Anarchy of the Dawn of the American Comic Strip,
1895–1915. Palo Alto: Sunday Press Books, 2012.
Meinrenken, Jens. “Ver-rückte Bilder! Wenn Kunst- und Bildgeschichte sich im Comic begegnen.”
kjl&m 09.3 (2009): 46–52.
Smith, Jeffrey A. “Sunday Newspapers and Lived Religion in Late Nineteenth-Century America.”
Journal of Church and State 48 (2006): 127–152.
Sabin, Roger. “Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?” A Comic Studies Reader. Ed. Jeet Heer,
and Kent Worcester. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 177–189.
Soper, Kerry David. “From Swarthy Ape to Sympathetic Everyman and Subversive Trickster: The
Development of Irish Caricature in American Comic Strips between 1890 and 1920.” Journal
of American Studies 39 (2005): 257–296.
Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the
Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.
Corey Creekmur
17 George Herriman: Krazy Kat
Abstract: George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, drawn between 1913 and 1944, is one of the
most iconic comic strips in the history of the medium. In contrast to other strips
which, over their often long print run, were handed from the original creator to
various successors, Krazy Kat remained with Herriman and ended with his demise.
The strip, hailed as one of the most important contributions to American art, is
marked by a peculiar tension between an almost compulsive repetition in the basic
formula and action and a sophisticated complexity in style and execution. This chap-
ter explores the origins and developments of the strip, the artistic elements, and the
implications of the conflicting love-hate relationships that structure the gag-a-day
narratives. Special attention will be given to indeterminate gender and racial identi-
ties that add to the ambivalences within the comic and turn the seemingly trivial
and monotonous strips into a bold comment on the enforced normativity and uni-
formity of his time.
Key Terms: comic strip, repetition, ambiguity, racial identity, queer reading

George Herriman (1880–1944) wrote and drew Krazy Kat as a daily black and white
newspaper comic strip between October 28, 1913 and June 25, 1944, and beginning
in 1916 as a larger Sunday strip, first printed in color in June 1935. Across this peri-
od, the strip appeared in a variety of sizes and formats, and even in different sec-
tions of the newspapers that carried it. While always fairly popular, generating com-
mercial tie-ins such as toys and animated cartoons as early as 1916, Krazy Kat was
also known to baffle many of its readers. However, the strip was continuously sup-
ported by its original publisher and fan William Randolph Hearst when editors
wished to drop it from their papers. After Herriman’s death, Hearst even refused to
follow the common practice of assigning another artist to continue the strip. Unlike
many other comic strips, which were the products of many hands, Krazy Kat there-
fore always remained entirely Herriman’s creation.
During its run, Krazy Kat also drew the unusual attention of influential intellec-
tuals, including modernist poet e. e. cummings and cultural critics Gilbert Seldes
and Robert Warshow, who all wrote rapturous essays on it: in 1924, Seldes called
Krazy Kat “the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in
America today” (231). By the same token, ‘serious’ artists have also regularly drawn
inspiration from Herriman’s strip: in 1922, John Alden Carpenter’s ballet Krazy Kat:
A Jazz Pantomime premiered, and decades later Ishmael Reed dedicated his experi-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-021
380 Corey Creekmur
mental novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) to Herriman. Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat: A Novel in
Five Panels (1988) continued the affiliation of Herriman’s strip with highbrow liter-
ary production. Among both fans and scholars, Krazy Kat is now widely regarded
as among the greatest works in the history of comics, and, at least in retrospect, the
strip exemplifies 20th-century American vernacular modernism, serving simulta-
neously as a commercial, mainstream cultural artifact and as a work indirectly
aligned with avant-garde artistic movements ranging from surrealism (which
emerged around the same time as Herriman’s strip) to later postmodernism, which
Krazy Kat seems to have anticipated. And as this chapter will develop further, the
strip also appears to have subtly foreshadowed forms of contemporary queer and
African-American cultural production.
Herriman had been drawing newspaper cartoons for over a decade when he
inserted a smaller comic strip of a talking cat and mouse beneath his regular-sized
strip The Dingbat Family (also at times called The Family Upstairs), a fairly conven-
tional treatment of the humorous antics of a wacky family and their unseen neigh-
bors that first appeared on July 20, 1910. A cat (already called Kat) and a mouse
were familiar, conventional antagonists, and by the second week of its run, Herri-
man’s mouse already employed the odd strategy of tossing a brick at the cat. The
strip’s genuine uniqueness emerged quickly, as the initially baffled Kat began to
welcome the mouse’s bricks as tokens of affection, and when Herriman had the cat
regularly kiss the sleeping mouse (who declares “I dreamed an angel kissed me”
upon waking), such curious actions planted the seed of the love-hate relationship
that would animate Krazy Kat for decades to come. But by 1912, the Dingbats were
sent “on vacation,” and the cat and mouse, now identified as Krazy Kat and Ignatz
Mouse, had taken over the strip entirely: as of October 28, 1913, Krazy Kat appeared
as its own comic strip. Most significantly, the evolving strip jettisoned not only the
Dingbat family, but humans altogether (as well as their domestic, interior spaces),
quickly building an all-animal, anthropomorphic cast and relocating their activities
to the sparse but evocative Coconino County, a mythic and mutable version of Herri-
man’s beloved Arizona desert.
One of Krazy Kat’s most distinctive features, maintained across three decades,
is its persistent centering around a triangular tension expanded from the already
contradictory relationship between Herriman’s original cat and mouse team: Krazy
Kat loves Ignatz Mouse, who views Krazy as his irritating foil. The addition of bull-
dog Officer Bull Pupp establishes the triangle’s base: Pupp adores Krazy and dem-
onstrates his affection by attempting to perform his professional duty by thwarting
or jailing Ignatz, whose burning desire, again, is simply to toss bricks at Krazy’s
head, objects Krazy perpetually misreads as love letters: when the bricks hit Krazy’s
head, the sound effect “Pow” is frequently accompanied by a small heart visualizing
the blow as an efficient summary of the strip’s most essential contradiction. This
endless cycle of love, hate, and (love-driven) duty drives a kind of repetition com-
pulsion at the center of the strip that remains irresolvable. While not every Krazy Kat
strip dramatizes this perpetual spiral, a deep structure of constant misrecognition

undergirds it from beginning to end, maintaining an ambiguous, emotional base to
a comic strip often viewed as “intellectual,” despite its frequent indulgence in low-
brow humor. Moreover, as if to make things even more fundamentally ambivalent
while further upending the common notion of dogs and cats — and cats and mice —
as natural enemies, Krazy is identified across the span of the comic strip as both
“he” and “she,” a fluidity encouraging later readers and critics to consider Krazy
Kat a pioneering queer text insofar as this instability regarding the gender of its
main character undermines any tacit understanding of the strip’s central actions as
expressions of heterosexual desire (↗11 Queerness). Is the male Officer Pupp smit-
ten by a male or female cat? Are the male Ignatz’s constant assaults therefore also
sexist, or perhaps homophobic? These basic ambiguities are never resolved, and
have contributed to the strip’s enduring legacy within the comics canon.
Herriman’s bold treatment of gender as an indeterminate facet of his main char-
acter is mirrored by his equally playful treatment of setting: foregoing the most
basic means of establishing spatial continuity through consistent backgrounds, the
starkly beautiful desert landscape of Krazy Kat changes markedly from panel to
panel. In most other comic strips, such abrupt differences would appear to be slop-
py errors, or at least distractions from the narrative’s main events. But within a strip
built upon near-obsessive narrative repetition, the constant mutation of Herriman’s
background images introduces change where we might expect stability. The setting
is curious in other ways as well: cacti often grow out of pots in the desert, and half-
moons can hang in the sky like sliced wedges of cheese. And once color enters the
strip, it can change drastically from panel to panel as well. Fond of popular music
(which is often ‘heard’ in the strip), Herriman might best be appreciated as an artist
who chooses to play endless variations on a theme. Even if his elaboration on his
core narrative seems at times to depart from it altogether, he always stages a return
to the fundamental geometry of comic misunderstanding which he established early
in the life of his strip.

The Krazy Kat dailies, usually consisting of four to six panels of roughly similar
size, were constructed as exceptionally witty but formally familiar examples of the
conventional gag strip: most function as autonomous parts of a series rather than
as a serial. At times, however, Herriman linked his daily installments into loose,
unfolding narratives, as in the famous “Tiger Tea” sequence running from May 1936
to March 1937, which traced the impact of an intoxicating tea (suggesting marijuana,
alcohol, and even catnip) upon Herriman’s cast of characters. Most of the daily
strips work up to a final gag or punchline, often involving outrageous puns or word-
382 Corey Creekmur
play from Krazy, though Herriman provides many of the elements that delighted his
fans in the earlier panels as well.
From very early on in the strip’s history, Krazy’s dialogue is deeply idiosyncrat-
ic, while his/her accent remains stubbornly unlocatable. In order to bring its sound
as fully into the silent strip as possible, Herriman rendered Krazy’s speech phoneti-
cally, with the result that Krazy’s voice is virtually audible to the strip’s readers; it
aids the reader’s comprehension and enjoyment significantly if one reads Krazy Kat
aloud. In Krazy’s voice, his beloved “darling” Ignatz is thus articulated as “dolling”
or “dollink,” while the “Kop” Bull Pupp is an “Offissa.” Despite frequent malaprop-
isms and constant miscommunication, Krazy is nevertheless highly attentive to the
vagaries of “lenguage”: “Whatta woil,” he/she declares, in a typical expression that
clearly demands to be heard as it is read.
While lacking regional specificity, Krazy does have an emphatically American
accent, thoroughly boiled in the nation’s famous melting pot: in any given instance
it might yield echoes of the deep South (including the distinctive sounds of Herri-
man’s childhood Louisiana) alongside the honking sounds of Brooklyn or the
Bronx. For Krazy as well as other characters, Herriman often draws upon the ethnic
“dialects” that were common in popular literature and on the vaudeville stage of its
era, including stereotypical Yiddish and “Negro” variants. Moreover, Krazy Kat is
often multilingual, featuring snatches of French (an echo of Herriman’s New Or-
leans roots), Spanish, Latin, German, and even Navaho among its multicultural vo-
cabulary.
In its use of intertextual references, Krazy Kat is equally allusive, featuring
butchered or creatively recontextualized quotations from popular songs, the Bible,
and literature, among other sources. Herriman, like many of his creative contempo-
raries (including Tin Pan Alley songwriters), was attentive to the pleasures and ab-
surdities of American slang, and his jokes therefore often incorporated topical refer-
ences or current jargon, making many of these references obscure for later readers.
Like many other comic strip authors, and publishing his work in the ephemeral
format of the daily newspaper, Herriman played to his immediate audience and
often drew upon the news of the day for many of his gags. Sonic distortion, like a
comedian’s array of funny voices, provided another layer of humor to his “comic”
strip, despite the form’s basic silence. In this regard, Herriman’s most prominent
heir was Walt Kelly, whose later anthropomorphic strip Pogo famously engaged with
the volatile politics of its era.
Herriman’s skills as a comic writer were matched by his distinctive drawings –
and eventually his use of color. After a decade as a professional cartoonist, Krazy
Kat arrived with its visual style more or less fully formed, though one can spot some
minor adjustments in the strip’s earliest years. The drawings are themselves reliably
‘funny,’ providing characters with exaggerated expressions, boldly physical actions
(evocative of contemporaneous slapstick film comedians), and the anthropomor-
phic details common to the depiction of ‘funny animals’ in comics: in Herriman’s
world, only Ignatz and Krazy appear regularly without human clothing, though the
latter usually wears a bow around his/her neck.
On the whole, Herriman’s animals aren’t designed to realistically resemble their
actual counterparts. While easily differentiated, Krazy, Pupp, and Ignatz share odd-
ly similar, long and hairless noses, undermining their ostensible status as distinct
animal species: Krazy and Pupp also share the same ears, whereas Ignatz has the
large circles Mickey Mouse would later inherit. But at the same time, Herriman’s
characters remain highly distinctive, and quite unlike most cartoon animals before
and after his comic strip: although frequently drawn without visible mouths and
with simple black dots for eyes, they are remarkably expressive, especially through
poses or ‘body language’ that efficiently conveys moods and attitudes even as it
amuses us. For example, when Ignatz tosses bricks (which are almost as large as
he is), his full body is in play, and Krazy receives their blow by becoming a stiff,
leaning rod lifted off of the ground, as a carefully placed shadow confirms. Officer
Pupp often holds his nightstick behind his back, in a pose that perfectly summarizes
his officiousness. Such depictions, repeated over and over again, are the equivalent
of the famous poses or gestures associated with comedic movie icons like Charlie
Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy, and their familiarity allows deviations from them to
be all the more surprising and delightful.
Further enhancing their recognizability, the lines of Herriman’s actual drawing
style are often described as ‘scratchy,’ since he allowed the marks of his pen to
remain visible in such details as the shading of Krazy’s dark fur or Ignatz’s bricks.
Unlike the exquisite, detailed brushwork of later adventure strips like Alex Ray-
mond’s Flash Gordon or Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, Herriman’s lines appear quickly
rendered, the result of a loose rather than steady hand. Compared to many of his
peers like George McManus (the creator of Bringing Up Father), his drawings aren’t
smooth or polished, or defined by solid, bold outlines: they are allowed to retain
rough edges and lines that waver. And unlike Winsor McCay, the creator of the
groundbreaking Little Nemo in Slumberland. (↗18 Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in
Slumberland), Herriman’s drawings approach minimalism in vivid contrast to
McCay’s ornate exercises in trompe l’oeil perspective. This looseness retains the
qualities of the sketch – again, linked to the instabilities of gender and location
already mentioned – and therefore serves Krazy Kat well: it provides its drawings
and pages as a whole with an energy and even fragility that enhances the overall
sense of dynamism characterizing the strip. Even when his drawings are enclosed
in panels (a technique Herriman often abandons), they seem to vibrate insofar as
their final inked and even colored printed versions continue to register the short,
quick actions of the pen and hand that produced them. The visual lightness of Herri-
man’s drawing style is especially evident when one views many of the animated
cartoons derived from his strip, which soon gave his characters the rounded, rub-
bery quality of other early animated cartoons, making them largely unrecognizable
as Herriman’s figures in the process.
384 Corey Creekmur
At another level, Krazy Kat’s black and white Sunday pages immediately reveal
Herriman taking advantage of the larger space at his disposal, especially in the
varied layouts of his panels; eventually, the additional tool of color at his disposal
allowed him to design overall patterns of symmetry and composition that exceeded
the panel-by-panel unfolding of each day’s trajectory towards a final gag. The color
Sunday strips also appeared to encourage Herriman to increase his cast of charac-
ters, although the core trio would remain his central focus. The Sunday strips ex-
periment with a remarkable variety of overall design options, including panels of
thin horizontal or vertical slices, or circles embedded within the standard squares
and rectangles. In some cases, Herriman removes panel divisions altogether, as in
a famous Sunday page from September 3, 1916 that depicts his characters in a large
central panel tossed by waves in a small craft on the ocean, the unbroken whiteness
of the page resembling the vast sea.
Notably, some of the humor of the Sunday strips becomes more formal than
verbal, exploiting the comic potential of the distinctive characteristics of the layout
of comics in addition to the funny drawings and witty dialogue they contain: al-
though the simple organization of a strip into marked panels or even unmarked
sectors seems to establish a temporal, narrative unfolding, the overall spatial design
of a Sunday page can also be taken in with a single glance. Like many of his most
creative colleagues, Herriman often took advantage of such potential for an overall
structure, as in an October 10, 1920 strip sliced into eight thin vertical panels in
order to trace the temporal shifts across what is maintained in all eight panels as a
rigorously stable space: a tall building where Ignatz, on the roof, is pulling a brick
tied with a string upward. As the brick rises vertically within the first five panels, it
follows an incline across them, as time unfolds. Characters also appear in (previous-
ly unseen) windows as the brick rises past them, and beginning in panel four, in
the exact middle of the page, Krazy enters. The last four panels then provide the
gag of Officer Pupp ‘foiling’ Ignatz by cutting the string from a top-floor window,
causing it to land, of course, on Krazy below (Krazy, as usual, is a “heppy, heppy
ket” as a result). Krazy remains in the same space at the bottom of the final five
panels, while each panel moves us forward in time. The repeated, familiar gag in-
volving the three main characters has thus been embedded within a comic strip
page of exquisite rhyme and balance, relying simultaneously upon the static spatial
design of the page and the imaginary temporality (and comic timing) provided by
the sequence of panels.
In other Sunday pages from the same period, Herriman constructs his strips out
of ‘panoramic’ horizontal rather than vertical panels, stacking them like the parts
of a sandwich on top of one another, again with an overall whole designed to inter-
act cleverly with the unfolding of a series of parts. When the Hearst newspapers
added color to their Sunday strips, Herriman clearly saw this as another creative
option, rather than something to simply please the eye of newspaper readers once
a week. Increasingly, shifting color patterns rather than a consistent base shape his
full pages, offering yet another form of the self-conscious inconsistency he set
against the unrelenting repetition driving his storyline page after page, year after
year.
3 Critical Reception and Legacy

Since the 1990s, a good deal of interest in Krazy Kat and George Herriman has cen-
tered around the revelation that its creator was biracial, ‘Creole,’ ‘colored,’ ‘Black,’
or ‘African American’: choosing the appropriate term is itself mired in the inconsist-
ent history of racial and ethnic categories in American history. This aspect of Herri-
man’s personal history and identity seems to have been obscure or unknown to
many of his contemporaries, and in his lifetime, he was apparently assumed to have
a number of different ethnic identities. Following the initial leads of comics scholars
M. Thomas Inge and Jeet Heer, the most detailed examination of Herriman’s family
and the racial designations applied to them can be found in Michael Tisserand’s
magisterial biography of Herriman. Moreover, this insight ‘behind the scenes’ has
led Tisserand and others to speculate persuasively that Herriman’s comics at times
reveal a coded, sometimes wry acknowledgment of racial issues, perhaps including
veiled acknowledgement of their creator’s own identity.
In this regard, Krazy Kat takes up the long tradition of artists using animals to
displace but also comment on human foibles and concerns found in (among others)
African folk traditions, as well as American mass culture. In addition to the possible
queer reading of Krazy due to his/her (we might now say ‘their’) unstable gender
or sexual fluidity, the suggestion that Krazy was also a ‘black’ cat raises additionally
intriguing options for understanding the serious as well as playful implications of
the strip’s inherent cultural functions. Such approaches are not designed to take
the fun out of Krazy Kat, but to encourage a richer understanding of the work of a
creator whose sense of his own racial and ethnic identity was likely subject to the
instability and inconsistency of these categories in American history.
Despite the strip’s high esteem, attempts to reprint Krazy Kat were largely
stalled until Fantagraphics Books completed a series of thirteen volumes collecting
the full run of Sunday strips (1916–1944), with extensive critical commentary. While
a number of other volumes have collected additional Krazy Kat strips (including the
full 1934 daily strips from the Library of American Comics), the vast majority of
Herriman’s daily strips have never been collected or reprinted. Like so many other
popular comic strips of the early twentieth century, Herriman’s work was both mas-
sively influential and frustratingly ephemeral. Publishing his creative efforts over
many years in a mass medium that was profoundly disposable (↗2 History, Formats,
Genres), scholarly efforts to properly preserve, archive, and appreciate these rich
works of comics history are still ongoing. In this sense, Krazy Kat is both exceptional
and typical for the cultural heritage of daily comic strips.
386 Corey Creekmur
4 Bibliography
4.1 Works Cited
Inge, M. Thomas. “Was Krazy Kat Black? The Racial Identity of George Herriman.” Inks: Cartoon
and Comic Art Studies 3.2 (May 1998): 2–9.
McDonnell, Patrick, Karen O’Connell, and Georgia Riley de Havenon. Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of
George Herriman. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986.
Seldes, Gilbert. “The Krazy Kat That Walks By Itself.” The Seven Lively Arts. Mineola: Dover
iPublications, 2001 (1924).
4.2 Further Reading

Tisserand, Michael. Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White. New York: Harper, 2016.
Yoe, Craig, ed. Krazy Kat: The Art of George Herriman: A Celebration. New York: Abrams
ComicArts, 2011.
Sebastian Domsch
18 Winsor McCay: Little Nemo
in Slumberland
Abstract: Winsor McCay was one of the original innovators of comics in their infan-
cy as a mass medium, and at the same time an accomplished master who, in his
several strips, but particularly through his Little Nemo in Slumberland series, created
a lasting milestone within comics history. This article introduces readers to McCay’s
work by situating him within his own historical moment of the media landscape
and popular culture, as well as the urban consumer society of early 20th-century
America. It goes on to sketch some of the central concerns within the strip, such
as the psychology of dreaming or the notion of delayed gratification. Moreover, it
illuminates some of McCay’s formal innovations, while also drawing attention to
some of his shortcomings, as, for example, his problematic use of stereotypes.
Key Terms: Winsor McCay, early comic strips, dreams in comics, consumption and
delayed gratification

Born between 1867 and 1871 (McCay himself was not sure and official records un-
available), Winsor McCay’s drawing skills emerged early, as did his seemingly insa-
tiable desire for drawing. According to anecdotes, he almost compulsively drew on
anything he could find, which, assuming he kept that attitude, would help to ex-
plain his incredible productiveness throughout his working career. McCay’s father,
attempting to steer his son in the direction of a respectable career, enrolled him at
Cleary Business College in Ypsilanti, Michigan. But it seems that young Winsor took
every opportunity to sneak off to Detroit, where he would draw portraits of the
customers of the Wonderland and Eden Musee dime museum for 25¢ apiece. At that
time, he gained the attention of John Goodison, a geography and drawing professor
at Michigan state Normal School, who started to teach him privately. This was the
only formal schooling that McCay was to get in drawing, but it did have a profound
impact, since Goodison focused on geometrical perspective and, being a former
glass stainer, influenced McCay’s use of color. McCay then went on to Chicago and
later Cincinnati and started to do artwork for posters and pamphlets at the National
Printing and Engraving Company, as well as posters and advertisements for the
Kohl & Middleton Dime Museum, and later Heck and Avery’s Family Theater,
Avery’s New Dime Museum, and Will S. Heck’s Wonder World and Theater. In 1898,
he started to work for newspapers, creating illustrations for the Cincinnati Commercial
Tribune and the Cincinnati Enquirer, ultimately becoming head of the art department
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-022
388 Sebastian Domsch
there. It was at the Inquirer that he first moved in the direction of comics, with his
series A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle, published from January until Novem-
ber 1903. These were illustrations to poems by George Randolph Chester featuring
sequential pictorial narratives.
After a move to New York City and to the New York Herald, McCay started his
first attempts at comic strips proper, finding early success with the series Little Sam-
my Sneeze, which debuted in July 1904 and ran until December 1906. Later in 1904,
he started what would turn out to be his longest-running strip, Dream of the Rarebit
Fiend. In a frenzy of productivity, he continued creating daily editorial cartoons and
illustrations while beginning three more regular comic strips. The third of these,
started in October 1905, was Little Nemo in Slumberland, developed as a modifica-
tion of the Dream-formula that was geared towards younger readers. In its original
form, the strip ran until 1911; it was further continued under the name In the Land
of Wonderful Dreams until 1914 and then once more under its original name from
1924 to 1926.
Although this is the work that McCay is best known for today, and the focus for
this chapter, he developed two additional major lines of work in the following years.
At the instigation of impresario F. F. Proctor, he created a vaudeville act, in which
he did drawings on stage with live music in front of an audience. He continued to
tour the eastern United States with this and other performances until 1917. And in
1911, he became a pioneer in animation, with his Winsor McCay: The Famous Car-
toonist of the N. Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, which was shown first in theatres
and then incorporated into the vaudeville act. This was followed later by Gertie the
Dinosaur (1913) and what was arguably the first animated documentary, The Sinking
of the Lusitania (1918) (Domsch 2016).
Looking at Little Nemo in Slumberland in isolation, so many of its features and
aspects seem unique and original. Couperie called McCay “[t]he greatest innovator
of the age” (1973, 27). But without questioning the originality of McCay’s work, a
thorough knowledge of the many contexts that inform it will be helpful for its un-
derstanding and appreciation. Even if many features are indebted to aesthetic, me-
dial, and social developments of McCay’s time, there is still enough innovation in
his specific amalgamation of these influences, and particularly in the masterful exe-
cution of the work.
First of all, Little Nemo has to be contextualized within McCay’s work in general,
both in comics and outside of comics. Nemo wasn’t McCay’s first work in comic
strips, and while it is certainly his crowning achievement, some of his previous
works prefigures aspects that would be further developed in Nemo. One of the lesser-
known amongst these is The Story of Hungry Henrietta, begun in January 1905, “per-
haps the strangest work in the McCay oeuvre and surely the only comic strip I can
think of about an eating disorder” (Bukatman 2012, 40). Obvious similarities to Little
Nemo are its focus on a child, although in this case the child is at first much smaller
and the action revolves around all the adults making a fuss about her. But whatever
happens in each strip, the case is always resolved in the last panel with Henrietta
quietly eating, thus establishing the repetitive formulaic panel sequence that will
also characterize the other strips, the most extreme case being Little Sammy Sneeze.
This strip, which McCay started in 1904, shows the extent to which early comic
strips were willing to be repetitive in a strictly formulaic, even mechanical way.
McCay seems to have tested the limits of repetition, to the point that it has been
called “an extremely insightful parody of the popular comic strip of the time” (Smol-
deren 2014, 150). It invariably consists of six panels arranged in two rows chroni-
cling Little Sammy’s devastating sneezes, with panel one to four being the prepara-
tion, panel five containing the sneeze that wreaks havoc on the scene we have been
introduced to, and panel six ending the strip with Sammy being unceremoniously
kicked out of the room.
While the setup obviously is reminiscent of vaudeville acts and silent movie
pratfalls, the series in its entirety takes on an absurdist, slightly Kafkaesque air,
particularly when one relates the cruel physical punishment that is meted out
against Sammy with the two catchphrases that flanked the title at the top of every
strip: “He just simply couldn’t stop it” and “He never knew when it was coming.”
So what, one wonders, is poor Sammy to do? Being eternally punished for an invol-
untary bodily reaction is surely a cruel fate, or, as Smolderen puts it, “Little Sammy
raises deep issues about the living body in action” (2014, 151). Contemporary readers
will undoubtedly not have perceived it that way, delighting rather in the dramatic
irony (Pfister 1988, 55) of seeing Sammy gear up towards a sneeze with everyone
around him being completely oblivious as well as in the ensuing chaos, but that
does not mean that the more existentialist dimension is inexistent. One glance at
another of McCay’s early strips will show that he was willing and able to mix gro-
tesque comedy with suppressed angst.
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, which first appeared on September 10, 1904, in the
New York Herald, recounts numerous nightmares by different people (there are no
recurring characters in this work), all presumably induced by eating too heavily
before going to bed. The strip shows McCay at his most weirdly inventive, and many
of the scenarios, even though they usually have a comic bent to them, are truly
terrifying, particularly when seen in their totality. Most strips followed a similar
narrative logic, in which the dreamer starts out from a relatively mundane situation
that soon becomes grotesque and continuous to grow in absurdity until the dreamer
awakes in the final panel.
Most of the nightmares have some anxiety of the dreamer at their root, which
makes them individual precursors to psychoanalytic dream interpretations and a
collective exhibition of the anxieties of the bourgeois citizens of the industrial age
(Bukatman 2012: 48). Bukatman, for whom “the rarebit dreamers were haunted, it
seems, by modernity” (51), has connected the collected nightmares to George Miller
Beard’s notorious diagnosis of modern society’s “neurasthenia,” claiming that “one
can find episodes that correspond to each of Beard’s catalog of anxieties:” (51) and
that “I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch, then, to declare the dreamers of Rarebit
Fiend to be, collectively, neurasthenic” (58). In a way, this means that the strip
might share some of the conservative and culture-pessimistic criticism of modernity
that was common at the turn of the century and equated the urban with over-refine-
ment, over-stimulation and nervousness. And indeed, the dreamers are not only
repeatedly exposed and publicly humiliated, but the anxieties are often triggered
by phenomena of modernity, such as urban traffic. But at the same time, in its sheer
inventive exuberance, the comic also shares in the subversive joy of the complete
breakdown of regulatory rules and the movement towards insanity. As in McCay’s
other comic about dreamers, the mundane and the fantastic are always at odds,
and as in every successful artistic investigation into dreaming, the boundaries be-
tween the two become irresolvably ambiguous – do I wake or sleep?
But ultimately, as fascinating and inventive as the panorama of dreamers is in
this strip, they yet lack a few of the ingredients that would make Little Nemo such
a lasting masterpiece, among them the visual lavishness and experimentation that
McCay brought to his representations of Slumberland, as well as a more successful
balance between the repetitive and the additive nature of the comic strip and the
complexity that was possible through its continuing narrative form. This refers to
the fact that strips work through repetition, but can also constantly add something
through each instance, as in the example of Gasoline Alley.

At the outset, Little Nemo in Slumberland is hardly more complex in its narrative
set-up than McCay’s other strips. The original premise has Nemo, a middle-class
boy who falls asleep at the beginning of each strip, being summoned by King Mor-
pheus to his kingdom of Slumberland in order to play with his daughter, the prin-
cess. Various messengers arrive at Nemo’s and try to get him to his destination, but
he usually does something that he should not do, like touch something or stray
from the path or ride too fast, so that the situation reverts to chaos and he is rudely
awakened in the last panel. Soon, another character is introduced: Flip is a green-
faced, cigar-chewing boy whose antics provide further complications to Nemo’s
progress. Later, Nemo and Flip, together with the princess and an African “savage”
called Impy, form the central group that goes on several fantastic adventures to-
gether.
There is a natural development to the strip as McCay continues to work on it
and grows as an artist into its potential. Part of this is related to narrative structure,
and part to using comics as a means for narrative. While McCay never veered away
from the formula of Nemo waking up in the last panel of each individual strip, he
not only developed recurring characters, but soon started out on longer, continuing
storylines. The strip’s basic premise already combines an epic scope with episodic
cyclicality, as Morpheus, the king of dreams, persistently summons Nemo to his

palace so that he can play with the princess, and Nemo invariably attempts but fails
to reach that goal. But what started out as essentially Sisyphean, an endlessly futile
attempt that leaves the attempter constantly where he started out in the beginning,
gradually takes on a more Ulyssean quality, as Nemo not only starts to make signifi-
cant progress towards Slumberland (thereby already breaking out of the Beckettian
cycle of helplessness that characterizes Little Sammy), but actually reaches it (on
March 4, 1906, four and a half months after setting out), finds the princess (July 8,
1906) and goes on from there towards further adventures that are often interrupted
only in form (by the inevitable final panel, but continuing the next day exactly
where the action left off). One might perceive this as an immersive move into the
world of dreams, away from the original notion that dreams interrupt the ordinary
(and ordered) waking life to one in which waking life – represented by nothing
more than the repetitive act of getting in and out of bed – is merely an interruption
of the fascinating events unfolding within dreams (as is illustrated by Nietzsche,
see Medina 2005, 21). Or one might perceive this as the move from the repetitive
nature of the slapstick routine (the eternal kick in the butt) towards the continuous
nature of (graphic) narrative.
Some of the more pronounced storylines include Nemo, Flip and Impy getting
lost in the Wonderland-like mazes of Befuddle Hall, a voyage to Mars and the Mar-
tian civilization which is satirically presented as an ultra-capitalist society in which
everything is commodified, and a trip around the world in an airship with a long
stay in New York City. These extended narrative arcs remain largely episodic, with-
out major complications, reversals, or character development, but they still demand
to be read continuously. The popularity of the strip must have quickly convinced
McCay and his editors that they could always rely on the audience’s knowledge of
the preceding episodes.
Particularly in the early part of the strip’s run, it seems that McCay needed to
gain confidence in the medium’s storytelling capabilities. The first twenty or so
strips are characterized by redundancy, i. e. a doubling of text and image, in the
sense that the (numbered) caption of every panel retells more or less exactly what
can be seen in the respective image. This is abandoned on March 11, 1906, but it is
replaced by a short textual summary of the whole strip in the first panel at the top
of the page that also contains the title. On April 29, these summaries grow more
integrated into the strip’s diegesis, by being presented as reports to King Morpheus
about Nemo’s progress. Beginning May 20, they are increasingly presented in the
form of dialogues, and soon they are indistinguishable from the comic strip proper.
Unquestionably, Little Nemo fell off artistically towards the end of its run, with
some of the inspiration gone (either a reason for or a result of its loss of popularity
at the time). McCay even abandoned the innovative and varied use of panel sizes
as well as narrative continuity. 1908 in many ways marks a high point in the strip’s
development, but in 1911, as Marschall has argued, McCay’s newly developed fasci-
nation for animation diminished his creative enthusiasm for work in comics (Mar-
schall 1989, 89).
While it took a while for McCay to grow into comics as a storytelling medium,
visually speaking the strip was noticeably accomplished from the very start. From
the opening strip, it not only looked compelling, the careful work of an assured
artist and craftsman, but already displayed the specific style that would characterize
the whole series throughout its run. This highlights that Little Nemo is at the same
time artistically outstanding and clearly a product of its time. As the short biograph-
ical sketch has shown, McCay had a very active and diverse career as an artist, one
that started long before he created his first comics. He absorbed all of the manifold
artistic influences of his day and combined them into his own peculiar style, partic-
ularly in his work on Little Nemo. Virtually all of the characteristic individual as-
pects of the visual level can be traced back to a variety of influences and inspira-
tions, from the color schemes and the ornamental lines to the intricate construction
of space and the perspectives in which it is presented. The attention to architectural
detail in the background is particularly striking to every observer of the strip – al-
though the term background does not do justice to the importance that is given to
the lavish vistas of majestic palaces, gardens and cities. But fantastic as these build-
ings are, contemporary readers would have no trouble associating them with the
architecture of their time, if somewhat dreamily enhanced. The palace of the king
of Slumberland for example was modelled strongly on the Chicago World’s Fair
Columbian Exhibition of 1883, whose architectural style would resurface constantly
throughout the series.
Also, in Little Nemo, we can see the synthesis of a number of artistic styles from
McCay’s time, for example “his graceful line work and use of flat areas of color are
reminiscent of the art nouveau poster art of Alphonse Mucha and Eugene Grasset”
(Roeder 2014, 7). Marschall, who makes the same observation, goes on to speculate
that “[t]his style may also have been influenced by McCay’s childhood art instructor,
who worked in stained glass” (Marschall 1989, 82). Other artists assumed to have
influenced McCay are the illustrator John Tenniel, whose work on Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland (1865) is an obvious inspiration for the rule- and gravity-defying
episodes in Befuddle Hall, as well as picture stories published by the Maison Quan-
tin in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s (Smolderen 2014, 157), and the depictions of
dreaming children by popular illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith. On the other hand,
McCay’s work clearly anticipates the surrealists of the 1920s.
The peculiar nature of McCay’s art was the combination of such influences with
styles that were more directly geared towards popular entertainment, such as
Vaudeville and early cinema. The strip from December 3, 1905, for example, is a
clear visual allusion to film pioneer George Méliès’ seminal A Trip to the Moon from
1902. And he incorporated the visual language of modern urban experience, such
as department store windows and particularly advertisement posters for circuses,
meaning that “[h]is fantastic imagery is very much rooted in the spectacular world
of commerce and popular entertainment that ushered in the twentieth century”

(Roeder 2014, 7). Roeder has shown in detail how close the connections are between
many of McCay’s design features and the celebrated circus posters of his day, many
of which were created by the Strobridge Lithographing Company:
McCay looked to these theatrical posters as a source for his unusual page designs and variably
sized panels […]. Strobridge lithography built its reputation on the high quality of its vivid
color printing and the strength of its clean design work. McCay similarly favoured a vibrant
color palette, with an emphasis on solid forms and broad areas of color, outlined in black. The
proportions of the Little Nemo strips also lend itself to comparison with circus posters – it was
printed on a broadsheet measuring approximately 16 inches wide and 21 inches in length, a
little more than half the size of a single poster sheet. Little Nemo recalls the iconography of
circus posters through its extensive use of exotic animals, from lions and zebras to the most
archetypal of circus animals, the elephant […]. McCay’s magnificently embellished title panels
were modeled after circus poster typography, in terms of their use of bold, eye-catching lettering
and decorative flourishes. (Roeder 2014, 82, 84, 98)
The emphasis that Roeder puts on the technological refinement of Strobridge’s work
is a reminder that Nemo is heavily indebted to its media context – the kind of publi-
cation it appeared in, but also the technology used to print it. Today, publishers
have recognized that one cannot divest the Nemo strips from their original form
without losing much of its uniqueness. There are now editions that attempt to faith-
fully recreate the appearance of the strips in their original form (see Maresca 2005
and Braun 2014), even though that makes for some extremely unwieldy volumes,
not to mention the prohibitively high price.
Historians of early comics have put a lot of emphasis on the importance of color
and printing quality for the fierce competition of American newspapers at the end
of the nineteenth century and on comics’ role within that competition (after all, it
was allegedly the Yellow Kid that gave the Yellow Press its name; ↗16 Richard F.
Outcault, The Yellow Kid). Newspapers attempted to capture readers’ attention by
all means available, and color was a convincing argument to potential buyers before
they even read a single word. The New York Herald had the most sophisticated print-
ing technology of its time, using the technique of the so-called Ben Day dots (as
opposed to the more commonly known halftone dots) which allowed for a wide
variety of colors as well as gradings of color. As Marschall explains, “[t]he newspa-
per comic was born of color, but Little Nemo was the first strip to fully utilize the
enormous potential of the surprisingly sophisticated technology of color presswork
in those days” (1989, 93). McCay indicated very precisely the colors he wanted to
use in the pages he sent to the printer.
In terms of publication context, the strip migrated from one newspaper to anoth-
er, being published first at the New York Herald, until McCay was lured away in 1911
by an offer from William Randolph Hearst to the New York American. There, McCay
secured the right to continue using his characters, but not the series title, so that it
appeared as In the Land of Wonderful Dreams until 1914. Ten years later, McCay
returned once more to the Herald, and the strip was revived under its original title.
Finally, Nemo should also be seen in the context of popular entertainment more
generally. As Roeder writes, Slumberland’s “fantastic landscapes were recognizable
to an audience acquainted with railroad circuses, amusement parks, and world’s
fairs: the period’s most popular forms of commercial entertainment” (Roeder 2014,
10). Its visual splendor can be related to the sensationalist nature of the public
relations and marketing style of Phineas Taylor Barnum and his imitators. Thus,
Nemo is embedded in many ways in the artistic and popular culture of its own
time, evoking this age through its splendid visuals for us as modern readers, while
retaining a timeless appeal, not least by combining the historically mundane with
the fantastic world of dreams.

The core idea of Little Nemo in Slumberland – a little boy lying in bed and dreaming
himself away into some kind of fairyland – was hardly new when McCay conceived
his strip. There were numerous precedents of the dreaming child even in narrative
forms that used illustration. These ranged from a French picture story called Histoire
de Martin Landor, ou la Musique des Enfants (1869), by Kroknotski with illustrations
by Jules Jean Antoine Baric some forty years earlier to Un Mauvais Reve by Claudet
and engraved by Barnet (Roeder 2014, 53). Since the central topic of the strip are
dreams, and the strip was created at the beginning of the 20th century, it is hard not
to immediately think of psychoanalysis: “Readers today cannot help but apply some
Freudian analysis to the story of a little boy who retreats from his sterile middle-
class home to a world of colourful, exciting dreams, initially in pursuit of the prin-
cess of Slumberland” (Shannon 2010, 191).
This becomes all the more intriguing when one notices that Sigmund Freud
himself included a comic strip in his original 1899 edition of The Interpretation of
Dreams, called “A French Nurse’s Dream,” featuring a surreal morphing effect famil-
iar to all readers of Nemo and Rarebit Fiend. As Richard Marschall cautions, “there
is no evidence that McCay read or subscribed to any of [Freud’s, Jung’s or Adler’s]
theories” (1989, 76), but a direct influence is hardly necessary for a psychoanalytical
approach to be productive or enlightening. Where the Rarebit Fiend stories often
highlight social constraints and anxieties by showing their utter disruption, “[i]n
Little Nemo, dreaming is staged as an arena outside of parental control: the bed
literally becomes the vehicle that conveys Nemo from the safety of the domestic
space and into realms of adventure and danger” (Roeder 2014, 54). And yet the
inevitable return at the end of each strip is a constant reminder of the world outside
dream, even when that world was hardly represented at all (although, notably, the
major representatives of waking life are the voices of Nemo’s mother and father).
Contemporary newspaper readers of Nemo’s adventures could not sustain their im-
mersion into its fantastic world in the same way that they could while reading Alice
in Wonderland, because they were fed these adventures one page at a time.
This is indicative of the complex and ambiguous relationship that Little Nemo
establishes between its fantastic and mundane realms. Considering the fairy-tale
setting of the strip, the often surreal dreamscapes and the inventiveness of much of
the fantastic scenery, not to mention the fact that this was “only a comic” in the
“funny pages” of a newspaper, and one about dreaming, one might easily conclude
that the strip is far removed from any contemporary real-life concerns, creating an
escapist otherworld that is beyond mundane jurisdiction. But as Roeder has convin-
cingly shown, Slumberland in all of its inventive glory not only echoes other (real-
life) places of escapism such as fun fairs and circuses, but is also an embodiment
of the consumer culture of McCay’s time, and the structure of the strip’s narrative a
metaphor (or training ground) for the principle of delayed gratification.
Consumption is strongly present in Nemo, with many of its tableaux resembling
department store windows, with assortments of toys and other desirables. This is
particularly noticeable around dates like Thanksgiving or Christmas, since McCay
aligned the contents of the strip to real-life events at the time of publication. Inter-
estingly, wish fulfillment is depicted either as instantaneous – as in the story arc in
which Nemo acquires a magic wand with which he then goes on to provide the poor
inhabitants of “Shantytown” with immediate riches – or it is perpetually delayed.
“The conflation of the fantastic with this sense of unquenchable longing is a leitmo-
tif McCay returns to again and again” (Roeder 2014, 63). For Marschall, this constant
contradiction even veers into cruelty and, ultimately, horror:
The external beauty of Slumberland – as McCay invested his art with breathtaking panoramas
and ornate decorations – was a cruel lie, for it promised wonder but usually revealed trouble
that bordered on terror. Nemo’s goals were forever elusive. His friends were, without excep-
tion, insipid or selfish. And when, at rare moments, genuine joy was within Nemo’s fragile
grasp, McCay would have the boy awake, full of regret. (Marschall 1989, 82)
All this is partly explainable by the particular logic of dreams, which are also more
often than not tantalizing rather than fulfilling, but, as Katherine Roeder has ar-
gued, it is also in sync with the logic of consumer capitalism: “Concurrent with the
rapid expansion of mass culture, these dreamscapes instructed viewers to revel in
fantasy and delight in ungratified longing, instilling the pleasures of consumer de-
sire in its audience of young dreamers” (Roeder 2014, 9). The question that arises
from this observation is whether McCay merely reproduces and reinforces the mech-
anisms of consumerist desire management, or whether the undercurrent of menace
and disappointment that lurks beneath the splendor can be seen as a subversion of
capitalist logic, almost like a ‘cliffhanger of capitalism.’ Marschall’s view is rather
pessimistic in that respect:
Historians have routinely overlooked the underlying vein of disappointment and cruelty that
established Little Nemo’s premise and fueled its adventures during its early years. Understand-
ably, the superficial brilliance of Slumberland’s settings could easily lead to mistaken impres-
sions; certainly Nemo himself always trusted the image to be reality. But ultimately McCay’s
world was […] sterile – full of grandeur but sterile. (Marschall 1989, 82)
For Roeder, conversely, “McCay envisions a complex dreamworld spectacular to be-

hold, but often rife with danger and anxiety.” He is therefore “alternately both en-
couraging and dismantling the promise of consumer abundance” (Roeder 2014, 76).
One could agree that the drive towards kinetic chaos and confusion that disrupts
every last tableau, carefully crafted as it might be, turns out to be a strong force
against the notion of the possibility of pure and uncomplicated indulgence.
Although the individual (and therefore static) image derives much of its splen-
dor and magic from the aesthetics of consumer culture and its suggestion of perfect-
ly desirable goods, the sequentiality of comics necessitates movement and change,
which can only be disruptive to the presented perfection, especially because the
seriality (↗5 Seriality) of the publication format encourages a cyclical narrative
movement that denies progress. But it gets more complicated than that, because on
the one hand, the movement isn’t simply cyclical anymore, as in e. g. Little Sammy,
it is rather a spiral that suggests both repetition and progress. And then, of course,
consumerist desire also follows a paradoxical logic in which the promise of perfec-
tion through consumption is constantly displaced further, creating the insatiability
of desire. One might therefore say that the disruptive force of comics mayhem is
necessary for keeping the desire machine going. Nemo needs to wake up so that he
can want to dream again (and the reader with him).
4 Literary and Graphic Aesthetics

While Nemo can tell us a lot about the strangeness of dreams (or the manifold ways
in which this strangeness can be imagined) and incidentally about the society and
culture from which it emerged, the main reason why readers and critics continue to
be drawn to this comic is certainly its striking aesthetics, “its ambition to put beauty
(in the Hogarthian sense) on center stage” (Smolderen 2014, 154), and its creative
exploration of the form of comics. One of the most astounding aspects of McCay’s
work in comics in general, and the Little Nemo strips in particular, is how quickly
and systematically he explored and thereby expanded this new form or medium, as
several critics have noticed. Smolderen concludes that “the series does indeed push
the limits of the genre well beyond what might reasonably have been expected in
such a short period of time” (Smolderen 2014, 149), while Marschall states that “he
stretched and thereby virtually defined the outer perimeters of formal comic-strip
expression” (Marschall 1989, 75). Considering that comics for a long time rose out of
and flourished in an environment that demanded repetition within clearly defined
structural constraints – being serially published in newspapers according to quickly
established formulas – it is quite an achievement that McCay went to such lengths
to innovate within the formulas.
An indication of McCay’s willingness to engage with the formal characteristics
of the new medium is the relative prominence of self-reflexivity in his work, of
which there are numerous now classic examples. The most frequently cited example
is probably the Little Sammy Sneeze strip in which the title character shatters the
panel borders, but there are many more instances that can be found in the Rarebit
Fiend and the Little Nemo strips (Bukatman 2012, 69), for example when the charac-
ters are so hungry that they eat the letters of the strip’s title.
As Thierry Smolderen points out, “the one level at which Little Nemo is com-
pletely original and personal is that of McCay’s page composition; his ever-changing
kaleidoscopic layouts seem driven by a logic of their own” (Smolderen 2014, 157).
Although he did have a precursor in Rodolphe Toepffer (↗2 History, Formats, Gen-
res), who had already related extreme variations in panel size to the temporal flow
of his storytelling, McCay combined the principle of functionally motivated varia-
tion with the aesthetic organization of the whole page that he took over from his
knowledge of and work in poster design. The result is a highly successful interplay
between the panels and their varying shapes when read in sequence, and the aes-
thetic effect of all the panels taken together and forming a page that was designed
to overwhelm the readers when they opened the newspaper to the comics section.
The ever-changing spatial organization of the comics page also acted as a coun-
terweight to the repetitive elements of the strips’ narrative organization, the invari-
able falling asleep in the beginning and rudely waking up in the last panel. From
the perspective of the comics’ evolution, this enabled an impressive early demon-
stration that the innovative nature of the medium’s expressive potential was not
restricted to the kinds of stories it told, but derived from the way it conveyed narra-
tive and meaning. This point has been deemphasized somewhat through the promi-
nence of the superhero in comics history’s later phase, which is why turning back
to McCay’s work is so important to enhance our understanding of the medium and
its development.
McCay didn’t seem all that interested in (or talented for) telling specific stories –
he spent the majority of his creative effort in developing particular notions of time
and space. And these notions strongly deviate from the linear conception that is
characteristic of so much of narrative, and embodied most prominently in the quest
or journey structure. Of course, the starting premise of the strip can be most accu-
rately described as a quest – go get to Slumberland and meet the princess – and
later there is an extended journey. But that is a structure that only becomes visible
or chartable when one abstracts from the episodes and considers the series as a
whole, and in addition it carries next to no narrative consequence, since nothing
really follows from it. But what the reader most immediately experiences on the
large-scale page are complex and shifting spaces presented in often surprising per-
spectives as well as non-linear and often chaotic movement: “McCay’s innovative
spatiotemporal manipulations also remake the world of the reader, who makes an
analogous voyage—albeit a motionless one: drawn into the world of the comics
page, with its wondrous transformations and morphing spaces” (Bukatman 2012, 1).
Real-life analogues to this would be spaces like the funhouse and the maze, or
kinetic experiences like amusement park rides: “This was the whole point of
McCay’s ever-changing layouts: to diagrammatize the experience of an amusement
park, where everything conspires to provoke uncontrolled muscular reactions and
propel the public into comical and disordered states” (Smolderen 2014, 157). The
epitome of this can be found in the episodes taking place in “Befuddle Hall,” an
essentially non-linear place in which gravity can change direction and spatial
boundaries can never be taken for granted. In this way, “McCay’s work stands as an
extraordinary example of the dialectic between classical and modern compositions,
specifically in his constant exploration of spatial boundaries” (Morton 2010, 308).
The association with amusement park rides stresses the important point that
space in Little Nemo is always closely tied to movement and therefore to time:
With Little Nemo McCay demonstrated an unprecedented (some would say unmatched) mas-
tery of temporal mapping while returning to the spatial solidity and scenic richness associated
with artists like Hogarth. (Bukatman 2012, 34)
Both within the panels and through the panels (their size and arrangement on the
page), McCay constantly evoked movement while skillfully manipulating time:
“McCay realized the unique properties of the comic strip format and intuited that
by altering the height or width of a frame he could effectively expand or compress
the flow of both time and space” (Roeder 2014, 54). This, of course, set standards
for what comics as a medium could do in terms of presenting narrative. That McCay
was willing and able to go so far so early within the medium’s evolution is most
likely also connected to the fact that he already saw beyond it – to the even newer
and more unexplored medium of film, and particularly animation.
Scholars have regularly noticed the cross-pollination of McCay’s work in comics
and in animation. Carrier writes that “McCay’s panels seem like separate frames of a
wide-screen motion-picture film, and so they anticipate his later work in animation”
(2000, 56), and for Morton, “McCay’s compositional style in both his strips and film
animations appears to be an engagement with the aesthetic dialogue existing be-
tween these two media at this specific historical moment” (Morton 2010, 308). While
Nemo is connected in many ways to the present – e. g. through its relation to vaude-
ville, art nouveau, or the circus – it also has ties to the (media) future. After all,
McCay’s other claim to fame is as one of the founders of animation, which is why
it is hardly surprising that cinematographic echoes can be regularly found in his
work.
Little Sammy Sneeze, with its clear ties to “The Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze”
published in Harper’s Weekly on March 3, 1894, “raised a principal question for
understanding the cinematographic language” (Smolderen 2014, 152), namely our
ability for mentally processing cinematic cuts. For Bukatman, “[t]he mechanistic,
unvarying structure of Little Sammy Sneeze presents a meticulous time-motion
breakdown” (Bukatman 2012, 40), something that can also be found on several oc-
casions in Nemo. The most frequently discussed example is the very first strip, when
Nemo rides a horse into Slumberland that is depicted in a posture straight out of
the revolutionary motion-capturing photography of Eadweard Muybridge (who may
or may not have been out to prove that horses indeed do “fly” by lifting off all four
legs at the same time). But McCay is not merely imitating Muybridge and anticipat-
ing animation, he is also integrating it into comics and combining it with its own
medium-specific strengths. In the very same strip, on the lower half of the page,
there are numerous flying animals, all individually rendered in freeze frames. But
when one looks across panel borders, the individual motions work together to form
undulating arcs that are only visible on the level of the full-page design, and would
therefore be lost in a straight adaptation to animation. “[T]his dialectic between
wild kinesis and perfectly rendered stasis has its analogue in the overarching narra-
tive of Little Nemo: the cosmic journeys across time and space counterbalanced by
the insistent return to the bed from which no one has moved at all—except some-
times in that brief, rude journey from bed to floor” (Bukatman 2012. 31).
5 Reception, Impact and Theoretical Perspectives

While it is clear that McCay is one of the most accomplished and innovative origina-
tors of comics and Little Nemo one of the early masterpieces of the form, it is equally
undeniable that there are areas in which he falls short as an artist, or cannot be
judged uncritically from a modern perspective. Among those are his use of language
and particularly dialogue, and his creation of characters that leaned heavily on ra-
cial caricature.
One usually says that one ‘reads’ a comic, but in the case of Little Nemo, an
adequate appreciation more often than not means trying to ignore the reading part
as much as possible, and revel in the visual dimension instead. While some of the
strangeness of the dialogue can be explained through McCay’s attempts (similar to
that of other early comics artists) to recreate now obsolete colloquial language, it is
probably no exaggeration to say that there is not a single line of dialogue in the
hundreds of strips that make up the series that is worth quoting for its own sake.
Most likely, he never even tried. One can easily tell where McCay’s emphasis lay by
looking at the visual presentation of the dialogues: frequently, the writing is
cramped within the speech balloons, suggesting that the actual contents were more
of an afterthought, because the characters had to say something after all (see Mar-
schall 1989, 94).
Another thing that McCay obviously neglected was creating round characters.
He was hardly unique in relying on stock characters and types for comic strips.
Nemo, however, is even further reduced as a character, because where most con-
temporary comic strip protagonists were characterized by one specific (and often
exaggerated) personality trait, Nemo, true to his name (Nemo being Latin for ‘no
one’), is virtually a blank who remains passive through most of his adventures.
While his personality has clearly evolved somewhat from the purely mechanical
Little Sammy, who was indeed little more than a single bodily function, Nemo re-
mained bland and undistinguished for most of the strip.
Where there was no depth, there apparently was no need for consistency, so
the “motives and psychology of his characters were, at times, incoherent” (Roeder
2014, 62). Nemo is sometimes depicted as noble, particularly in the episodes involv-
ing the airship, and sometimes as an egotistical petty child, and his motivation
can never consistently be inferred by the reader. Obviously, this wasn’t seen as a
shortcoming by McCay. But more important than Nemo’s individual psychology was
his function as a social type. As No One, he is the everyman child of the middle-
class readers, a suburban kid representing that class’s ideal of childish innocence,
as expressed in his constant amazement and wide-eyed wonder and in his almost
equally constant passivity (although both the inconsistency and the passivity could
also be read as characteristic aspects of the dream).
While Nemo was intentionally designed to be a blank canvas onto which
McCay’s readership could project themselves, the characters of Flip and Impy are
both more interesting from a narrative viewpoint, and more problematic since they
are drawn from the darker regions of comics’ general tendency to reproduce stereo-
types. Impy, the inarticulate black “savage” is an especially glaring case of racist
caricature. Within McCay’s work, Impy has his “ancestors” in the proto-comic strip
A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle, where three of his lookalikes constantly
torment animals, who then change their bodily shape (becoming the animals that
we know) in order to get away from or back at the jungle imps.
Critics have argued that the racism inherent in characters like Impy has to be
understood more as an indication of “how Americans conceived of racial and na-
tional identity in the progressive era” than as an individual expression of racism,
and that “Nemo is hardly unique in its prominent use of black characters presented
in vaudeville Jim Crow imagery” (Shannon 2010, 197). But while that may be true,
it does of course not mean that the problematic attitude behind such depictions
should not be critically assessed. Indeed, one can argue that “McCay’s work merely
unselfconsciously reflects the racist attitudes of his times” (Shannon 2010, 200), but
that reflection must ultimately also be seen as an affirmation of the status quo
(Roeder 2014, 66). Also, there have been plenty of artists in every age who have
criticized racist stereotypes and actively worked against them – so the claim “that’s
the way things were back then” simply reproduces a privileged and racist point of
view. And a deeper characterization would have helped to humanize the depiction
and soften the racism or classism, but this is where the comic falls consistently flat,
especially in respect to Impy. Of course, one could argue that caricature is what
comics do, and stereotyping is a fundamental aspect of caricature. But the inarticu-
late Impy is not a caricature of an existing figure, he seems merely the sum total of
a number of racial stereotypes.
The character of Flip is more complex in many regards, although he is also, first
of all, a walking collection of stereotypes and prejudices. Shannon has analyzed in
detail how this character evokes the other and blurs racial boundaries:
Ostensibly white, Flip has powerful family connections in the person of his uncle, the Dawn,
so we assume he is, like Nemo, white. […] Flip’s ‘theatrical’ greasepaint obscures his true racial
identity and identifies him with the comic actors of the minstrel shows and vaudeville stage
[…]. Flip, the cigarsmoking, green-faced, jive-talking troublemaker and black sheep of the fam-
ily may well be seen as the black voice that accompanies Impy’s black face. (2010, 200)
But while Flip’s appearance is racialized, he served to broaden the social appeal of
McCay’s comic, and to bring together the respectable middle-class figure with the
more carefree working-class urchin that was such a staple in early comic strips,
from Hogan’s Alley to the Katzenjammer Kids. In fact, as Roeder writes: “With the
addition of Impie in 1907, the threesome forms a continuum of popular boyhood
types: the innocent savage, the working-class trickster, and the genteel, overcivi-
lized boy from the suburbs” (Roeder 2014, 74). From a contemporary child-develop-
mental perspective, Nemo might have been an ideal character, but on his own he
was also something of an impasse, lacking the essential ‘boyhood savagery’ neces-
sary to progress further into adulthood. This is one of the lessons that Flip must
teach Nemo and his little readers, and it finds its epitome in the episode where
Nemo finally takes the initiative, surprising everyone by beating up Flip (June 20,
1909) and in the process upsetting the strip’s narrative equilibrium.
But what might be only questionably true for a child’s development is certainly
true for narrative progression. In this respect, Flip is urgently needed in order to
provide some forward momentum to the series. From the start, Nemo only ever act-
ed as a hindrance to his own goals, doing something – usually without bad inten-
tions or any knowledge about the potential consequences – that tilts the situation
into chaos, resulting in the inevitable awakening at the end. However, McCay must
have recognized that he could repeat that formula only so many times before losing
his audience’s attention, so Flip was introduced to provide some welcome variation.
Even though he also starts out as merely an impediment, his prankish activities
gradually become more interesting in themselves, until he almost takes over as the
center of attention, if not of the story. Therefore, flawed as he is, he is surely the
most memorable character that McCay created for his comic strip.
6 Conclusion
As comics become ever more established within scholarship, its historic roots are
also increasingly uncovered and analyzed. As many of the earliest strips, which
were practically inaccessible to readers and scholars alike, become available in
modern reprints, they start to gain the acknowledgment that they deserve. This is
partly for their historical role in establishing and developing comics into the form
that we are familiar with today, but also for their inherent aesthetic and intellectual
value. Winsor McCay is an important case in point in this respect, both an innovator
and a master, who has finally reemerged from relative obscurity. In 1989, Marschall
still had to lament that “the history of American graphic art is poorer for the neglect
he has traditionally received” (75). But this has decisively changed in recent years,
with articles and even monographs being published on McCay in general and Little
Nemo in Slumberland in particular, cementing its role as an early classic.
7 Bibliography
7.1 Works Cited
Braun, Alexander and Winsor McCay. The Complete Little Nemo by Winsor McCay. Köln: Taschen,
2014.
Bukatman, Scott. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Couperie, Pierre. A history of the comic strip: Created in conjunction with the Exhibition of Comic-
Strip Art at Museé des Arts Décoratifs, Palais du Louvre. New York: Crown, 1973.
Domsch, Sebastian “Selbstreflexive Implikationen des animierten Dokumentarfilms: Ari Folmans
Waltz with Bashir.” Film. Bild. Wirklichkeit: Reflexionen von Film – Reflexionen im Film. Ed.
Metten, Thomas and Michael Meyer. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2016. 381–400.
McCay, Winsor. Little Sammy Sneeze. Bonn: Bocola, 2010.
Maresca, Peter and Winsor McCay. Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays. Palo
Alto: Sunday Press Books, 2005.
Maresca, Peter and Winsor McCay. Many More Splendid Sundays. Palo Alto: Sunday Press Books,
2008.
Marschall, Richard and Winsor McCay. The Best of Little Nemo in Slumberland. New York: Stewart,
Tabori and Chang, 1997.
Marschall, Richard. America’s Great Comic-strip Artists: From the Yellow Kid to Peanuts. New York:
Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1997.
Medina, José and David Wood, eds. Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions, John
Wiley & Sons, 2008.
Morton, Drew. “Sketching Under the Influence? Winsor McCay and the Question of Aesthetic
Convergence Between Comic Strips and Film.” Animation 5.3 (2010): 295–312.
Pfister, Manfred, and John Halliday (transl.). The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Roeder, Katherine. Wide awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, mass culture, and modernism in the art
of Winsor McCay. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.
Shannon, Edward A. “Something Black in the American Psyche: Formal Innovation and Freudian
Imagery in the Comics of Winsor McCay and Robert Crumb.” Canadian Review of American
Studies 40.2 (2010): 187–211.
Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. Translated by
Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.
Telotte, J. P. “Winsor McCay’s warped spaces.” Screen 48.4 (2007): 463–473.
7.2 Further Reading

Baker, Nicholson, and Margaret Brentano. The World on Sunday. Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s
Newspaper (1898–1911). New York & Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2005.
Balzer, Jens, and Lambert Wiesing. Die Erfindung des Comic. Yellow: Schriften zur
Comicforschung 3. Bochum: Ch. Bachmann, 2010.
Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945. Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1998.
Juergens, George: Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1966.
Kunzle, David. History of the Comic Strip vol 1, The Early Comic Strip. Narrative Strips and Picture
Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450–1825. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1973.
Lefèvre, Pascal. “Newspaper Strips.” The Routledge Companion to Comics. Ed. Frank Bramlett,
Roy Cook and Aaron Meskin. New York: Routledge, 2017. 16–24.
Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels. A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon Press,
1996.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation. The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
Eric Hoffman
19 Dave Sim: Cerebus
Abstract: This chapter provides an introduction and an overview of Dave Sim’s mon-
umental graphic novel Cerebus. It starts by pointing out some of the contexts of
Cerebus’s creation, such as the direct market distribution method and Dave Sim’s
growing engagement with creators’ rights. Readers are introduced to the comic’s
emerging plot developments in their ever-increasing complexity, as well as to the
gradual broadening of the narrative, satirical, and philosophical scope of the whole
project. Cerebus is an expansive text, ranging from humorous to extravagant to vio-
lent and grotesque. Furthermore, its distinctly postmodern foregrounding of its own
apparatus allows Cerebus the method – as satire, as parody, as an act of autobiogra-
phy, as a black and white comic book that, for most of its publication, existed in a
literary ghetto – to revel in its outsiderness, to comment on everything from comic
books to politics to religion to gender, and to criticize society for its immorality and
for its social transgressions, real or imagined. The chapter finishes with a critical
look at the still highly controversial legacy of Sim and his major work, which has
been hailed both as a ground-breaking milestone for comics history and harshly
criticized for its misogyny.
Key Terms: Direct market, Canadian comics, black and white ground-level comics,
fantasy
1 Introduction
Dave Sim’s Cerebus began its unparalleled 300-issue run as one of a small number
of notable black and white, self-published ‘ground level’ comic books – occupying a
thematic and economic middle ground between underground comix and the ‘above
ground’ products of major publishers. Published in discrete floppies on first a bi-
monthly and then a monthly basis over a 25-year period from 1977 to 2004, Cerebus
was among the earliest successes of the direct market distribution method, wherein
comics were distributed to brick and mortar comic shops – a select market com-
prised of a primarily older and more sophisticated audience – on a non-returnable
basis, thus bypassing the established (and prohibitively expensive) newsstand dis-
tribution.
Initially, Cerebus was a biting satire of comics and other fantasy-related material
commonly found in comic book shops. As a result, much of Cerebus’s effectiveness,
and concomitant narrative coherence and stability, depended on the reader’s famili-
arity with a vast array of comics and fantasy elements and history. As Cerebus pro-
gressed, it underwent many tonal, thematic, and visual shifts; therefore, any critical
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-023
406 Eric Hoffman
reading of Cerebus is necessarily complicated by the significant generic and artistic

transformations which take place within its narrative trajectory.
Under the classic newsstand distribution model, spotty circulation methods
meant readers routinely missed out on key issues and, as a result, comics creators,
motivated by economic incentives of attracting and retaining new readers, depend-
ed largely on the production of self-contained issues that managed to provide just
enough back story to make the comics understandable to new readers or to readers
whose access to those titles was limited. Marvel and DC Comics titles occasionally
included storylines that ran for a dozen issues or more, yet this was infrequent. By
contrast, due to the relative consistency and predictability provided by the direct
market, Cerebus’s creator, publisher, writer, principal artist, and letterer Dave Sim
gradually introduced a long-form narrative within the confines of his ongoing series
in a way that few long-running comics had attempted, before or since – though two
ground-level comics that started at the same time as Cerebus, Elfquest and First
Kingdom, attempted 15–20 issue storylines (Hoffman 2012, 81) – one where charac-
ters would gradually grow old and die (e. g. Gasoline Alley), as opposed to the more
common sliding-scale conceit utilized by most ongoing mainstream superhero com-
ics (e. g. Spider-Man, Batman, et al.).
Sim also utilized the new direct market in novel – and influential – ways: he
produced reprints of Cerebus, at first five to six issues at a time as Swords of Cerebus,
then later in larger volumes, collecting as many as twenty-five issues in each, which
came to be known as ‘phonebooks’ due to their size. In fact, Sim’s trendsetting
republication of the series in sixteen volumes is something that Cerebus’s epic nar-
rative, as it progressed, eventually came to demand. This republication and refor-
matting removed the need for new readers to acquire a considerable number of back
issues in order to follow the story, and thus provided a relatively easy and inexpen-
sive means of engagement with its increasingly complex narrative, as each volume
collected one (or part) of Cerebus’s nine major story lines, with the exception of the
first volume; Sim did not begin structuring Cerebus’s longer storylines until issue
#26. Following the conclusion of High Society (issues #26–50, 1981–1983), which ran
nearly 500 pages, Sim remarked how the storyline had ended prematurely, that
there were still other subjects he wanted to address, namely religion. As a result, in
his next storyline, Sim gave himself considerable flexibility; he did not specify an
exact issue with which it would conclude.
During Church & State, Sim enlisted Gerhard (b. 1959) as collaborator, a creative
decision that significantly expanded the work’s visual palette and narrative scope.
Church & State (1983–1988), the longest of the Cerebus novels, ran, with prologues
and epilogues, from issue 52 to 111 at a length of over 1,200 pages, or 1/5 the length
of the entire 300-issue series; the storyline was so lengthy, in fact, that in collected
form it spans two massive 500-page collections. The Cerebus collections also acted
as advertisement for the ongoing series, proving lucrative enough for the main-
stream industry to take notice; for example, it is now common for trade paperbacks
Fig. 19.1: from The Last Day (2004),

© 2004 Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.
to collect, on average, six to twelve issues of a monthly series and for these collec-
tions to be marketed, for better or for worse, as so-called ‘graphic novels.’ Sim was
the first to demonstrate the economic viability of this model.
While Sim’s relatively novel approach to serial narrative points to both econom-
ic realities facing comic book publishers prior to the development of the direct mar-
ket, it also functions as a critique of the comic industry’s overall lack of creative
engagement with the form at the time, or the effort on behalf of creators to experi-
ment in such innovative ways. Cerebus thus represents an unusual document of the
artistic and intellectual experimentations that an artist – particularly one as brilliant
and uncompromising as Sim – given such a lengthy project and a medium flexible
enough to accommodate varying textual and visual innovations, undergoes over the
course of a long career.

David Victor Sim was born 17 May, 1956 in Hamilton Ontario, to a small, working
class family. The family moved to neighboring Kitchener when Sim was only two;
Sim would remain there his entire life, with elements of the natural landscape of
Kitchener and its surrounding community and even native history providing some
of the backdrop for the fantasy world depicted in Cerebus.
Sim became interested in comics at an early age. He was at first drawn to Silver
Age-era DC Comics, principally those drawn by artists Curt Swan, Jim Mooney, and
408 Eric Hoffman
Kurt Schaffenberger, whose realistic, expressive, clear-line style proved a major in-
fluence on Sim’s later drawing. When Sim reached adolescence, Neal Adams’s work
was immensely popular, as was the work of artist Barry Windsor-Smith on Marvel’s
licensed property Conan the Barbarian, and the work appearing in then-prevalent
Warren magazines, including Creepy and Eerie, most notably that of Berni Wright-
son, whose Badtime Stories (1971) Sim claims first inspired him to become an artist
(Hoffman 2012, 8).
Sim was also considerably influenced by the satirical comics appearing in MAD
Magazine, including Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood’s ‘Superduperman’ parody,
which would inspire many of the parodic elements in Cerebus, especially Sim’s on-
going ‘superhero’ character, the schizophrenic, mentally unstable Artemis, more
commonly known as ‘The Roach,’ who routinely transforms into a parodic represen-
tation of contemporary popular superheroes throughout its run. With regards to
parody as represented in Cerebus, underground cartoonist Jack Jaxon’s Conan paro-
dy “Testicleez the Tautologist” (1971) was equally inspirational (Hoffman 2012, 9–
10).
At the age of seventeen, Sim dropped out of high school in order to devote
himself to the pursuit of a career as a cartoonist and comic artist. He routinely sub-
mitted (largely unpaid) work to the then-burgeoning field of Xeroxed and offset
printed fantasy and comic book fanzines, producing workmanlike depictions of
various Conan-inspired barbarians, among other fantasy and superhero fare. He
composed articles and conducted interviews of comic book personalities, which
were published in the fanzine Rocket’s Blast Comicollector and in a newsletter, The
Now and Then Times, which Sim edited and largely wrote and illustrated.
In 1976, during his brief stint as an employee at the Kitchener Bookstore Now
and Then (whose owner underwrote the publication of his newsletter), Sim met Deni
Loubert (b. 30 September 1951), a French-Canadian comics enthusiast, who was in-
terested in publishing a fanzine modeled after one published by Gene Day, in which
Sim had had work published. The enterprising Sim assisted her with the creation of
the fanzine, entitled Cerebus (an unintentional mis-spelling of Cerberus, the three-
headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades). Loubert, together with her brother
and sister, devised the name for their imprint, Aardvark-Vanaheim, and Sim drew
a caricature of a sword-wielding, barbarian anthropomorphic aardvark for the fan-
zine logo. The artwork was sent to a disreputable publisher and never seen again.
Sim, inspired by the success of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comic, and other
sword and sorcery material – including Michael Moorcock’s then-popular series of
fantasy novels featuring Elric the Albino and Steve Gerber and Val Mayerick’s How-
ard the Duck (1973–1979), a satirical, metafictional send-up of anthropomorphic
‘funny animal’ comics – returned to the concept of the barbarian aardvark, and
named him Cerebus. Disappointed by the verities of the medium, both among major
and small comic companies (including dishonest or incompetent publishers, the
interference of editors, and minimal artist royalties), Sim decided to self-publish,
believing that if he completed three issues, at the very least he would have a fin-
ished product for his portfolio. Cerebus, however, proved to be an unanticipated
success, and sold upwards of tens of thousands of copies per issue within its first
two years, thus providing Sim and Loubert with a modest income. The two began
to attend comic book conventions, a relatively new cultural phenomenon, in an
effort to further promote and distribute the then bi-monthly comic.
In 1979, Sim and Loubert were married and, that same year, a major review by
noted critic and publisher Kim Thompson appeared in the comics magazine The
Comics Journal. In his review, Thompson compared Sim’s storytelling capabilities to
Carl Barks’s and praised Sim’s visual and literary sophistication. Around this time,
Sim suffered a mild nervous breakdown as the result of an overdose of LSD. Follow-
ing a brief hospitalization, Sim, during recovery, and in light of Thompson’s encour-
aging review, began to re-envision the then largely-episodic heroic fantasy comic as
a single narrative. This change occurred soon after Sim’s announcement, in issue
#12, that Cerebus would run until December 2003, which, at its then bi-monthly
pace, would take the series to issue #156. This plan was revised following Sim’s
transition to monthly publication; in issue #19, Sim announced that Cerebus would
last 300 issues, and that it would chronicle the life of Cerebus up until his death.
Importantly, the book would be subdivided into ‘novels,’ with High Society being
the first, that would last anywhere from 10 to 25 or 30 issues, with the single work
as one expansive novel in the style of the Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor
Dostoevsky, a structure Sim maintained, with only a few exceptions (issues #51,
#112/113, and #137 and #138) for the remainder of the series. Thus, with High Society,
Cerebus underwent the first and potentially most radical of its formalistic transfor-
mations, from monthly floppy to epic novel in the making, a change that, as noted
above, had major implications not only for the comic but for the medium as a whole.
During the early 1980s, Loubert expanded the Aardvark-Vanaheim imprint to
publish the work of other artists, and toured extensively to promote their comics.
Soon after, Sim and Loubert divorced. Loubert took the non-Cerebus Aardvark-Vana-
heim properties (including Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty’s Ms. Tree, Bob Bur-
den’s Flaming Carrot, William Messner-Loebs’s Journey and Arn Saba’s Neil the
Horse) and started her own short-lived imprint, Renegade Press (1984–1988). Sim,
meanwhile, turned his attention to the publication of the initial Cerebus collections
(1986, 1987) – the ‘phonebooks’ mentioned above – and the Aardvark International
imprint, which would publish a single title, Michael Zulli and Stephen Murphy’s
ecological science fiction fable, Puma Blues (1986–1989, 2015). Sim’s decision to
market his initial collected edition of Cerebus, the politically-themed High Society
(1986), directly to customers via mail order, rather than via Diamond Distribution,
a major comics distributor, led Diamond’s representative William D. Schanes to re-
taliate by refusing to distribute Puma Blues. This incident directly led to the drafting
of the Creator’s Bill of Rights in November 1988, which protested the industry’s
unfair treatment of creators, questionable distribution and work-for-hire practices,
410 Eric Hoffman
and the prevalence of onerous contracts that limited profit-sharing, licensing, and
return of artwork.
Following from this, during the mid-1990s Sim became a major proponent of
self-publishing and authored a ‘manual,’ The Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing
(1997), collecting essays on self-publishing that initially appeared in Cerebus’s back
pages. Around this same time, Sim encountered considerable controversy when in
issue #186 of Cerebus (1994) he introduced the theme of anti-feminism in a seeming-
ly autobiographical essay written by the pseudonymous character Viktor Davis (as
in David Victor Sim). This essay appeared in the midst of the partially prose-based
story arc Reads (#175–186, 1993–1994). In it, Sim characterized women as “voids …
without a glimmer of understanding of intellectual processes” (Sim, Cerebus #186,
September 1994), among other criticisms.
Subsequently, Sim’s acidic views of the female gender, present as early as Jaka’s
Story (#114–136, 1988–1990), became increasingly pronounced within the fictional
narrative of Cerebus. In 2001, Sim followed up with the essay “Tangent,” published
in the back pages of issue #265, in which Sim addresses accusations of misogyny
and furthered his non-traditional and derogatory views on feminism and the female
gender. Sim’s controversial viewpoints led to considerable backlash, including con-
tinued accusations of misogyny, that resulted in considerable criticism and led to
diminished sales of Cerebus, and arguably inaugurated Sim’s self-described ‘pariah’
status in the comics world, and also complicating the critical response to his work.

Cerebus is a 6,000-page ‘graphic novel’ largely concerned with its eponymous pro-
tagonist, an anthropomorphic barbarian aardvark, who later becomes Prime Minis-
ter, then Pope, then houseguest, then messiah, then bartender, and finally founder
of a new religion. Benefitting from an unusual degree of generic slippage, Cerebus
functions equally well as a sword and sorcery fantasy with world-building elements,
as a humorous satire of the comics medium, as parody, and as a political, social,
and – especially in its latter half – religious commentary and gender critique.
From start to finish, the geography, history, and narrative of Cerebus – apart
from the aforementioned, rare, text interstices and the occasional, metafictional ap-
pearances by ‘Dave,’ a fictional representation of Sim – remains a distinctly imagi-
nary world, not unlike J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which provides a useful com-
parison. Yet just as Middle Earth is a combination of aspects of Norse mythology
and Anglo-Saxon and Roman Britain history and geography, Cerebus ends up draw-
ing much of its mythology from its ongoing satire of popular comic books from the
late 1970s up to the early 2000s.
Initially, Cerebus was a parody of two distinct – and altogether different – sour-
ces: first, Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, specifically the Marvel
Comics’ Roy Thomas written/Barry Windsor-Smith drawn adaptation, and second,

the character Howard the Duck, created by Steve Gerber. Much of the humorous
frisson provided by Cerebus’s early issues depends greatly on the value one places
on such generic slippage, in addition to Sim’s frequent parodies of, and visual hom-
ages to, then-popular comic books. In fact, the comic was at first entitled Cerebus
the Aardvark, its title thereby calling attention to the very essence of its dual parodic
targets, e. g. Conan the Barbarian, Howard the Duck. The Howard the Duck influ-
ence is primarily thematic; the character Cerebus, like Howard, is a foul-tempered,
anthropomorphic creature, “trapped in a world he never made” (Howard’s tag-line),
i. e. in a world full of humans, that inadvertently enters into politics.
For much of the first volume, consisting of the initial 25 issues of the series,
Cerebus’s vaguely fantastical world of Estarcion retains an indistinct political struc-
ture. There are various kingdoms, townships, and so forth, yet the political hierarch-
ies and relationships are not well-defined. The first specific mention of this political
makeup comes with the introduction of the city-state Palnu, which occurs in a series
of self-contained comic strips Sim produced for the Comic Buyer’s Guide (1980). A
parody of Canadian-born Hal Foster’s comic strip Prince Valiant, and drawn to re-
semble that strip, Sim’s Prince Valiant stand-in is Lord Silverspoon, a spoiled (as in
‘born with a silver spoon in his mouth’), insufferable prince with whom Cerebus
has an unfortunate run-in. The pair is eventually shipwrecked and held captive by
the savage inhabitants of an island, before they are rescued by Silverspoon’s father,
Lord Julius, the Lord of Palnu, essentially a rendition of Groucho Marx. Julius’ city-
state Palnu is depicted as a hopeless bureaucracy. The storyline continues in Cerebus
#14–16 – later referred to as The Palnu Trilogy (1980), a crucially important political-
ly-themed 71-page narrative and the first instance in Cerebus of a self-contained story
told over a series of issues – and these issues provide much of the backdrop for Sim’s
first foray into long-form storytelling, High Society, setting up many of the themes
which Sim will explore for the remaining 284 issues of the series.
In the Palnu Trilogy, these themes for the most part remain in the background,
and are rather sketchy, hasty, and unclear. However, in High Society, because of its
campaigns, both political and wartime, the world of Estarcion becomes better de-
fined. Notably, in Sim’s depiction of this landscape, the character of the various
nation states is distinctly provincial. The north is depicted as a cold, desolate waste-
land, mostly uninhabited, with the majority of the population living in the south,
further consolidated into various towns and cities, each with its own defined char-
acter. Some cities are more highly refined, almost European, while others have a
rough-hewn, frontier feel to them; their denizens are the barbarians that populate
the early issues chronicling Cerebus’s years as a mercenary and soldier of fortune.
This introduction of a more advanced, European-style civilization is a clever way
for Sim to reconcile the shift from slapstick Conan parody to more sophisticated
political satire, simultaneously withdrawing from individual issue-focused stories
and short, two- or three-issue story arcs, to longer and increasingly more complex
novel-length story lines lasting hundreds of pages.
412 Eric Hoffman
In High Society, Cerebus, as diplomatic representative of Palnu, arrives in the

city/state of Iest (pronounced ‘Yest’), taking up residence at the Regency Hotel. He
soon becomes involved in politicking and high finance, about which he under-
stands very little. Cerebus eventually meets Julius’ ex-wife Astoria, who begins to
use him as a pawn in a complex political struggle between herself and her ex-hus-
band, Lord Julius, each of whom are attempting to gain control of Iest by installing
a puppet Prime Minister. Cerebus is eventually chosen as Prime Minister, yet the
power quickly goes to his head. Though removed from his mercenary context, Cere-
bus remains a barbarian and, not satisfied with Iest, he attempts to gain control of
surrounding city-states with an unsuccessful war of conquest, which results in the
loss of his position (fig. 19.2).
The subsequent storyline, the expansive Church & State, involves Adam Wei-
shaupt (whose name relates to Adam Weishaupt, German philosopher and founder
of the Order of the Illuminati), here a political schemer and political associate of
Astoria, herself the founder of the competing feminist ideology of Kevillism. With
Cirinism and Kevillism, Sim depicts opposing matriarchal viewpoints between the
classic totalitarian strain (for example, the family values, temperance era matriar-
chy, who view all life as sacred, hence ‘pro-life’) versus a more modern, 1970s era
feminism, which, in Sim’s description, prizes “individual rights and freedom above
all.” Together they manipulate Cerebus into becoming Prime Minister a second time.
After the Pope of the Eastern Church of Tarim (in keeping with Sim’s male/female
dichotomy, Tarim is the male deity, Terim his female equivalent) is murdered by an
assassin hired by Weisshaupt, Cerebus is made Pope. Meanwhile, Cerebus has re-
cently discovered that his love interest, Lord Julius’s niece the ‘Princess of Palnu’
Jaka Tavers is now married and pregnant. Following his rejection by Jaka, Cerebus,
a fairly reprehensible character, becomes quite unhinged, determined, since he can-
not obtain Jaka, to achieve something, even if it means his own destruction. He
becomes power mad, and uses his position as Pope to demand gold upon threat of
death. His megalomania results in his positioning himself to be the one who under-
goes the Ascension, an attempt at mystical confrontation with the Creator, rendered
as a trip to the moon.
On the moon, Cerebus meets George, the ‘Judge,’ a mysterious entity who prof-
fers the first of Sim’s three gender-inflected creation myths – here it is the male void
being consumed by the female light – before the Judge warns Cerebus that Cerebus
will die “alone, unmourned and unloved.” Following this dire warning, Cerebus
returns to Earth, only to discover that the Cirinists have taken control of Iest. Sus-
pecting that they will seek retribution, Cerebus, who by chance manages to locate
Jaka and her new husband Rick Nash, hides out in her home on a mountainside.
Church & State is largely an exploration of religion, in particular its worldly
interferences in the political and economic spheres. Indeed, the political concern
that came to dominate Cerebus from the Jaka’s Story storyline forward is that of
gender politics. Church & State, with its focus on an extended political battle be-
19 Dave Sim: Cerebus
Fig. 19.2: from High Society (1986), © 1986 Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.

413
414 Eric Hoffman
Fig. 19.3: cover for Church & State II (1988), © 1988 Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.
tween male (Cerebus) and female (Astoria) rivals, and its concluding monologue
concerning the gender-specific origins of the universe, announces this thematic fix-
ation. Because Astoria does not found the feminist system of Kevillism until after
she suffers a miscarriage, Sim implies that feminism is merely the result of a frus-
trated or obstructed feminine impulse of childbirth, and that had she instead had
children, Astoria would not otherwise have been with politics. After the events of
Mothers & Daughters (#151–200, 1991–1995), Astoria goes into seclusion and begins
working on a garden as what Sim portrays as an act of sublimated motherhood.
Childhood in Cerebus is often depicted as especially traumatic, Cerebus’s upbring-
ing in particular, perhaps introducing psychoanalytic reasons for Cerebus’s behav-
ior as an adult. Abortion, miscarriage, incest, and infanticide feature prominently
at various intervals throughout the work.
During Cerebus’s Ascension, the Cirinists take over, and institute strict, totali-
tarian rules concerning social behavior; among their many draconian command-
ments is that dancing is prohibited. In Jaka’s Story, the eponymous Jaka, in defiance
of this law, continues to dance, albeit for an empty tavern, whose owner, Pud With-
ers (whose name, per Sim, is meant to evoke a flaccid penis), secretly desiring her,
provides her with a wage and room and board. As a complement to this foursome
(Cerebus, Jaka, Rick, and Pud), Sim includes Oscar, a flamboyant homosexual and
a caricature of Oscar Wilde. Oscar openly lusts after Rick; because of this, Jaka
dislikes him, as does the homophobic Pud.
Sim’s Oscar is not a novelist or short story writer; rather, he is the author of
‘reads,’ comic book equivalents in the world of Cerebus, which feature a page of
prose facing a page comprised of a single illustration, and the first non-parodic ex-
ample of postmodernist metanarrative in Cerebus. This aspect will soon come to
overwhelm much of its narrative. Jaka’s Story alternates between this ‘present’ sto-
ryline and the ‘reads’-style prose sections concerning Jaka’s aristocratic childhood.
Toward the end of Jaka’s Story, Oscar lets Rick know that he has completed his
book. Entitled Daughter of Palnu, it is revealed to be the same prose sequences of
Sim and Gerhard’s graphic novel.
During an impromptu celebration of Oscar’s completion of his ‘read,’ Jaka
dances for Cerebus, Oscar, Rick, and Pud. The tavern is then unexpectedly raided
by the Cirinists, who quickly arrest Jaka for dancing and Oscar for writing without
consent (“no artistic license,” the Cirinist soldier deadpans), killing Pud in the pro-
cess. Oscar is sentenced to two years hard labor and Jaka is imprisoned. During her
interrogation, the Cirinists reveal to Rick that Jaka aborted their child in favor of
pursuing her career as dancer, arguably the first instance of Sim’s extensive critique
of feminism, though, at the time, it appeared to read as a defense of feminist princi-
ples.
Melmoth (#139–150, 1990–1991), follows the final days of Oscar, confusedly a
second, different Oscar Wilde caricature, recently released from prison. The story-
line again centers on a tavern; as do the subsequent storylines, Guys (#201–219,
1995–1997) and Rick’s Story (#220–231, 1997–1998), which depict Cerebus as the bar-
tender of a Cirinist-sponsored males-only tavern in the northern countryside of Es-
tarcion, in addition to the return of Rick, who, as a result of his disastrous relation-
ships with women, begins his descent into religious madness. In Melmoth, Cerebus,
despondent after Jaka’s arrest, enters a near-catatonic state – for which Oscar’s pro-
tracted death spiral acts as physical metaphor – and spends most of his time sitting
in front of the tavern, clutching Jaka’s childhood doll Missy. Cerebus, argues Sim,
is at this point little more than a “self-pitying, immobilized, near-catatonic, vainglo-
rious, vindictive, mean-spirited, lost, anguished, loathsome little drunkard,” in a
state of mind with real-world correlatives, namely the “various stages of ‘coming to’
after prolonged exposure to women” (quoted in Hoffman and Grace 2013, 226.)
The storyline that follows Melmoth, Mothers & Daughters, greatly expands and
explores the nature and effects of Sim’s straw men, the Cirinists, with its fictional
essays, namely Sim’s extensive critique of feminism, any merit of which is consist-
ently undermined by his use of logical fallacies, anecdotal evidence, and ad homi-
nem attacks. Mothers & Daughters is Cerebus’s central storyline; it effectively ties
together narrative threads left dangling from the first half of the series, and introdu-
ces narrative trajectories that will have major repercussions for the remainder of the
series. In fact, according to Sim, Mothers & Daughters ends the main narrative of
Cerebus, with the remaining one hundred issues of the series effectively acting as
an extended coda:
The Cerebus story ends in issue 200 in the sense that [Cerebus] won’t let go of Jaka and won’t
see who and what Jaka is, so whatever progress he is able to make through the rest of his life
is severely limited compared to his potential. There is the rising action from 111 to 200 which
is fitful but largely along a straight line, a vector and largely vertical. From there it’s all rico-
416 Eric Hoffman
Fig. 19.4: from Cerebus 152, 9–10 (December 1991), © 1991 Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.
chet. He’s going to live a long time, so he has to end up somewhere, but the somewhere is
really irrelevant after issue 200. Through his choices, he forfeits his chance to be a major
catalyst in the history of his time and his world and becomes, instead, just a minor functionary.
(Sim 2004)
In Minds, the final section of Mothers & Daughters, Cerebus begins a second Ascen-
sion, traveling past the Moon and out into the outer reaches of the solar system,
and is shown images of key transformative moments from his past in which he
made a decision in that resulted in the suffering of others. Eventually, he hears a
disembodied voice (presented to him in the form of his own thought balloon, thus
making it ambiguous whether he is in fact hearing an actual voice, or whether the
conversation is taking place entirely inside his own head). The voice refers to itself
as ‘Dave,’ who, in the comic’s most overtly metafictional moment, explains to Cere-
bus that he is Cerebus’s creator. ‘Dave’ then tells Cerebus the history of the Cirinists,
thereby providing a second gender-inflected creation myth, this time a female void
consumed by a male light, testing Cerebus, and by extension the audience’s, illu-
sions about the female gender. ‘Dave’ then explains to Cerebus that Cerebus’s love
for Jaka interfered with Cerebus’s original destiny, that everything went wrong for
him as a result of his interest in Jaka, and that all of his decisions subsequent to
that point were emotional in nature and therefore in error. Cerebus disregards the
implications of this revelation, and instead demands that ‘Dave’ make Jaka love
him. In response, ‘Dave’ provides Cerebus with various theoretical futures with
Jaka, each of them with equally tragic outcomes. Despondent, Cerebus requests that
‘Dave’ return him to Estarcion, specifically to a tavern he remembers from his years
as a mercenary.
Importantly, with the characters Victor Reid, a ‘reads’ author Victor Reid (Reid
is, obviously, a homonym for the verb ‘to read’), the thinly-disguised Sim stand-in
Viktor Davis, whose essay, which concludes the Reads storyline, reverses George’s
initial creation myth by positing a ‘Female Void’ consisting of emotion in battle with
the ‘Male Light’ of reason, and especially with ‘Dave’ Sim positions himself as the
fundamental arbiter of truth. It is arguably at this point that Cerebus becomes a
Fig. 19.5: from Form & Void (2002), © 2002 Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.
vehicle for Sim’s more unambiguous explorations of gender politics and, with Rick’s
Story and Latter Days, religion (Sim would personally eventually arrive at his own
hybrid faith, based on Islam and Judeo-Christianity).
After the Mothers and Daughters storyline and its lengthy codas, Guys and Rick’s
Story, and shortly after ‘Dave’s’ departure, the long-absent Jaka arrives at the tavern
where Cerebus is bartender. She and Cerebus decide to undertake a journey to Sand
Hills Creek, in the Northern Territories, where Cerebus grew up. The couple’s
lengthy journey makes up the entirety of Cerebus’s penultimate storyline, Going
Home (#232–265, 1991–2001). Much to Cerebus’s consternation, their voyage is con-
stantly derailed by Jaka’s desire to shop, clothing stores being the female equivalent
of taverns in Cerebus.
In a love triangle that echoes that of Jaka’s Story, Cerebus and Jaka make a
portion of their journey by riverboat, and encounter a writer, F. Stop Kennedy – a
caricature of F. Scott Fitzgerald – a trek that makes up Fall and the River, the second
part of Going Home. With winter looming, Cerebus and Jaka take refuge in a hunting
lodge occupied by Ham Earnestway – a caricature of Ernest Hemingway – and Ear-
nestway’s wife Mary. (Ham, like Cerebus in Melmoth, is in a catatonic state for much
of the narrative, a result of his years of drinking and Mary’s pestering and domineer-
ing.) Upon reaching Sand Hills Creek, Cerebus discovers that his parents have died.
Dejected, Cerebus rejects Jaka, and they separate, this time for good (fig. 19.5). (Typi-
cal of Cerebus, he fails to acknowledge his role in this tragedy; had he and Jaka
taken the journey via her preferred means of travel, they would have undoubtedly
arrived earlier.)
Latter Days, the final narrative arc of Cerebus, is Sim’s most experimental, and
narratively unsuccessful, storyline. Taking place after much of the main cast of Cere-
bus has died, the tone shifts from the elegiac Going Home to outright parody. Al-
most inexplicably, Cerebus becomes a religious leader following his abduction by
the Three Wise Fellows (Sim’s baffling caricature of the Three Stooges, known here
as Mosher, Losher, and Kosher), whose actions, inspired by an erratic, possibly in-
sane religious text, form the basis of a new, ‘Cerebite’ religion. The trio then convin-
418 Eric Hoffman
Fig. 19.6: from Latter Days (2003), © 2003 Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.
ces Cerebus to lead them in a revolt against the Cirinists. The conclusion of the first
part of Latter Days consists of a section entitled Chasing YHWH, an exasperating,
interminable (and visually nearly microscopic) commentary on the Book of Genesis,
as recorded by Konigsberg, the ‘Not-So-Good-Samaritan,’ Sim’s caricature of anoth-
er comedy legend, Woody Allen, who instigates the religious commentary by bring-
ing Cerebus the Torah, but who, as Sim contends in the notes to Latter Days, is
mostly there in order to provide a light comic counterpoint to the heft of the reli-
gious exegesis.
In Latter Days Cerebus pays the ultimate price for his own action/inaction. Hav-
ing led a successful coup against the Cirinists, conquering Estarcion, Cerebus sets
up a fascist utopia, and subsequently retires to a well-guarded Sanctuary from
which he cannot leave, effectively becoming a prisoner of his own making. Reinforc-
ing Sim’s theme that Cerebus has failed to learn from his mistakes – namely, that
women are evil and the cause of his undoing – Cerebus becomes infatuated with
‘New Joanne,’ a journalist and a dead ringer for Jaka. (Whether she actually looks
like her or whether this is a psychological projection remains ambiguous.)
The remainder of Cerebus – collected in the final volume, The Last Day (issues
#289–300, 2003–2004) – concerns the now elderly Cerebus’s interactions with his
son, Shep-Shep, who has arrived at the Sanctuary at a time when it is under siege
by a group of ‘feminist-homosexualists’ led by New Joanne, the ‘New Joannists,’
pursuing such ‘rights’ as pedophilia, zoophilia, juvenile recreational drug use and
lesbian motherhood. As a result, society has undergone a total moral breakdown,
the result of decades of loosened moral standards brought about by an uncon-
strained feminist agenda. This section finds Sim at his most nakedly didactic and
satiric. Cerebus, in an attempt to reclaim his warrior/barbarian role, only manages
to fall, pathetically (and humorously – his final act is a rather pathetic flatulence)
to his death. He finds himself in the afterlife, in what he thinks is Heaven, populated
by nearly every major (deceased) character in Cerebus. He then gradually realizes
that this may in fact be Hell, before being dragged into non-existence, as every-
thing, including the panels, fades into the white of a blank page. Thus, Cerebus
dies just as George predicted, “alone, unmourned, and unloved.” More specifically,
he dies accidentally, falling from his bed, echoing a mysterious prognostication first
introduced in Church & State: “something fell.”

Cerebus contains elements suggestive of 20th century Canada and, in Estarcion’s
position as a pre-industrial world, aspects of the country’s frontier era, particularly
in its portrayal of the desolate, frozen ‘northern’ expanses of this imaginary world,
which also clearly reflects the social makeup of modern Canada, a vast country with
very distinct and almost isolated cultures. These provinces have their own different-
ly structured legislatures, which are not sovereign and have limited constitutional
responsibilities.
Politics in Cerebus, too, has quite similar limited territorial powers, and the gen-
eral aim of most political maneuverings in High Society and Church & State consists
of attempts at gaining executive powers in order to obtain control of the various
territories, with often irrational motives and still more irrational outcomes. The
struggle for power and dominance is eventually folded into Sim’s increasingly domi-
nant anti-feminist themes in Cerebus’s second and third acts, with his depiction of
the struggle between the Kevillists and Cirinists, with the Cirinist takeover setting
the stage for an inevitable clash between the male and female gender, as depicted
in Latter Days.
Given Sim’s willingness throughout Cerebus to shift tones, themes, and even
characterizations, the social order is portrayed as altogether unstable – there is the
preponderance of failed revolutions and Ascensions – tenuous at best, and subject
to continuous upheaval. Subsequent Ascensions, for example, call into question the
veracity of the earlier creation myths, reversing the male-void, female-light dichoto-
my not once but twice. The Judge’s cyclically repeating nature of time, and the
notion of alternating male-and-female-inflected creation, finds a visual correlative
during Astoria’s trial sequence in Church & State, wherein Astoria and Cerebus ex-
change roles as well as genders. Cerebus is later revealed to be a hermaphrodite in
possession of both male and female reproductive organs; his dichotomous sexual
nature reconciling Sim’s split gender creation myth.
George and ‘Dave’ are not isolated examples of unreliable authority, for equally
questionable authorial voices abound. Sim’s reliance on these narrators allows him
the flexibility to shift perspectives, tones, and at times disregard continuity. Where-
as with discrete superhero comics inconsistent chronologies and discontinuities are
the result of constantly shifting teams of writers/artists/editors/publishers, princi-
pally guided by commercial motives, in Cerebus, Sim quite intentionally introduced
unreliable narrative as an integral formal construct. A 300-issue series involving a
large cast of characters, instigated as a parody of Conan that quickly transcended
420 Eric Hoffman
its initiatory parodic genesis into considerably more serious subject matter while
simultaneously expanding its satirical aim, almost demands a consistent formal ap-
paratus to explain away its numerous narrative incongruities.
One of the principal means Sim introduces to allow for its varying realities is
the introduction of a number of authors into the world of Cerebus (among them
Cerebus, the many individuals known as Suenteus Po, Astoria, Oscar the author of
The Daughter of Palnu, a hagiographic biography of Jaka Tavers, his counterpart
Oscar Wilde, Serna/Cirin, F. Stop Kennedy and Ham Earnestway, and fictionalized
depictions of Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, and Sim him-
self). Their identity as authors is crucial: whether they are writing fiction or non-
fiction, they are always involved in constructing realities. Indeed, much of the expo-
sition in Cerebus is epistolary, with each of these authors providing alternate and
competing views of reality. Each of these authors is to be considered an authority
with regards to their individual interpretations, yet none of them, including Sim
himself, are to be viewed as the work’s ultimate authority. (Sim, not his fictional
stand-in but Sim the author in our three-dimensional world, would eventually de-
clare God the ultimate arbiter of reality and therefore Cerebus’s true author.) A fasci-
nating metafictional aspect of Cerebus is the inclusion of two fictional representa-
tions of Sim. The author Victor Reid is, like Sim, the self-perceived victim of an
uncaring, exploitative publishing industry that cares little for creative achievement
beyond its production of further materials to exploit. The transparently Sim-mod-
eled essayist Viktor Davis, in pure metafictional fashion, exists outside the frame-
work of the imaginary aspect of Cerebus as text, commenting and reflecting upon
Cerebus as artifice. The Reid storyline acts as a thinly-veiled critique of the comics
industry; for anyone even vaguely familiar with Sim’s anti-corporate, pro-independ-
ent stance, which by the time of Reads’ publication had developed into something
of a crusade, it is abundantly clear that Reid’s complaints are indistinguishable
from Sim’s (fig. 19.7).
Meanwhile, the character of Rotsieve, the “anti-Victor” (54), first introduced in
Reads (in fact Victor read backwards phonetically), is an obvious stand-in for the
vitriolic anti-feminist Sim. The moral superiority of the crusader Rotsieve prompts
Reid to question his acquiescence to the Cirinist regime, an acquiescence that large-
ly results from the monetary gain he has enjoyed since their ascendancy. Viktor
Davis, on the other hand, an even more obvious alter ego for Sim, is the victim of
a conspiratorial, totalitarian feminist agenda that seeks to install a female-centric
superstructure over all matters both public and private, from politics to interperson-
al relationships. Feminism for Davis is an all-encompassing, malicious agenda
whose aim is, ironically – given feminism’s goal of equality among the sexes – the
absolutist oppression of the male sex.
In effect, all three of Reads’ central protagonists (Cerebus, Reid, and Davis) do
battle with a feminist matriarchy, physically (Cerebus), emotionally (Reid) or men-
tally (Davis). All three are, in their own way, victims of this imposed social order,
Fig. 19.7: from Minds (1996)

and each is subjected to its whims and forced to concede defeat (Reid), to do vio-
lence against others (Cerebus), or to struggle to define and identify the insidious
ways a feminist agenda has crept into and come to transform society (Davis) and
not, to Sim’s mind, for the better. Thus, each of Sim’s protagonists is the victim of
forces largely beyond his control; their argument arises from the “minority view-
point,” and results in part from Sim’s admitted personal tendency to be consistently
“contrary to the accepted consensus on any given subject” (Sim 1991, 7).
The introduction of Viktor Davis, while anachronistic, is not the first time Sim
violates the integrity of the Cerebus timeline or worldview. Sim notably introduces
similar anachronisms in his various satires, most notably the sociopathic and
schizophrenic Roach, who suffers from multiple personality disorder, and assumes
various identities, all of which are parodies of then-popular superheroes. By Latter
Days, when Sim incorporates traced photorealist depictions of Woody Allen, what-
ever is left of Cerebus’s narrative cohesiveness – already destablized by such incon-
gruities as the various chronologies (whether or not the events depicted take place
on Earth or how, in a narrative at first intended to take place in the prehistory of
civilization, Cerebus knows about the Torah) – begins to crumble.
Yet even this rather experimental and uncompromising material follows from
Sim’s original, implied objective with Cerebus: to defy comic convention, whether
it be self-publishing, the use of a sliding scale timeline, the routine replacement of
writer/artist/editor, the emphasis on commercial aspects (sales, advertising, licens-
ing), classic distribution methods, the limitation of storylines to create accessibility,
and so on. Sim extended this urge toward non-conformity in both Cerebus’s routine-
ly shifting yet still masterfully structured narrative and especially in its visual sense.
422 Eric Hoffman
Fig. 19.8: Cerebus issue 20 (September 1980) when reassembled. From Cerebus (1987)
Various sections echo one another via repeated themes and/or settings: the political
and religious themes of High Society and Church & State find their correlative in
Mothers & Daughters, its own four sections reframing the first four books, and book-
ended by the tavern settings of Jaka’s Story, Melmoth, Guys and Rick’s Story; the
love triangles of Jaka’s Story and Fall and the River; the depiction of the disintegrat-
ing artist in Melmoth and Form & Void; the recapitulation of various aspects of the
entire series in Latter Days.
In addition, there is Sim and Gerhard’s omnipresent visual experimentalism,
notably the oft-mentioned eccentric and innovative use of word balloons and letter-
ing. The latter, as explored in the essay “Seeing Sound” by C. W. Marshall (2012),
effectively introduces Sim’s groundbreaking efforts at furthering the potential of
diegetic sound in comics by utilizing these often overlooked visual conventions.
Other visual experiments and innovative uses of perspective include pages which,
if separated and re-assembled, form a large single image (Fig. 19.8), the design of
comics pages on a vertical axis to approximate the style of a Sunday comic strip,
the reproduction of the sensation of Cerebus trapped in a spinning and ascending
tower by designing the page layout so that the reader must rotate the comic 360 de-
grees, uses of decidedly cinematic tracking and zooms, the break up of larger panels
into smaller panels in an effort to convey a motion or transition, and the frequent
Fig. 19.9: from Guys (1997) © 1997 Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.
utilization of photographs and models to recreate depth of field, and architectural

and other diagrammatic accuracy.
During the course of Cerebus, observes essayist Tim Kreider, “Dave Sim had
become one of the best cartoonists in North America. And not just in the excellence
of his technical skill – he was relentlessly inventive and virtuosic. His exuberant
formal experimentation extended from his lettering and paneling to the design of
whole issues … ‘Thou shalt break every law in the book,’ was his injunction to
himself” (Kreider 2011, 340).
5 Reception, Impact, and Theoretical Perspectives

Commercial and critical reception to Cerebus remains sharply divided. Initial re-
sponse to the work was quite positive, with sales exceeding Sim and co-publisher
Loubert’s expectations. Frequenters of then-new brick and mortar comic book
shops, which, benefiting from the newly-emerged direct market, carried dozens of
underground and ground-level titles otherwise unavailable for purchase on news-
stands, enjoyed the comic’s humor, and its knowing, witty mash-up of sword and
sorcery and funny animal genres. As mentioned above, Kim Thompson’s 1979 re-
view of the first 12 issues of Cerebus in The Comics Journal (itself one of Sim’s many
satiric targets) heralded Sim as inheritor of the tradition of Carl Barks’s Duck stories
and was crucial in encouraging Sim to further broaden his narrative and stylistic
and visual pallet. Thompson’s review lent Cerebus an air of critical respectability –
he subsequently conducted an extensive discussion with Sim and Loubert, pub-
lished in the Journal in 1983, Sim’s first major interview, in which Thompson pro-
claimed: “Dave Sim displays the intelligence and wit of a man entirely in tune with
and in control of his craft” (Thompson 1983b, 82–83).
424 Eric Hoffman
By the mid-1980s, Cerebus was at its critical and commercial zenith, selling up-
wards of 30,000 copies per issue (much lower than the worst-selling title by a major
publisher, but still respectable given its limitation to only direct market outlets),
and celebrated as among the most accomplished comic books available. Cerebus
routinely won audience and critical awards, and was featured in the occasional
mainstream article together with the work of other celebrated comics auteurs from
that period, including Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Harvey Pekar.
Unfortunately, Sim sabotaged this critical goodwill in 1994 when, following the pub-
lication of his anti-feminist essay in issue #186, he encountered considerable back-
lash from both readers and critics. In response to issue #186, the February 1993
issue of The Comics Journal published a cover story on Sim, with the headline “Mi-
sogynist Guru of Self-Publishers,” accompanied by a cartoon portraying Sim as a
Nazi guard with naked, emaciated women held captive in a concentration camp;
where the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” should appear on the iron gates, instead is
written “Aardvark-Vanaheim.” The accompanying critical excoriation included re-
sponses from several contributors, including Sim’s ex-wife Loubert.
The section begins with an essay entitled “The Story That Wasn’t: ‘Reads’ [sic]
and the Comics Industry,” by Sim champion Kim Thompson in collaboration with J.
Hagey. “What should be done,” ask Hagey and Thompson rhetorically, “when an
artist expresses [...] ideas or convictions that are utterly repugnant to the majority
of his contemporaries?” According to Hagey and Thompson, Sim argues that
“[a]lmost all women are greedy leeches who prey upon male energy” (1993, 112). A
man’s only recourse is to avoid women at all costs. Hagey and Thompson interpret
this as a “justification of – even a call for – misogyny” (1993, 112). “As a philosophi-
cal stance,” the authors continue, Reads “comes on like a combination of bitter
post-break up barroom rant, biologic conspiracy, and bizarre male Objectivism”
(1993, 112). While Hagey and Thompson do allow for the possibility that the essay
was a Swiftian “provocation inserted into what is, after all, a clearly fictional frame-
work,” Sim’s admission that “[i]t wouldn’t be that big a stretch to categorize [Reads]
as Hate Literature Against Women,” is to Hagey and Thompson a “fair description”
(1993, 112).
Had this essay been published in any medium other than a comic, the authors
allege, “there would have been immediate public uproar [...] at the very least within
the confines of the industry or medium affected” (Thompson and Hagey 1993, 112–
113). As the Journal’s self-described “token feminist,” Anne Rubinstein writes in her
article “The Saddest Fate” that she detects the influence of Norman Mailer in the
Victor Reid story, which is that of a writer unable to complete a major work, whose
progress is interrupted by contractual obligations and relationships with women,
who suffers the final indignity when a baby girl smears strained spinach on his
manuscript. Victor Reid ‘becomes’ Viktor Davis, whose troubles are, to Rubinstein,
far less specific than Victor’s, and the result of a “vast conspiracy” of the “Devour-
ing Rapacious Female Void” (1993, 120). Rubinstein disagrees with Sim on three
points: (1) that the differences between men and women “transcend all our similar-
ities and explain all our behavior”; (2) that in relationships women exert greater
control than men, and; (3) “that there is some amorphous, evil ‘Life Force’ behind
all this, leading women in the great male-controlling conspiracy” (1993, 120).
In the face of these controversies, sales of Cerebus remained somewhat volatile
for the remainder of its run; significant enough for Sim to continue publication of
the comic, though during its final years, sales fell as low as 5,000–8,000 copies per
issue. The general consensus among readers is that the artistic merit of Cerebus is
inconsistent, though readers generally accept that the earlier, more humor-based
storylines are much preferred to the later material, with its frequent forays into
dense text-based sections and odd narrative digressions. Accordingly, High Society
remains the best-selling volume of Cerebus, is generally the recommended starting
place for those readers new to the work, was the first to receive digital treatment,
and is frequently included in ‘best of’ lists, usually accompanied by the warning to
avoid later volumes in the series. Moreover, critics often cite Jaka’s Story as an aes-
thetic high-point to the series; with its limited cast and setting, and its tightly fo-
cused narrative, it is among the most accessible volumes in the series. However,
critical reassessments of later volumes have appeared more recently (Wolk 2005,
Kreider 2011, Hoffman 2012), and praise Sim and Gerhard’s increasingly sophisticat-
ed artwork, their experimentalism, Sim’s mastery of the use of lettering and word
balloons, among other original visual and narrative elements.
Apart from a handful of major assessments that have appeared after the conclu-
sion of the publication of Cerebus and further assessments, most notably Douglas
Wolk’s Believer essay, “Aardvark Politick,” in 2005 and Tim Kreider’s “Irredeemable:
Dave Sim’s Cerebus,” in The Comics Journal in 2011, critical reception to Cerebus
has remained surprisingly scant, especially given the wealth of potential scholarly
approaches the text affords. Blogs and internet reviews, as to be expected, lean
toward the extreme, and accuse Sim of outright misogyny or uncritical accolades,
with little in between. Arguably, Sim’s self-described ‘pariah’ status and the text’s
engagement in ‘anti-feminist’ diatribe has limited its potential scholarly audience,
yet similar controversies – the nearest, and most obvious, comparison is to Ezra
Pound’s fascism in The Cantos – have not resulted in comparable neglect. That Cere-
bus is a comic book, as opposed to an epic modern poem, a form that has until
quite recently existed in something of a literary ghetto, may also be a contributing
factor.
A second roundtable was published in the October/November 2004 issue of The
Comics Journal, following the completion of Cerebus. The first essay, “Can Cerebus
Survive Dave Sim?” by Rich Kreiner, poses the central question: is it possible for
Cerebus as a creative work to overcome its creator’s polemics? Kreiner says yes,
pointing to the work of Leni Riefenstahl, Ezra Pound and Richard Wagner (2004,
101). In his essay “Quixote Triumphant,” longtime Sim critic R. Fiore accuses him
of “tilting at windmills,” namely “feminists, Marxists and homosexualists,” whom
426 Eric Hoffman
Fig. 19.10: from Reads (1994) © 1994 Aardvark-

Vanaheim, Inc.
Sim blames “for every depravity committed” in the name of pluralism. Since his
religious awakening, Sim views any disagreement with his views as “not only wrong
but immoral” (Fiore 2004, 103). In fact, Sim’s outspokenness raises the question of
the effect of an artist’s views on his or her artwork. Fiore (in his typically rhetorically
overheated style that, like Sim’s, seems written to provoke) compares Sim’s Cerebus
to Hitler writing a great oratorio about killing Jews. In the end, he observes, it is
best to place the aesthetic and moral qualities of the work into separate categories,
that, in the case of Sim, beliefs do not necessarily invalidate his art on the basis
that they are so clearly outside the mainstream and therefore of no real threat to
anyone.
Thankfully, enjoyment of Cerebus does not require the reader to confront Sim’s
beliefs head-on; one can take them or leave them. Observes Fiore: “The bitterness
and self-pity that are often on display in the explanatory material is almost entirely
quarantined from the comics. Whatever his peregrinations as a philosopher, [Sim]
remains a storyteller with a storyteller’s instincts” (Fiore 2004, 104), though Cerebus
“jumped the shark with the anti-climax of Church & State [and] Cerebus’s conversa-
tion with the Judge.” At that time, “Sim made his decision for self-indulgence.... His
motto from that point on seemed to be ‘Whatever I do is right’” (Fiore 2004, 105).
After Church & State, Sim seemed less and less interested in Cerebus and more inter-
ested in the pursuit of other subjects, most notably his eleven-issue meditation on
Oscar Wilde’s death in Melmoth, or his extended prose sections in Reads. Had aes-
thetics been Sim’s primary concern, he would have then wrapped up the series
around the mid-way point and gone on to other things; however, Sim was afraid of
losing his economic base at the same time he was determined to finish the 300 is-
sues he had promised; therefore he made the decision to have Cerebus fit his extra-
literary interests.
Arguably the most visible assessment came in 2005, with the publication of
Douglas Wolk’s Believer essay, subsequently reprinted in his widely-distributed col-
lection Reading Comics (2008). In his essay, Wolk describes Cerebus as “an absolute
masterpiece – one of the most ambitious and fully realized narratives of the past
century. And its flaws are plentiful, wide, and maddening, and penetrate straight to
its core.” Similarly, Tim Kreider’s 2011 assessment recognizes the “magnitude of the
project, its stylistic innovation and virtuosity, and its influence on other artists,” yet
acknowledges that Sim’s “idiosyncratic and controversial views on the sexes, poli-
tics and religion […] alienated a lot of his audience” (342). Kreider also criticizes
Cerebus for being “too much a product of, and too narrowly concerned with, the
world of comics ever to become the kind of breakout critical or commercial success
as, say, Maus, Fun Home or Persepolis.” But, to Kreider, “the main impediment to
Dave Sim’s literary reputation is Dave Sim himself. […] Sim’s controversial ideas are
not peripheral to his work; he makes them its central message and purpose” (2011,
343).
6 Conclusion
Cerebus is an expansive text, that ranges from humorous to extravagant to violent
and grotesque. Furthermore, its distinctly postmodern foregrounding of its own ap-
paratus allows Cerebus the method – as satire, as parody, as an act of autobiogra-
phy, as a black and white comic book that, for most of its publication, existed in a
literary ghetto – to revel in its outsiderness, to comment on everything from comic
books to politics to religion to gender, and to criticize society for its immorality and
social transgressions, real or imagined. Cerebus also manages, in the midst of this
somewhat didactic program, to provide a fully realized fictional world, and within
it, a vast narrative of epic proportion, unique within the comic book medium. As
with its precursors, Cerebus is very much a product of its time and place. Fourteen
years after the final issue, it is clear that this work remains, and will remain, Sim’s
magnum opus. There is no question that Cerebus had a profound effect on the com-
ics medium, yet it is difficult to gauge Cerebus’s continued reputation among read-
ers and critics, or to predict how future generations of readers and comics creators
will come to view this brilliant and maddening work.
428 Eric Hoffman
7 Bibliography
7.1 Works Cited
“Blood and Thunder.” The Comics Journal 176 (April 1995): 5–10.
Cosh, Colby. “Our Northern Neighbors, the Cirinists.” The Comics Journal 263 (2004): 125–128.
Fiore, R. “Quixote Triumphant.” The Comics Journal 263 (2004): 104–111.
Hoffman, Eric, ed. Cerebus the Barbarian Messiah: Essays on the Epic Graphic Satire of Dave Sim
and Gerhard. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012.
Hoffman, Eric and Dominick Grace, eds. Dave Sim: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2013.
Kreider, Tim. “Irredeemable: Dave Sim’s Cerebus.” The Comics Journal 301 (2011): 337–375.
Kreiner, Rich. “Can Cerebus Survive Dave Sim?” The Comics Journal 263 (2004): 101–102.
Marschall, C.W. “Seeing Sound.” Cerebus the Barbarian Messiah: Essays on the Epic Graphic
Satire of Dave Sim and Gerhard. Ed. Eric Hoffman. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. 127–148.
Rubenstein, Anne. “The Saddest Fate.” The Comics Journal 174 (1993): 120.
Sim, Dave. Cerebus issues 1 through 64 (1977–1984). Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim.
Sim, Dave. High Society. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1986.
Sim, Dave. Cerebus. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1987a.
Sim, Dave. Church & State I. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1987b.
Sim, Dave. “About Last Issue,” Following Cerebus 2 (2004): 36–40.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Cerebus issues 65 through 300 (1984–2004). Kitchener, Ontario:
Aardvark-Vanaheim.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Church & State II. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1988.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Jaka’s Story. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1990.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Melmoth. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1992.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Cerebus Zero. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1993a.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Flight. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1993b.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Women. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1994.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Reads. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1995.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Minds. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1996.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Guys. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1997a.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Rick’s Story. Kitchener: Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1997b.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Going Home. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 1999.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Form & Void. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 2001.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. Latter Days. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 2003.
Sim, Dave and Gerhard. The Last Day. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 2004.
Thompson, Kim. “Good Aardvark Art.” The Comics Journal 52 (1979): 25–26.
Thompson, Kim. “Dave and Deni Sim Part One.” The Comics Journal 82 (1983a): 66–78.
Thompson, Kim. “Dave and Deni Sim Part Two.” The Comics Journal 83 (1983b): 59–125.
Thompson, Kim and J. Hagey. “The Story That Wasn’t: ‘Reads’ and the Comics Industry.” The
Comics Journal 174 (1993): 112–117.
Wolk, Douglas. “Dave Sim: Aardvark Politick.” Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and
What They Mean. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2007. 289–303.
7.2 Further Reading

Beaty, Bart. “Pickle, Poot, and the Cerebus Effect.” The Comics Journal 207 (1998): 1–2.
Blackmore, Tim. “Cerebus: From Aardvark to Vanaheim, Reaching for Creative Heaven in Dave
Sim’s Hellish World.” Canadian Children’s Literature 71 (1993): 57–78.
Brownstein, Charles. “Dave Sim: 20 Years of Cerebus.” Feature Magazine (1997a): 4–30.
Brownstein, Charles. “Gerhard: 20 Years of Cerebus.” Feature Magazine (1997b): 31–37.
DeCandido, Keith R.A. “Talking Heads.” The Comics Journal 134 (1990): 38–41.
Domsch, Sebastian. “From Hyper-Male Aardvarks to the Female Void: Gender Politics in Cerebus.”
Politics in Fantasy Media: Essays on Ideology and Gender in Fiction, Film, Television and
Games. Ed. Gerold Sedlmayr and Nicole Waller. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014. 72–84.
Grace, Dominick. “Aardvarkian Gothic.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8.6 (2017): 560–
571.
Groenewegen, David. “Does This Seem Right to You? Stories Within Cerebus.” The Comics Journal
263 (2004): 118–120.
Jolly, Don. “Interpretive Treatments of Genesis in Comics: Robert Crumb and Dave Sim.” Journal of
Religion and Popular Culture 25.3 (2013): 333–343.
McDaniel, Anita K. “Dave Sim on Guys.” International Journal of Comic Art 7.1 (2005): 473–484.
Rothenberg, Kelly. “Cerebus: An Aardvark on the Edge (A Brief History of Dave Sim and His
Independent Comic Book).” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1900 to
Present 2.1 (2003): n. pag.
Sim, Dave. Collected Letters 2004. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 2005
Sim, Dave. Collected Letters 2. Kitchener, Ontario: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 2008
Sim, Dave. “On Writing Cerebus.” Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Ed. Pat
Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. 41–46.
Spurgeon, Tom. “Dave Sim.” The Comics Journal 184 (1996): 68–106.
Spurgeon, Tom. “Dave Sim Part II.” The Comics Journal 192 (1996): 69–89.
Martin Lund
20 Will Eisner: A Contract with God
Abstract: Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978)
marked the beginning of a second phase in the writer-artist’s career. It has been
called the ‘first graphic novel’ and has been hailed as a central text in the emer-
gence of the ‘graphic novel’ as a cultural phenomenon. This chapter presents and
discusses formal aspects of Contract, elucidates its productive context, and discuss-
es its reception. It shows how Contract was neither the first graphic novel nor the
most important early one. Instead, it argues that the promotion of these ideas has
contributed to a self-marginalizing discourse among a certain type of comics fans,
and ends with the hope that Eisner scholarship can move beyond repeating com-
mon myths and engaging in uncritical celebration of the writer-artist, so as to better
promote critical understanding of his work.
Key Terms: Will Eisner, antisemitism, Jewishness, graphic novel, authorship
1 Introduction
Will Eisner (1917–2005) is a man who, in comics circles, usually needs no introduc-
tion. His career spanned most of US comic book history, from the days of the mid-
1930–1940s Golden Age of superhero comics to the early-21st century dawn of the
graphic novel’s status as, supposedly, one of the nation’s fastest growing genres.
He helped create the studio system, helped popularize the term “graphic novel,”
and was an active proponent of the idea that comics lacks and should strive for
cultural legitimacy in US culture. His life’s story has been told in three different
books, all of which, at best, straddle the line that separates biography from hagiogra-
phy (Andelman 2005; Schumacher 2010; Levitz 2015), and his work has been praised
countless times, including in a bibliographical companion (Couch and Weiner 2004),
the introduction of which describes him as possessing “eldritch powers” capable of
reaching “some Platonic ideal of hyper-expressivity” (O’Neil 2004, 11).
Eisner’s is an interesting persona. It is common to see his work acclaimed as
trend-setting, game-changing, and brilliant. But to see it discussed at any length,
or with any critical depth, is a rarity. As communications scholar Greg H. Smith
notes about Eisner’s The Spirit (1940–1952) – in an endnote – “[w]e tend to misre-
member The Spirit as being more innovative than it probably was, partly because
of Eisner’s own guidance. […] Most of Eisner’s Spirit stories are well-wrought exam-
ples of the comics practice of the day; only rarely do they become experimental”
(2010, 198n4). Conversely, Eisner himself was good at compartmentalizing his pub-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-024
432 Martin Lund
lic and private identities, keeping interviews focused on his comics advocacy and
innovation while talking little about his life, and otherwise influencing what was
known about him (Lund 2016, 120–121). This image-making extended to his use of
stand-ins for himself in many long-form comics, in which he often framed himself
as an artistic dreamer, and through his non-comics works, from Comics and Sequen-
tial Art to the series of interviews he conducted with comics creators and collected
in the book Will Eisner’s Shop Talk (Lund 2016; Eisner 1985; 2001). The upshot of
this is that Eisner’s image in US comics history has been shaped largely by Eisner
himself and by a loose community of devoted fans.
While Eisner’s work has not always been uniformly received with accolades and
hosannas, it is worth noting that Eisner’s supporters have at times been fierce in
their response to his detractors. For examples, one of Eisner’s biographers specu-
lates about the motives of Gary Groth, editor of The Comics Journal, for writing a
damning review of one of Eisner’s works: “When Eisner’s books were reviewed they
were treated as if they were stone tablets issued from on high [thought Groth], and
Eisner was treated as if he were the man destined to deliver comicdom to the Prom-
ised Land” (Schumacher 2010, 244). Feeling that Eisner was getting off easy when
others of his generation and stature were being taken to task for their participation
in an often exploitative comics industry past and present, Groth wrote a review that
in his own words was “harsh (I winced a couple times upon re-reading it), but it
was honest, accurate, and, of course, utterly suicidal” (Groth 2005, 197). The re-
sponse was swift, and sometimes savage; because Groth questioned Eisner’s repre-
sentation of his own role in the creation of the exploitative studio system, Groth
was caricatured as having accused Eisner of “crimes against humanity” and was
himself accused of McCarthyism (The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon
Library & Museum, Will Eisner Collection, WEE TEMP10, first unmarked folder
[#59]). Eisner, who had been a frequent contributor to the Journal, never worked
with Groth again.
It would go too far to claim that there has been little critical study of Eisner’s
work because of a fear of similar backlash. But it is important to note that Eisner
has had such strong support, and that he continues to be regarded as a central
figure of US comics history. As I hope to show in the following pages, however, his
importance has sometimes been inflated, and this inflation has contributed in pal-
pable and significant ways to the spread of a harmful self-marginalizing discourse
within a segment of US comics fandom. This process began in earnest in 1978, when
Eisner returned to commercial, narrative comics production with his long-form com-
ic A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, long regarded as the first, or at
least the most important, graphic novel.

After finding reasonable success, first with his studio and then with his Spirit, which
had been moderately popular in its day but no breakout hit, Eisner left the world of
mass-audience directed commercial comics production in 1952. For a decade and a
half, he instead focused on creating work for the Armed Forces, for the Department
of Labor, and for his own publishing house, Poorhouse Press, which published nov-
elty books for steady profits (Schumacher 2010, 190–91). For most of the 1960s,
which by any measure was an eventful decade in US comics history, Eisner stayed
on the sidelines. But he was not completely forgotten. In 1965, writer and comics-
creator Jules Feiffer published The Great Comic Book Heroes, a short book on super-
heroes in which he singled out his friend and former employer for praise (2003).
Following Feiffer’s book, Eisner and his Spirit came to the attention of more and
more people, and a snowball effect was set in motion. In short order, what comics
journalist R. Fiore has dubbed “the cult of Will” emerged, a “following that believed
in Eisner as an artist and was determined not to let him remain obscure” (2005, 183).
Eisner, it seems, relished his newfound fame, and helped nourish it. But he did
not, at first, return to the business in any lasting way. Multiple late-1960s responses
to fan mail show him saying that he had no plans to ever get back into comics (e. g.
WEE 1 16). In a 1976 interview with the Boston University News, he said that, while
his Poorhouse Press’s humorous Gleeful Guides were not the kind of work he is
usually identified with, “it is Will Eisner today” (WEE 1 24). This distance would not
last. Since the late 1960s, he had been a frequent comics convention attendant and
guest. He was regularly sent information about new comics. He looked at the under-
ground comix with great interest, if also sometimes with apprehension over their
explicit content. And he followed developments in Europe with a keen interest.
What he saw was a supposedly different way of making comics, a way in which, as
he would repeat many times in the years to come, comics creators could produce
work that had “something to say” (see Inge 2011). This all came together in his
decision to produce Contract which, as discussed more below, he sometimes present-
ed as the culmination of his own path, more than as a joining in with long-running
developments. As he put it in one 1978 interview: “I am at work now, hopefully not
singlehandedly – I’d like to be joined by other artists – in an effort to produce litera-
ture in sequential art form, or what you would call ‘comic art’” (yronwode 2011, 67).
One final aspect of Contract’s creative context should be discussed before turn-
ing to its style, substance, and reception. In 1978, the US was at the tail end of
the so-called “ethnic revival” or “ethnic reverie.” Where US popular culture had
previously prized homogeneity, it was increasingly coming to not only allow for,
but actually encourage, ethnically marked cultural production (Frye Jacobson 2008,
chap. 1). Sociologist Herbert Gans noted in 1979, the year after Contract came out,
that as ethnicity became more visible, older entertainers were re-embracing their
roots either to spur their careers or because of a personal conversion: “[E]ither they
434 Martin Lund
have acted more publicly and thus visibly than they did in the past, or in respond-
ing to a hospitable cultural climate, they have openly followed ethnic impulses that
they had previously suppressed” (1979, 199). Further, as historian Bruce Schulman
notes,
the appeal lay in the quest – that family, lineage, and ancestry aroused the imaginations of
Americans – that everyone wanted to celebrate roots, explore identities, cut themselves off
from the run-of-the-mill main and emphasize a distinctive heritage. Americans rediscovered
their families, their ethnicity, their spirituality. They looked back – but almost exclusively at
themselves. (2002, 77; see Goldstein 2006, 212–126)
In Contract, Eisner certainly looked inward, through the inclusion of Jewish el-
ements and the revisitation of the tenement world, but even more so in another,
less obvious respect. Time and again, he would stress how Contract contributed to
the medium of comics (e. g. yronwode 2011, 67; White, Berger, and Barson 2011, 84–
85). In doing so, he kept the comic’s personal significance to his life close to his
vest. It would take decades before he revealed his true inspiration for Contract’s title
vignette. Still, in his introduction to the 2006 W. W. Norton edition of the work, he
wrote that the creation of Frimme’s story “was an exercise in personal agony. My
only daughter, Alice, had died of leukemia eight years before the publication of this
book. My grief was still raw. My heart still bled. In fact, I could not even bring
myself to discuss the loss. […] This is the first time in thirty-four years I have openly
discussed it” (Eisner 2006, xvi). In the foreword to another Norton collection of
Eisner’s work, comics creator Scott McCloud wrote: “[I] never once heard Will or his
wife, Ann, mention the central tragedy of their life – the death of their daughter,
Alice” (Eisner 2007, 11). Although Eisner kept the background of the title vignette a
secret, the emotional investment shines through.
But it is not the only place where Eisner builds on personal experience (e. g.
yronwode 2011, 68–71; Mougin 1991, 68). Although he sometimes called Contract
autobiographical, that does not mean that he was writing autobiography in the clas-
sical sense, as the biography of a person by that same person (see Lejeune 1982,
193) (↗9 Life Writing). He certainly did not, as Yiddishist Jeremy Dauber claims,
attempt “unmediated autobiographical intimacy” (Dauber 2006, 289). Even if stories
told in comics were not always-already mediated, there are far too many protago-
nists and too many experiences that Eisner could never claim as his own in Contract
for such a claim to be remotely plausible. “I’m desperately eager to achieve believ-
ability,” Eisner would later tell an interviewer: “Not so much realism as believabili-
ty” (Robinson 2011, 188). In his original preface, he said that although Contract’s
stories and people are “compounded from recall,” they were “things which I would
have you accept as real” (1996). Thus, his references to the stories being “autobio-
graphical” or written from memory, about “the things I know,” as he so often put
it, are perhaps best regarded as claims to authenticity.
During Eisner’s absence from commercial comics, authenticity had become a
“hot commodity” on the marketplace: consumers wanted authentic identities, au-
thentic experiences, and, perhaps most important in connection with Contract, they
wanted the goods and texts they consumed to be authentically produced, which
increasingly implied a connection to ethnicity (Halter 2000, chap. 1; Frye Jacobson
2008, chap. 1, 123–124). Eisner would make such claims to authenticity repeatedly
throughout his career. Sometimes he spoke about Depression-era New York, some-
times about Jews and Jewish culture, but always with an eye toward reassuring
readers that he was producing without artifice from life and memory, from personal
experience, from things he had seen, or, importantly, from stories he had been told
by others (e. g. Luciano 2011, 93–94; Fingeroth 2011, 212, 212; Mougin 1991).

3.1 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns
Contract is a roughly 180-page collection of four interconnected comics vignettes,

set in a Depression-era tenement building on the fictional Dropsie Avenue in the
Bronx. The title vignette tells the story of Frimme Hersh, a Hasidic (or “Ultra-Ortho-
dox”) Jew, who after the death of his adopted daughter feels that God has abrogated
the contract that Frimme established with Him as a youth fleeing persecution in
what is now Georgia. In his grief and anger, Frimme decides to give up his pious
ways, and instead embarks on a real estate career. Although successful, Frimme
feels that something is missing in his life, so he has a beth din, or a council of three
rabbis, draft him a new contract. Confident that he now has an unbreakable con-
tract, Frimme challenges God and falls down dead from a heart attack (Eisner 2006,
4–61). As a darkly ironic addendum, the stone upon which Frimme’s first contract
was written is later found by a pious boy from the neighborhood, who signs his
name to it and so “enters” into his own contract with God, possibly beginning the
bleak cycle anew.
The second vignette, “The Street Singer,” follows Eddie, a down-on-his-luck
man who sings in the alleys between tenements for pocket change. One day, a
former diva hears him sing and decides to take him under her wing, to make him a
star, and to take him as her lover. She gives Eddie money to buy new clothes and
to make himself presentable, which he promptly spends on booze, drinking more
than his fill and forgetting where she lives. The final page of the vignette shows
Eddie back in an alley, singing for scraps (Eisner 2006, 65–92). The third vignette,
“The Super,” is about Mr. Scruggs, the tenement’s German, anti-Semitic, and antiso-
cial super, who keeps to himself when not angrily responding to tenants’ complaints.
A lonely man, he is tempted by a young girl who knows he is a lecherous man into
paying for a peek at her underwear. The situation escalates and in the end, hated
by the tenants and hounded by the police, he commits suicide (95–121). Finally, in
“Cookalein,” a young man and his family travel to a summer resort in the Catskills
436 Martin Lund
Mountains. It is part coming-of-age story rooted in Eisner’s own teenage experiences,

and part exploration of human sexuality and courting practices (125–80).
In the preface to the original edition of Contract, Eisner briefly discussed the
work’s urban focus:
In the four stories, housed in a tenement […] I have tried to tell how it was in a corner of
America still to be revisited […] It is important to understand the times and the place in which
these stories are set. Fundamentally, they were not unlike the way the world of today is for
those who live in crowded proximity and in depersonalized housing. The importance of deal-
ing with the ebb and flow of city existence and the overriding effort to escape it never seems
to change for the inhabitants. (Eisner 1996)
Decades later, when W. W. Norton reissued the comic, Eisner would strike the same
note. Along with his later long-form comics A Life Force (1988) and Dropsie Avenue
(1995), he describes Contract as “stories drawn from the endless flow of happenings
characteristic of city life” (Eisner 2006, xiii). Contract itself, he writes, is a “book
about tenement life” (xvi).
Certainly, with the exception of the title story, Contract’s vignettes are all stories
about city life. They are permeated with alienation, anonymity, and, as would be-
come a hallmark of Eisner’s work from this date on, survival in the city. It is not a
pleasant view Eisner presents, which likely is due to his having a fairly negative
view of city life, if one believes what he told fellow comics-creator Frank Miller:
“[T]he city […] has become a place of danger. In the beginning, the jungle […] was
the area of danger. [W]e became sovereign over the beasts in the field, and we’ve
replaced jungle with city. The city has become the jungle, the place of danger” (Eis-
ner and Miller 2005, 260). That is not to say that all of Contract is a bleak expression
of the war of all against all; the one neighbor of Frimme’s that we see is friendly,
for example, and many of the tenants in “Super” seem to get along well enough.
But Eddie is selfish and his loss at the end feels deserved, while Scruggs struggles
against not only the little girl, but his whole building, and most of the cast of “Cook-
alein” is willing to go to great lengths to get a leg up in the race for sexual release.
But if Eisner’s framing of Contract through the years is any indication, its con-
tents are less important than its form. Throughout his career, Eisner was a self-
styled comics advocate. The oldest known example of his speaking out for his cho-
sen medium can be found in a Philadelphia Record interview published on October
13, 1941, when the daily Spirit comic strip premiered:
The comic strip, he explains, is no longer a comic strip but, in reality, an illustrated novel. It
is new and raw in form just now, but material for limitless intelligent development. And even-
tually and inevitably it will be a legitimate medium for the best of writers and artists. It is
already the embryo – Eisner apologizes for the trite phrase – of a new art form. And he believes
in it and will stay with it proudly, and without apologies. (Abbott 1941)
This quote should not be confused with Eisner’s later advocacy of comics as ‘se-
quential art’ and his division of comics into ‘high’ and ‘low.’ He is talking in this
interview about what he saw as comics’ potential and about what he saw as a meas-
urable gain in quality of popular, mass-distributed comic strips – “In those days
[when Eisner founded his studio] anything went […]. But it has changed unbeliev-
ably now” (Abbott 1941) – and he speaks about this increased popularity with what
seems like a completely earnest celebration of “the average intelligence rate of chil-
dren,” the same category of readers he would later come to caricature as “ten-year
old cretins from Kansas City” (Burkett 2011, 108).
Indeed, in later years, Eisner would become quite vocal about what he increas-
ingly perceived and described as the shortcomings of popular comics. He would
stand on the frontlines of the long-running project to ‘consecrate’ comics within the
halls of culture (see Gabilliet 2010, pt. 3), and he would express his critiques in
ways that were often harsh and negative, and sometimes even framed in racialized
language (Lund 2016). Although he had already spoken in terms of consecration in
interviews and responses to fan mail, it was in Contract’s original preface that he
first systemically articulated his view. There is very little in this preface about the
contents of Contract, about why Eisner felt the story was worth telling, or about
why anybody should care about it as a specific, individual work, and much about
its style and ‘worth’ for the furtherance of the comics medium’s standing and pro-
gression towards ‘art.’ On the latter topic, he writes first about how he began experi-
menting with comics with a view towards its ultimate potential (it could “deal with
meaningful themes”) in the 1940s, with Spirit. Contract, he writes, was “a harvest
at last from seedlings I had carried around with me all those years,” gathered at a
time when “sequential art stands at the threshold of joining the cultural establish-
ment” (Eisner 1996, n.pag.).
3.2 Literary and Graphic Aesthetics
On Contract’s style, Eisner goes on to stress that, “[i]n telling these stories, I tried
to adhere to a rule of realism which requires that caricature and exaggeration accept
the limits of actuality” (Eisner 1996, np). He also writes about how he let the story
dictate the form and use of page-space, regardless of established conventions, and
about how he integrated text into the images, so that it would be “interlocked with
the art.” What he wanted to do was to “see all these threads of a single fabric and
exploit them as a language. If I have been successful at this, there will be no inter-
ruption in the flow of narrative because the pictures and the text are so totally
dependent on each other as to be inseparable for even a moment.” Whether or not
he was successful in his ambition is worth considering at some length.
On the topic of Eisner’s use of the page in Contract, one sometimes reads about
how innovative his handling of frames was. Smith, for example, claims that Eisner
seems “energized by the innovative work of comics artists in the 60s and 70s” and
to have been emboldened “to make good on his nascent tendency to play with the
438 Martin Lund
panel border” when other comics creators had started doing so, citing Neil Adam
and Jim Steranko as examples (2010, 195). In his preface, Eisner writes that, in Con-
tract, the “normal frames (or panels) associated with sequential (comic book) art
are allowed to take on their own integrity. For example, in many cases an entire
page is set out as a single panel” (1996, n.pag.). However, for much of Contract, the
departure from supposed convention comprises merely the removal of the panel
border or, as Eisner points out, the use of a full page for a panel. Neither of this
was novel at the time, and the latter kind of example, filled with text as many of
those pages are, is more reminiscent of an illustrated book than of comics as tradi-
tionally understood (e. g. Eisner 2006, 4–23).
One can sense, between the lines of Smith and Eisner’s descriptions, a common
caricature of American mainstream comics as a field in which deviation from a rigid
grid structure is uncommon. This may have been relatively true in the earliest days
of the US comic book industry (including some of the work Eisner himself did in
the 1930s and 1940s), but it had become far less common by the time of Contract.
Moreover, experimentation with panels and borders and a high degree of awareness
of the medium’s limits had been around long before Adams and Steranko. George
McManus, in his comic strip Bringing Up Father (1938–2000), for example, had his
characters climb between tiers of panels or unravel the borders around them (Har-
vey 2013), while George Herriman’s Krazy Cat (1913–1944) was a laboratory for for-
mal experimentation (Herriman et al. 1986). While not as wildly experimental as the
cited strip artists, the creators of the earliest Batman stories in 1939 frequently let
weapons, as well as the hero’s cape and ears bleed out past the panel border (Finger
et al. 2005).
Indeed, with reference to Herriman and many other strip artists, as well as to
comic book artists from the 1940s onward, comics historian Joseph Witek has noted
that:
[t]here is nothing notable in panels of action being larger than panels of speech or reflection.
In fact, the technique of varying the size of the comics panel to fit the action contained within
is one of the fundamental gestures of the comics medium […] Given the freedom to design
page layouts from scratch in the comic-book format, most artists almost immediately preferred
to modify regular grids by eliminating one or more vertical panel borders to form double-or
triple [sic] width panels, thus varying the visual effect without actually altering the basic di-
mensions of the basic building-block panels. (2009, 152–53)
Everything described here can be found in the earliest Superman stories (Siegel
et al. 2006), just as it can be seen in Eisner’s earliest Spirit strips (Eisner 2000).
Witek goes on to talk about variations of panel size, as well as other “flamboy-
ant technical gestures” related to panel design. Examples include experimentation
with the panel itself, from the use of different types of panel borders, wavy or jagged
lines, or changes in panel shape, such as the use of circular, triangular, or more
unusually shaped panels. Witek also cites blackout panels, extreme close-ups, often
within circular “cameo” panels, and a frequent use of figures or panel elements that
leave the panel and seem to emerge onto the physical page itself and making the
panel only a notional “container” for whatever action it depicts, as in the Batman
example cited above (2009, 154). Indeed, Swiss cartoonist and teacher Rodolphe
Töpffer included a meditation on panel size variation in his 1845 “Essay on Physiog-
nomy” (1965, 9–10). “[T]he early comic book artists,” notes Witek, “sensed the possi-
bilities inherent in shaping narratives using the page itself as the fundamental unit”
(2009, 155). In terms of its overall design, then, Contract is less radical than its my-
thology might suggest.
This being said, one of Contract’s “flamboyant technical gestures” is worth not-
ing in particular. As Smith rightly points out, Eisner’s latter-day work often incorpo-
rates architecture into the page layout (Smith 2010, 192–93). Doors, windows, and
arches are particularly common in this regard, and all three features are used
throughout Contract to act as panel borders (see Eisner 2006, 8, 10, 29, 41, 71, 95,
99, 112, 128, 165, 166). Walls and alleys are also enlisted for similar double duty (65–
67, 92, 116), as is the NYC skyline (87). Similarly, windows and doors are repeatedly
used to serve as frames within frames (11, 14, 20, 22, 68, 121, 126, 127), providing a
sense of claustrophobia or introducing a new narrative element, for example. Al-
though this is arguably a creative use of the page, and one that would remain part
of Eisner’s visual repertoire for the rest of his life, it is not all that novel. Characters
are more often simply framed by architectural elements when they enter or leave a
room (e. g. 10, 99) or are standing in an alley (e. g. 67). The biggest exception is
perhaps when two characters are seen through different windows (41), in what is
simultaneously readable as a single panel and as two separate ones. But the wild
experimentation with form and page layout that had characterized Herriman and
many of his contemporaries is absent, and the grid throughout Contract is essential-
ly either upheld or avoided through single-page compositions. Eisner’s variations
on the border, then, at most constitute a difference in degree from the panel uses
Witek discusses, not in kind.
Along with the theme of survival discussed briefly above, Contract did introduce
another element that, while not unique to Eisner, would be a hallmark of almost all
his work to come: melodrama. As Smith notes about the visual language of Eisner’s
work, his dramatic style makes the writer-artist “appear to be a retrograde figure
bogged down in melodramatic content from the nineteenth century” (2010, 183).
While Smith goes too far in suggesting specific works as providing Eisner with inspi-
ration without biographical support, he is correct in stressing Eisner’s emphasis on
broad gestures and unnatural and exaggerated posing. Smith’s own example from
Contract is when Frimme throws his head back, raises his arms, and screams to
God: “NO! Not to me! You can’t do this […] We have a contract!!” (186; Eisner 2006,
23). There are multiple other examples of this kind of broad gesture and visual char-
acterization where the displayed character trait or emotion is emphasized to the
point where it becomes over-explicit and almost a caricature of itself, as in the shots
of Scruggs that emphasize his lechery (107, 110). These moments can be described,
440 Martin Lund
with Smith’s phrasing, as “quiet stoppages of action,” events that can be used to
great effect by “depicting a moment where something must change before the story
can move forward” (Smith 2010, 188), but in Contract the stoppage is rarely quiet,
and caricature and exaggeration often do not remain bounded within the limits of
“actuality.”
Eisner also spoke of lettering. The title page of Contract’s first story has “A Con-
tract With God” etched into a piece of stone. The first three words are designed to
look like Roman lettering, while the last one is intended to look “Hebraic.” Eisner
used this page to illustrate his thoughts about lettering in his 1985 handbook Comics
and Sequential Art. “Lettering, treated ‘graphically’ and in the service of the story,”
he wrote, “functions as an extension of the imagery.” It “provides the mood, a narra-
tive bridge, and the implication of sound” (10–11). The stone itself is supposed to
“imply the permanence and evoke the universal recognition of Moses’ Ten Com-
mandments on a stone tablet” (11), even though the design is unlike most tradition-
al depictions of Moses’s tablets and nearly-identical to the one upon which Frimme
wrote his contract.
Again, numerous other examples can be given. The title for “The Street Singer”
looks like wind-blown paper or laundry (Eisner 2006, 65). When Frimme hears of
his daughter’s death, he begins speaking to God in an accusing tone. His questions
are punctuated with stylized question marks that, again, look vaguely “Hebraic” (in
this case, they resemble the Hebrew letter ‫ ל‬with a diacritical “dot” beneath it; 25–
26). Another character’s singing is embellished with a brief (nonsensical) musical
annotation (80), and Scruggs’s sorrow when he finds his dog poisoned by the little
girl is viscerally expressed in the lettering of his anguished cry (113).
Contract was not the first time Eisner embellished his captions and dialogue in
such ways. Each week, his Spirit strip had its title incorporated into a graphic design
that was usually somehow related to the story that followed. He also sometimes
played with dialogue text, in order to fit the mood of the story, often when effects
that emphasized horror or insanity were needed. This has become a famous part of
Eisner’s legacy, particularly the title designs. Possible homages to that type of de-
sign can be found in numerous comic books, as in the title pages for November–
December 1968’s X-Men #51, penciled by Jim Steranko. However, even though Eisner
is now perhaps the most written-about cartoonist to have made each title unique,
he was not the first to do so. One early example is cartoonist Billy Ireland, working
in Columbus, Ohio, who started doing the exact same thing in his Sunday cartoon/
comic strip “The Passing Show” sometime in or around 1919, and continued to do
so until his death in 1935 (for examples, see Shelton Caswell 2007, 105–203).
In Contract, Eisner frequently integrates text and image well, making words drip
with rainwater, blaze with anguish, or otherwise connect with the emotions they
represent in ways far more creative than the italics, boldface, or underlining (or all
three simultaneously, as was a hallmark of evangelical comics propagandist Jack T.
Chick) which are the stock in trade of much other comics production. This creative
lettering counts among the things that stand out most in Contract, and is often so
deftly wrought that it invites the reader to stop and admire the craftwork.
Contract is clearly the result of careful and caring labor by a skilled artist and
a competent draftsman. But it is also flawed, if judged on the premises Eisner origi-
nally offered the work to readers. In a later conversation with Frank Miller, Eisner
would praise the sparsity of Miller’s artwork: “Part of your storytelling skill depends
on how much detail you put in. And it has to do with rate of story speed. Your [type]
of story moves so fast that if you stop the reader and give him a wall with five
hundred windows carefully done, you’re going to derail the whole damn thing”
(Eisner and Miller 2005, 267). While Eisner’s appraisal of Miller’s work goes against
Miller’s own ideas about what a comic should do, it is perfectly in line with what
Eisner had said in his original Contract preface: he wanted to integrate text and
image so closely that “there will be no interruption in the flow of narrative because
the pictures and the text are so totally dependent on each other as to be inseparable
for even a moment” (Eisner 1996, np).
In a critical reading of Contract, however, one can question how well this
project succeeds. Eisner often at least comes close to “derailing” his own readers
with carefully done detail. The visual exaggeration of character movements, the
extensive embellishment of captions and speech balloons, and the sheer amount of
narration in many panels – particularly in the title vignette – all work at cross-
purposes with Eisner’s stated desire to create a cohesive whole in which “no inter-
ruption of the flow of narrative” happens. To truly appreciate Eisner’s frames and
borders, to fully grasp the emotions expressed by his broadly gesticulating charac-
ters, and to really understand their inner struggles, readers must allow for pauses
in their reading, just as they do in a work by any other artist. Contract’s ordinary
messiness, combined with the stylistic and formal aspects discussed above, roots
the work firmly in the US comics-world of its day; it is a well-crafted example of
contemporary comics practices with experimental aspects in dialogue and continui-
ty with trends that had been growing long before Eisner decided to return to comics,
but it is not the radical break it has often been portrayed as in recent years.

The aura of authenticity that Eisner fostered served him well in the latter, post–
Contract stages of his career. Coupled with his oft-outspoken hopes for comics fu-
ture, it is no wonder he was situated in a place where fans searching for capital-”A”
comics Artists could find a model (see Beaty 2012, chap. 4). The “cult of Will” has
been vocal in its promotion and defense of Eisner, and it has struggled to keep
myths about him alive, despite growing evidence against their veracity. There are
innumerable defenses of Eisner’s grotesque racial caricature Ebony White in Spirit,
for example, and one of Eisner’s biographers simply brushes off evidence that Eis-
442 Martin Lund
ner perjured himself in an early 1940s lawsuit (Schumacher 2010, 51–53), likely be-
cause the standard narrative helps sanitize US comics’ past and purify the busi-
ness’s sometimes immoral foundations (Lund 2016).
When Contract came out, the “cult of Will” was already in full swing, and be-
cause Eisner used his comic to argue that comics “could be more,” his fans have
been happy to keep giving him a central role in the emergence of the “graphic
novel.” The first paperback edition of Contract described it as a “graphic novel,”
and the use of these two words on the cover has become the stuff of legend in US
alternative comicdom. Contract was long hailed as the first “graphic novel,” al-
though this claim is problematic for at least three important reasons. First, formally,
as the synopsis above shows, Contract is not a novel, but a collection of intercon-
nected short stories more akin to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or James
Joyce’s Dubliners.
Second, there are innumerable examples of long-form comics before Contract to
which the label is more applicable. When, exactly, the first “graphic novel” was
published is impossible to say, but the only possible reason to not also apply the
label to the comics works of Rodolphe Töpffer, sometimes described as the earliest
known comics, is the desire to uphold the myth of the medium’s “birth” in the USA
(Kunzle 2007; Lund 2014). After all, Töpffer’s work was what Eisner called “sequen-
tial art” and lives up to Eisner’s description of comics which, in its “most economi-
cal state […] employ[s] a series of repetitive images and recognizable symbols” (Eis-
ner 1985, 8).
Third, although Eisner would repeatedly claim to have coined the term “graphic
novel” on the fly while pitching Contract to a publisher (e. g. WEE 22 8), he was far
from the first to use the term. The story of his coinage has been repeated numerous
times since, in different configurations (e. g. Weiner 2003, 17; Inge 2011, xi). But
examples of self-described “graphic novels” from the 1970s abound: Len Wein, Joe
Orlando, and Tony DeZuniga’s Sinister House of Secret Love #s 2 and 4, from January
and May 1972, are described on their covers as “A Graphic Novel of Gothic Terror”;
Richard Corben’s 1976 Bloodstar was described as a “graphic novel” on its dust
jacket; and Richard Metzger’s 1976 collected edition of his serialized Beyond Time
and Again was subtitled A Graphic Novel. Moreover, Eisner had been corresponding
with writer-artist Jack Katz since at least 1974, when Katz sent the first issue of his
series The First Kingdom, which he described to Eisner as a “graphic novel” (WEE 1
22). Eisner responded favorably to Katz and commented specifically on the scope of
his project, and the two kept in touch for years, with Katz sending new issues of his
developing “graphic novel.” When Katz’s first six issues were collected, First King-
dom was identified as a “graphic novel.” Eisner, then, was not a soloist, but singing
in a choir. (The examples go much further back if one allows for similar, rather
than exact phrasings: Captain America Comics #10 (Jan. 1941) contains an ad for the
“Sentinels of Liberty” fan club that describes the Young Allies comic as a “complete,
book-length comic” [Lee et al., 1941]).
As evidence against Eisner’s coinage inevitably started emerging, however, the

narrative began to change, focusing instead on how he had popularized the term
and format. Eisner’s two most recent biographers are prime examples. Journalist
Michael Schumacher quotes Eisner as acknowledging that there had been others
before him, but still takes pains to claim Eisner was far ahead of his time (2010,
201–5), while comics-creator Paul Levitz lists numerous pre-Contract “graphic nov-
els” before affirming that “somehow, it was [Contract] that would matter most to
the generation of creators that would follow” (Levitz 2015, 139–46).
But there are problems with these claims, just as there are with the claims about
Eisner’s coinage of the term ‘graphic novel.’ Schumacher references a favorite self-
portrait of Eisner’s, in which the writer-artist stands alone on a barren plain, next
to a display of his own “graphic novels”; in the distance, a throng of people is
kicking up a cloud of dust as they rush to catch up with Eisner (2010, 206). If Eisner
were indeed the one to popularize the “graphic novel,” if he was standing alone,
ahead of the rest of comicdom, his work would have had to be popular. And, at
least initially, Contract does not seem to fit that bill. It did undoubtedly have a
following, but as comics historian Paul Williams has shown, it sold a total of 6,059
copies between its release and January 1980. This is about a thousand copies fewer
than Eisner’s 1978 golf and tennis calendars, which one could hardly describe as
bestselling numbers (2015). When compared to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a self-
published comic book released in May 1984, which immediately sold out its first
print run of 3,000 copies and a second of 6,000, had an immediate, palpable, and
readily identifiable effect on American comicdom, and quickly boomed into a fran-
chise that is going strong more than three decades later (Wright 2001, 279–80),
Contract does indeed seem like a fringe phenomenon initially. Indeed, as Williams
(2015) notes, while some fans loved Contract intensely, others merely thought it was
passable, and still others thought its “boosters were wildly over-estimating its im-
portance and innovation.”
It can be objected, rightly, that it is not just numbers that count, but also influ-
ence. Many have indeed claimed that reading Contract was a deciding moment for
them, that that was when they decided to make their own long-form comics. This
might well be true, but even if the influence of Contract as an inspiration were that
strong for one group of readers, it matters little in the end because other titles would
soon overshadow both Contract and those inspired by it. Williams addresses what
he calls “the Contract with God distortion,” by which the 1970s have been pulled
out of shape in order to give Contract primacy, first as the ‘first’ graphic novel, and
more recently as the most ‘important’ early ‘graphic novel’ (2015). Circular thinking
though it might be, the centrality of Contract is a reality for those who regard it as
central, and for those who might not have read it but have heard about its centrality
in the formation and popularization of the graphic novel. Still, most of what has
been claimed about Contract as a primary graphic novel is overstated, as we have
seen; it was undeniably important, at least for those to whom it was important, and
444 Martin Lund
it was a foundational text in the changes wrought to American comicdom in the

1970s and 1980s, on its own merits or through the influence it had on others, but it
was not singular. A more accurate picture than Eisner’s self-portrait would have
Eisner on that plain with other writers and artists setting up shop around him and
with people milling about and moving between stands, some stopping at Eisner’s
and others ignoring what he has on offer in favor of others’ work.
By continuing to focus on Contract as if it were unique, we lose track of how
the term graphic novel actually became part of the broader cultural vocabulary. In
1982, publishers, perhaps inspired by the discourse in the alternative comics press
about “graphic novels” and similar terms, and possibly even by Eisner’s advocacy
itself, started publishing limited series and graphic novels, “which was the industry
term for books that offered new stories in the style of the European album” (Gabilliet
2010, 87). When Marvel Comics launched their series of graphic novels in 1982, and
DC Comics started theirs in 1983, however, they did not do so because they bought
into Eisner’s talk about comics’ potential to be “art”. They did it to capitalize on a
way to avoid the stigma attached to comics, and, more important, because the
changing structure of the comics market allowed for new ways to profit.
These early efforts, like Eisner’s, helped spread the term further but failed to
get the “graphic novel” train going. What really moved the term into the center of
US comicdom, however, and brought it into broader popular awareness, was a trio
of comics released in 1986: Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alan
Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, all of which
were originally serialized and only retroactively billed as graphic novels. More im-
portantly, all three were discussed as such in more media channels and by more
people, seemingly without any specific attribution for the coinage of the term, mak-
ing their impact, and thus that of the label “graphic novel,” greater than Eisner’s
had been (Baetens and Frey 2014, chap. 4). Dark Knight alone sold 90,000 copies
in 1986 and 190,000 in the following year, creating incentive for its publisher, DC,
to bring out more limited series and “graphic novels” (Gabilliet 2010, 93).
Had the ‘big three’ not appeared, it is likely that something else would have
taken their place, but because of their historical importance to the dissemination
and acceptance of the term, they now stand on more solid ground as the most ‘im-
portant’ early graphic novels. Since their release, more and more comics have been
labeled graphic novels, in many cases seemingly only because it helps sell books
and because it ostensibly sounds better than comics to the non-initiate. There might
well be more to graphic novels than just “marketing speak,” as two scholars of the
term have claimed (Baetens and Frey 2014, 7), but it simply cannot be ignored that
the term has gained its current speed because the market pushed it (see Gabilliet
2010, 87, 98–100) and because it has been used to label and market any long-form
comic book, from works with what some call ‘serious’ or ‘adult’ content – the identi-
fication and distinction of which seems to have been the original purpose and intent
of the term and of Eisner’s use of it (see Schumacher 2010, 201) – to trade paperback
collections of monthly serialized comic books featuring, for example, superheroes

or mutated reptiles.
Despite the indiscriminate way the term graphic novel is used, it has also served
as an important rhetorical dividing line. As English-scholar Catherine Labio has
noted, the term
sanitizes comics; strengthens the distinction between high and low, major and minor; and
reinforces the ongoing ghettoization of works deemed unworthy of critical attention, either
because of their inherent nature (as in the case of works of humor) or because of their intended
audience (lower, less-literate classes; children; and so on). (2011, 126)
This is exactly the effect Eisner was hoping to achieve when he coined terms like
“sequential art,” called superhero-readers “cretins” and superhero-creators “por-
nographers” who sold images but not story (Heintjes 2011, 201), and championed
the ‘graphic novel.’ A critical reader might ask how this view fit with Eisner’s posi-
tive view of Miller, for example. It is important to remember that Eisner was human,
and thus not always consistent or at least as prone as anyone else to changing his
mind over time. In the “pornographers” quote above, from a 2000 interview, he
uses the label in a clearly pejorative sense, but he had also himself worked with
actual pornographers in at least two 1977 issues of Al Goldstein’s National Screw
(June and February; WEE 56 13). It is of course impossible to say whether he
changed his views about pornography, or if he simply saw more worth in the work
of literal pornographers than he did in that of figurative ones, but the point remains:
in his public speaking, as in his artwork, there was a divide between theory and
practice, ideal and reality.
Returning to Eisner’s role as a champion of graphic novels, as comics historian
Charles Hatfield has noted, the ambition to lift one type of comic up to the standards
of capital-lettered Art and Culture has a danger attached to it: “rejection of the cor-
poratist ‘mainstream’ gives the post-underground alternative scene everything: its
raison d’être, its core readership, and its problematic, marginal, and self-marginaliz-
ing identity” (Hatfield 2005, 111; emphasis added). In his study of comic book cul-
ture, American studies scholar Matthew Pustz (2000) shows that comics fans often
perceive themselves as marginalized and ridiculed by non-fans, and that they see
themselves as better than outsiders for realizing how good their chosen medium is.
Fan culture is also comprised of subcultures, whose members see themselves as
above members of other comics subcultures. Pustz’s “snob” label (97) best fits Eis-
ner and his ‘cult,’ who look down on ‘fanboys’ and other ‘immature’ and ‘unintellec-
tual’ readers.
As a venerated comics creator who took such an active role in this segment of
comics fandom, then, Eisner is perhaps best described as a prophet of comics snob-
bery, whose coming down from the mountain occurred when he delivered Contract
to his acolytes. In this view, what was new about Contract’s use of ‘graphic novel’
was neither its theme, form, nor its label. It was the way it provided an anchor for
446 Martin Lund
Eisner and others’ championing of the term as a marker of quality and distinction
and provided a focal point for a new phase in one segment of US comicdom’s self-
imposed, self-righteous marginality and paved the way for, among other things,
Eisner’s own racialized and classed language and vitriol against readers of comics
other than those he championed (see Lund 2016) as well as the “Cult of Will’s”
sometimes frantic protection of Eisner’s work and legacy.
5 Conclusion
This chapter, with its discussion of Contract’s context, central topics and concerns,
its style and content, and its reception is not intended as the final word. To the
contrary, it is designed simply to be a beginning, a call for an earnest critical revalu-
ation of Eisner’s life and work. The intention has not been to dethrone one of US
comics’ ‘grand old men,’ but it has, unapologetically, been to question his estab-
lished image. Only once the uncritical celebration that surrounds Eisner and his
Contract are dispersed, can we truly begin to understand what his work really was,
warts and all.
The length of Eisner’s career in comics is matched by only a small number of
other writers and artists and the number of roles he played in the field of American
comics is matched by even fewer. In his work, Eisner spoke about life, love, and
loss, about himself and his family, about people he had known and about people
he made up, about life in New York City and the dangers he saw connected to it,
about Jewish life in the US and about anti-Semitism, as well as about many other
things. He was many things to many people. He said and wrote things many find
admirable and things many can find questionable at best and reprehensible at worst.
And yet, his work remains largely understudied, written about mostly in terms of
how good it was, rarely in terms of what it actually said – even though Eisner him-
self repeatedly claimed that the most important thing for a maker of comics was
having ‘something to say.’ For better and for worse, it is time to listen in earnest.
6 Bibliography
6.1 Works Cited
Abbott, Norman. “‘The Spirit’ of ‘41.” The Philadelphia Record, October 13, Second Section, 1941.
Andelman, Bob. Will Eisner, A Spirited Life. Milwaukie: M Press, 2005.
Baetens, Jan and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014.
Beaty, Bart. Comics Versus Art: Comics in the Art World. University of Toronto Press, 2012.
Burkett, Elinor. “A Cartoonist’s Cartoonist.” In Will Eisner: Conversations, edited by M. Thomas
Inge, 108–12. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Couch, N. C. Christopher, and Stephen Weiner. The Will Eisner Companion: The Pioneering Spirit
of the Father of the Graphic Novel. New York: DC Comics, 2004.
Dauber, Jeremy. “Comic Books, Tragic Stories: Will Eisner’s American Jewish History.” AJS Review
30.2 (2006): 277–304.
Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art: The Understanding and Practice of the World’s Most Popular
Art Form. Tamarac: Poorhouse Press, 1985.
Eisner, Will. A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories. New York: DC Comics, 1996.
Eisner, Will. Will Eisner’s The Spirit Acrhives Volume 1. New York: DC Comics, 2000.
Eisner, Will. Will Eisner’s Shop Talk: Comics legend Will Eisner interviews industry pioneers.
Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics, 2001.
Eisner, Will. The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
Eisner, Will. Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
Eisner, Will and Frank Miller. Eisner/Miller: A One-on-One Interview. Edited by Charles
Brownstein. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books, 2005.
Feiffer, Jules. The Great Comic Book Heroes. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2003.
Finger, Bill, Gardner Fox, Bob Kane, Creig Flessel, Jerry Robinson, and Sheldon Moldoff. Batman
Chronicles: Volume One. New York: DC Comics, 2005.
Fingeroth, Danny. “The Spirit of Comics: The Will Eisner Interview.” Will Eisner: Conversations. Ed.
M. Thomas Inge. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. 205–219.
Fiore, R. “The Cult of Will.” The Comics Journal, no. 267 (May 2005): 183–89.
Frye Jacobson, Matthew. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. Cambridge:
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated
by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Gans, Herbert J. “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America.” On
the Making of Americans: Essays in Honor of David Riesman. Ed. Herbert J. Gans, Nathan
Glazer, Joseph R. Gusfield, and Christopher Jencks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1979. 193–220.
Goldstein, Eric L. The Price of Whiteness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Groth, Gary. “Will Eisner: Chairman of the Board.” The Comics Journal 267 (May 2005): 194–97.
Halter, Marilyn. Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity. New York: Schocken Books,
2000.
Harvey, R.C. “Bringing Up Father and the Rest of the Comic Page.” The Comics Journal June 17
(2013).
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2005.
Heintjes, Tom. “Eisner Wide Open.” Will Eisner: Conversations. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Jackson:
Herriman, George, Patrick McDonnell, Karen O’Connell, and Georgia Riley De Havenon. Krazy Kat:
The Comic Art of George Herriman. New York: Abrams, 1986.
Inge, M. Thomas. Will Eisner: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Kunzle, David. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2007.
Labio, Catherin. “What’s in a Name? The Academic Study of Comics and the ‘Graphic Novel.’”
Cinema Journal, 50.3 (2011): 123–26.
Lee, Stan, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Charles Nicholas Wotjkoski, and Al Avison. Captain America
Comics #10. Meriden, Connecticut: Atlas Comics, 1941.
Lejeune, Phillipe. “The Autobiographical Contract.” French Literary Theory Today: A Reader. Ed.
Tzvetan Todorov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Levitz, Paul. Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2015.
448 Martin Lund
Luciano, Dale. “Will Eisner.” Will Eisner: Conversations. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2011. 87–102.
Lund, Martin. “Climbing the Hill: Will Eisner’s Heritage Fabrication and Comics Identity Politics in
The Dreamer (1986) and After.” Le Statut Culturel de La Bande Dessinée: Ambiguïtés et
Évolutions. Ed. Maaheen Ahmed and Jean-Louis Tilleuil. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia, 2016.
Lund, Martin. “Comics, a Discourse on Definition.” Redrawing the New York-Comics Relationship.
April 7 2014. https://redrawingnewyork.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/comics-a-discourse-on-
definition/.
Mougin, Lou. “Will Eisner.” Comics Interview 1991.
O’Neil, Dennis. “Introduction.” The Will Eisner Companion: The Pioneering Spirit of the Father of
the Graphic Novel. Ed. N. C. Christopher Couch and Stephen Weiner. New York: DC Comics,
2004. 9–12.
Pustz, Matthew J. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2000.
Robinson, Tasha. “Interview: Will Eisner.” In Will Eisner: Conversations. Ed. M. Thomas Inge.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. 185–95
Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics.
Cambridge: Da Capo, 2002.
Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Shelton Caswell, Lucy. Billy Ireland. 2nd re. Columbus: The Ohio State University Libraries, 2007.
Siegel, Jerry, Joe Shuster, Leo O’Mealia, Fred Guardineer, and Sheldon Mayer. Superman
Chronicles: Volume One. New York: DC Comics, 2006.
Smith, Greg M. “Will Eisner, Vaudevillian of the Cityscape.” Comics and the City: Urban Space in
Print, Picture and Sequence. Ed. Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling. New York: Continuum, 2010.
183–98.
Töpffer, Rodolphe. Enter: The Comics − Rodolphe Töpffer’s Essay on Physiognomy and the True
Story of Monsieur Crépin. Trans. E. Weise. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965 (1845).
Weiner, Stephen. Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. New York: NBM
Pub, 2003.
White, Ted, Mitch Berger, and Mike Barson. “A Talk with Will Eisner.” Will Eisner: Conversations.
Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. 79–86.
Williams, Paul Gerald. “Six Months In (and Some Graphs).” The 1970s Graphic Novel Blog. March
2015. http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/1970sgraphicnovels/2015/03/06/six-months-in-and-some-
graphs/.
Witek, Joseph. “The Arrow and the Gird.” A Comics Studies Reader. Ed. Jeet Heer and Kent
Worcester. University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 149–156.
Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
yronwode, cat. “Will Eisner Interview.” Will Eisner: Conversations. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2011. 47–78
6.2 Further Reading

Beaty, Bart. Comics Versus Art: Comics in the Art World. University of Toronto Press, 2012.
Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. The Greatest Comic Book of All Times: Symbolic Capital and the
Field of American Comic Books. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016.
Kunzle, David. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2007.
Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European
Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 – Vol. 1. History of the Comic Strip. Berkeley: University of
Kunzle, David. The Nineteenth Century. Vol. 2. History of the Comic Strip. Berkeley: University of
Lund, Martin. “Climbing the Hill: Will Eisner’s Heritage Fabrication and Comics Identity Politics in
The Dreamer (1986) and After.” Le Statut Culturel de La Bande Dessinée: Ambiguïtés et
Évolutions. Ed. Maaheen Ahmed and Jean-Louis Tilleuil. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia, 2016.
Dawn Stobbart
21 Raymond Briggs: When the Wind Blows
Abstract: In 1982, Raymond Briggs released his first graphic novel, When the Wind
Blows, which tells the story of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, as they prepare for and attempt
to survive a nuclear war, based on real governmental information: the Protect and
Survive pamphlet, designed to be issued to householders across the UK in the event
of a war. In doing so, Briggs uses the story to offer a damning critique of the trust
placed in the government and the use of nuclear weapons, through representing
the effects of such a disaster on an ordinary married couple.
This chapter will firstly situate the graphic novel within its historical context,
before analyzing the text to show how Briggs uses this medium to question the role
of weapons, war, and the government, drawing the reader into the personal story of
one couple and their attempts to implement the advice found in official government
literature that they believe will help them survive a nuclear war, and using this to
offer a critique of the attitudes of the population, the government, and of nuclear
war itself, through the narrative, the visual imagery, and the peritextual information
that surrounds the novel.
Key Terms: Raymond Briggs, nuclear war, historical context, Protect and Survive,
protest

In 1982, Raymond Briggs released When the Wind Blows (1982), a graphic novel
aimed at an adult audience. Briggs has been entertaining children and adults alike
for more than fifty years with his unique drawing style and storytelling ability, and
is best known for his graphic fiction (or picture books), including Father Christmas
(1973), Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), and, most famously, The Snowman (1978). He
has also been responsible for several graphic narratives that subvert his own artistic
style, aimed specifically at adults. These include Gentleman Jim (1980), When the
Wind Blows (1982), and The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984).
Whilst initially seeming simple and similar to Briggs’s children’s fiction (especially
given the writing style and art of The Tin-Pot General), these works are “often com-
plex graphic novels with challenging, underlying messages” (Evans 2011, 50), con-
taining social, moral, and political criticisms and implications (↗7 Politics). Briggs
uses the concepts that Mary Galbraith subsequently articulates when she says that
“so long as a certain decorum is observed, almost any image in them will be persist-
ently seen as cute and non-serious, no matter how potent” (Galbraith 2009), to fulfil
a criterion taken for granted in media: using fiction as a conduit to engage with
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-025
452 Dawn Stobbart
political and social situations, and showing the repercussions of an individual’s

actions when they come up against the ‘Powers That Be.’
This chapter focuses on the graphic novel When the Wind Blows, a “grimly hu-
morous and horribly honest book” (Briggs 1982, back cover) that tells the story of
Jim and Hilda Bloggs, a working-class couple living in the south of England. When
a nuclear attack on the UK becomes imminent, the couple use the government-
issued instruction leaflet Protect and Survive to prepare their home for the attack,
and the reader follows their futile attempts to survive in the aftermath of the bomb.
Using the pictorial structure of the graphic novel, Briggs condemns the use of nucle-
ar weapons and questions the levels of trust placed in the British government in the
1980s, especially by those who survived World War Two.
To show how Briggs denounces the UK government’s Public Service strategy
that was supposed to help the British population survive a nuclear war, there are
two distinct parts to this chapter. First, contemporary readers may not be familiar
with the historical context, especially given the fear that many people had about
nuclear war in the early 1980s, or the associated nuclear disarmament movement.
Therefore, it is important to situate When the Wind Blows within its historical con-
text. Second, this analysis will demonstrate how Briggs uses this medium to de-
nounce the role of weapons, war, and the government, whilst drawing the reader
into the personal story of one couple, using techniques specific to the comic medi-
um to do so, including the adherence to, and the subversion of common picture
book tropes to tell an adult narrative.
Scott McCloud suggests that comics are a “vacuum into which our identity and
awareness are pulled,” and that in reading a graphic novel, “we don’t just observe
the cartoon, we become it!” (1994, 36). In Understanding Comics, he points out that
the medium is “intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic re-
sponse in the reader” (McCloud 1994, 9). This encapsulates both authorial intent
and the reader’s emotional response to fiction, something Briggs utilizes in When
the Wind Blows. This is achieved through the juxtaposition of Briggs’s artistic style,
the narrative content, and its context. I shall begin with a brief discussion of
Briggs’s proficiency as an artist and storyteller.

Briggs’s oeuvre, and resultant adaptations, are both easily distinguishable from
graphic fiction by other authors, and easily recognized. In the UK, his most famous
adaptation, The Snowman (1982) is frequently featured on UK television at Christ-
mas, making his style “instantly recognizable, both in its warm look, and in its
serious moral world” (British Council Global 2016), and this continued popularity is
bolstered by adaptations that adopt his specific visual style in other media. Philip
Hensher says that Briggs’s artistry “is peculiarly English – his attractively fuzzy
style draws […] on a line of beautifully domestic and idealistic English artists, going
back to […] Samuel Palmer” (British Council Global 2016). This is especially evident
in his adult fiction (British Council Global 2016), through the satirical tone he
adopts, and the artistic style he commands, especially in The Tin-Pot General. Briggs
tends to focus on individuals in his fiction, especially “working class characters
who make do, griping and complaining, yet savouring life’s small pleasures” (Craig
2004), which allows him to use his own personal history and experiences to con-
struct his stories. This can be seen in the many manifestations of his own parents,
who form the basis of several of his characters, a trope that culminated in their
biography, Ethel and Ernest (Briggs 1998). This graphic novel recounts the couple’s
personal history, which includes menial jobs, living in the same house for more
than forty years, and raising Briggs (↗9 Life Writing). The similarities between
Briggs’s parents and the characters in the two graphic novels Gentleman Jim and
When the Wind Blows is particularly evident, as I shall discuss further in this chapter.
The characters in When the Wind Blows, Jim and Hilda Bloggs had already been
introduced in 1980, in Briggs’s graphic novel Gentleman Jim. In this story, toilet
attendant Jim yearns for a more exciting life, and after reading a novel entitled
Gentleman Jim the Highwayman he decides to “be like Gentleman Jim – rob the rich
and give to the poor” (Briggs 1980, 17). Because of his lack of understanding of
governmental rules and regulations, his efforts to emulate the highwayman land
Jim in prison. When the Wind Blows was released two years later, and sees Jim and
his wife Hilda reunited, retired, and relocated to the country.
Briggs’s artistic style is predominantly constructed through the use of pastel
colors and pencils, where he employs a wide range of page layouts, including juxta-
posing closed panels with unframed panels, sometimes interspacing them with
splash pages. He concentrates on a small cast of characters, focusing on their expe-
riences and their memories to create a narrative that the reader becomes invested
in. It is this style that firstly draws the reader into the story and then heightens the
pathos and tragedy of the protagonists. Whilst this can be seen across his fiction, it
becomes particularly explicit in When the Wind Blows. The reader is first treated to
an evocation of Briggs’s well-known children’s stories, creating a mood of nostalgia
that is mirrored by the couple (Mitchell) before the dreadfulness of the protagonists’
situation becomes apparent. This is then heightened by the characters being por-
trayed, as David Dowling writes, as “hardworking, middle-aged English folk” (Dowl-
ing 1987, 61) who trust in the “Powers That Be” (as Jim refers to them throughout
the story), and in the way that the narrative discloses the horror of nuclear warfare
to the reader alongside the characters. This allows Briggs to indicate a lack of under-
standing shared by some people in the UK – especially those that had survived
World War Two and had a nostalgic view of war, as shown by Hilda commenting
“it was nice in the war” and “those were the days” (Briggs 1982, 7), and indeed the
world at the time When the Wind Blows was published, and which was highlighted
in many UK newspapers at the start of the decade. When the Wind Blows, then, is
454 Dawn Stobbart
firmly rooted in its own contemporary context – our historical one – and so, we
need to look at the early 1980s to aid our understanding of the graphic novel.
With any piece of fiction, it is important to look at the context in which it was
written. In his essay “The Death of the Author” (1977), Roland Barthes emphasizes
that an author is always the product of his time, and that the message any work
conveys is inextricably linked to its social and historical context. Historicism argues
that a reader can only understand the meaning of a piece of literature by fitting it
around the discourses and events taking place during the period in which it was
produced.
In the wake of a deteriorating relationship between the USSR and the West after
the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in January 1980, the election of Margaret
Thatcher in the UK in 1979 (and of Ronald Reagan in 1980), the way in which foreign
relations were conducted changed, resulting in a threat of nuclear war such as had
not been seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The invasion of Afghanistan
signalled the end of détente – the improved relationship between the USSR and the
West that had lasted from 1969 to 1979 (Skinner), and the UK media were quick to
pick up on the nuclear threat to the UK and its inhabitants. On 16 January 1980,
The Times began a four-part series about Britain’s civil defense program (P. Evans
1980), in the process drawing attention to the government-produced pamphlet Pro-
tect and Survive (Central Office of Information 1976). This leaflet, a revision of an
earlier version from the 1960s named Advising the Householder on Protection
against Nuclear Attack (Her Majesty's Stationary Office), was intended to be distrib-
uted to all UK households in the event of a real threat of nuclear war, and contained
information such as what to do on hearing an attack warning, what to do after the
attack, and what to do on hearing the fall-out warning. This was quickly followed
by a BBC Panorama television broadcast (Paxman 1980), which contained the gov-
ernment’s public service announcements that were to accompany the leaflet – ani-
mated clips that would be shown on television in the run-up to a nuclear attack.
Together, this comprised the official advice to make small-scale changes to ordi-
nary citizens’ homes, such as creating inner refuges from doors, gathering a survival
kit (which includes enough water and food for the family for fourteen days), and
detailing what to do with the bodies of the dead. Whilst not mentioned explicitly,
Briggs makes the reference clear through the Bloggs’ use of leaflets similar to Protect
and Survive that Jim procures from the local library, which mirror the instructions
found in the real pamphlet. These instructions subsequently form the basis of the
Bloggs’ attempts to survive the attack in When the Wind Blows. Jim and Hilda place
their trust in the government, believing that the people in charge would have the
country’s best interests at heart, and that following the directives carefully would
keep them safe – a fallacy that Briggs exposes throughout the narrative.
Alongside a heightened threat of nuclear war, the 1980s saw a growing move-
ment of protest against the nuclear arms race. This began with the publication of
Protest and Survive, by E. P. Thompson, in April 1980, and a resurge in membership
to the protest group The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), whose member-
ship had been in decline (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 2016). Daniel Cordle
argues that the Protect and Survive leaflet devolved responsibility for the protection
of the public from the government to itself, and that it highlighted the vulnerability
of the public to the effects of a nuclear attack (Cordle 2012), 656. He further main-
tains that the fiction of the time ‘communicate[s] the helplessness felt by individuals
and communities in the event of a nuclear conflagration’ (Daley 2013, 74). Authors
such as Robert Swindells (Brother in the Land (1984)) and Raymond Briggs not only
recognized what Cordle calls the “seeming absurdity of Protect and Survive” (2012,
658), but actively call attention to it, showing the lack of useful advice it contains
in the event of a nuclear attack on the UK.
When it was published, When the Wind Blows was one of a number of fictional
representations to enter into the discourse Cordle identifies, looking at the effects of
nuclear war and its immediate and long-term consequences. Throughout the 1980s,
novels and films dealing with atomic bombs and nuclear warfare, such as The Day
After (Guttenberg 1983), Threads (Meagher 1984), and Children of the Dust (Lawrence
1985) were being released as authors and filmmakers began to “expose the vulnera-
bility of individuals, nations, and the world to nuclear devastation” and to “delegiti-
mize a Cold War status quo predicated on nuclear peril” (Cordle 2012, 654–655). The
importance of the historical context of When the Wind Blows becomes evident upon
an examination of the book’s central topics and concerns, which is where our analy-
sis now turns.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the people who have the power to start
a nuclear war are generally the only ones who will be able to survive it. With Jim
and Hilda Bloggs, Briggs attempts to highlight how a nuclear attack would affect
an average person living in the UK rather than surveying how infrastructure and
the running of the country would be affected, and their hopes of surviving such an
event. In When the Wind Blows, Briggs most explicitly emphasizes the failings in the
government’s instructions to the householders of the UK, with its contradictory and
ultimately futile advice.
A second major theme of When the Wind Blows is the understanding Jim and
Hilda Bloggs have about the wider world and especially warfare in the 1980s, as
Briggs shows the regard and trust the couple place in the government. Whilst read-
ers can see that the instructions in Protect and Survive will not help them, Jim and
Hilda still believe that it will save their lives because of their experience of the
previous war, and set about collecting the items that the Protect and Survive leaflet
tells them they need. The naivety of the couple is evident from the outset, as discus-
sions about the construction of a fall-out shelter are juxtaposed with much more
456 Dawn Stobbart
mundane and trivial questions, like whether Jim would like another sausage, or a
choice between treacle tart and bread and butter pudding (Mitchell). However, from
the moment When the Wind Blows shows the bomb dropping, the reader is fully
aware that the couple are doomed. Nevertheless, the characters maintain their belief
that everything will return to normal. In the aftermath of the bomb, Jim and Hilda
are as naïve as they were before, believing that the milkman will still come, that
there will be deliveries of newspapers, that the local shop will be opening within a
day or two, and that life will soon be back to normal. Any amusement the reader
initially feels at the couple’s preparations is replaced by a growing feeling of horror
and sadness, brought about by knowing that all the couple’s preparations are for
nothing, and that they will surely die.
Jim and Hilda are stylized in Briggs’s unique fashion. He represents the faces
of his characters with dots and a dash for their eyes, mouth, and noses (Spurr and
Cameron 2000, 184). Their cheeks are ruddy, and Jim wears trousers, shirt and bra-
ces, whilst Hilda wears a blue dress, full apron and a cap. Her clothes, in particular,
suggest a maid’s uniform, reminding the reader of the couple’s working-class social
status. The language the couple use to speak to each other is full of endearments,
such as “ducks,” “dear,” and “love,” and the reader quickly comes to see that they
have a warm and affectionate relationship with each other (Mitchell). These interac-
tions are amusing for the reader at first, as Hilda fills and labels two weeks’ worth
of water, and puts her cushions into plastic bags to protect them from the fallout,
Jim paints the windows, and the couple discuss the merits of wearing a new white
shirt for the bomb. This happy scene contrasts starkly with the ending of the narra-
tive, where the couple lie in darkness, encased in paper bags, weakly trying to pray,
whilst they wait for death, still believing that “the Powers That Be will get to [them]
in the end” (Briggs, 1982, 38).
Briggs’s focus on a single household allows him to show how they attempt to
get through a war that they have no way of surviving, and how the official literature,
both in the fictional world of the Bloggs, and the real world was (and is) merely a
way of placating the populace. The couple’s relationship heightens the pathos of
their situation, their trust in each other, and in the government, is both poignant
and distressing, especially given the media format that the story is told through.
The child-friendly ‘comic’ style of the novel, and the connotations that the comic
form has with narratives of reassurance creates a series of expectations that are
subverted in this novel, situating it as an important precursor to the adult oriented
graphic novel subgenre, of which Maus (Spiegelman 2003) became a leading force
some years later.

The format of When the Wind Blows is part of the established structure of graphic
fiction. There are 38 pages in the graphic novel itself, with a total number of 48 pa-
ges, including paratextual information. This ‘extra’ information, existing outside the
main body of the text, is defined by Gérard Genette as “a certain number of verbal
and other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations”
(2001, 1) and is as much a part of the text as its main body, with one of its functions
being to allow the publisher and author to “mediate the relations between the text
and the reader” (2001, xi). This is important in situating the graphic novel within
its cultural milieu, as well as signaling its political and ideological intentions to the
reader, and drawing attention to specific intertextual references that are important
to the readers understanding of the text. This part of the analysis of the text involves
interrogating these paratextual aspects. Therefore, we begin with the title, and the
various ways in which it can be interpreted.
When the Wind Blows takes its name from the children’s rhyme “Rock-a-Bye
Baby.” If there is any doubt in the reader’s mind about this reference, the rhyme is
printed on the back cover (Briggs, When the Wind Blows Back Cover), explicitly
signaling its relevance. While there are several competing origin stories for the
rhyme (Songfacts), it has an undeniably sinister undertone, describing an infant’s
fall from a tree. Within the context of this book, the wind in the title could refer to
the powerful wind that follows a nuclear detonation: in the immediate aftermath of
a nuclear explosion, the heat from the fireball causes a high-pressure wave to devel-
op, and move outward, away from the epicentre of the explosion. The leading edge
of this is called the shock front, and behind this, the air is accelerated to incredibly
high velocities, creating a powerful wind capable of destroying anything in its path
(AJ Software and Multimedia). This scientific understanding is supported by the
introductory passage in the Protect and Survive leaflet, which states
If nuclear weapons are used on a large scale, those of us living in the country areas might be
exposed to as great a risk as those in towns. The radioactive dust, falling where the wind
blows it, will bring the most widespread dangers of all. No part of the United Kingdom can be
considered safer than another. (Central Office of Information 1976, 4)
This perfectly describes the context and setting of When the Wind Blows. For Jim
and Hilda, the memories they have of the previous war renders the country a safe
place: English children were evacuated to the country in World War Two, as a safe
refuge from the air-raids, through Operation Pied Piper (Talley 2013), and therefore,
the couple would see themselves as less vulnerable than those in urban areas, a
fallacy the graphic novel illustrates. Furthermore, wind in both these meanings can-
not be controlled, and when the wind blows, it does not discriminate: everyone is
equally at risk, and nothing can change this. The title highlights, therefore, the
powerlessness and insignificance of the couple in the face of this powerful force.
The book’s title can also be linked to the short story “There Will Come Soft
Rains,” by Ray Bradbury (Bradbury 2008 [1950]), which takes its inspiration from a
1920 poem of the same name by Sara Teasdale. In this story, “a computer-controlled
house continues to perform its duties despite there being no trace of any human
458 Dawn Stobbart
habitation. The house, the only surviving remnant of an urban landscape in a post-
nuclear environment, reads Teasdale’s poem aloud, seemingly unaware that the
recipient is long dead” (Stobbart 2018, 131). In both Bradbury’s and Briggs’s stories,
the focus of the narrative lies within the confines of a single house, rather than on
the wider world, and just as Briggs references the lullaby “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” so too
does Bradbury, writing:
At ten o’clock the house began to die.

The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. (286)
The destruction of the house in “There Will Come Soft Rains” mirrors that of the
Bloggs’ house in When the Wind Blows; the wind blowing causes the destruction of
both houses’ inhabitants, but the story is also significant in its allusions to the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War Two. Bradbury writes that the
“entire west face of the house was black, save for five places” (Bradbury 2008, 262)
and that these places are “five spots of paint – the man, the woman, the children,
the ball” (262) a family who were not expecting a “titanic instant” (262) and who,
like the silhouettes that can be found in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were burned
into the very walls before which a nuclear explosion vaporized them. The layers of
intertextuality here are complex, yet clear. Teasdale’s poem was written as a re-
sponse to her own disillusionment over World War One; Bradbury bases his story on
similar themes, and the influence of Teasdale’s poem is so strong that he includes
it in the story. Both authors are concerned with the senseless destruction of man-
kind by our own hands through war, and Briggs also follows this theme, while
linking back to the earlier texts through the use of the wind motif. Any of these
interpretations of the title make sense on their own, and taken together they show
a deeply layered thematic intent, with the book’s title accumulating multiple layers
of meaning even before the reader opens it.
Before the narrative itself begins, the information found outside the main text
situates its importance as an anti-war screed. These include several comments from
British MPs emphasizing the gravitas of the subject matter and the importance of
Briggs’s tale as an ‘anti-Bomb statement’ (Briggs 1982). There are also comments
from several newspapers, across all political affiliations, which cite When the Wind
Blows’ significance, with repeated references to its originality, and the horror of its
contents. All of this tells the reader what they will be engaging with, and more than
that, what the reactions of other readers have been.
After this paratextual information, there is a title page that is a full-page panel,
showing a balding man at a newspaper stand in a library. He is standing in front of
The Times, whilst other British newspapers The Guardian, the Financial Times, and
the Daily Telegraph stand unread on either side of him. Contextually, this appears
to reference The Times as the national newspaper that introduced the general public
to the Protect and Serve leaflet (Evans 1980, 4).
Following this, the main body of the text begins with a long panel that fills an
entire row, showing Jim leaving a bus at a crossroads. The scene is idyllic, with a
small house nestled in the background, and a pair of windmills in the upper-right
corner of the frame. The crossroads shown in the center of the panel are a real
location on the South Downs, and the windmills invoke the Pastoral landscapes of
the Nineteenth Century. The colors are warm: the grass is green, the sky is blue,
and the clouds are billowy and white. Juxtaposing the bright colors of the panel,
Jim is not smiling, and Hilda comments that he ‘seems a bit down’ when he arrives
home. Hilda talks to Jim about the dinner, while he tries to explain to her about the
‘International Situation’ and how “The decisions made by The Powers That Be will
get to [them] in the end” (1), even as it becomes clear that Jim himself does not
understand what he is talking about. His mistaking the ultimate deterrent for the
“ultimate Determent” and “the balloon, or is it a maroon” going up at any moment
is matched by Hilda’s acceptance and indifference to the news, as she asks him
whether he wants burgers or sausage for his tea. Both reactions reveal that the pair
has little understanding of the gravity of the situation (Spurr and Cameron 2000,
185).
In keeping with the theme Briggs had established for the couple in Gentleman
Jim (1980), Jim does not understand the terminology used in the newspapers and
Hilda dismisses the newspapers as being ‘full of rubbish.’ This confusion carries
over to the second page, where the couple discuss the coming war. Briggs shows
Jim’s panic at a radio announcement, drawing his cheeks as pallid in contrast to
their ruddy color in the previous panel, and beads of sweat coming from his head
(known as “emanata,” which are used to portray emotion, Mikkonen 2017, 225),
whilst Hilda again remains calm and accepting of the coming war. She appears to
be more concerned with what she is serving for dessert and Jim’s use of bad lan-
guage than with the escalating geopolitical situation.
Briggs’s use of intertextuality therefore allows him to contextualize his own
graphic novel within a wider narrative of protest against nuclear armament, and
the use of paratextual information such as the story’s title also has the effect of
doing this. At the same time, the inclusion of contemporary information as part of
the novel itself, such as the reaction of members of the UK parliament, whilst refer-
ring to the novel as a whole, offers a stark contrast to the idyllic setting of the first
pages and the lives of the couple: the pastoral setting, and the can-do attitude of
the Bloggs is undermined by the quotes from the press and other readers, which
repeatedly references the horror of the tale. In doing this, Briggs signals to the read-
er the adult content of the novel, even before the narrative itself becomes horrific.
5 Structure
When the Wind Blows has two distinct parts, which are separated by two double
splash pages that represent the detonation of a nuclear bomb. Throughout both
parts, the majority of the book is laid out in panel form. Each page features seven
460 Dawn Stobbart
rows of two, three, or four panels per row, surrounded by gutters. This format was
inspired by a Swiss miniature version of Father Christmas (1973, British Comic
Awards 2012), and initially makes the pages appear cramped, with anywhere be-
tween 15–30 panels appearing per page (in comparison to Gentleman Jim̧ which has
up to four rows of four panels) with the bright colors of the first pages providing a
feeling of coziness and warmth that offsets the cramped appearance of the rest of
the graphic novel, and moreover, making Jim and Hilda appear as literally small
people. These paneled pages are offset with large inserts bleeding into the panels
that are used to show memories of the Second Word War, through a nostalgic and
subjective viewpoint, and double-page spreads that represent the wider world, and
the danger the Bloggs face.
All of the small panels feature the Bloggs in their home. Their lives are encapsu-
lated in these panels, along with their attempts to survive the Bomb. Through these
panels, the reader is invited to form an emotional bond with the couple, as Briggs
shows the reader the minutiae of their lives in the house. The tight confines of the
panels detailing this are juxtaposed with the double-page spreads and panels that
are not confined by the usual frames, bleeding into panels that occupy the same
page. Donald Ault describes this process as one where “space is forced to give way;
things are squeezed out of one space on the page into another; one image is sacri-
ficed for another” (Ault 2000, 125), and they are used throughout Briggs’s graphic
novels, such as in Gentleman Jim, when Jim is imagining an exciting life, or when
he is reading a book. In When the Wind Blows, however, this structure is used to
portray memory. The present of Jim and Hilda’s retirement is overlaid by an idyllic
remembrance of the war, rather than the reality, and therefore allows the reader to
see the basis of the couple’s belief that they will be safe in the event of another war.
The first suggestion that the couple’s lives will be disrupted comes on page two.
Sitting down to dinner, the radio broadcasts a statement that takes up the majority
of the panel, with neither Jim nor Hilda appearing in the frame. The speech bubble
containing the text differs from the others on the page, as Achim Hescher notes in
Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration the balloon “indicates the source and
the type of speech or sound: […] serrated or jagged outlines ‘a voice relayed elec-
tronically or with volume, which we deduce according to other picture elements’”
(Hescher 2017, 149). The jagged edges of the radio broadcast not only signals its
electronic origin, but also highlights its shocking and urgent content: rather than
being contained in the round bubble that is used for the two characters, the edges
of the balloon spill over the panel’s edges. The text itself is in capital letters, not
written in sentences, but rather in headlines and ellipses, highlighting its urgency
and importance, and the next panel shows Jim’s panicked response, a contrast to
the speech used so far. His visualized vocal reaction, whilst less jagged on the page,
is nevertheless shown as panicked, reflecting the speech of the radio presenter with
its wavy lines.
The next few pages show Jim and Hilda making plans to create their inner ref-
uge, following the instructions laid out in Protect and Survive. The colors remain
bright, with the couple going about their tasks, as Jim removes doors and Hilda
makes tea and does the ironing, with neither one of them apparently understanding
the gravity of the situation. As the couple begin to organise themselves, the reader
is shown the preparations for war, through a double-page spread of a missile emerg-
ing from a silo. The missile is brown, and the background is blue, with no discerni-
ble difference between the sky and the horizon. The only text on these two pages is
“MEANWHILE, ON A DISTANT PLAIN” written in capitals, inside an angular white
box in the upper left-hand corner. This spread is in direct contrast to the previous
(and next) pages, with their bright colors and small panels, and intimates that this
is something that will affect more than the Bloggs’s lives, which are being represen-
ted in the small panels. Drew Morton considers that the size of the panel (in this
case a double page spread) can ‘express the inciting incident to the story’ (Morton
2017, 98). As with his example of Watchmen and the murder of the Comedian that
precipitates the events of the novel, in When the Wind Blows, the preparation and
detonation of nuclear weapons are the events that hook the reader into the story.
The next two pages also differ from the small panels that the couple inhabit.
Jim and Hilda’s memories are presented through large panels, whose frames are
cloud-like, visibly representing memory. World Leaders from World War Two are
drawn crudely, possibly in style of George Grosz (Grosz’s influence can also be seen
at the end of the narrative, through the colors used as the couple go to their “final
rest,” Dowling 1987, 61) or Otto Dix: Churchill with a cigar and his famous V for
Victory sign with his fingers; Hitler is drawn almost demonically, with his arm
raised in a Nazi salute, and Stalin is shown with a big smile and a pipe, an almost
jolly figure resembling a Matryoshka to some extent, which corresponds to Hilda’s
speech bubble about him, where she considers him to be “a nice chap, like an
uncle” (Briggs 1982, 6). The visual representation of these figures as cartoonish
mimics the visual language sometimes employed in 1940s propaganda, and which
shows the ‘good’ characters as larger than life, and full of color, whilst the enemy
is pasty, green, and unhealthy-looking, creating a caricature of these figures, that
reflects the satirical tone of Dix, Grosz, and other German Expressionists (Martiny).
These memories eclipse and overshadow the present-day panels containing the
pair, their memories transporting them away from the peril they are in, to a seem-
ingly safer place. The bottom of the page returns the reader to the present, with Jim
comparing Churchill and his cigar, and Stalin with his moustache with the “imper-
sonal commuters” (a misunderstanding of the word computers) that committees use
to “Arrive at Decisions” (Briggs 1982, 6), this juxtaposition stressing the couple’s
innocence. And as the next page shows, their memories are not confined to world
leaders. Jim fondly remembers sleeping in a “Morrison,” whilst Hilda reminisces
about Anderson shelters, before the pair fondly recalls the “good old days” of
The Shelters…the Blackout…the All Clear…cups of tea…the ARP…Evacuees…London kids see-

ing cows for the first time…Old Churchill on the wireless…the Nine-o’clock News…Vera Lynn
singing away…Worker’s Playtime ITMA…Spitfires and Hurricanes in the blue sky over the corn-
fields…the White Cliffs of Dover…old Jerry coming over every night… (Briggs 1982, 7)
462 Dawn Stobbart
These pages reinforce the nostalgic view of war, and the almost childlike innocence
with which the Bloggs view the political leaders who sent their countries to war.
The small panels detailing the couple’s home life and the double-page spread
showing the war preparations meet when the missiles are detonated, and the iconic
white flash of the bomb eclipses the couple in their inner core. As before, there is a
double-page spread that signals the wider world and the importance of the event
taking place; the pages are white, with an edge of pink, whilst the second double
page becomes more distinguishable, as the small panels that denote the couple and
their lives reappear. From here, Briggs shows the couple trying to cope with the
aftermath of the bombs and the nuclear fallout.
One of the first things the reader notices about the second part of the book is
that the feeling of comfort that the panels have with their confined spaces and the
bright colors changes to oppression as the couple become captives within their
home once the bombs have fallen. Briggs uses color to show the changes in the
couple and their surroundings. In the initial aftermath, the couple are enveloped in
darkness, with only a flashlight and candle to see by, and this is reflected in an
aesthetic change on the page. The couple are initially buoyed by their survival of
the initial blast. However, as soon as they emerge from the shelter and see the mess
that their home is in, the bright colors of the first part quickly fade. Initially, this
can be ascribed to the chaos that the couple find outside the inner core, but it
becomes evident that Briggs is using the fading colors to represent the couple’s
actual lives. As they become ill from the fallout and their physical health deterio-
rates, the colors of the house fade alongside the couple, until the last page, where
the couple are lying in the shelter in bed on their final night. The panels are filled
with deepening shades of brown, as Jim recites a mixture of religious quotes, ending
with “Into the Valley of the Shadow of Death… […] rode the Six Hundred,” before
they finally fall silent.
These final words, a mixture of a line from Psalm 23 (Ps 23:4) and a line from
“The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, have a dual purpose;
firstly, the lines of the poem are a continuation of an earlier excerpt of the same
poem that Jim recites to Hilda “Ours is not to reason why, ours but to…” not articu-
lating the next part of the line “do or die” (Briggs 1982, 24), an apt description of
everything the couple are trying to do within the pages of the book, under the direc-
tion of the pamphlets Jim has obtained from the library. Secondly, whilst the line
from the psalm is part of Tennyson’s poem (it is repeated twice: “All in the valley
of Death/Rode the six hundred” (line 3/4) and “Into the valley of Death/Rode the
six hundred” (line 16/17) 509), it is the psalm Jim is trying to remember and to
recite, its use a liturgy rather than an explanation, although it also functions as a
final epiphany for the couple – a realization that they, and all they know, is at an
end. The psalm has become associated with funeral sermons, and therefore its use
at the end of this narrative is particularly fitting: the couple are dying, and Jim is
reciting their funeral rites, in the absence of any official to do it for them.
The line from “The Charge of the Light Brigade” requires a little knowledge,
referring as it does to a historical event from the Crimean War. Written in 1854, the
poem describes the mistake that led to more than 600 men, on horses, to charge
against heavily fortified Russian defenses. Unlike the psalm’s positive tone, which
sees the speaker unafraid because of his trust in God, the 600 men are sent to their
deaths due to a mistake by the superior officers. There is a clear correlation between
the events of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and When the Wind Blows that this
ending makes explicit, for the reader and for the Bloggs alike. Following the “or-
ders” (through the Protect and Survive leaflet) of the people in charge, they are
“reduced to disgusting decay by powers beyond them which they nevertheless try
to understand and regard to the end as wiser masters” (Dowling 1987, 61).
In having Jim getting mixed up in his retelling of the psalm, Briggs suggests
that there is no language appropriate to describe their deaths (Dowling 1987, 61),
nothing that Jim can say to justify or explain their final moments, wrapped in paper
sacks, huddled together under doors, waiting for the “Powers That Be” to “get to
[them] in the end” (37). This ending, whilst highlighting the tragedy of the narrative,
also focuses on an unarticulated reason for some of the advice in the leaflet. Having
their identification documents near them, and being in the paper bags would mean
that when – and if – the authorities get to them, the task of identifying and remov-
ing bodies would be made significantly easier.

Upon its publication, When the Wind Blows not only joined the debate over the use
of nuclear weapons, it instantly achieved critical recognition. It was presented to
every member of the UK House of Commons, and it was discussed in a motion in
British Parliament on February 15th, 1982. During this debate, Labour MP John Gar-
rett stated that “[t]his house welcomes the publication of When the Wind Blows by
Raymond Briggs as a powerful contribution to the growing opposition to nuclear
armament and hopes that it will be widespread” (Briggs 1982, 4). The novel joined
a “marked shift in popular culture dealing with nuclear disaster” (Becker-Schaum
et. al. 2016, 13), and was a popular book on release, being in the top ten bestselling
books on the Times list in April 1982 (The Times).
At its heart, When the Wind Blows is a cautionary tale, told through a visual
medium. It cautions against human naiveté in believing a government who hands
out ill-considered and contradictory advice in the face of the worst disaster that can
befall a country. Briggs uses Jim and Hilda Bloggs to represent “hardworking mid-
dle-aged folk” (Dowling 1987, 61), and watching Jim and Hilda try to navigate the
guidelines in the Protect and Survive leaflet drives home to the reader the futility of
their attempts to survive in the nuclear attack, an attack that, in reality, is impossi-
ble to prepare for. The book’s focus on their home highlights the concept that the
464 Dawn Stobbart
reader would be in the same situation. The violence in this graphic novel “is ex-
tremely powerful” (Dowling 1987, 61), and is made more shocking through this be-
ing one of the first graphic novels to undercut the notion of the form as being a
cozy, cute, and childish medium and to begin the process of establishing the graphic
novel as a serious subgenre within the comic medium. This inversion of the norms,
and creation of a serious form of pictorial literature growing out of the comic book
form was used several years later by Art Spiegelman to create the graphic novel Maus
(Spiegelman 2003, ↗22 Art Spiegelman, Maus), recounting the lives of his parents as
they try to survive World War Two and their experience of the Holocaust.
The legacy of When the Wind Blows has been lasting, and it has become an
enduring part of British culture. After being adapted to radio in 1984, it became an
animated film (1986), with actors Peggy Ashcroft and John Mills voicing Hilda and
Jim Bloggs. This was accompanied by a soundtrack written by Roger Waters of Pink
Floyd, while the title song was written and performed by David Bowie. The film is
a mixture of stop motion and drawn animation, with the hand-drawn characters
being surrounded by physical sets (↗6 Adaptations), which closely follows the
graphic novel’s themes and Briggs’s animation style in overlaying the two-dimen-
sional characters on a three-dimensional background.
Even after more than thirty years and the end of the Cold War, this graphic
novel still has more than just historical relevance, and should remind the reader
that there are governments that treat the population just as Jim and Hilda are treat-
ed, and that these governments implement policies and ideologies that can bring
harm and disaster to the world. The reader is invited to learn from the Bloggs’ expe-
rience that the truthfulness and reliability of any information is only as good as the
source it comes from, and that the people in power might not have the best interests
of the individual at the heart of their advice and instructions to the public. Despite
its position as a historical narrative in the twenty-first century, as Briggs himself
states “that dread’s coming back […] you just don’t know what’s going to happen
[…] when NATO and the UN were created, we though it meant there could never be
another world war. Well, there bloody could be.” (Aitkenhead 2016) As long as we
live in a world that continues to stockpile these weapons, the horror that this novel
portrays will continue to be relevant. Finally, When the Wind Blows serves as a re-
minder that there are still over 16,000 nuclear warheads in the world, which could
render this speculative history of the UK a reality, and instead of fictional characters
dying, it could still be the reader.
7 Bibliography
7.1 Works Cited

Aitkenhead, Decca. “Raymond Briggs: ‘There could be another world war. Terrifying, isn’t it?’” The
Guardian 24 December 2016.
Ault, Donald. “‘Cutting Up’ Again Part II: Lacan on Barks on Lacan.” Comics & Culture: Analytical
and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Ed. Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian
Christiansen. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000. 123–140
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text: Selected Essays. London: Fontana
Press, 1977. 142–148.
Becker-Schaum, Christoph et. al., eds. The Nuclear Crisis: The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and
the German Peace Movement of the 1980s. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016.
Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. London: HarperCollins, 2008 [1950].
Briggs, Raymond. Ethel and Ernest. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998.
Briggs, Raymond. Father Christmas. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973.
Briggs, Raymond. Fungus the Bogeyman. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977.
Briggs, Raymond. Gentleman Jim. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980.
Briggs, Raymond. The Snowman. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978.
Briggs, Raymond. The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman. London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1984.
Briggs, Raymond. When the Wind Blows. London: Penguin, 1982.
British Comic Awards. “Hall of Fame: Raymond Briggs.” British Comic Awards.
http://britishcomicawards.com/hall-of-fame-raymond-Briggs/. 2012.
British Council Global. Raymond Briggs. 2016. https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/
raymond-Briggs.
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. “The History of CND.” Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
2016. http://www.cnduk.org/about/item/437.
Central Office of Information. Protect and Survive. London: HMSO, 1976.
Cordle, Daniel. “Protect/Protest: British nuclear Fiction of the 1980s.” The British Journal for the
History of Science 45.4 (2012): 653–669.
Craig, Amanda. Raymond Briggs Interview. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/childrens-book-
reviews/interviews/raymond-Briggs.htm. 2004.
Daley, Christopher. “Review: Daley on Cordle.” Journal of Literature and Science 6.1 (2013): 74–75.
Dowling, David. Fictions of Nuclear Disaster. Basingstoke: MacMillan Press, 1987.
Evans, Janet. “Raymond Briggs: Controversially Blurring Boundaries.” Bookbird: A Journal of
International Children’s Literature 49.4 (2011): 49–61.
Evans, Peter. “SS 20 Russian Missiles Expose Britain’s Weakness to Attack.” The Times,
January 16, 1980: 4.
Galbraith, Mary. “Meditation on the Polar Express.” Interjuli.de. 02 (2009).
http://www.interjuli.de/de/assets/Artikel/0902 %20Ideologie/
07.%20Kapitel%20Galbraith%20Polar%20Express.pdf.
Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001.
Hescher, Achim. Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
2017
Lawrence, Louise. Children of the Dust. London: Red Fox, 1985.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
Mikkonen, Kai. The Narratology of Comic Art. New York: Routledge, 2017.
466 Dawn Stobbart
Mitchell, Neil. “Why apocalyptic animation: When the Wind Blows is still devastating.” BFI 29
September 2019. https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/when-wind-blows-
raymond-briggs-jimmy-murakami.
Morton, Drew. Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books during the Blockbuster
Era. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2017.
The Day After. Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Perf. Steve Guttenberg. 1983.
The Snowman. Dir. Dianne Jackson and Jimmy T. Murakami. Perf. David Bowie and Raymond
Briggs 1982.
Threads. Dir. Mick Jackson. Perf. Karen Meagher. 1984.
OED Online. “Historicism, n.” OED.com. March 2012. http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/
view/Entry/87304?redirectedFrom=historicism#eid.
Panorama: If the Bomb Drops. Dir. Louise Capell. Perf. Jeremy Paxman. 1980.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin Books, 2003
Spurr, Barry and Lloyd Cameron. Standard English. Leichhardt: Pascal Press, 2000.
Stein, Daniel. “Comics and Graphic Novels.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature-Image-Sound-
Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 420–438.
Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noel Thon. From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015.
Stobbart, Dawn. “Playing the Future History of Humanity: Situating Fallout 3 as a Narratological
Artifact.” On the Fringes of Literature and Digital Media Culture: Perspectives from Eastern
and Western Europe. Ed. Irena Barbara Kalla, Patrycja Poniatowska and Dorota Michulka.
Leiden: Brill, 2018. 123–134
Swindells, Robert. Brother in the Land. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Talley, Lee A. “Operation Pied Piper: Historical Texts and the CCSS.” The Alan Review, 2013: 26–
32.
Teasdale, Sara. Flame and Shadow. London: Macmillan, 1920.
Tennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Ed.
Christopher Ricks. London: Routledge, 2007. 508–511.
Thompson, E P. “Protest and Survive.” Wilson Center Digital Archive. 1980. http://digitalarchive.
wilsoncenter.org/document/113758.
When the Wind Blows. Dir. Jimmy Murakami. Perf. Peggy Ashcroft and John Mills. 1986.
7.2 Further Reading

Cordle, Daniel. “Protect/Protest: British nuclear Fiction of the 1980s.” The British Journal for the
History of Science 45.4 (2012): 653–669.
Dowling, David. Fictions of Nuclear Disaster. Basingstoke: MacMillan Press, 1987.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
Stein, Daniel. “Comics and Graphic Novels.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image –
Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 420–438.
Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noel Thon. From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015.
Thompson, E P. “Protest and Survive.” Wilson Center Digital Archive. 1980. http://digitalarchive.
wilsoncenter.org/document/113758.
Joanne Pettitt
22 Art Spiegelman: Maus
Abstract: This article aims to provide an introduction to Art Spiegelman’s Maus
(1986, 1991). It considers Spiegelman’s work as a piece of Holocaust commemora-
tion, foregrounding the various narratives of loss and fragmentation that the text
produces. I follow Erin McGlothlin’s understanding of the narrative structure as ex-
isting on three distinct levels: the diegetic level of Vladek’s story; the middle layer
that focuses on Art’s relationship with his parents; and the “outer layer” (2003: 182)
that is concerned with Art’s own processes of narrative construction. Relating these
various layers to the production of different narratives of trauma, I show that the
text works as a commemorative piece by foregrounding themes of loss and fragmen-
tation.
Key Terms: Holocaust, Postmemory, Memory, Life Writing, Commemoration

Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden; his family emigrated to the United
States in 1951, when Art was three. In 1965, he took up a place at Harpur College
(now Binghamton University) but, following a mental breakdown that saw him
briefly institutionalized and the suicide of his mother (both in 1968), he left without
obtaining a degree. At high school, Spiegelman majored in cartooning and, later,
he acted as staff cartoonist for his college newspaper and editor of a college humor
magazine. Starting in the mid-1960s, he also spent twenty years as a contributing
artist and designer for Topps Chewing Gum. Since then, Spiegelman has gone on to
become one of the most recognizable and important names in the world of graphic
art.
Indeed, his magnum opus Maus has been credited with legitimizing the graphic
novel as a credible form of artistic representation. Taking thirteen years to produce,
the final product was the culmination of eight years’ worth of interviews with Spie-
gelman’s father, Vladek, and hours of painstaking research on the history of the so-
called ‘Final Solution.’ The seed of Maus’s main conceit – the rendering of those
who lived through the Holocaust as cats (perpetrators) and mice (victims) – was
laid as early as 1972, when Spiegelman was asked to contribute to an issue of Funny
Animals. Stumbling on the metaphor as a means of drawing attention to the black
experience in the United States (based on the idea of the Klu Klux Kats), Spiegelman
soon realized that he could apply the cat/mouse imagery to his own, more immedi-
ate experiences. The resulting three-page strip saw Vladek’s story of Holocaust sur-
vival being told to his son – Mickey – as a bedtime story. In the end, Mickey falls
asleep, apparently oblivious to the significance of the story being told.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-026
468 Joanne Pettitt
Returning to the tale several years later, the first part of the newly ‘renovated’
Maus appeared in serial form in RAW magazine, an anthology of comics started up
by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, in 1980. Having attracted the atten-
tion of Jonathan Silverman from the Scott Meredith Agency, Maus was touted to a
large number of publishing houses; reasons for rejection included the more generic
“this does not meet a need on our list,” to more specific explanations such as: “I
can’t see how to advance the thing into bookstores” and “the general tone of the
narration is more like that of a situation comedy than seems right for the book”
(Spiegelman 2011b, 76–77). Eventually, the graphic novel was taken on by Pantheon.
However, the problems in bringing the graphic novel to fruition did not end there:
in 1985, before the second part of Maus had been completed, Spiegelman got wind
of a full-length feature animation that was being produced by Steven Spielberg; the
film, An American Tail, made use of a similar strategy to that of Maus, showing
Jewish mice fleeing persecution in Russia and heading for a new life in America.
Fearing that the film would be released before Maus was completed, and that he
would be perceived “as somehow creating a kind of twisted and gnarled version of
a Spielberg production” (Spiegelman 2011b, 78), Spiegelman was forced to publish
Maus in two volumes, part one Maus: A Survivor’s Tale in 1986, and part two And
Here My Troubles Began in 1991.
Maus’s pathway to publication was unique in other ways, too. Robert Hutton,
for example, acknowledges that by choosing to publish with a major publishing
house, “Spiegelman had already bypassed comics culture and was part of the main-
stream publishing sphere […]. The collected Maus was widely touted as a crossover
book, but in terms of publication and distribution it existed entirely within the
mainstream book market. This meant that Maus would be sold and marketed in a
way that no previous comic had” (2015: 34). By moving away from the serial format
traditional to comics and marketing the book through channels normally associated
with more traditional literary forms, Maus was already positioned as a cross-over
work.
Perhaps as a result, Spiegelman’s work has proven difficult to categorize; in-
deed, issues of classification have been a source of continual debate since its origi-
nal publication. For example, Spiegelman has noted being “irrationally peeved”
when the book was awarded a young adult award, considering it “a prejudice
against [his] medium” (Spiegelman 2011b, 103). Despite eventually accepting the
classification of Young Adult fiction (if it was good enough for Gulliver’s Travels and
Huckleberry Finn, it was apparently good enough for Spiegelman! [103]), questions
of how to categorize the work continued. In an interview for The Guardian, Spiegel-
man explained:
There was a bookstore in my neighbourhood that kept Maus on its table of new releases for
years. So, finally, I introduced myself. “This is so, fantastic,” I said. “The way you keep my
book here.” But the manager, who was really grumpy, said, “It’s only because I can never
figure out where to put the damn thing!”‘ He sniggers. “I guess that would sit badly with a
publisher. I mean… do you put it near Garfield, or what?” (Spiegelman 2011a)
This issue of classification came to a head in 1991, when Maus was put on the New
York Times best seller list as a piece of fiction. In a letter to the editor, Spiegelman
famously wrote: “I know that by delineating people with animal heads I’ve raised
problems of taxonomy for you. Could you consider adding a special ‘nonfiction/
mice’ category to your list?” (Spiegelman 1991). According to Spiegelman, one editor
was so miffed at the idea of moving Maus to the non-fiction list that he exclaimed:
“Well look, let’s go out to Spiegelman’s house and if a giant mouse answers the
door, we’ll move it to the non-fiction list!” (Spiegelman 2011b, 150) Nevertheless,
the paper caved and Maus was moved to the non-fiction list; Thomas Doherty poign-
antly describes the move as representing the point at which “the veracity of the
image – even the comic book image – had attained parity with the word” (1996, 69).
In an anecdote that effectively sums up the controversy over the medium of
Maus, Spiegelman remembers being “aggressively barked at by a reporter: ‘don’t
you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?’” He replied: “‘No, I
thought Auschwitz was in bad taste’” (Spiegelman 2011b, 155).
2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns

2.1 Narratives of Suffering
Towards the end of Metamaus (2011), there are two versions of Art Spiegelman’s
family tree, showing members of the family born in the ninety-nine years between
1838 and 1937. The first version shows the family as it was at the start of World War
Two; the second shows the same family at the end of the War in 1945. In the latter
version, only thirteen out of a total eighty-five boxes contain names; three contain
names of those whose death is unconfirmed; seventeen are marked as having died
before the war. The remainder were all killed in the Holocaust; their absence is
poignantly acknowledged by the emptiness of the boxes; juxtaposed with the pre-
war family tree on the previous page, the vast number of deaths attributable to the
genocide is immediately visible.
At the bottom of each of the pages is a photograph: the first shows Spiegelman’s
parents, Vladek and Anja, with their baby son Richieu, taken around 1940; the sec-
ond is taken in 1945 and is missing Richieu, who did not survive the War. Anja and
Vladek stand slightly apart so that the space that had previously been occupied by
their son remains unfilled. Over these two double-page spreads (228–231), Spiegel-
man again uses empty spaces to articulate the volume of loss and the devastating
impact the Holocaust had on his family.
It is not, I think, a coincidence that the subsequent pages of Metamaus are
concerned with the ending of Maus, which concludes with an image of the tomb-
stone of Spiegelman’s parents, and with his own autograph. This alignment of the
two images (the family trees and the tomb stone) is significant because both return
470 Joanne Pettitt
the reader to the themes of death and loss that are so central to Spiegelman’s narra-
tive. Maus should thus be read as an attempt at commemorating the dead. It aims
to mark the loss of the millions who lost their lives in the Holocaust and, microcos-
mically, the loss of the author’s own survivor-mother, who committed suicide after
the War, the loss of Spiegelman’s brother, Richieu, who was killed, and the eventual
death of Vladek, who died in 1982 before Maus was completed.
Emphasizing this commemorative goal, Spiegelman has himself described the
text as his “version of a yahrzeit candle, a memorial” (Spiegelman 2011b, 234). The
remainder of this essay seeks to consider the ways in which Spiegelman’s graphic
novel elucidates these themes of fragmentation and loss.
Following the work of Stephen Tebachnick, Erin McGlothlin identifies three dis-
tinct narrative layers in Maus: the diegetic level of Vladek’s story; the middle layer
that focuses on Art’s relationship with his parents; and the “outer layer” (2003, 182)
that is concerned with Art’s own processes of creative construction. Spiegelman
himself suggests something similar, commenting:
The subject of Maus is the retrieval of memory and, ultimately, the creation of memory. The
story of Maus isn’t just the story of a son having problems with his father, and it’s not just the
story of what a father lived through. It’s about a cartoonist trying to envision what his father
went through. (Spiegelman 2011b, 73)
Understanding the structure from this perspective allows for a clearer understanding
of the processes that contribute towards Maus’s commemorative goal. The losses
that define the narrative are tied together by questions about how to remember and
represent them; as James E. Young puts it, Maus “is not about the Holocaust so much
as about the survivor’s tale itself and the artist-son’s recovery of it” (1998, 73).
Yet these processes of memory are not straightforward. That is because there
are two primary narrative perspectives (Art and Vladek) that are oriented around
two different sources of trauma: the trauma Vladek experiences during the Holo-
caust and the trauma felt by Art following the suicide of his mother (see also Kolář
2013). The author experiences these traumas differently, the first is received through
processes of what Marianne Hirsch has described as postmemory; while the second
is more immediate, experienced personally rather than vicariously. Taking into ac-
count the three narrative levels that McGlothlin identifies as the diegesis, the family
narrative and the metanarrative, we might also note that each of these layers some-
how alludes to the various narratives of trauma that underpin the story: the diegesis
outlines the trauma of the parents, while the family narrative deals with Art’s own
experiences, both as the son of a woman who committed suicide, and as a son who
is historically removed from both his parents’ pasts and who therefore struggles to
find common ground. The metafictional thread is concerned with the ways in which
Art attempts to navigate between these different narratives.
2.2 Vladek’s Trauma
Vladek recounts much of his story as he pedals his exercycle, showing his inability
to move forward in what Hillary Chute has called a “paradoxical stillness” (2005).
That Vladek is stuck in the traumas of the past is also depicted spatially. Liam Kru-
ger, for example, argues:
When Vladek talks about getting his prison tattoo (Spiegelman 1991: 20, panels
5–6), a panel is shown with a line of adumbrated mouse figures waiting to be tat-
tooed; this panel is intersected by Vladek in the ‘present,’ displaying his tattoo and
standing in the same pose as the inmates. Vladek is still very much ‘in’ that mo-
ment – he occupies the same space, and in the comic book space means time. (2015,
362)
Space is again used to represent the continuity of time when Vladek tells how
he was forced onto an overcrowded train and left with no food or water for “I don’t
know how long, up to a week” (247). Upon the revelation that the train was bound
for Dachau, the story flicks back into the present. The imagery, though, suggests
continuity as the image of the car in the present appears to come out of the train of
the past (248). The direction of movement and the staging of the two forms of trans-
port suggests the interconnectedness of the two periods. The trajectory is equal in
both panels, suggesting that Vladek and his family remain on the path carved out
by the atrocities committed in the past: they are driven (in the most literal sense)
by these experiences.
This connection between past and present is further emphasized in the stories
that are relayed on either side of this transition. In the past, Vladek explains that,
as the victims on the train were forced to throw out the dead, they took any items
that could be of use: “if the dead had bread left, or better shoes, we kept… they
didn’t need anymore” (247). In the present, Vladek insists on taking back an almost-
empty box of cereal that he cannot eat to the supermarket, earlier arguing “I cannot
forget it… ever since Hitler I don’t like to throw out even a crumb” (238). The connec-
tion between the necessary plundering of the dead bodies and Vladek’s inability to
waste food in the present implies that his behavior is conditioned by his previous
experiences. The transitional metaphor of the train as it is replaced by the car is
thereby shown to adhere to Erin McGlothlin’s observations about the role of time in
Maus:
Even though Spiegelman’s comic project appears to contain two separate, seem-
ingly unconnected narrative strands that strictly delineate the then of the father’s
Holocaust story and the now of the narration of that story, the text evades any at-
tempt on the part of the reader to keep these two chronological levels distinct from
one another (179). A significant element of this temporal collapse is the postmemori-
al transition of Vladek’s story to his son.
472 Joanne Pettitt
2.3 Art and Postmemory
Marianne Hirsch describes postmemory as:
the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trau-
ma of those who came before – to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories,
images, and behaviours among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted
to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. (5)
The tri-part structure of the narrative allows for this inter-generational transmission
of trauma to be made explicit. At several points, as Vladek tells his story, Art can
be seen lying on the floor in front of his father, taking notes or holding recording
equipment (e. g. 53, 84, 197). These acts of transcribing and recording show the
transmission of the father’s story as it becomes the son’s: Art (Spiegelman), as the
author of Maus, becomes the ‘owner’ of his own narrative of the Holocaust. This
intergenerational transfer is further inscribed through the dedication of the narra-
tive to Richieu – Spiegelman’s murdered brother – Nadja, his daughter and, in later
editions, Dashiell, his younger son.
This postmemorial collapse is also acknowledged by Hillary Chute. In a panel
in which Art lays on the floor in front of his father, Art’s legs cross over into a
neighbouring panel that depicts the past that Vladek had been relating (47). Chute
argues:
In Spiegelman’s suggestive panelization, Art’s legs bridge decades: looking up at his sitting
father, and facing “forwards” towards the direction of the unfolding narrative (if one considers
that one reads from left to right), Art’s legs are yet mired in the past. His body conspicuously
overlaps and joins a panel depicting 1939, and the panel depicting 1978’s conversation. Signifi-
cantly, it is in the act of writing and recording his father’s deposition that Art’s body spills
over between frames, thus disrupting the “setting apart” of Vladek’s history from the discur-
sive situation of the present (2003).
There are several other points at which this transmission is emphasized in Maus.
Michael G. Levine notes, for example, the metaphorical significance of Vladek’s
safety box. In the box, Vladek keeps a cigarette case and a lady’s powder case from
before the war. Both items had been hidden in a chimney before being surreptitious-
ly retrieved by Vladek once the War was over (2003, 95). In one sense, these items
reflect Vladek’s own trajectory: they too survived their proximity to the chimneys
and came out of the War. This connection to Vladek’s own experience of survival
suggests that the legacy of the Holocaust has somehow become tangible, actualised
in the sense that it has attained a material presence in the present. As Vladek arran-
ges for Art to have a key to the safety deposit box, “in case anything bad happens
to me” (128), both Art and the reader are reminded of the proximity of Vladek’s
death, a proximity that is linked both to the Holocaust and to the frame narrative.
As Art is given access to the box, the legacy of survival (and its implicit connotations
of loss) are handed down to the son. In turn, Art passes on the contents to his own
children, marking the continued transmission of the legacy (Spiegelman 2011b, 68).
Art’s smoking may also be viewed as indicative of this inherited trauma. Chute’s
observations that “The smoke from Art’s cigarette, as it drifts upwards from the
bottom-left corner, is consonant with and becomes the smoke from the crematoria”
(2003) chimes with similar advances made by Levine, who writes that the smoke
from Art’s cigarette may alternatively be read as Art “draw[ing] in a breath of Ausch-
witz” (91) or that “Auschwitz is the very air he breathes” (92). At the moment the
smoke of the cigarette fuses with the smoke of the chimneys at Auschwitz, the past
and the present merge. The act of inhaling the smoke, as Levine suggests, “seems
to draw together inside and out, present and past, the inflamed airways of the living
and the airborne remains of the dead” (91). The obsessive nature of Art’s smoking
habit further suggests that this process of imbibing is one that takes on the repeti-
tive structure of trauma.
2.4 Art’s Trauma
Running alongside the Holocaust narrative is a sub-plot about the suicide of Art’s
mother, which functions both as another occasion of loss, and as a reminder of
Art’s own traumatic experiences. As Mcglothin notes, “Art has his own story to tell”
(2013, 183). The suicide of Anja – Art’s mother – haunts the narrative. It is expressed
most fully in ‘Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History,’ a graphic short story that
had been written/drawn by Spiegelman in 1972. The story is told in a style complete-
ly distinct from that of the rest of Maus: its characters are human, it is framed by a
thick black border and is drawn in a more expressionist style. It consequently re-
mains unassimilated; the lack of pagination in this section reinforces this sense of
estrangement. While acknowledging Art’s own grief and sense of guilt, the story
shows how these feelings are continually undermined by Vladek’s suffering: “I was
expected to comfort him!”
This sense that Art’s suffering pales in comparison with that of Vladek is central
to Maus. In the prologue, Art falls over while roller skating with his friends, who
then run off without him. Vladek’s response – “if you lock them together in a room
with no food for a week… then you could see what it is, friends!” (6) – draws the
reader’s attention to Vladek’s own experiences during the Second World War, there-
by undermining Art’s own sense of pain and suffering. Hamida Bosmajian observes
that “this crucial childhood memory imprints on the narrator not only that friends
are unreliable but also that his pains are unimportant and that he is insignificant
in relation to Vladek and his story” (2003, 35). At the end, this displacement or
silencing of Art’s pain is completed when Vladek removes him from the story entire-
ly: “I’m tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now” (296).
Throughout the story, Art’s brother Richieu is, on the one hand, a ghostly pres-
ence and, on the other, an object of a disrupted brotherly competitiveness. Stanislav
474 Joanne Pettitt
Kolář acknowledges Art’s awareness of “the absurdity of the rivalry with his dead
brother” but notes that “as a ‘replacement child’ [Art] fills a void” (2013, 231). Kolář
goes on to say: “Artie seems to be disqualified for his ‘combat’ with his brother
because he knows that unlike Richieu, he does not share his parents’ tragic past”
(232). According to Kolář, then, it is this lack of shared traumatic experiences that
defines the relationship between Art and Vladek, and that makes it so combative.
It is on this note of Art’s perceived inferiority to his brother that Maus II ends, leav-
ing the reader with the sense that these family tensions are never fully resolved.
Art suffers because of the death of his mother, because he cannot really replace
his dead brother, and because his father’s experiences are at once passed down to
him vicariously, and removed from his own sphere of experiential knowledge. With
the intertwining of these familial traumas and those associated with the Holocaust
more specifically (the experiences of Vladek, Anja and Mala), the narrative breaks
down the distinctions between the different narrative threads. At the same time,
Art’s inability to integrate these experiences into a coherent narrative is expressed
through both the metafictional layer of the story, which foregrounds the difficulties
Art experiences with organizing his father’s story into a structured account, and
through elements of the text that resist integration entirely. Marianne Hirsch writes:
The truly shocking and disturbing breaks in the visual narrative – the points that fail to blend
in – are the section called ‘Prisoner on the Hell Planet’ in Maus in which an actual photograph
appears, and the two photos in Maus II. These three moments protrude from the narrative like
unassimilated and unassimilable memories. (1997, 29)
The author goes on to note that, across the two parts of Maus, all four members of
the Spiegelman family are shown in photographic form (31): a young Art and his
mother on the beach at the beginning of ‘Prisoner on the Hell Planet’ (102), Richieu
on the dedication page at the beginning of Maus II (165), and Vladek, posing (some-
what bizarrely) in a “new and clean” camp uniform for a souvenir photo after the
end of the War (294). Like the family photos included at the bottom of the family
trees in Metamaus, the dispersion of the images across the two books underlines
the sense of fragmentation that the text produces.
This fragmentation is also created through the voicelessness of several of the
characters. Vladek’s second wife, Mala, is, for example, a Holocaust survivor, but
she is never given the opportunity to tell her own story, either by Art or by Vladek.
Anja’s narrative, on the other hand, is intrinsically tied to that of Vladek, and so
her experiences are detailed as part of Vladek’s own. In ‘Prisoner on the Hell Planet’
Art reveals that Anja did not leave a suicide note. Later, her diaries are destroyed
when Vladek, in a fit of rage or depression, sets them alight. This book burning is
reminiscent of those undertaken by the Nazis and so returns the reader yet again to
the narrative of Nazi persecution. Michael G. Levine considers the burning of the
books to function as a repetition of Anja’s suicide, “a suicide that is repeated in the
form of a homicide (Vladek’s ‘murderous’ burning of the diaries)” (2003, 84).
The link between this second death and the Holocaust is also underlined by the
burning of the books, which might be considered as a parallel (though in no way
an equal) to the fires in the crematoria of the concentration camps. Nancy K. Miller
usefully contends that “we should understand the question of Anja as that which
will forever escape representation and at the same time requires it: the silence of
the victims” (2003, 52). The silencing of both Mala and Anja not only leads to a
narrative that is constructed solely through male voices (see Hirsch 33–35), but it
also reminds the reader of all of the narratives that will never be given expression.
From this perspective, it is also notable that both ‘Prisoner on the Hell Planet’ and
Maus itself end with the stifling of voices: “Pipe down, Mac! Some of us are trying
to sleep!” (105) and “I’m tired of talking Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now…”
(296). That both stories end in this way suggests that there is more left to say: the
closing of Maus thereby refuses to allow for a cathartic ending or a final resolution.
Vladek’s sleeping – and, more generally, his death – might indicate that his own
tale has been told, but there are many others that still have not been given voice.
Like the gaps in the family tree at the end of Metamaus, and the deaths marked by
the tombstone at the end of Maus, these absent voices highlight the irretrievable
void left by the Nazi genocide.
In all, then, Spiegelman’s work is filled with gaps. It foregrounds voicelessness
and it continually returns to those who did not survive the war. While much of the
narrative is concerned with the ways in which the traumas of the Holocaust have
been passed down to subsequent generations, at its root, the text works as a com-
memoration of those who are missing, and as a reminder of the magnitude of suffer-
ing caused by the genocide.

One of the main causes of controversy relating to Maus is its use of cats (Germans),
mice (Jews) and pigs (Poles) as metaphors for racial or national identities. Robert C.
Harvey, for example, contends that:
[Spiegelman’s] visual simplification renders all Jews in virtually the same way…individuality
is thereby eliminated…it was precisely this sort of dehumanizing of Jews that had to take place
before the Nazis could persuade themselves to “exterminate” the “vermin” (1994, 244)
Harvey is, however, in the minority. And for Spiegelman, the mouse (maus) meta-
phor worked: not only did it acknowledge Spiegelman’s own place within the comix
canon with allusions to Disney’s Mickey Mouse (referred to more directly in the
three-page original), but it also represented a re-appropriation of the anti-Semitic
imagery of vermin that had dominated the Nazi era; Spiegelman himself has gone
so far as to call Hitler a “collaborator” in his project (cited in Doherty 1996, 74).
476 Joanne Pettitt
One of the reasons the metaphor works and does not simply reproduce Nazi
stereotypes, as Harvey claims, is because of Spiegelman’s ability to deconstruct the
metaphor at the same time that he constructs it. This happens at various times
throughout the story: when various characters don pig masks as a disguise (e. g.
127, 146, 157); when a large mouse frightens Anja as she hides with Vladek in a
cellar (149); and when the author himself appears wearing a mouse mask (e. g. 201,
204). Harking back to Jean-Paul Sartre’s comment that “the Jew is one whom other
men consider a Jew” (1976, 49), the use of animal heads on otherwise very human
characters demonstrates the artificiality and arbitrariness of such constructions; as
Joshua Brown puts it: “Spiegelman tackled Hitler’s metaphor to undermine it. The
horror of racial theory is not rationalized or supported by the metaphor; it is brought
to its fullest, tense realization” (1988: 108).
In moving away from verisimilitude, Spiegelman sought instead to construct the
Holocaust as “a mental zone” (Spiegelman 2011b, 166). This (perhaps paradoxically)
allowed for a more authentic form of representation. Hillary Chute argues:
When the stylized animal characters, drawn in a simplified cartoon style, exist and act in
frames, and on pages, with meticulously realistically drawn props and locations – such as the
gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz – the reader of Maus registers a jolt, a defamiliarizing
recognition beyond that [sic] they would experience in a representation with a consistent style
of verisimilitude. It is this jarring quality that is the power of the text’s deliberately un-synthe-
sized collisions of styles and the root of its ethical representation of horror (2005, see also
McGlothlin 2003; Wilner 2003 ).
The animal imagery that Spiegelman adopts thus functions in two important ways:
it re-appropriates the anti-Semitic imagery propagated by the Nazis and shows the
arbitrariness of divisions along racial or ethnic lines, and it foregrounds the medium
of representation as essential to its meaning by highlighting the constructed nature
of the narrative. As a result, the gap between event and image is continually ac-
knowledged. In this sense, the cartoon imagery ironically feeds into Maus’s wider
concern with the need for authentic representation.
Ultimately, Maus not only revolutionized the way that graphic novels and com-
ics were perceived (Spiegelman once called the comic the “hunchback half-witted
bastard step-child of the graphic arts,” qtd. in Curran, 2016, 67), but it also provided
a nuanced and complex account of the legacy of the Nazi genocide.

Maus has attracted the attention of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, in-
cluding memory studies, trauma studies, literary studies and Holocaust studies. Ac-
cording to Spiegelman, it has sold over a million copies of each book in the US
alone. It has also been translated into a large number of foreign languages (“around
thirty”) (Spiegelman 2011b, 152). But the near-global circulation of Maus did not
happen without some complications. In Metamaus, Spiegelman notes the difficul-
ties in getting the work translated into Polish because of the somewhat ambivalent
representation of the Poles as pigs (124). Later, he also acknowledges the belated-
ness of the Hebrew version, noting that “the antipathy may have had something to
do with the fact that the book doesn’t posit Israel as the happy ending to the Holo-
caust, like, say, Schindler’s List. If anything, this is a diasporist’s account of the
Holocaust” (153). For the Israeli publication, Spiegelman was also forced to make
changes after having been threatened with a libel suit by a relative of Pesach, who
is portrayed as a member of the Jewish police in the original. Because it is illegal to
reproduce images of the swastika in Germany, Spiegelman’s front cover image also
caused legal difficulties there (155).
Reception to the work once it was published also varied. Spiegelman notes an
anti-Semitic subtext in British responses; he also observes that the French seemed
more attentive to the form and style of the work; the Italians focused more on the
family narrative, while the Germans were more concerned with the historical legacy
of the Second World War (159). In spite of these varying responses – reflecting,
perhaps, the complexities and specificities associated with national memories of
the Holocaust – Maus has exceeded all expectation. As well as the Pulitzer Prize,
Spiegelman’s work won a number of other awards: among many others, it was a
finalist in the biography/autobiography category of the National Book Critics Circle
awards (1986 and 1991); it won a special Max & Moritz Prize in 1990; and an Eisner
Award for the best graphic novel (reprint) in 1992. It also came first in Wizard Maga-
zine’s list of “100 Greatest Graphic Novels”; it was number four on the Comic Jour-
nal’s “Top 100 Comics of the Twentieth Century” list; and Entertainment Weekly
listed it as seventh on a list of “The New Classics: Books – The Best 100 Reads from
1983 to 2008.” As Spiegelman himself put it in an interview with The Guardian, “It
has become canonical […] There’s no way out of it: if I were a blues musician, it
would play in car commercials. It has entered the culture in ways that I never could
have predicted” (2011).
Certainly, Maus has entered the canon of Holocaust literature in ways that few
people could have predicted. Its publication marks a paradigm shift that paved the
way for other graphic narratives and opened up new ways of engaging with the
Nazi genocide. Its resonance both inside and outside of the academy attests to its
cultural, critical and artistic importance.
478 Joanne Pettitt
5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited

Bosmajian, Hamida. “The Orphaned Voice in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Considering Maus:
Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survival Tale” of the Holocaust. Ed. Deborah R. Geis.
London: University of Alabama Press, 2003.
Brown, Joshua. “Of Mice and Memory.” The Oral History Review 16.1 (1988): 91–109.
Chute, Hillary. “Literal Forms: Narrative Structures in Maus.” Indy Magazine online, December 21,
2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20051221101203/64.23.98.142/indy/winter_2005/chute/
index.html.
Curran, Beverley. “Maus: A Translational Comics Text.” Translation Review 95.1 (2016): 67–77.
Doherty, Thomas. “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust.” American Literature
68.1 (1996): 69–84.
Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1994.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Massachusetts:
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Hutton, Robert. 2015. “A Mouse in the Bookstore: Maus and the Publishing Industry.” South
Central Review 32.3 (2015): 30–44.
Kolář, Stanislav. 2013. “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.”
Brno Studies in English 39.1 (2013): 227–241.
Kruger, Liam. “Panels and faces: segmented metaphors and reconstituted time in Art
Spiegelman’s Maus.” Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 29.3 (2015): 357–
366.
Levine, Michael G. “Necessary Stains: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Bleeding of History.”
Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survival Tale” of the Holocaust.
Ed. Deborah R. Geis. London: University of Alabama Press, 2003.
McGlothlin, Erin. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.”
Narrative 11.2 (2003): 177–198.
Miller, Nancy K. “Cartoons of the Self: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Murderer – Art
Spiegelman’s Maus.” Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survival Tale” of
the Holocaust. Ed. Deborah R. Geis. London: University of Alabama Press, 2003.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Anti-Semite and the Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. New York:
Schocken Books, 1976.
Spiegelman, Art. “A Problem of Taxonomy.” The New York Times, December 29, 1991.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Spiegelman, Art. “Auschwitz became for us a safe place.” The Guardian 23. October 2011a.
Spiegelman, Art. Metamaus. London: Penguin Books, 2011b.
Tebacknick, Stephen E. “Of Maus and Memory: The Structure of Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel
of the Holocaust.” Word and Image 9 (1993): 154–162.
Wilner, Arlene Fish. “‘Happy Happy Ever After’: Story and History in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.”
Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survival Tale” of the Holocaust.
Ed. Deborah R. Geis. London: University of Alabama Press, 2003.
Young, James E. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of
History.” Critical Enquiry 24.3 (1998): 71–87.
5.2 Further Reading

Budick, Emily Miller. “Forced Confessions: The Case of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Prooftexts 21.3
(2001): 379–398.
Curran, Beverley. “Maus: A Translational Comics Text.” Translation Review 95.1 (2016): 67–77.
Hathaway, Rosemary V. “Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus as Postmodern Ethnography.” Journal of
Folklore Research 48.3 (2011): 249–267.
Liss, Andrea. Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Loman, Andrew. “Well Intended Liberal Slop: Allegories of Race in Spiegelman’s Maus.” Journal of
American Studies 40.3 (2006): 551–571.
Tebachnik, Stephen. “The Religious Meaning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Shofar: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22.4 (2004): 1–13.
Urdiales-Shaw, Martín. “Between Transmission and Translation: The Rearticulation of Vladek
Spiegelman’s Languages in Maus.” Translation and Literature 24 (2015): 23–41.
Nicola Glaubitz
23 Robert Crumb
Abstract: The article gives a survey of the American comic artist Robert Crumb’s
work from the 1960s to the present. It chiefly discusses Crumb’s publishing policy
in the transition from underground comix to alternative comics (ca. 1968–1980), and
his position in the field of art and mainstream publishing. A detailed reading of
Crumb’s most popular comic “Keep on Truckin’” (1968) and its 1972 sequel “Remem-
ber Keep on Truckin’?” in the context of the American counterculture elaborates,
firstly, Crumb’s characteristic drawing style that nostalgically invokes vintage strips
from the ‘golden age’ of newspaper funnies from the 1920s to the 1940s, and adds
roughness and a crude sex appeal to ‘cute’, polished images of 1950s commercial
comics. Secondly, it considers the commercialization of underground comix and
Crumb’s skeptical attitude to both the underground scene and the institutions of
art, for which he was of interest as a marginal, popular artist. Thirdly, it discusses
his take on the ‘coffee table book’ as a reflection on a culturally established, middle-
brow format. Crumb’s attempt to carve out a position as a craftsman in the tradition
of early twentieth century entertainment is discussed critically with respect to cur-
rent debates on the ‘gentrification’ of comics since the emergence of the graphic
novel.
Key Terms: alternative comics, underground comix, commercialization, autobiogra-

phy

Robert Crumb (born in 1943) is an American comics artist (frequently classified as a
cartoonist), illustrator, editor and musician. He often signs his work as R. Crumb.
His magazine Zap Comix, first published in early 1968, initiated and inspired the
movement of underground and alternative comics in the United States (Rosenkranz
2002, 69–72) and beyond. Crumb’s comic strips feature human and funny animal
characters, set in the American counterculture of the 1960s. They draw on personal
experience, chiefly with sexuality and psychedelic drugs. Like George Herriman’s
Krazy Kat or Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strips from the 1910s to the 1970s, Crumb’s
funnies serve the purposes of social commentary and satire while also functioning
as a vehicle for personal expression.
Having drawn comic strips with his older brother Charles since childhood, he
worked as a professional designer and illustrator for a Cleveland-based greeting
card company from 1962 onwards. After his 1967 move to San Francisco’s Haight-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-027
482 Nicola Glaubitz
Ashbury district, he became an independent artist and editor. His most famous
characters (Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Shuman the Human, Mr. Snoid) portray and
at the same time lampoon the late beatnik and hippie movements and their existen-
tialist self-stylization, their search for spiritual enlightenment and sexual liberation,
and their naive optimism. Crumb’s presentations of female characters – first and
foremost the oversexualized African American Angelfood McSpade – are highly con-
troversial (Kipnis 2011) for their blatant sexism and racism.
Crumb began working for small independent magazines like Yarrowstalks in
1967 and had a Fritz the Cat story (“Fritz Bugs Out”) serialized for the men’s maga-
zine Cavalier. He then published his work in magazines such as Zap and Weirdo
(which he also co-edited), Arcade, Nasty Tales, The Village Voice and Mineshaft.
Ralph Bakshi contributed to Fritz the Cat’s fame by adapting it into an animated
film in 1970, from which Crumb immediately distanced himself. Apart from author-
ing stand-alone comic strips and comic books, Crumb collaborated with under-
ground comics artists like Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, and his wife Aline Ko-
minsky-Crumb as well as with Harvey Pekar (American Splendor, 1976). He also
worked with writers Charles Bukowski and David Zane Mairowitz (Introducing Kaf-
ka, 1993) on illustrated book projects, using more realistic variations of a style he
also employed in his autobiographical and satirical strips.
He illustrated (among others) books that matched his interest in sex, such as
James Boswell’s diaries and Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (in Weirdo
No. 13, 1985). The publication of his sketchbooks from the 1990s onwards gave a
larger readership insight into his work process. His 2009 non-satirical adaptation
The Book of Genesis Illustrated topped the New York Times graphic novel bestseller
list and the Amazon Christian books list (Luscombe 2009). Crumb has been living
and working in France since 1990, continues to work for The New Yorker and other
magazines, and engages in political discussions concerning comics, such as the
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. He has received the Eisner Award in 1991 and the
Grand Prix of Angoulême in 1999.
Crumb’s work offers insight into the intersection between visual art and com-
ics – unlike many other comics artists who garner academic interest for their cross-
over between literature and comics. As Beaty and Woo observe, “comic book stories
are frequently compared to novels in terms of their complexity of plot, characteriza-
tion, and theme. [...] More rarely, comic book artists may be compared to masters of
painterly composition in terms of expressivity, design sensibility, and rendering.”
(Beaty and Woo 2016, 5) Crumb’s work has been included in the sphere of art from
an early point on: he has been a continuous presence in museums and galleries
since a first group exhibition at the Art Museum of Peoria, Illinois, in 1966. His
work was included in the show Human Concern/Personal Torment: The Grotesque in
American Art at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, in 1969, and the art muse-
ums that have hosted solo exhibitions include the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
(2000), and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2004).
23 Robert Crumb 483
1.1 Underground Comix and Alternative Comics: New Forms

of Publication and Distribution
Crumb’s work was a major force in reshaping the field of comics in the 1960s (Hat-
field 2005, 16): from 1968 on, Zap contributed to offer a redefinition of the comic
book format, reconfiguring the relations between producers, publishers and readers
by initiating direct marketing (Hatfield 2005, 16). Underground comix emerged in
the wider context of American countercultural movements of the 1960s and gave
way to alternative comics in the mid-1970s (Sabin and Triggs 2000, 10 ; ↗2 History,
Formats, Genres). The ‘x’ in comix was understood to refer to ‘X-rated’ (Sabin 2001,
92, Chute 2017, pos. 105) until Art Spiegelman redefined the term, deriving the ‘x’
from the ‘mix’ of image and text, and envisaging grown-up instead of ‘adult only’
comics (Beaty and Woo 2016, 24). Comix artists favored single authorship over the
assembly-line production of commercial comics, and engaged actively with contem-
porary political concerns. The terminological shift in how artists described their
own work reflects the transition from a largely amateur graphic culture which exist-
ed alongside the entrenched field of commercial comics, to an established subcul-
ture. This subculture eventually became commercially viable yet remained highly
specialized, with a network of shops and publishers, and an organized fandom and
magazines such as Raw (1980–91) and Weirdo (1981–93) (Hatfield 2005, 20–21). By
turning comics into a medium for personal expression, Crumb pioneered the trend
of autobiographical comics that gained momentum in the 1980s (Hatfield 2005,
111 f.; ↗9 Life Writing). Like the artists of the Pop Art movement, he introduced a
strong sense of irony and self-reflexiveness into comix (Hatfield 2005, 16–17).
The origins of underground comix are difficult to date precisely. Among their
forerunners are 1950s amateur ’zines, college humor magazines, underground
newspapers, and psychedelic rock poster art. Harvey Kurtzman’s satirical maga-
zines Mad (1952) and Help! (1960) with lampoons of movies, television, and other
comics provided inspiration and later turned into a platform for underground comix
artists (Sabin 2001, 92). Underground comix also revived the tradition of illegally
distributed pornographic parodies of well-known newspaper comics, the so-called
‘Tijuana Bibles’ (Pekar 1970, 679). Despite some earlier, short-lived and small-scale
publications, Crumb’s Zap Comix (1968) is the first underground comic book, i. e. a
magazine exclusively containing comics (Hatfield 2005, 8). Comic artists like him
were reclaiming a format that had been associated with mass-produced, commercial
comics, i. e. the funny animal strips, superhero, true crime, and romance series of
major publishers like Marvel, DC and Archie Comics. As market commodities, these
comic books relied on standardized graphic and narrative formulas that could be
processed by collaborating artist teams working within tight deadlines (Hatfield
2005, 9). Their storylines and artwork followed the Comics Code of 1954, a self-
censoring agreement among the major publishers banning controversial topics like
sexuality, drugs and violence (↗2 History, Formats, Genres).
484 Nicola Glaubitz
The six issues of Crumb’s Zap Comix released between 1968 and 1973 perfectly
illustrate the boom and subsequent decline of comix and its publishing conditions.
Zap Comix (later issues, starting with issue 7, are occasionally titled Zap only) turned
into the “best-selling title in the underground” (Rosenkranz 2002, 140). Crumb drew
the 24 pages of what became Zap Comix No. 1 (February 1968) single-handedly and
distributed the 5,000 copies of the first issue for 25 cents each on the streets and to
local shops in Haight-Ashbury with friends (Rosenkranz 2002, 70). The (chronologi-
cally) first issue, released later as Zap # 0, had also been drawn single-handedly by
Crumb in 1967 but went missing temporarily with the Yarrowstalks editor (Crumb
and Poplaski 2005, 142). Distribution to countrywide head shops was underway
within a year. From issue no. 2 onwards, it became a collaborative enterprise with
Rick Griffin, Spain Rodriguez, Victor Mocosco, S. Clay Wilson and Robert Williams
(Rosenkranz 2002, 86). Zap Comix No. 2 sold out within weeks and had to be reprint-
ed; by 1972, an estimated one million copies of the constantly reprinted issues had
been sold (Rosenkranz 2002, 87, 185).
Zap Comix thus functioned as a “catalyst for a whole new form of comix pub-
lishing” (Hatfield 2005, 8): the direct market. Presses like Krupp Comic Works (later
renamed Kitchen Sink Press), The Print Mint, Last Gasp, and Rip Off Press published
underground comix and sold them via mail order or in shops not subject to the
Comics Code Authority (Weiner 2010, 4). The ‘head shops’ selling hippie parapher-
nalia, records, poster art, hookahs and independent newspapers were the major
outlet for comix (Rosenkranz 2002, 4). As Crumb recalls, small publishers mush-
roomed from 1968 onwards and turned the “underground comix thing into a busi-
ness before my eyes” (Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 163). The presses for which Crumb
worked began with print runs of up to 20,000 for the first issues (Rosenkranz 2002,
171).
The boom did not last long, however. The explicit and sometimes violent male
sexual fantasies featured in Zap and Snatch appealed to some customers while an-
tagonizing many others (Rosenkranz 2002, 89, 90, 137). The original audience quick-
ly fragmented for several reasons: the sexually explicit content led the sex industry
to use underground comix magazines as advertising space from 1971 onwards, and
more radically political magazines voicing the concerns of women’s liberation and
minority rights organizations emerged. In addition, more restrictive laws imposed
on head shops made distribution increasingly difficult, and in 1973 a new Supreme
Court decision made charges of obscenity dependent on local community stan-
dards – thereby severely restricting the extant distribution networks for comix (Ro-
senkranz 2002, 215). Only the newly founded magazines Arcade, Raw and Weirdo
continued to publish work by established underground artists (among them Crumb,
Gilbert Shelton, and Art Spiegelman) and new talents such as the Hernandez broth-
ers (Rosenkranz 2002, 235). The Zap collective, at this time, began to question its
status as an elite and established group (Rosenkranz 2002, 233), and discontinued
the magazine until 1975. Eight further issues were published sporadically until 2014.
23 Robert Crumb 485
In 1973 Crumb, like other underground artists, looked for alternative sources of
income and publication modes. He toured with his band and sued successfully
against copyright infringements for his most popular and frequently pirated comic
strip “Keep on Truckin’” (1968; see 2.2). By 1975, the era of underground comix was
over: comix evaporated as a countercultural force and became a niche commodity
that thrived on the notoriety it had acquired through its focus on sex, drugs and
radical politics. As editor of the first nine issues of Weirdo and comics artist for
other magazines and anthologies, Crumb continued to contribute to the emerging
“new” or “alternative comics” scene which, along with the graphic novel, explored
new cultural fields (Hatfield 2005, 19–20).
In the mid-1970s, Crumb adapted to changing audiences and distribution net-
works outside the original counterculture and fan base, making a move that only a
handful of other comix artists managed to perform: without giving up his affiliation
with the subculture, he entered traditionally more elite and high-cultural venues
(galleries and art museums) and mainstream publishing. Like the work of other
internationally renowned artists like Hergé, Hugo Pratt, Moebius, or Chris Ware,
Robert Crumb’s art sells in the form of original drawings. According to Beaty
and Woo, “Crumb is the only alternative cartoonist to sell work for more than
$ 100,000.” (2016, 36). Crumb claims to have never explicitly prepared work for
galleries or collectors of originals (König and Fischer 2004, 29) and voices amused
consternation about the criteria for artistic quality and the conventions of museums
and art criticism (Obrist 2006, 10, 39–40, Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 297–300). But
since his first inclusions in exhibitions in 1966 and 1969, he never lost contact with
the art scene and the frequency of his art shows increased in the 1980s (for a list,
see König and Fischer 2004, 247–268; see 2.3).
In the 1980s, Crumb seized on another opportunity opened up by the increasing
respectability of the medium. To keep his ‘classical’ work in circulation, he reissued
older work, partly in more prestigious hardcover editions (e. g. Bible of Filth, 1986;
The Complete Crumb Comics, from 1987 onwards). As an illustrator, he produced
collector’s items and coffee table books. Meet the Beats: A Portfolio of Portraits by
Robert Crumb, featuring drawings of beat icons like Jack Kerouac, William S. Bur-
roughs or Allen Ginsberg (1986), and the Portfolio of Beloved Music Makers of Days
Gone By (1999) were issued in limited editions of 100 and 200 copies respectively.
Books like these, as well as the sketchbooks reproduced in hardcover at a moderate
price, catered to a now affluent generation of older comics fans. The release of limit-
ed editions tapped into the practice of amateur collecting, which had long been a
vital part of comix subculture (Hatfield 2005, 20, Varnedoe and Gopnik 1990, 160).
But Crumb also catered to middlebrow audiences. The Robert Crumb Coffee Table
Art Book (1997) and The Robert Crumb Handbook (2005), both written and edited by
Crumb and Peter Poplaski, stake a claim in the market for anthologies and, more
importantly, set the agenda for the reception of Crumb’s work: they collect comic
strips, biographical information, new artwork, commentary on his own work and
486 Nicola Glaubitz
selected criticism. While the handbook is geared towards information, the Coffee
Table Art Book responds to the conventions of catalogues and anthologies.
Crumb has also actively shaped the reception of his work beyond these publish-
ing activities: he was one of the first to introduce comix into an academic context
when Denis Kitchen, head of Kitchen Sink Press, taught a course on comics appreci-
ation at Wisconsin University in 1971, and invited Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb
and Jay Lynch for lectures (Rosenkranz 2002, 210). Crumb published numerous com-
ic strips on the topic of art and drawing comics and is an eloquent interviewee (e. g.
in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film Crumb, 1994, or in a 2014 issue of Critical In-
quiry). In hindsight, Crumb’s skillful wrangling of diverse audiences, artist personae
and styles may look like a consistent and highly efficient strategy of pushing into
as many fields receptive to comics as possible without ‘selling out’ too blatantly.
1.2 Crumb in the 1960s Counterculture and Beyond
The work of artists like Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton,
Aline Kominsky, Bill Griffiths, Phoebe Gloeckner, Trina Robbins or Victor Mocosco
differs from commercial comics on the one hand and the pornographic eight-pagers
on the other. They turn comix into a medium for personal, subjective expression
and storytelling. Comix introduce issues largely banished from comic books by com-
mercial considerations and/or the Comics Code, such as violence and sexuality in
all imaginable forms, the 1960s drug culture, and politics ranging from left-wing
anti-Vietnam protest, the Civil Rights Movement, feminism and the Gay Liberation
movement to reactionary conservatism. Typically, the utopian politics of these
movements are bound up with nostalgia for pre-industrial forms of (cultural) pro-
duction (Fiedler 1971, 83, Varnedoe and Gopnik 1990, 158). Nostalgia for a lower-
class popular culture from an early age of mass entertainment is particularly charac-
teristic of Crumb’s work. His old-fashioned style recalls pre-World War II comic
strips (Varnedoe and Gopnik 1990, 158, 159, see 2.2, Chute 2017, pos. 109), and he
frequently expressed admiration for illustrations and popular music of the first two
decades of the twentieth century in interviews and in his comic strips. Crumb
presents himself visually and verbally as a sincere craftsman eager to deliver “genu-
inely high-quality entertainment” (Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 364, see 394). Never-
theless, Crumb’s work ethos remains firmly anchored in the context of mechanically
reproduced media: he values the effect of his drawings in print reproduction over
the originals (Obrist 2006, 38, König and Fischer 2004, 5, 28–29).
Crumb’s comix display sometimes violent sexual fantasies and typically com-
bine the ironic subversion of commercial stereotypes with blunt, hilarious self-dep-
recation. An “uneasy blend of utopian and reactionary sentiment” (Hatfield 2005,
19) is salient in the 1993 comic strip “When the Niggers Take over America!” (Weirdo
No. 28) and its companion piece “When the Goddamn Jews Take over America!”
23 Robert Crumb 487
These strips condense crass racial and anti-Semitic prejudices in what may be read
as a parody, a documentary of collective political resentment, or merely a provoca-
tion for provocation’s sake (Beaty and Woo 2016, 32). In “The Family that LAYS
together STAYS together” (Snatch No. 2, 1969) and “Joe Blow” (Zap No. 4, 1969), the
parodic element prevails: the six-page comic strip “Joe Blow” features incest, and
“The Family” shows incest and a dog having sexual intercourse with a toddler
(Chute 2017, pos. 116) in an obvious send-up of American middle-class family values.
The titillating function of its pornographic dimension is here blunted by the gro-
tesque cartoonishness of its characters.
A more problematic ambivalence can be found in comic strips parading Crumb’s
obsessive love-hate relationship with big-bosomed and thick-legged women with
large bottoms. Women characters like the stereotypical black sex goddess Angel-
food McSpade or Devil Girl are visually presented as strong, vigorous, and intimidat-
ing. Yet they are forever willing or stupid enough to submit to penetration in gro-
tesque impossible positions by small, scruffy males endowed with oversized
genitals. The male partners are recognizable as alter egos of Crumb – nerdy, shy,
with buck teeth and thick glasses. Despite the unacceptable stereotypization, these
images suggest an unstable hierarchy. They literally depict women being subdued
by men, but the grotesque exaggeration of male and female physique renders the
idea of domination highly ambivalent and perhaps reversible. Furthermore,
Crumb’s disturbing fantasies are explicitly marked as personal and autobiographi-
cal and could therefore also be read as acts of self-exposure and self-ridicule.
As these examples show, not only mainstream commercial visual culture or con-
ventional morality but also the practice and ethos of comix itself turn into a target
of satire in Crumb’s work. This tendency is even more pronounced in works that
use autobiographical conventions, such as the book-length collaboration with Har-
vey Pekar, American Splendor (1976), about Pekar’s life, and strips such as “The
Many Faces of Robert Crumb” (XYZ Comics, 1972) or “The Adventures of Robert
Crumb Himself” (Tales from the Leather Nun, 1973). It has been argued that “[p]er-
haps the greatest, and by now best-known cartoon character in Crumb’s rich oeuvre
is Robert Crumb himself” (Buruma 2006). This assessment is borne out but also
lampooned by mock-confessional comic strips which faithfully register all the ob-
sessions, fantasies, and moments of deep embarrassment that twenty-first century
autofiction is rediscovering for literature. ‘Robert Crumb’ is an ambiguous amalgam
of trademark, consciously fashioned persona (Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 393) and
an artist seeking self-expression, and one can argue that this particular amalgam
proved attractive for the field of visual art.
488 Nicola Glaubitz
2.1 Central Topics and Concerns: Self-commentary

and Reflection on Cultural Formats
The Robert Crumb Coffee Table Art Book is in several respects representative for the
scope of Crumb’s work, clearly illustrating his self-positioning at the intersections
of comix, comics, middlebrow culture and the still more traditionally highbrow field
of visual art. I extend Hatfield’s useful approach to comics, treating comic books as
“social objects” (2005, 4) and publishing formats as carriers of meaning, to the for-
mat of the coffee table art book here before I focus in detail on two comic strips
included in Crumb’s anthology.
The term ‘coffee table book’ refers to a book with a conspicuously social and
symbolic function. It is strategically placed in a private space to inspire conversa-
tion among guests and to display the owner’s wealth, class and good taste. Nine-
teenth-century ‘grand piano books’ and (from the 1960s onwards) ‘coffee table
books’ are lavishly illustrated, accessibly written nonfictional books, or, more nar-
rowly, art books (see Stamm 2002, OED online, 2016). As the curators of the Crumb
exhibition at Museum Ludwig in 2004 observe, coffee table art books offer “a way
for the bourgeoisie to show they have arrived at a certain intellectual level” (König
and Fischer 2004, 11). While they provide “the ultimate credentials for art that has
received an art-historical seal of approval” (11), they are also considered the epitome
of middlebrow culture, as mere signifiers of prestige, social status and – worse –
an artist’s marketability.
Coffee table books therefore have a mixed reputation and, hardly surprising,
have been turned into an ironic, self-referential format that ostentatiously flaunts
its functions (for example in Steven Appleby’s The Coffee Table Book of Doom, 2011).
Crumb’s The Robert Crumb Coffee Table Art Book was issued by Kitchen Sink Press
in conjunction with Little, Brown and Company – a major publisher for highbrow
fiction and nonfiction – in 1997, scheduled to coincide with the Christmas buying
season (Holm 2016). The large size of the hardcover edition (28.5 by 33.5 cm), its
glossy, high-quality paper and the generously spaced layout conform perfectly to
the coffee table book format. The book is organized chronologically, giving an over-
view of Crumb’s work, ranging from unpublished childhood drawings to more re-
cent art. The bulk of the material consists of reprints of iconic Crumb comic strips,
illustrations and sketches from the 1960s to the 1990s, reproductions of abstract oil
paintings in the cubist manner from the 1980s, and photographs of life-sized sculp-
tures Crumb fashioned after his ‘big women’ characters. Each of the 15 chapters is
introduced by one page, authored, lettered and illustrated by Crumb himself, and
is complemented by autobiographical comic strips in a manner that D. K. Holm
(2016) aptly describes as a ‘slide show with voice-over’ technique – the combination
23 Robert Crumb 489
of a running commentary in captions with individual illustrations mock-document-

ing or contradicting the words.
The book is mostly a straightforward coffee table book rather than an ironic
reflection on this type of book, as one might have expected in light of Crumb’s
earlier appropriations of commercial formats. Crumb’s strips doubled as cultural
commentary from an early point on (Hatfield 2005, 16, Varnedoe and Gopnik 1990,
160) and adapt, appropriate, parody, or satirise culturally circulating styles and
characters. They bring out their original cultural associations by combining them
with unfamiliar content or storylines and transport a sense of the historicity of com-
ics and cartoons as well. The Coffee Table Art Book, however, indicates distance to
convention only by its mildly offensive material and the hand-lettered text (only
captions, page numbers, the table of content and publisher’s information are print-
ed), thus blurring the distinction between comic strip and commentary. But the text
blocks provide documentation and critical commentary, and fulfil their convention-
al function.
2.2 Literary and Graphic Aesthetics: “Keep on Truckin’”

and “Remember Keep on Truckin’?”
Crumb’s one-page comic strip “Remember Keep on Truckin’?”, reprinted in the cof-
fee table book, is a wry commentary on his own work that conveys a sense of how
quickly and thoroughly an icon of contemporaneity – the highly popular “Keep on
Truckin’” from Zap No. 1, 1968 (fig. 23.1) – turned into an empty cliché attached to
a bygone, already historical moment. “Remember Keep on Truckin’?” was published
in 1972 to reflect the increasing commercialisation of underground comix. “Keep on
Truckin’” has one margin-to-margin title panel above four equal-sized, square pan-
els separated by black lines. As in other Crumb drawings, the characters are out-
lined in bold and sometimes slightly irregular black ink, while volume is indicated
by deft crosshatching. This technique gives a gritty, dense texture to figures whose
rounded contours and bright, unshaded coloring invoke the conventions of weekly
funnies.
Crumb’s work as a whole is influenced by Walt Kelly (“Pogo”), John Stanley
(“Little Lulu”), Carl Barks (“Donald Duck”), Pat Sullivan (“Felix the Cat”) and Mad
cartoonist Basil Wolverton. Further influences are Al Capp (Li’l Abner), Gene Ahern
(Our Boarding House), George Herriman (“Krazy Kat”) and E. C. Segar (“Popeye”)
(Varnedoe and Gopnik 1990, 158; Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 24–25, 62, 79; Hatfield
2005, 11). Crumb recalls that he and his brother were avid and critical comics con-
noisseurs and collectors at an early age and began to draw out of frustration with
the “too cloyingly cute, conservative and corporate” Disney comics (Crumb and
Poplaski 2005, 86). Crumb typically works with block coloring or in black-and-
white, and his later style also includes more realistically proportioned characters
and scenarios.
490 Nicola Glaubitz
Fig. 23.1: Keep on Truckin’ copyright © Robert Crumb, 1968.

Used with permission.
“Keep on Truckin’” is made up of a series of five individual images showing grin-

ning male figures (in a group of four, individually, and in pairs) with huge feet in
nailed shoes, mostly wearing formal suits. All of them are strutting through simply
sketched American inner city and suburban streets. The most striking structural
feature is the tension between sequence and juxtaposition: the captions (integrated
into the panels at the top, not set off by boxes) are clearly recognizable as song
lyrics even if one does not catch the reference to an old Blind Boy Fuller blues song:
“Keep on Truckin’/Truckin’ on down the line/Hey hey hey/I said keep on truckin’/
Truckin’ my blues away!” Each panel features different characters; in the first, sec-
ond, and fourth panels they strut from left to right (and thus ‘forwards,’ in reading
direction); in the third and fifth panels, they move in the opposite direction. The
sequence breaks or syncopates the movement and emphasizes the end of the strip
with ‘inward’-facing characters. The page thereby brings out the formal tensions of
comics, simultaneously presenting individual images and a sequence (see Hatfield
2005, x).
The characters’ matching postures – one leg stretched forward, torso bent back,
arms raised at the elbows – suggest popular African-American dance styles, for ex-
ample the 1920s cakewalk, or the expressive movements of modern dance. The bod-
ies look heavy, voluminous, and sensual, and their clothes suggest fashions of the
interbellum years (straw hats, gloves, dark suits) or working class apparel (jeans,
caps and paper hats in panel 5). The success of this comic strip is certainly due to
its non-narrative and musical character. The absence of story or ‘message’ (other
than the idea of exchanging sad feelings for shared enjoyment), the vaguely nostal-
gic suggestion of a folk culture brimming with vitality and its ‘groove’ turn it into a
suggestive image sequence that captures the carefree, optimistic spirit of the coun-
terculture.
Crumb’s 1972 visual commentary grudgingly acknowledges the success, diffu-
sion and reproduction of the reference cartoon, and its commercialization (fig. 23.2).
The captions vary the phrase ‘Keep on’ from panel 2 onwards, which suggests a first
23 Robert Crumb 491
Fig. 23.2: Remember Keep on Truckin’? copyright © Robert

Crumb, 1972. Used with permission.
alternative: “That was a big hit, ... well, now, how ‘bout Keep on Rollin’ Along?!” A
sequence of slang variations with ‘keep on’ follows, from ‘keep on chunkin’’ and
‘keep on hoppin’’ (panels 3 and 9) to a quotation from singer-songwriter and Civil
Rights Movement activist Len Chandler’s song “Keep on keepin’ on” (panel 10; the
line was apparently also used in a speech by Martin Luther King, see Sullivan 2011,
52). In speech bubbles, characters affirm the slogans with unthinking enthusiasm.
‘Keep on’ is combined with various hippie slang words that encourage a vague and
perhaps vacuous optimism. The characters also strut to a clearly suggested musical
groove, but the page is organized in a deliberately irregular, cluttered way: Crumb
puts 27 panels in irregular shapes and decreasing sizes on one page, beginning and
ending with a larger panel. The images decrease from about a sixth of the whole
page to thumbnail-size, suggesting that the artist has tried to squeeze in as many
panels as possible as quickly as possible. The overall layout has an unplanned, even
haphazard look – panels are not arranged in horizontal tiers but tilt downwards on
the left. In contrast to the syncopated rhythmic structure of the original, “Remember
Keep on Truckin’?” conveys a sense of mad acceleration and frantic multiplication.
The panels zoom in to the smallest, penultimate panel, which only contains the
words “Keep/© 1972 / Robert Crumb.” The copyright sign salient in all other panels
(sometimes twice) points to the imminent legal struggle over “Keep on Truckin’”:
in 1973, Crumb would secure the copyright and royalties for the original strip, one
of the contested issues being the missing copyright claim in the 1968 comic strip.
The penultimate panel suggests that his work has dwindled down to a flashy brand
name – “Keep” and “Robert Crumb” – that no longer even needs pictures. The final,
larger panel turns the original’s promise of freewheeling pleasure into a sarcastic
reminder not to cease consuming in order to maximize pleasure: “And don’t forget
to keep buyin’ those ‘Keep on Shuckin’’ posters, patches, T-shirts, cigarette papers
[...] and so on ad nauseum [sic].” The speech bubble enumerating these merchan-
492 Nicola Glaubitz
dise items weighs down heavily on the four figures now strutting out of the panel.
Their identical look emphasizes how the original has now become standardized,
serialized, and mindlessly reiterated.
The strip contains a number of established Crumb characters: the baseball cap-
wearing characters of the first and last panels are familiar from the penultimate
panel of 1968, the resentment-ridden, snide ‘normal man’ Mr. Snoid reappears in
panel 2, a funny animal character conflated with an African-American stereotype
and a woman in boots with upward-pointing large breasts are depicted in panels 5
and 10, and a nerdy figure with thick glasses in panel 6 – roughly placed in the
page’s center – resembles Crumb. The nude female figure in panel 18 and the male
with an oversized penis in panel 20 add the obligatory dose of nudity. On the whole,
the page showcases Crumb’s trademark style and characters, and somewhat bitterly
registers their appropriation by the market.
2.3 Reception, Impact, and Theoretical Perspectives
Robert Crumb’s work has become a fixture in two very different cultural fields –
underground/alternative comix and art – and as such, it sits in the crossfire of de-
bates on high and low culture. With the emergence of the term ‘graphic novel’ in
the 1980s (Weiner 2010, 6), the debate over the cultural value and status of comics
has flared up once again: the notion of ‘graphic novels’ was welcomed as an over-
due consecration of comics as a form of literature by some critics, and as an unpro-
ductive appropriation of comics’ subcultural capital by others. While the intensified
academic interest in comics has led to a more differentiated consideration of their
literary and narrative qualities, it has also raised the question to what extent these
terms – in their double function as formally descriptive and aesthetically evaluative
terms – are applicable to comics at all (see Hatfield 2005). Crumb’s comix lend
themselves to an exploration of the tensions involved in the ‘gentrification’ of com-
ix − not so much with respect to their literariness, though, but with respect to their
integration into the field of visual art.
There exists as yet no academic monograph on Robert Crumb – which may be
due to the fact that he mainly published in relatively short forms, is frequently
classified as a cartoonist and thus falls outside the scope of academic criticism cen-
tered on the notion of graphic novels, derived from literary art forms (Beaty and
Woo 2016, 30–31). D. K. Holm’s Robert Crumb: The Pocket Essential Guide (2016) is
a survey with brief readings of selected Crumb comic strips, aimed at a broader
audience of fans and collectors, and Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Robert Crumb (2012) is
largely biographical. Furthermore, Crumb’s work has been discussed in the contexts
of erotic art and pornography, censorship, racial and gender stereotypes, and auto-
biographical comics (Shannon 2010, 2012; Kipnis 2011; Fuente Soler 2011, Most
2006). Crumb also features prominently in social and aesthetic histories of under-
23 Robert Crumb 493
ground comics, e. g. Patrick Rosenkranz’ Rebel Visions (2001) and Roger Sabin’s
Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (2002). Crumb and underground/alternative com-
ix are chiefly discussed in terms of their status as an emergent and marginal, sub-
cultural art form defining itself, its artists, audience, contents and circulation in
contrast to commercial comics by major publishers. The key question here is not
whether but to what extent comix are subject to a similar market logic (Hatfield 2005,
xi, xii).
Another issue is the problematic status of attributions like authenticity, margi-
nality or subversiveness (Dony et al. 2014; Sabin and Triggs 2000, 2). As Sabin and
Triggs show, authenticity, marginality, a liberal-leftist orientation and a non-com-
mercial production and distribution network either fail to apply to underground and
alternative comics in general or cannot be defined properly (2000, 2–3; for a more
general and more complex discussion see Collins 1989, 26 and passim). Charles Hat-
field’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature focuses historically on post-1975
comics in order to argue that comics reception constitutes a form of literary reading
(Hatfield 2005, 152–63). For the study of Crumb, who plays a significant but minor
role for Hatfield, the dimension of book history and the material and discourse his-
tory of (comic) books offer a productive point of departure. The Greatest Comic Book
of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (2016) by Bart
Beaty and Benjamin Woo follows Hatfield’s impulses and analyses how comic book
canons are created at the intersection of fan community activities and the mecha-
nisms and institutions of (academic) comics criticism. This study adapts and ex-
pands Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of literary and cultural production for
the study of a cultural form that cannot be captured by traditional notions of com-
mercial mass culture and art (or literature). For Beaty and Woo, Robert Crumb is
representative for one of four segments of the field of American comic books, name-
ly the subfield of the “consecrated avant-garde, those works and creators with a lot
of prestige but with relatively little commercial success” (Beaty and Woo 2016, 13).
Crumb’s reputation relies on symbolic capital, i. e. on prestige within the communi-
ty of those who appreciate comic books, and on his refusal of economic success
(Beaty and Woo 2016, 29). These criteria for success are transferred to the field of
comic books from the avant-garde movements in visual arts and literature described
by Bourdieu.
The relation of comics to the field of visual art has been largely bracketed out
in histories of underground and alternative comics. Art historians and curators have
documented this relation from the point of view and with the standards of art histo-
ry: the comics chapter in Kirk Varnedoe’s and Adam Gopnik’s catalogue for High
and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (1990) at the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, is the first in-depth investigation of the relation of comics and cartoons to
modern art. While most cartoonists and comics artists are cited as points of refer-
ence for modern artists like Picasso, Miró, Rauschenberg, Warhol or Guston, Robert
Crumb is discussed in detail as a representative of an alternative or vernacular his-
494 Nicola Glaubitz
tory of modern art (Varnedoe and Gopnik 1990, 112, 122, 156; see also Hignite 2002,
Fischer and König 2004). Varnedoe and Gopnik’s argument that Crumb is one of
the artists who developed an alternative version of modern art, not its antithesis
(1990, 112), is neither completely singular nor unprecedented. Horkheimer and
Adorno’s chapter on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) re-
serves its harshest critique for middlebrow culture and detects art-like, transgressive
elements and reception habits in allegedly vulgar mass entertainment like slapstick
comedy, comics, and animated film. Underground comix artist Gilbert Shelton re-
portedly said that comix are “more like art and less like comics” (qtd. in Rosenkranz
2002, 4), and for Hatfield, “[a]lternative comics waver between these two positions –
between the punk and the curator, so to speak” (Hatfield 2005 xi, xii).
The affinity between the avant-garde and underground art is due to similar re-
quirements for success (Beaty and Woo 2016, 13). Provocation and lack of (or disre-
gard for) economic success, as Bourdieu argues (1993, 66, 75), qualify cultural prod-
ucts for the field of high art but these qualities are also figuring in self-descriptions
of the comix subculture (Hatfield 2005, xi). These criteria, first and foremost, permit
the inclusion of Crumb’s comix into the field of high art and into underground cul-
ture. Moreover, Crumb’s penchant for relatively short forms and single illustra-
tions – he sees himself as a pictorial rather than storytelling artist (Crumb and Pop-
laski 2005, 243, Beaty and Woo 2016, 30) – match an environment that long
considered non-narrativity as a criterion for genuinely modern art (König and Fi-
scher 2004, 26). His repeated confessions of ignorance concerning the rules govern-
ing the art world, and his even sharper rejection of its commercial, sterile and elitist
nature (Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 298, Obrist 2006, 39), are, paradoxically, also
welcomed in an art system that has established the foregrounding and the ironic
self-reflection of its own rules as a fixture at least since Conceptual and Pop Art.
The aesthetic attributions that make underground comics safe for curators often
converge in a romanticized image of ‘folk art.’ Varnedoe and Gopnik (1990, 134) do
indeed suggest this term for Crumb, and König and Fischer – not to mention Crumb
himself – prefer it as well (König and Fischer 2004, 9, 93). Folk art is allegedly a
vital, protean, unadulterated, fresh, raw mode of expression that has come under
threat by a growing entertainment industry and standardized mass culture, and is
exploited by high art (Herlinghaus 2002, 834, 840–842). Turning such attributions
naively into qualitative standards is certainly problematic. It is equally problematic,
however, to ignore the various and mutual exchanges between underground/popu-
lar culture and avant-garde art. Forms, formats, and modes of expression have cir-
culated since the early twentieth century between movements like dada, cubism, or
surrealism and popular culture. The fact that the resulting formal and thematic
choices and their aesthetic effects result from similarly structured discursive and
social contexts does not render them ineffective, first and foremost because forms
also carry semantic and affective connotations that art (or popular culture) can ac-
cess, distort or repeat.
23 Robert Crumb 495
The exact modes of inclusion of Crumb’s work into a subcultural and an elitist
high-cultural domain are discussed in Beaty and Woo (2016). However, Beaty and
Woo do not consider Crumb’s self-stylization as a craftsman. The craftsman persona
remains at a distance from both fine and underground art. Invoking craftsmanship,
Crumb inscribes himself in a tradition of popular entertainment that reaches from
Brueghel, Bosch, and Gillray to comics artists of the early twentieth century (Obrist
2006, 22, Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 297–300).
This craftsman persona and his nostalgic reverence for early twentieth century
music and illustration are largely and tellingly exempt from Crumb’s otherwise per-
vasive irony and exaggeration. So is the graphic work that most closely corresponds
to the attitude of the humble, skillful, professional illustrator (e. g. in the Art and
Beauty series begun in 1996): the single drawings from life and from photographs –
ranging from 19th and early-20th century ethnographic and documentary photo-
graphs to contemporary press and private photos and Instagram findings (Armit-
stead 2016) – display Crumb’s masterly drawing skills and subordinate it to the
faithful rendering of (again) mostly voluminous female bodies. The graphic distor-
tions, exaggerations and inaccuracies typical for his comic strips, however, are re-
duced to a minimum. The characteristic discrepancy and tension between object
and drawing, foregrounding artificiality, and Crumb’s typical use of that tension to
stimulate fantasy and imagination (Ault 2004) are largely absent.
One might argue that Crumb’s drawings are illustrations that approach quaintly
outmoded coffee table book art, eschewing provocation and self-irony in favor of
an effect-oriented display of craftsmanship. A more suggestive but also more evalu-
ative epithet would be ‘slick’ and ‘lifeless’ – indicating that this assessment is pro-
nounced from the point of view of underground and high art. In a less evaluative
manner, one can argue that all three domains in which Crumb’s work is situated –
underground culture, fine art, and middlebrow coffee table book illustration – pro-
vide terminologies to describe and differentiate visual structures and narratives in
his comic strips, and to forge links to particular graphic and pictorial traditions.
Whether these descriptions correspond with the looking and reading experience (or
even change it) is a matter of individual and informed reception; and whether the
inevitable aesthetic value judgments attached to them can be supported is, of
course, a matter of further discussion.
3 Bibliography
3.1 Works Cited
“coffee, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 19 September 2016.
Armitstead, Claire. “Robert Crumb: I was born weird.” The Guardian, Sunday 24 April, 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/24/robert-crumb-interview-art-and-beauty-
exhibition.
496 Nicola Glaubitz
Ault, Donald. “Preludium: Crumb, Barks, and Noomin: Reconsidering the Aesthetics of
Underground Comics.” Imagetext: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 1.2 (2004).
Beaty, Bart, Benjamin Woo. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of
American Comic Books, London: Palgrave, 2016.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature. London: Polity,
1993.
Buruma, Ian. “Mr. Natural.” The New York Review of Books 6 (2006). http://www.nybooks.ocm/
articles/18834 (03.April 2007).
Chute, Hillary. Why comics? From Underground to Everywhere. New York: Harper, 2017.
Collins, Jim. Uncommon Cultures. Popular Culture and Post-Modernism. New York, London:
Routledge, 1989.
Crumb, Robert and Peter Poplaski. ed. The Robert Crumb Coffee Table Art Book. New York: Kitchen
Sink Press / Little, Brown & Company, 1997.
Crumb, Robert and Peter Poplaski, ed. The Robert Crumb Handbook. London: MQ Publications,
2005.
Kipnis, Laura. “‘I’m Offended.’” Obscenity and the Limits of Liberalism. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2011. 115–129.
König, Kasper and Alfred M. Fischer. “Vorwort/Preface.” Robert Crumb: Yeah, but is it art? Ed.
Alfred M. Fischer. Museum Ludwig, Köln / Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2004. 5–
36.
Dony, Christophe, Tanguy Habrand and Gert Meesters. “Introduction.” La bande dessinée en
dissidence − Comics in Dissent. Ed. Christophe Dony, Tanguy Habrand, Gert Meesters. Liège:
Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2014. 9–18.
Fiedler, Leslie. “Cross the Border – Close the Gap.” 1969. Cross the Border – Close the Gap. Ed.
Leslie Fiedler. New York: Stein and Day, 1971. 61–85.
Fuente Soler, Manuel de la. “La memoria en viñetas: Historia y tendencias del cómic
autobiográfico.” Signa: Revista De La Asociación Española De Semiótica 20 (2011): 259–276.
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Robert Crumb. Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2012.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics. An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2005.
Herlinghaus, Hermann. “Populär/volkstümlich/Populärkultur.” Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Vol. 4.
Ed. Karlheinz Barck. Stuttgart, Weimar 2002. 832–884.
Hignite, Todd. “Avant Garde and Comics: Serious Cartooning.” Art Papers 26.1 (2002): 16–19.
Holm, D. K. Robert Crumb: The Pocket Essential Guide. Pocket Essentials: Harpenden, 2005.
Luscombe, Belinda. “Genesis: The Word according to Robert Crumb. The obsessive cartoonist
interprets Genesis, and climbs to the top of Amazon’s Christian Bestseller list.” Time Nov. 1.
2009. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1935104,00.html.
Most, Andrea. “Re-Imagining the Jew’s Body: From Self-loathing to ‘Grepts.’” You Should See
Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006.
19–36.
Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Robert Crumb. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2006.
Pekar, Harvey. “Rapping about Cartoonists, Particularly Robert Crumb.” Journal of Popular Culture
3.4 (1970): 677–688.
Rosenkranz, Patrick. The Underground Comix Revolution. 1963–1975. Seattle: Fantagraphics,
2002.
Sabin, Roger,Teal Triggs. “Introduction.” Below Critical Radar. Fanzines and Alternative Comics
from 1976 to now. Ed. Roger Sabin and Teal Triggs. Hove: Slab-o-Concrete, 2000. 1–16.
Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels. London: Phaidon, 2001.
Shannon, Edward A. “Something Black in the American Psyche: Formal Innovation and Freudian
Imagery in the Comics of Winsor McCay and Robert Crumb.” Canadian Review of American
Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Etudes Américaines 40.2 (2010): 187–211.
23 Robert Crumb 497
Shannon, Edward. “Shameful, Impure Art: Robert Crumb’s Autobiographical Comics and the
Confessional Poets.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 35.4 (2012): 627–649.
Stamm, Rainer. “Von den Blauen Büchern zum Coffee-table-book.” Buchhandelsgeschichte 2
(2002): 49–54.
Sullivan, Denise. Keep on Pushing. Black Power Music From Blues to Hip-Hop. Chicago: Lawrence
Hill Books, 2011.
Varnedoe, Kirk, Adam Gopnik. High and Low. Moderne Kunst und Trivialkultur. München: Prestel,
1990.
Weiner, Stephen. “How the Graphic Novel Changed American Comics.” The Rise of the American
Comics Artist. Creators and Contexts. Ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons. Jackson: University
of Mississippi Press, 2010. 3–13.
3.2 Further Reading

Creekmur, Corey. “Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture: Representing Racial Difference in
Robert Crumb’s Underground Comix.” Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic
Novels. Ed. Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague. London: Routledge, 2014. 19–33.
Critical Inquiry. Special Issue: Comics & Media. 40.3 (2014).
Danky, James Philip et al. Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix. New
York: Abrams ComicArt, 2009.
Dony, Christophe. “Reassessing the Mainstream vs. Alternative/Independent Dichotomy, or, the
Double Awareness of the Vertigo Imprint.” La bande dessinée en dissidence − Comics in
Dissent. Ed. Christophe Dony, Tanguy Habrand, Gert Meesters. Liège: Presses Universitaires
de Liège, 2014. 93–112.
Estren, Mark James. A History of Underground Comics. Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1993.
Fiene, Donald M. Robert Crumb. Checklist of Work and Criticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Boatmer
Norton Press, 1981.
Gabilliet, Jean Paul. Des comics et des hommes. Histoire culturelle des comic books aux États-
Unis. Nantes: Éditions du Temps, 2005.
Verhagen, Erik, ed. Robert Crumb: Contemporain malgré lui. Special Issue. Art Press 340 (2007).
Monika Pietrzak-Franger
24 Alan Moore: From Hell
Abstract: This chapter focuses on the work of Alan Moore, one of the most influen-
tial British comics creators. Besides offering a meditation on the psychology of
crime, From Hell provides an imaginary portrait of Victorian society, explores the
origins of the Jack the Ripper myth and documents its tenacious presence. These
primary preoccupations dictate a number of issues that are intertwined in the novel:
Britishness, Victorian hypocrisy, masculinity and violence, the city as a palimpsestic
site of history and memory, the city as a psychological mirror of the protagonist’s
mind, and the economic exploitation of women, to mention just a few. In this chap-
ter, I focus on the central theme of the novel, namely, on its exploration of creative
and interpretative processes and of the problems inherent in historiography. In this
context, the novel can be read as a treatise on the impossibility of arriving at a
single historical truth. Its formal properties likewise stress the plurality of perspec-
tives on Jack the Ripper and contribute to the self-reflexive character of the text.
Key Terms: historiography, intertextuality, intermediality, metafiction, adaptation

“Alan Moore is by common consent among fans and critics the most important con-
temporary comic writer,” notes James Chapman in his book British Comics: A Cultur-
al History (2011, 243). And although this may be a matter of contention, Moore has
been described as “one of the most acclaimed and controversial comics writers to
emerge since the late 1970s” (Di Liddo 2013, blurb) and as a “writer extraordinaire”
(Campbell and Moore 2013, 5). Critic Douglas Wolk notes “[i]t’s not at all correct to
say that the past twenty-five years of the history of comics are the history of Alan
Moore’s career, but it’s fair to say that it sometimes seems that way” (Parkin 2013,
2). These are just some of the statements used by Moore’s critics, co-creators and
biographers. Moore likes to call himself a “compulsive fantasist” (Baker 2008, 12).
Primarily known for his comic books, Moore is an eclectic artist with a reper-
toire that encompasses novels, critical work, music pieces and performances. In
different ways, they highlight the experimental bent of their creator. Born on 18
November 1953 into a working-class family in the deprived area of Northampton,
central England, Alan Moore was encouraged by his parents to read and write from
an early age. He began his schooling at Spring Lane Primary School, but his results
made him eligible to continue at Northampton Grammar School for Boys. As his
scholarly results worsened, he became an autodidact, reading anything that fell into
his hands. Expelled in 1970, allegedly for dealing with LSD, Moore first accepted a
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-028
500 Monika Pietrzak-Franger
number of jobs. After he married and moved together with his first wife Phyllis, née
Dixon, however, he resolved to live off his art. Even though his early freelance work
as illustrator and comics writer did bring him some money, he had to claim benefits
to be able to support himself and his family (his first daughter Leah was born in
1978, his second daughter, Amber, in 1981). His first marriage ended when Moore’s
wife left him to live with their joint lover, Deborah Delano. In 2007, Moore married
his collaborator, the graphic artist Melinda Gebbie.
Like Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis, Moore is cred-
ited with revolutionizing the medium of comics (Chapman 2011, 257). Chapman be-
lieves his texts “are just as significant postmodern texts as Umberto Eco’s The Name
of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum” (2011, 257) and counts him among the artists
responsible for the so-called renaissance of British comics in the 1980s. Although
Moore had always been an avid comics reader, his professional romance with the
medium began in the late 1970s when he started writing and illustrating his own
strips for alternative fanzines and music magazines. Next to mainstream comics,
the 1970s saw the appearance of underground works which, as one of the forms of
counterculture, addressed topics conspicuously absent from the mainstream narra-
tives: sexuality, alternative lifestyles and anti-establishment attitudes (↗23 Robert
Crumb). Apart from offering “social commentary, satire and sex,” many countercul-
tural comics also explored the formal properties of the medium (Chapman 2011, 206
and 107). The subsequent decline of the underground was accompanied by the rise
in prominence of fan fiction and small press comics, which appeared in the context
of new production technologies and distribution forms. Because of their non-profit
orientation, they invited riskier topics and alternative formats (Chapman 2011, 200–
223). And although the 1980s were a period of instability due to the decline of the
juvenile market and the exodus of British artists to America, the quality of comics
produced in Britain reached unprecedented levels. What is more, distinctly British
themes, topics and aesthetic traditions entered the American comics market and
showed a (considerable) degree of economic success (Chapman 2011, 243–244).
Clearly, Moore had his share in this development. 2000 AD first commissioned
a comics adaptation of E. T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (which became Skizz: the story of
an alien who crashes to Earth) and the Ballad of Halo Jones (1984). Marvel UK ap-
pointed him to write for Captain Britain, and the new monthly comic magazine War-
rior published his Marvelman and V for Vendetta. Moore’s work brought him to the
attention of the editors of DC Comics, who hired him to continue the then rather
formulaic and barely successful monster strip Saga of the Swamp Thing (1984–1987),
which under Moore received an experimental and deconstructive makeover. In addi-
tion, Swamp Thing addressed politically and socially viable issues, most notably
environmentalism. Moore’s work for DC Comics also involved contributing scripts
for Marvel Superheroes, Superman and writing the limited series Watchmen, which
would become even more successful as a ‘graphic novel’ in its trade paperback
edition.
His increasing discontent with and continual battles over copyright issues have
been regarded as some of the reasons behind his pursuit of a more independent
artistic existence, with the creation of the Mad Love comics publishing company
and with his work for Taboo, an edgy horror comics anthology, for which he began
Lost Girls with Melinda Gebbie. The year 1993 marked Moore’s return to the main-
stream industry and to the genre of the superhero comics (↗15 Superheroes). This
preoccupation also led to a year-long cooperation on The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen, published by America’s Best Comics (ABC). In 2016, Moore announced
that he would be retiring from comics writing: “I think I have done enough for
comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics,
inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground
and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that” (Cain
2016). This statement accompanied the publication of his second colossal novel Je-
rusalem.
Moore’s inspirations come from a number of genres and media: Norse sagas,
Arthurian legends, science fiction, ghost stories, occult books (Di Liddo 2013, 29).
He cites Winsor McCay (↗18 Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland), American
superhero comics and British comic strips of the 1960s as major influences within
the medium (Di Liddo 2009, 29). His scripts, just like the comics that result from
them, are full of such intertextual and intermedial echoes as he provides his collab-
orators with a veritable compendium of sources, but also companions to his
thought-processes (see Campbell and Moore 2013). Moore has worked across a num-
ber of genres, from fantasy (Promethea) and steampunk (The League), through su-
perheroes (Watchmen) to literary erotica (Lost Girls). His works have been widely
praised for their “formal innovation, narrative complexity and psychological depth”
(Chapman 2011, 243).
Despite their various thematic foci, they can be distinguished by certain recur-
ring elements, such as their heightened intertextuality (see Handbook of Intermedi-
ality), a preoccupation with (narrative) structure and with the comics form in gener-
al. What is also ever-present is a dialogue, albeit sometimes indirect, with current
political issues (↗7 Politics). V for Vendetta (illustrated by David Lloyd) undoubted-
ly has a political twist. A dystopian narrative about a near-future England in which
an anarchist disguised in a Guy Fawkes mask attempts to topple the fascist govern-
ment, it gained him a cult following. Interpreted as a convoluted criticism of Marga-
ret Thatcher’s politics, it has also been credited with inspiring the internet-based
activist hacker group Anonymous, along with the Occupy protestants, who adopted
the Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol, “a common brand and a convenient placard to
use in protest against tyranny” (Lloyd qtd. in Waites 2011).
Moore’s preoccupation with politics is also reflected in Watchmen (1986–1987),
which questions the concept of the superhero and famously deconstructs the genre
of superhero comics (↗8 World-Building). Set in an alternate reality, and closely
mirroring the climate of the 1980s, the series has been praised for its new form. Its
self-reflexive mode, nonlinear plot and innovative perspective gained it the title of
the “Citizen Kane of comics” (Chapman 2011, 244) and the most noteworthy comic
of the twentieth century. In an intertextual game with readers, another of Moore’s
comics, Lost Girls (1991–1992, 2006) offers a fanciful exploration of the sexual lives
of three historical/literary female characters (Lady Fairchild, an adult Alice of Won-
derland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy from Peter Pan) just before the
outbreak of the Second World War. This fusion of the particular and the political/
mythical is also noticeable in Promethea (illustrated by J. H. Williams III and Mick
Gray; 1999–2005). Here, the college student Sophie Bangs, who lives in an alterna-
tive version of 1990s New York, embodies the goddess and, with her, the idea of
generational female solidarity.
In various ways, these and other works address topical political subjects. In
fact, in what may be considered his manifesto, “On Writing for Comics,” Moore
names political and social relevance as one of his major goals for writing comics:
“By relevance [...] I mean stories that actually have some sort of meaning in relation
to the world about us, stories that reflect the nature and the texture of life in the
closing years of the twentieth century” (Moore qtd. in Di Liddo 2009, 29).

Without being obviously political, From Hell (illustrated by Eddie Campbell) evinces
Moore’s major thematic and aesthetic preoccupations. It originally appeared in seri-
alised form (first for the comic anthology Taboo in 1989–1992, then as an independ-
ent series of ten volumes published by Tundra Publishing and Kitchen Sink Press,
1991–1996) and, in 1999, it was released as the collected edition From Hell: Being a
Melodrama in Sixteen Parts by Eddie Campbell Comics. The graphic novel offers a
frame narrative: while the main chapters focus primarily on the story of the killings
of five prostitutes in 1888 London, the prologue and the epilogue relate to events
taking place in 1923. Two maps of the sites of the murders and two appendices,
which provide annotations to the chapters and a creative meditation on the posthu-
mous life of (the idea of) Jack the Ripper complete the volume. This last part, enti-
tled “Dance of the gull-catchers,” was first published in 1998.
Highly intertextual and intermedial, the novel borrows from the genres of bil-
dungsroman, mystery, detective fiction, horror, thriller and historiographic metafic-
tion. The fourteen chapters contain a number of narrative strands that center on the
figure of the protagonist – William Gull, a. k. a. Jack the Ripper. In this sense, From
Hell does not follow the typical whodunit plot but rather offers a psychological por-
trait of the serial killer. It adapts the scenario suggested in Stephen Knight’s Jack
the Ripper: The Final Solution (1977), according to which the unseen killer was none
other than the nineteenth-century doctor commissioned by Queen Victoria to elimi-
nate all the women who knew about the clandestine marriage of her son Prince
Edward to a shopkeeper. In this sense then, Jack the Ripper serves in a number of
ways as a guardian of Victorian social hierarchies and the order that they allegedly
enable. The story’s climax can be found in Chapter Ten with the killing of the last
prostitute-witness, Mary Kelly. In the denouement, the reader is given access to Wil-
liam Gull’s vegetative existence in St. Mary’s Asylum, Islington in 1896.
Besides offering a meditation on the psychology of crime, the novel also pro-
vides an imaginary portrait of Victorian society, explores the origins of the Jack the
Ripper myth and documents its tenacious presence. These primary preoccupations
dictate a number of issues that are intertwined in the novel: Britishness, Victorian
hypocrisy, masculinity and violence, the city as a palimpsestic site of history and
memory, the city as a psychological mirror of the protagonist’s mind, and the eco-
nomic exploitation of women, to mention just a few. The framing of the main chap-
ters with the prologue, the epilogue, the maps and the appendices activates a num-
ber of other interpretative levels. One of them is the exploration of creative and
interpretative processes and of the problems inherent in historiography.
The novel can even be read as a treatise on the impossibility of arriving at a
single historical truth. By foregrounding the influence of media on the creation and
perpetuation of the myth of Jack the Ripper, by including a variety of perspectives
on the serial killer and by highlighting the issues of seeing and interpretation, the
novel is as much concerned with the question of interpretation as with the historical
persona of Jack the Ripper. Overall, it can be read on two levels: 1) as an exploration
of William Gull/Jack the Ripper as a visionary and interpreter of history and space;
and 2) as an interrogation of the ways in which he has been invented and inter-
preted.
Chapter Two, “A State of Darkness,” is a study of Gull’s psychological makeup.
It offers a journey from childhood to adulthood, uncovering, in a series of vignettes,
the protagonist’s steps towards maturity. Each of these steps is marked by a tension
between seeing and blindness. Switching between various perspectives, the chapter
moves in and out of Gull’s psyche, marking the formative moments in his life with
black panels. Explorative escapades, bourgeois background, freemasonry, surgery,
urban architecture, mental disorders, the female body, monarchy and mythical dei-
ties are introduced as sources of his knowledge, points of reference and frameworks
for reasoning. On the whole, then, the chapter offers a narrative of Gull’s ascend-
ance to knowledge and acquisition of insight. Yet, as it begins and ends with entire-
ly black panels – with the exception that the first panel after the titular one is an-
chored in a particular space and time (Moore 2006, II.1) – it simultaneously
questions Gull’s powers of seeing, signals the ‘dark’ forces at play in his reasoning
processes and foreshadows the grim outcome of his mission. In this, it highlights
the fallibility of his vision.
This unreliability is further explored in Chapter Four, which begins with the
blackmail letter and Queen Victoria’s commission of the murders and focuses on
Gull’s journey across London. Gull’s expedition in the company of his coachman
Netley unravels the palimpsestic character of the city’s sites and, by establishing
their psychogeographic dimension, offers and solidifies a justification for Gull’s mis-
sion. Iconographically, Gull and his companion are established as being part of the
fabric of the metropolis: the last panels on pages five and six show them literally
disappearing into the city and merging with its architecture. They are thereby linked
to the perennial sources of power that run through the city. In this constellation,
London is a site of recurrent history to be found, read and interpreted by Gull. It is
“[a] veritable textbook we may draw upon in formulating great works of art” (Moore
2006, IV.9).
While rediscovering London in this way, Gull interprets its particular sites
against their historical and mythical background. His simultaneous sketch of their
itinerary on the London map delivers another justification of his plan. The penta-
gram that he draws in the course of the journey provides him with the allegedly
pre-existent justification for his actions. The pentagram – one of the key Masonic
signs – offers him the answer to the question of how to restore the order that the
blackmail is about to destroy. Yet the condition that Gull attempts to achieve is a
higher type of order, one that stabilizes patriarchy and undermines the various
sources of feminisation in the city. Steeped in mythological, religious and historical
narratives, Gull’s mission is to “sacrifice […] Diana’s Priestesses” (Moore 2006,
IV.37). This supposedly necessary sacrifice is supposedly preordained by the city:
“Our story’s WRITTEN, Netley,” Gull claims, “inked in blood long dry […] engraved
in stone” (Moore 2006, IV.37–38). At the same time, this fatalistic vision is clearly
imposed by Gull himself as he chooses the itinerary and interprets London’s sites.
In this journey, London is both a location of living, teeming history and a psychoge-
ography of his mind.
Although Gull promises to read London “CAREFULLY and with RESPECT,” the
type of reading he offers fulfils his violent claim that “[w]e’ll penetrate its meta-
phors, lay bare its structures and thus come at last upon its meaning” (Moore 2006,
IV.9). The violence that is thus unleashed targets the female body – the body of the
supposedly threatening prostitutes. Culminating in Chapter Ten’s visceral, methodi-
cal and almost masterly killing of Mary Kelly and dismemberment of her body, this
ruthlessness is mythologized and depicted as continuing into our times. By insert-
ing a number of panels with a twentieth-century setting, the chapter highlights the
unacknowledged yet perennial presence of evil in the metropolis. “See me! Wake
up and look upon me! I am come amongst you. I am with you always!” shouts
William Gull at the sight of self-centered, absent-minded twentieth-century office
workers (Moore 2006, X.21).
Chapter Fourteen, “Gull ascending,” offers closure to Gull’s story. Locked in
St. Mary’s Asylum, exposed to the (emotional) cruelty of the asylum staff, he sinks
into a delirium. In a sequence of panels that recall the boat journey with his father
(Chapter Two), Gull moves “out of dark into brilliance” (Moore 2006, XIV.5). Hove-
ring over London, he sees the pentagram-like trajectory of the city as he apparently
travels throughout the centuries to meet criminals that will have come in his wake.
This ascent is also a metamorphosis: an inmate of a psychiatric asylum transforms
into a boy, only to take up the form of William Blake’s Ghost of the Flea before
finally (dis)appearing as a God-like figure – first as a head in the sky, then as a sun,
finally as the words “God” “and then I…” on an entirely white, panel-less page
(Moore 2006, XIV.24). The ecstasy of his hallucinations, structurally paralleled by
the orgasm of one of the asylum staff, culminates in Gull’s death. A number of
issues are revisited in this section: the irretrievable intertwining of Eros and Thana-
tos, the circular character of history, the self-inflicted fate of a man who saw himself
destined for greatness.
The second major theme of the novel is a reflection on the ways in which Jack
the Ripper has been interpreted as a historical instance, media phenomenon and
an object of scholarly and literary interest. This theme is pursued on various themat-
ic and formal levels. The concept of dissection encapsulates the novel’s self-reflex-
ive preoccupation with historiography. A dictionary entry of “Au-top-sy” precedes
the first page of the prologue, providing the framework for how to read From Hell.
Here, autopsy is understood as a “[d]issection and examination of a dead body to
determine the cause of death,” “[a]n eyewitness observation,” and “[a]ny critical
analysis.” In this sense, Barish Ali argues, “[a]utopsy is clearly what the entire
graphic novel is about. It is a dissection of history, an examination of the dead body
of history on the part of the authors and Sir William Gull” (2005, 613–614).
Yet, even as the novel promises to dissect the body of (the myth of) Jack the
Ripper, it questions the possibility of arriving at any sort of ‘truth.’ Although the
chapters offer the aforementioned scenario that allegedly provides the answer to
the pertinent question of who the killer was, the ‘truthfulness’ of this version is
constantly undermined. The prologue and the epilogue offer a frame narrative that
extrapolates this scenario as a figment of one man’s imagination. The appendices I
and II supply further elaborations on the creative character of historical analysis
and medial adaptation (↗6 Adaptations). Apart from offering further background
information for the readers, Appendix I provides them with various factors that in-
formed Moore’s choice of sources. It thus highlights selectivity and creativity as the
major forces at work in the process of graphic novel writing as well as in historical
research. Appendix II goes further in that it fictionalizes the history of Jack the
Ripper’s adaptations and media presence. Both historicize interpretative impulses
and outline various traditions of interpretation. Both also signal our own responsi-
bility and complicity in reading history and historical phenomena.
This theme recurs on the visual level. The prologue begins with the cadaver of
a seagull (the almost-but-but-not-quite homonym of William Gull) followed by six
panels that depict two male silhouettes approaching the dead animal. As one man
pokes the cadaver with his stick, the theme of appearance and reality unravels in
the dialogue between the two men. This catapults the seagull into the story. From
then on, it will reappear as a reminder and sign of the book’s metanarrative. The
seagull’s point of view suggests the perspective on a political discussion on-board

a ship that finishes with denigrating remarks vis-à-vis the Queen: “The Famine
Queen. To Hell with HER and her CHILDREN an’ her CHILDRENS children,” utters
the lover and sitter of Walter Sickert, who will later blackmail him and thus force
the Queen to take up certain measures to prevent a royal scandal (Moore 2006, I.7).
Here, the woman’s words carry a threat that the seagulls seem to register and carry
on. The impression is supported by the composition of the last panel on the page,
which is dominated by the seagulls hovering over the ship on which the conversa-
tion is taking place as the repetitive “To Hell with all of ‘em” reverberates as an
echo from the previous panel (Moore 2006, I.7). Here then, the seagulls turn into
signs of threat and ensuing violence. Their menacing presence is felt again in Chap-
ter Eight: they are inserted in the middle panel, preceded by a sequence of lovemak-
ing and followed by the frightened step of a prostitute returning to her pimp (Moore
2006, 8.5). The sequence of lovemaking is in fact also an insertion. It appears after
a sequence of panels that highlights the dread of a number of prostitutes who, hav-
ing heard of the killings, fear for their lives. The scene of the sexual encounter is
followed by the arrival of the seagulls, which – as in the previous instance – return
as a threatening motif and bring an end to the hopes of leaving the city uttered by
the woman to her lover.
In their next reappearance, the seagulls become a literal embodiment of William
Gull in his own delusional vision of his greatness. The birds populate the upper
panel of the page (Moore 2006, XIV.6), this time accompanied by young William’s
question “Where am I now?” The voice appears to merge the young boy’s questions
with the old man’s musings as he mentally experiences a transmutation. “I hover
on the brink of form, inchoate and ethereal, filled with a fierce, exultant joy I must
make manifest.” “I concentrate my being to a single bloody point” (Moore 2006,
XIV.6). This bloody point changes into a puddle of blood on-board a ship and ap-
pears to spill into the Thames. This transubstantiation is only one stage in Gull’s
metamorphosis as he becomes, at least in this particular moment, disembodied
while at the same time remaining embodied in the whole environment that is taint-
ed with his blood. Here, as he remembers a quotation about an unknown scientists,
he revels in “[t]he universe and all Space and Time as his laboratory, wherein to be
about his work, his measurements and tests. / His autopsies” (Moore 2006, XIV.7).
This merging of the two levels of the narrative in fact appears much earlier when
the cadaver of the seagull – lying on the beach with two figures approaching in the
background – returns in William Gull’s apparent vision during the ceremony in
which he is accepted as a member of the Masonic order (Moore 2006, II.9). It reap-
pears at the end of the epilogue as a cadaver slowly gnawed at by the tooth of time,
abandoned on a deserted beach as the figures of Inspector Abberline and Robert
Lees retreat into the night.
Finally, the seagull reappears in Appendix II, “Dance of the gull catchers.” In
one of the bottom panels on page ten, it hovers over the nets of gull catchers just
underneath the name “William Gull.” This panel then is another rare instance in
which various levels of the narrative are brought together and spelled out for the
reader. The choice of the seagull to incorporate the unseen serial killer highlights
his phantom-like existence and allows Moore to emphasise the fleetingness and
constructedness of his myth. Appendix II finishes with the emphasis on the impossi-
bility of the task of dissecting the mystery of Jack the Ripper: “[t]he complex phan-
tom we project. That alone, we know is real. The actual killer’s gone, unglimpsed,
might as well not have been there at all” (Moore 2006, Appendix II.23). The state-
ment reappears in a different form at the end of the novel. As the seagull flies away
on the bottom of the last page, unobstructed by any panel outlines, the accompany-
ing text highlights the futility of our pursuits: “We were looking at the naked wom-
an dancing when it flew away” (Moore 2006, Appendix II.24).
Although it adapts one hypothesis that explains the mystery of Jack the Ripper,
From Hell also constantly undermines its credibility. By introducing the frame narra-
tive, by emphasizing the creative and interpretative processes partaking in the gen-
eration of this and other historical narratives and, finally, by including the reflection
on various ways in which Jack the Ripper has been adapted and appropriated, From
Hell questions the ‘truthfulness’ of this scenario and introduces a number of per-
spectives from which to see the phenomenon. By the same token, it highlights the
polyvalent perspectives from which to see history and reflects on the various funda-
mental impediments to historiography.

From Hell’s formal properties likewise stress the plurality of perspectives on Jack
the Ripper and contribute to the self-reflexivity of the novel. The black-and-white
drawings endow late nineteenth-century London with a gritty atmosphere, partly
by intermedially mimicking the style of the nineteenth-century periodical press. The
strict, very regular paneling (mostly consisting of 9-panel or 7-panel pages) not only
allows for a rhythmic unfolding of the story, but also emphasizes the importance of
the role of the panel as a constitutive and controlling unit in comics storytelling.
This rhythm is further heightened by the repetition of a number of images that re-
turn – with uncanny regularity – often inserted between a coherent sequence of
panels. Such interventions serve various functions. They highlight the importance
of context for the understanding of phenomena and show to what extent re-contex-
tualization modifies the meaning of the repeated entity. They work as reminders
and foreshadowings. They also capture the repetitive character of memory and, like
a refrain, they are reminders of a traumatic, repressed past. Graphically, various
elements also disrupt this regularity. Because of the overarching structure, the pa-
ges that break with the scheme gain in significance. Besides architectural elements
(e. g. IV.16, IV.28, IV.32, VII.11), the seagull is the most prominent motif that breaks
up the form of the panel. While this draws attention on the structural level to the
respective moments in the narrative’s construction, this disharmony can be read on
the symbolic level as the impossibility to capture and control both the city of Lon-
don and its history (by William Gull) and the phantom of Jack the Ripper, which
‘bleed out’ into the world.
The aforementioned repetitions of citations also highlight the complex charac-
ter of From Hell’s temporal frame. Set in September 1923, the frame narrative is
posterior to the events described in the embedded narrative. Chapter One, set in
July 1884, precedes Chapter Two, which spans the years from Gull’s childhood to
his adulthood, Chapters Three to Twelve are set in the year of the murders. Chapter
Thirteen takes place in the year 1889, and Chapter Fourteen fast-forwards to 1896.
This linear chronology, however, is disrupted in a number of ways. For one, addi-
tional temporal levels are introduced in selected chapters. In Chapter Ten, which
constitutes the climax of the narrative, the events of the night of 9 November 1888
are interrupted by various flash-forwards. The addition of the figures of notorious
serial killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady on the benches of the operating theatre
as Jack the Ripper ‘dissects’ the corpse of Mary Kelly, catapults us to the 1960s
(Moore 2006, X.14).
The office space (Moore 2006, X.20), meanwhile, is reminiscent of 1980s indus-
trial aesthetics. The temporal structure of Chapter Fourteen is equally complicated,
moving between the years 1896, 1827, 1888, the early nineteenth century (William
Blake), the late twentieth century (Hindley and Brady), back to the early nineteenth
century, forward to the late twentieth century, back to the late nineteenth, then to
early twentieth and, finally, back to the year 1896. On the other hand, Chapter Four,
for instance, takes us back further to include, among others, Britain’s pagan history.
This temporal structure is further complicated by the novel’s heightened intertextu-
ality and intermediality that adds more temporal levels to the story. The insertion
and repetition of Hogarth’s engravings, the portrait of Karl Marx, the image of Boa-
dicea/Britannia as well as the iconic architectural sites emphasize both the continu-
ity and circularity of history, but also the palimpsestic character of collective memo-
ry and hints at the continuous threat – and blessing – of the act of forgetting.
Intertextuality and intermediality have more than this one function. In fact,
Annalisa Di Liddo considers intertextuality the key formal device used by Moore:
“Most of Moore’s comics start from an intertextual assumption: a quotation, or an
allusion to an existing character, a distinctive genre, or a particular work. They are
built on a proper web of references that are not only mentioned or suggested but
challenged and recontextualized in order to convey new meanings” (2009, 27). For
Ali, the “series of verbal and visual quotations” in From Hell “subverts – that is
congenially invites while doing violence to – historical and graphic representation”
(2005, 613). Through the accumulation of various sources and media, the novel also
beckons towards Victorian mass media as giving an impulse to the creation of the
myth of Jack the Ripper. It is shown to have derived from a series of medial events:
press-cuttings, coroner’s reports, discourses on criminality, depictions of criminals,

letters written to the London police. This intertextual and intermedial context un-
dermines the notion that there can ever be any valid answer to the perennial query
of who the killer was. More generally, it also signals the self-reflexive stance of the
novel towards the issue of representation and historiography.
This same preoccupation with various levels of narration and multiple perspec-
tives is further highlighted by the book’s variable focalization. The aforementioned
moving in and out of Gull’s perspective in Chapter Two complicates our own posi-
tion. As the chapter switches between external perspective and William Gull’s sub-
jective point of view (e. g. Moore 2006, II.2), it also introduces panels that are slight-
ly off his perspective. This insertion of “the nearly-but-not-quite subjective point of
view,” Jochen Ecke argues, not only confuses us but also “alerts us to the fact that
we are witnessing two different narratives unfold on these pages: we construct Wil-
liam’s biography out of the cues given by the comic book, and at the same time,
William is fashioning his own biographical narrative” (2013, 77). Ecke interprets this
difference in the reader’s and William Gull’s perspective as “anchored in historici-
ty – our retrospective point of view allows us to refrain from the same catastrophic
acts of synthesis that Gull commits. […] From Hell’s bleakness is shown to be the
product of a dialectical process that, though inevitable for Gull, can still be rejected
by his double, the reader” (2013, 79).
These various levels of narration and heightened intertextuality and intermedi-
ality are just some of the multiple frames that signal the book’s self-reflexivity and
provide the reader with interpretative aids. Apart from the most basic frames offered
by the panels, panel sequences, and page arrangements, the series of epigraphs
that precede each chapter serve as prisms through which to see and interpret the
given section. These visual and verbal citations stem from a number of heteroge-
neous sources: from the aforementioned dictionaries, medical books, political trea-
tises, narrative fiction (Kafka, Sinclair) and paintings (Sickert, Stuck) to poetry
(Yeats, Milton, Dickinson) and nineteenth-century periodicals. Like the other inter-
textual and intermedial references, these compilations of epigrams create an echo
chamber of sorts: a palimpsestic, polyvalent text. Appendix I and Appendix II – as
further frames of reference – reposition the novel in the context of Ripperology and
the long history of Jack the Ripper adaptations and appropriations. Both therefore,
as has already been mentioned, signal the fictional character of the account and
give insight into the processes of selection, adaptation and mediation that are inher-
ent in historiography.
There is another frame that further undermines the ‘truthfulness’ of the scenario
chosen by Moore and executed by Campbell: the paratextual frame offered by the
dedication which appears on the verso of the title page. It reads: “This book is
dedicated to Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Marie
Jeanette Kelly. You and your demise: of these things alone are we certain. Good-
night, ladies.” It emphasizes the only certainty that we have: the brutal killings of
five women in the London East End in the year 1888. In addition, it pays tribute to
them and registers their deaths and, however problematic the narrative and the
aesthetics it offers, it also respectfully salutes them.
Despite this salutation, the graphic depiction of Mary Kelly’s murder has been
received as maintaining a misogynistic tradition of gender-specific depictions of
comic characters (↗17 George Herriman, Krazy Kat). This over thirty-page-long se-
quence slows down the action of the graphic novel and celebrates Jack the Ripper’s
violence. There is a two-page sequence of his mutilation of Kelly’s face, followed by
scalping, breast-cutting, thigh-cutting, and bowels boiling. The dominant vertical
and diagonal composition emphasizes both Gull’s authority and his skilled swift-
ness that culminates on page 26, where, in a sequence of seven panels, Mary Kelly’s
body literally disappears into streams of blood that – paradoxically –unite the mur-
derer and the victim aesthetically.

Although it received many awards and was adapted to the screen, which certainly
proves its popularity, From Hell was also initially banned in Australia, supposedly
due to this aesthetics. It has furthermore invited a number of theoretical and the-
matic approaches. Like Moore’s other works, this graphic novel has been discussed
with reference to the occult and the Gothic (Murray 2013) and in relation to the
established notions of gender and sexuality (Brigley-Thompson 2012, Miettinen
2012). In this context, Bringley-Thompson sees the text as “a story of sex, empire,
and purity” and “a bleak portrait of exploited women, perverted sexual desire, and
clinical callousness” (2012, 79). Miettinen argues that although the novel criticizes
the misogynistic violence of Jack the Ripper, its aesthetic and structural emphasis
on brutality and aggression simultaneously undermines this reading (2012).
Importantly, in the existing interpretations, sexuality has been linked both to
the city and to its modern pathologies. In her reading, Monica Germanà sees London
as always already “deviant because of its inherent subversion of cultural normativi-
ty” (2013, 146) and regards the narrative as stressing the importance and “function
of madness – viewed as deviancy from established order, subversion of authority
as well as spectacle and object of repressed desire – in the construction of metropol-
itan subjectivity” (2013, 154). The psychic life of the metropolis takes central stage
for Elizabeth Ho, who interrogates the novel’s construction of Jack the Ripper as a
national character against the background of the discourse of Englishness. She ar-
gues that Moore and Campbell’s psychogeography is a “powerful intervention in
the production of Englishness” insofar as the novel attempts to “remap touristic
London as a landscape of alternative desire: places where glimpses of some origi-
nary trauma and suffering can still be felt” and can be seen as “markers for where
the national consciousness can be said to have changed” (2006, 109).
The significance of space has also been linked to the exploration of history and
historiography in the novel. In fact, From Hell has been variously interpreted as a
narrative about historiography and the hermeneutics of history. For Christine Fer-
guson (2009), the killer embodies the misogynistic impulse of New Criticism. For
Barish Ali, he is the incarnation of a critic. In From Hell, he argues, “there is an
open invitation to the critic to cut up, slice, and dissect the text – in other words,
to commit violence by mimicking or retracing the performance of the antagonist,
Jack the Ripper” (2009, 607). For me, Jack the Ripper functions as an avatar of an
adaptor who explores (and exploits) historical narratives in the name of his creative
vision. In this sense, the novel can also be read as “metadaptation”: as a comment
on the practices and aesthetics of adaptation and appropriation (Pietrzak-Franger
2010).
What most of these critical positions have in common is the interrogation of the
various functions of intertextuality and intermediality in Moore’s works. Rather than
seeing his exaggerated compilation of citations in terms of postmodernist pastiche
and thus, after Fredric Jameson, as “a jumble of references that ultimately result
as an end in itself,” Di Liddo defines it in terms of “Bakhtinian heteroglossia (or
plurivocality) and dialogism,” which allows her to see From Hell as a case of histori-
ographic metafiction concerned with a processes of creating graphic literature (Di
Liddo 2009, 62). Most of the critics thus acknowledge the highly self-reflexive and
metareferential character of the text.
5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited

Ali, Barish. “The Violence of Criticism: the Mutilation and Exhibition of History in From Hell.” The
Journal of Popular Culture. 38.4 (2005): 605–631.
Baker, Bill. Alan Moore on His Work and Career. New York: Rosen Publishing, 2008.
Brigley-Thompson, Zoë. “Theorizing Sexual Domination in From Hell and Lost Girls: Jack the
Ripper versus Wonderlands of Desire.” Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical
Essays on the Graphic Novels. Ed. Todd A. Comer and Joseph Michael Sommers. Jefferson:
McFarland, 2012. 76–87.
Cain, Sian. “Alan Moore confirms he is retiring from creating comic books.” The Guardian,
8 September 2016.
Chapman, James. British Comics: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion, 2011.
Comer, Todd A. and Joseph M. Sommers. Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical
Essays on the Graphic Novels. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012.
Di, Liddo Annalisa. Alan Moore: Comics As Performance, Fiction As Scalpel. Jackson: University
Ecke, Jochen. “‘Is that you, our Jack?’: An Anatomy of Alan Moore’s Doubling Strategies.” Alan
Moore and the Gothic Tradition. Ed. Matthew Green. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013. 65–
83.
Ferguson, Christine. “Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s
White Chappell Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” Lit: Literature Interpretation
Theory. 20.1–2 (2009): 45–64.
Germanà, Monica. “Madness and the city: the collapse of reason and sanity in Alan Moore’s From
Hell.” Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition. Ed. Matthew J. A. Green. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2013. 140–158.
Green, Matthew J. A., ed. Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition. Manchester: Manchester
Ho, Elizabeth. “Postimperial Landscapes: ‘Psychogeography’ and Englishness in Alan Moore’s
Graphic Novel From Hell: A Melodrama in Sixteen Parts.” Cultural Critique. 63.1 (2006): 99–
121.
Miettinen, Mervi. “‘Do you understand how I have loved you?’ Terrible Loves and Divine Visions in
From Hell.” Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic
Novels. Ed. Todd A. Comer and Joseph Michael Sommers. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. 88–99.
Moore, Alan, and Bill Baker, ed. Alan Moore on His Work and Career. New York: Rosen Publishing
Group, 2008.
Moore, Alan, and Eddie Campbell. From Hell. London: Knockabout Comics, 2006.
Moore, Alan, and Eddie Campbell. The From Hell Companion. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions,
2013.
Moore, Alan, and Eric L. Berlatsky, ed. Alan Moore: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012.
Murray, Christopher. “‘These are not our promised resurrections’: unearthing the uncanny in Alan
Moore’s A Small Killing, From Hell and A Disease of Language.” Alan Moore and the Gothic
Tradition. Ed. Matthew J. A. Green. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 215–234.
Parkin, Lance. Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore. London: Aurum Press Ltd.,
2013.
Pietrzak-Franger, Monika. “Envisioning the Ripper’s Visions: Adapting Myth in Alan Moore and
Eddie Campbell’s From Hell.” Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisiting, Revising and
Rewriting the Past. Special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies 2.2 (Winter 2009/2010): 157–185.
Waites, Rosie. “V for Vendetta masks: Who’s behind them?” BBC News Magazine, 20 October
2011.
5.2 Further Reading

Cortsen, Rikke P. “Full Page Insight: the Apocalyptic Moment in Comics Written by Alan Moore.”
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. 5.4 (2014): 397–410.
Khoury, George. The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. Raleigh: Two Morrows Publishing, 2003.
Millidge, Gary S., and Michael Moorcock. Alan Moore Storyteller. New York: Universe Publishing,
2011.
Moore, Alan, J H. Williams, and Mick Gray. Promethea. La Jolla: America’s Best Comics, 2000.
Moore, Alan, Curt Swan, Jerry Siegel, and Joe Shuster. Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man
of Tomorrow? New York: DC Comics, 2010.
Moore, Alan, David Lloyd, Steve Whitaker, Siobhan Dodds, Jeannie O’Connor, Steve Craddock,
Elitta Fell, and Tony Weare. V for Vendetta. New York: DC Comics, 2005.
Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1987.
Parkin, Lance. Alan Moore. Harpenden, Herts: Pocket Essentials, 2009.
Evan Hayles Gledhill
25 Neil Gaiman: The Sandman
Abstract: Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman ran for seven years as a monthly serial in
the 90s, resulting in an initial ten volumes of collected tales, and a story spanning
thousands of years of human history told through the perspectives of humans, cats,
gods and monsters. Gaiman’s collaborative working history, and magpie approach
to literary history and popular culture, results in a rich tapestry of thematic resonan-
ces. The intricacy of Gaiman’s world-building, that includes many literary, historic
and artistic allusions, allows the series to be read through the lens of classical myth,
postmodern pastiche, or a myriad of other perspectives. This chapter focuses on the
series’ formal innovation within the context of DC comics, and its traditional con-
tent as a gothic text. The complexity of Gaiman’s fictional work is echoed in his
refusal to simplify the experience of being a reader, or an author. The Sandman is
a story about stories, about a curator of stories who doesn’t know how to assess
his own history; it is therefore also about being an author, a reader, and a living
individual.
Key Terms: Storytelling, Gothic, collaboration, postcolonialism, gender

Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is two thousand pages of a single multi-faceted story,
when viewed from the perspective of its central character Morpheus, the Dream
King, whose biography it charts. Over the course of seven years of serial publica-
tion, resulting in an initial ten volumes of collected tales and multiple offshoots, a
story spanning thousands of years of human history emerged. However, like Walt
Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855), the graphic novel and its eponymous subject
‘contain multitudes.’
Gaiman is an inherently collaborative author; as a comics creator he never
draws, but always works in partnership with artists. He borrows characters from
other writers, as well as turning authors like Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe
into characters themselves. In The Sandman’s first volume, Preludes and Nocturnes,
Alan Moore’s John Constantine, from the Hellblazer series, makes a brief appearance
(“Dream a Little Dream of Me” #3), alongside older DC characters like Martian Man-
hunter of the Justice League (“Passengers” #5), and villains Doctor Destiny and The
Scarecrow (“Imperfect Hosts” #2) to name but a few. Gaiman’s knowledge of comics
history is not limited to his own publisher’s titles; for example, visual reference is
also made (“Moving in” #11) to early twentieth century comic strip Little Nemo in
Slumberland (↗18 Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland). Gaiman’s character
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-029
514 Evan Hayles Gledhill
Lucifer Morningstar, heavily influenced in turn by Milton’s depiction of Satan in

Paradise Lost (1667), was one of the Sandman regulars subsequently loaned out for
a sister title within the same creative universe, penned by Mike Carey (and now
further adapted from Carey’s own Lucifer serial into a Fox television series).
In his approach to older literature and myth, in the way he leaves imaginative
doors open for future possibilities, Gaiman is rarely working alone, whether his
creative associates are alive and involved or not. In his introduction to the collection
of academic and critical essays The Sandman Papers, Gaiman declared that “once
you’ve written something it’s not yours any longer: it belongs to other people” (San-
ders 2006, iv). This cooperative approach to the creation of literature makes Gaiman
a great comics author, as he fundamentally understands the joy, and difficulty, of a
shared story-world. Serialized graphic fictions depend upon team work in the con-
struction of each individual instalment, but also to sustain world-building and con-
sistent characterization over time (↗8 World-Building), aspects which are frequent-
ly disrupted in the industry as authors and artists move from title to title, working
on characters initially created by others.
Gaiman’s publishing career began with journalistic pieces and work that de-
rived from other authors, such as Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy Companion (1985) based on the novels of Douglas Adams. The highly suc-
cessful collaboration on the novel Good Omens (1990), with Terry Pratchett, another
upcoming British fantasy author soon to reach the status of National Treasure, dem-
onstrates the skills in comedy, intertextuality and collaborative working that under-
pin Gaiman’s work as a comic writer in both senses of the word. Gaiman’s comics
work began in the UK market, including short stand-alone stories for science fiction
weekly 2000AD, an unfinished run on Miracleman for Eclipse Comics (replacing
Alan Moore as author), and the graphic novel Violent Cases (1987), his first pub-
lished partnership with artist Dave McKean, later a key Sandman collaborator. The
narrative themes that have come to define Gaiman’s career are already apparent in
this early work, with his focus on complex character interaction; for example, in his
bringing to the fore non-heroic characters in the Miracleman run ‘The Golden Age,’
to explore the impact and effects of powerful individuals’ actions within society.
During this period in which Gaiman was establishing himself in comics, DC
undertook a deliberate British talent hunt, after the successful transplantation of
Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and others to the US. Karen Berger, the DC editor special-
izing in horror and mystery comics who would be instrumental in the formation of
the Vertigo imprint in 1993, and Dick Giordiano, an executive editor with a back-
ground as a comics artist himself, made trips to the UK to attend conferences and
meet potential recruits. Gaiman’s connection to Moore as a friend and colleague
helped situate him within the American market; he submitted a story about Swamp
Thing, which Moore was then writing, as an example of his work to Berger (Bender
1999, 20). The pre-existing characters Gaiman wanted to work with locate his work
both within the twentieth century comics industry, and the longer literary tradition
of Gothic fiction. Pitching for titles the Phantom Stranger, with his opera cape and
occult abilities, and The Demon – about a literal demon, Etrigan, from Hell – dem-
onstrate Gaiman’s interest in the Gothic, magic and the fantastic, rather than the
more science-fiction based traditional superhero genre. Like his British comics col-
leagues named above, Gaiman’s influences range from British history and politics
to ancient mythologies, and from classic sci-fi to canonical literature. He is an open-
ly political author, involved in fund-raising, protest and other active engagement in
charitable causes, and links his reading of comics as a teenager in 70s Britain to a
wider pop culture of anti-establishment rebellion (Bender 1999, 20).
The original period of Sandman’s serial publication saw many developments in
the cultural acceptance of comic books, as well as in the expectations for comics’
forms and themes (↗2 History, Formats, Genres). The overlaps in the British crea-
tors’ publishing backgrounds and their thematic interests are indicative of the more
sombre tone of comics, particularly in DC’s output, during the 1980s. Jamie Delano,
writer of Hellblazer in this period, suggested that the distance between the American
publishing market and British politics allowed authors a greater freedom:
[I]t was England we were writing about, we started to be able to talk about politics and things
like that, which didn’t happen in comics […]. I was interested in commenting on 1980s Britain.
That was where I was living, it was shit, and I wanted to tell everybody.” (qtd in Carroll 1997).
The reflective and profound narratives Gaiman wanted to write suited the increasing
acceptance of adult-orientated storytelling in comics and graphic novels, and the
creeping spread of the gothic from the traditional horror comic into other genres.
The year of Sandman’s initial release also saw Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola’s
oneshot Gotham by Gaslight (1989), situating Batman in the late nineteenth century
of Jack the Ripper, and the first instalments of Alan Moore’s own history of the
Ripper killings From Hell (1989–1996) (↗24 Alan Moore, From Hell). There had been
clauses in the Comics Code Authority forbidding the words ‘crime,’ ‘horror,’ and
‘terror’ from titles, well into the seventies. Yet it was the Gothic titles that inspired
this generation of award winning artists; from the early noir-ish Batman as re-
worked by Frank Miller, to the Gothic mystery series such as the original House of
Mystery (1951–1983) referenced in The Sandman. The CCA restrictions died with very
little protest or comparative controversy only a decade after the final update in 1989,
perhaps because many of the medium’s greatest talents, recognised formally inside
and outside their industry, stressed the influence of the sorts of comics the Code
has specifically sought to suppress.
Serious awards for contributions to comics in art or industry had only been
established in the 70s, with the Shazam, replaced by the Jack Kirby award, and then
the Eisner in the mid-80s. Soon after the industry had begun to formally recognise
its high quality contributors, literary award committees began to take notice of the
graphic novel with Art Spiegelman’s Maus (↗22 Art Spiegelman, Maus) winning the
Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen awarded a
Hugo in 1988. Interestingly, after Gaiman and Vess’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
issue of Sandman won the 1991 World Fantasy Award for best short story, the first
comic to win in that category and the last, the “rules were changed to prevent it ever
happening again” (Wagner, Golden and Bissette 2008, 377). Clearly, not everyone in
literary publishing wanted to invite comic books to their table. However, alongside
changes in critical reception came new approaches within the scholarly community,
leading to the increasing study of comics and graphic novels as works of artistic
merit in their own right, rather than as merely the subject of censorship and indica-
tive of cultural trends. The Comics and Comic Art area of the Popular Culture Associ-
ation formed in 1992, and the International Comics Art Forum in 1995.
In discussing his journey to becoming a best-selling author, Gaiman has empha-
sized the influence of comic books when he was a young man: he told his careers
advisor in secondary school that he wanted to write American comics (Bender 1999,
13). B. Keith Murphy’s essay “The Origins of the Sandman” suggests why American
comics were of particular interest to the budding author (Sanders 2006). The British
Harmful Publications Act, first put in place in 1955 and made permanent in 1969,
was targeted specifically at horror comics. Many American comics were, technically,
contraband, and thus more exciting and glamorous than their home-grown counter-
parts, such as the comparatively tame Dandy (1937–present) and Beano (1938–
present). Yet, the more violent American fare was only superficially more rebellious;
British entertainment, both published and performative, has a long history of satire
and subversion that can be traced to the rebellious attitudes and affront to power
offered by the comic strip antics of the Bash Street Kids and Dennis the Menace.
Gaiman’s engagement with this tradition of subversive British humor is apparent in
his other graphic collaborations, such as The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy
of Mr. Punch (1994) illustrated by McKean. This graphic novel explores ideas of pow-
er and influence within families, through parallels with the traditional British street
entertainment of the Punch and Judy puppet show. This exemplifies many themes
frequently explored in Gaiman’s individual work and collaborations, which are of-
ten rooted in a sense of geographical place and history, and focus on the stories of
individuals shaped by both lived experience and storytelling, as is central to The
Sandman.

The Sandman himself, in Gaiman’s vision, is responsible for dreams, not only for
the humans of Earth, but for all living things across the cosmos. He is one of the
seven Endless, personifications of eternal experiences: Death, Delirium (who was
once Delight), Desire, Despair, Destiny, Destruction, and Dream. The Endless are,
supposedly, unchanging as they are eternal yet the example of Delight’s turn into
Delirium referenced in the “Prologue” (#21) to the fourth collected volume, Season
of Mists, and Destruction’s refusal of his role (developed in “The Doll’s House” #10,
“Lost Hearts” #16, and “Prologue”), suggest quite early in the series that there is a
marked difference between experience and theory. In the “Prologue,” Dream is de-
scribed by the nameless narrator as “most conscious of his responsibilities, and
most meticulous in their execution.” For a character as fixed in his outlook and
unchanging in his personality, Dream ironically has many forms and faces. He ap-
pears to dreamers as they shape him in their own image; whether by species, he
appears as cat in “Dream of a Thousand Cats” (#18), or by conventions of dress and
fashion. The Dream King is also called by many names, depending upon who is
addressing him: Lord Shaper to the faerie (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” #19), Lord
L’Zoril to J’onn J’onzz the Martian (“Passengers”) and in turn Morpheus, Oneiros
and Kai’ckul in various human languages through history. It is suggested that he
“accumulates names to himself as others make friends” (“Prologue”), a sentence
that simultaneously makes a link between naming, knowing and affection and then
breaks it with regard to its subject. Dream meets, interacts with, and is known by
many individuals over the thousands of years that Gaiman’s narrative spans, but
he generally refuses to know them, or to understand the perspectives of others.
Chronologically, the story of The Sandman seems fairly simple. Morpheus, Lord
of Dream, has relationships with humans, but feels distant and unengaged from
their fleeting lives and passions. As he states bluntly to his half-human son, Or-
pheus, whose wife has died: “You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell.
You grieve. Then you continue with your life” (Sandman Special, “Song of Orpheus”
#1). Dream feels that his human lovers and family do not understand him, and he
does not grasp their motivations and human priorities. Dream’s sister, Death, en-
courages him to engage more closely with the living (“A Death in the Family” #7).
After spending time on Earth, Dream engages Shakespeare to write great stories so
that the world will not forget fairies and other truths (“Men of Good Fortune” #13),
and also grants one man, Hob Gadling, eternal life. In exchange for immortality,
Hob will attend a regular meeting with Morpheus every century in a London pub,
and will tell him about the experience of change and of human life. Stories, such
as these from Hob, appear regularly as stand-alone episodes within the comic series.
Dream denies that this is a friendship, or that he is lonely.
But in the twentieth century, Morpheus is imprisoned for nearly a hundred years
in solitary captivity, which provides an opportunity to reflect on his past actions,
and himself (“Sleep of the Just” #1). Once released, he begins to revisit those whom
he has wronged, such as his ex-lover Nada (“A Hope in Hell” #4) and his son Orphe-
us (Brief Lives “Chapter 9” #49), and attempts to make amends. However, his ab-
sence has caused knock-on effects in our reality as people fall asleep but are unable
to wake up and escape from the Dreaming realm Morpheus oversees (The Doll’s
House #9–16). As he tries to set things right, Dream realizes that other eternal forces
are at work – in part, through the meddling of his sibling, Desire (“Lost Hearts”).
Technically, it is Destruction who set in motion the chain of events; he told Orpheus
that Death could help him visit the Underworld, which leads to Orpheus’ immortality
and Calliope’s estrangement from Dream (“Song of Orpheus”). As these repercus-
sions are key to the events that lead to Dream’s imprisonment, Destruction’s involve-
ment foreshadows the series’ conclusion. Unable to resolve all, without acknowledg-
ing and accepting change in himself, Morpheus seeks a resolution that will lead to
his own demise, and his replacement with a new incarnation of Dream (The Kindly
Ones, “13,” #69).
Several minor characters introduced in the first issues recur throughout the se-
ries, either in key plot lines or simply as references that develop a sense of a coher-
ent fictional universe. The character of Nada, a jilted lover of Dream whom he has
banished to Hell for a perceived betrayal, appears first in “A Hope in Hell,” her
backstory is revealed in “Tales in the Sand” (#9), and her relationship to Dream is
fully revealed, after which his cruelty is used as a bargaining tool against him, in
Season of Mists (#21–28). Nada’s interactions with Dream span thousands of years,
as do his interactions with another ex-lover, Calliope, and their son Orpheus. Calli-
ope first appears in an eponymous issue (#19), before her narrative importance
becomes clear in the special issue “Song of Orpheus,” now collected within the
volume Fables and Reflections. Orpheus appears first in “Thermidor” (#29), as a
disembodied head, before this circumstance is explained in “Song of Orpheus.” Fi-
nally, Orpheus is put out of his misery by this father in Brief Lives “Chapter 9.”
The unravelling of Dream’s identity and self-assurance is demonstrated though his
changing relationship to these individuals over time. Dream’s servants in his king-
dom, as diverse as a human who died in the dreaming and became a talking raven
(“Moving In”) and a landscape with a personality named Fiddler’s Green (“The
Doll’s House”), recur in a more straightforward manner from issue to issue. These
characters and relationships form the structure, the weft as it were, into which the
other stories are woven and the details stitched. Without a sense of place and family
for the Dream King to return to, there would be only the endless possibilities of
infinite dream stories to tell.
As Gaiman has noted repeatedly, The Sandman is a story about stories, but it is
also a story about people – and about a personification becoming a person. In their
encounters with each other, the Endless debate their role with regards to the living;
Dream suggests to Desire that the Endless are “servants of the living […] we exist
because deep in their hearts they know we exist,” but Desire rejects this, claiming
almost in reverse that “human beings are the creatures of desire” (“Lost Hearts”).
It is suggested that if Desire could no longer believe this about their power over
humans, they would go mad like Delirium, or abandon their post like Destruction.
However, as in his earlier work on Miracleman, Gaiman often focuses on those af-
fected by the actions or absences of the Endless rather than the immortals them-
selves. The ninth volume, The Kindly Ones, follows the almost-human Lyta Hall (not
identified in the comic as, part of wider DC mythology, the daughter of Wonder
Woman and Steve Trevor) and her son Daniel, who gestated in the Dreaming; just
one of the narrative arcs focusing on another individual’s perspective, and on their
experiences as a result of the Dream King’s actions. Dream does not often come off
well when seen through the eyes of other characters; through presented sympatheti-
cally, his attitudes and actions are subject to much critical reflection in the series.
The Sandman, at its core, is the journey that the most inflexible and inhuman of the
Endless makes to realize that living is an exercise in change and adaptation, and
empathy.
As the series progressed, Gaiman grouped narrative arcs across several issues
thematically and not necessarily by linear narrative content. In order, the ten vol-
umes of the collected editions, as commonly published, are: Preludes and Nocturnes
(#1–8) in which the Sandman escapes imprisonment; The Doll’s House (#9–16) in
which he deals with the ‘dream vortex’ that formed in his absence; Dream Country
(#17–20) which is a collection of stand-alone stories; Season of Mists (#21–28) which
recounts Dream’s trip to hell to free Nada; A Game of You (#32–37) follows the jour-
ney of a girl named Barbie, who becomes trapped in the Dreaming, linking charac-
ters and events from the second volume; Fables and Reflections is another collection
of shorts, depicting periods of Morpheus’ life on Earth, containing previews and
special issues as well as regular issues #29–31, #38–40, and #50; Brief Lives (#41–
49) explores the family history of the Endless, as Dream and Delirum go in search
of Destruction; World’s End (#51–55) is another volume of collected short stories, the
central theme being that each is told by a different traveller in the same inn; The
Kindly Ones (#51–69) contains a one-shot from Vertigo Jam, and recounts the story
of Lyta, and her son Daniel who will replace Dream, linking characters back to
volumes five and two; The Wake (#70–75) recounts Dream’s funeral, serves as a
reflection on the themes of the main narrative, and ties up loose ends. This listing
might suggest that a reader could skip volumes to read ‘the plot,’ but given the
manner in which characters recur and information about Morpheus’ past comes to
light, a summary by volume can only over simplify.
However, the first six issues, collected together in Preludes and Nocturnes, fol-
low a relatively simple narrative as the Lord of Dreams escapes from magical impris-
onment and goes about collecting the powerful magical items that were stolen from
him. The inept magicians who had hoped to conjure Death instead, the appearance
of cynical Brit John Constantine, and a visit to Hell that includes a battle of wits in
a demonic revue bar, are suggestive of the humor and irony of Gaiman’s other work,
such as the novel Good Omens. In a sense, Gaiman is playing it safe in these early
issues, with multiple references to established DC characters and a deceptively
straightforward quest narrative concentrated on the eponymous hero. This was the
first serial comic for Gaiman, cover artist McKean, and original penciller Sam Keith.
Working within the structure of the large and well-established publishing house of
DC created limitations, as well as opportunities, and certain artistic choices were
curtailed. Gaiman had planned to disrupt readers’ expectations, and add dramatic
irony through foreshadowing, via misdirection in the advertising blurb for the next
instalment that comes at the end of an issue (Bender 1999, 39). The titles in the
blurb were jokes about the content of the next issue, rather than its actual title;
thus the introduction of the character of Death in “The Sound of Her Wings” is
foreshadowed as “A Death in the Family.” That Gaiman abandoned this running gag
after just thirteen issues demonstrates that there are limitations of form and content
imposed by the publishing infrastructure.
Though Gaiman thinks that he “probably would have ended up doing most of
the things I ultimately did” with Sandman, had he been offered a different character
by DC (Bender 1999, 26), on a practical level he was able to work through such a
detailed, and chronologically disrupted narrative because the title was profitable.
By issue #8, the sales figures for the comic were excellent, and the creative and
editorial team were able to look at longer term plans without fear of a cancellation
notice. Thus, Gaiman says, “I was able to take a close look at what I was going to
do, and make very specific plans. By issue ten, I knew in great detail where I was
going […]. I’d originally planned the series to last for about forty issues” (Bender
1999, 37). By as early as the sixth issue “24 hours,” we begin to see aspects of the
subversion of comic tropes for which the series would become famous. Gaiman had
hoped to devote a page to each hour in a day, taking readers through the real-
time experience of the characters but was unable to develop the necessary narrative
structure in this form (Bender 1999, 36). However, this issue features the titular char-
acter himself very little, focusing instead on the individual stories of minor charac-
ters, in this case the victims of Doctor Destiny. This relative absence of the protago-
nist would become a fairly regular feature of the series as it developed.
Overall, The Sandman is a self-contained series, and was designed as such.
However, just as many issues of the comic can be read as standalone stories, the
reader can get more out of the individual tale by placing it within a wider context.
Encounters with other DC characters are relatively infrequent in Gaiman’s series,
and are not structured to lead the reader on to other comics, just as the many liter-
ary allusions do not necessarily lead a reader overtly to another specific work of
fiction: these intertextual references function rather as ‘Easter eggs’ for readers to
discover at their own pace. Gaiman resented, at times, editorial pressure to ensure
that his creation fit chronologically and cohesively into the wider DC universe. Gai-
man reports that he once told Karen Berger “nobody reading the Sandman is going
to be reading the Demon, nobody’s going to care, you’re upsetting the master plan”
(Bender 1999, 99), but he later decided that she was right about the wider collabora-
tive universe and agreed to restructure his narrative to ensure continuity in the
politics of Hell across DC titles. Inherently collaborative authors still develop strong
feelings of ownership over their artistic vision, even when revising older materials.

The original Sandman character, credited by artist Bert Christman and writer Gard-
ner Fox, started out in mystery comics of the thirties, before taking on more aspects
of the superhero. At first he was a human, named Wesley Dodds, who used a sleep-
ing gas to put criminals to sleep or to elicit confessions from them. Gaiman’s reinter-
pretation jettisoned almost every aspect of the original concept; the only visual fea-
ture incorporated into the new story is the gasmask, which becomes a ceremonial
‘helm’ as part of the Sandman’s robes as Lord of the Dreaming realm. Gaiman does
make a number of references to the original source material, and to other DC revi-
sions of the character, particularly in A Doll’s House. In this volume, Hector Hall
(not overtly identified as DC superhero the Silver Scarab) has died, but his spirit,
and his still-living wife Hippolyta, are trapped in a portion of the Dreaming by diso-
bedient servants of Morpheus. In “Playing House” (#12) Hall is depicted wearing a
costume very similar to that of the superheroic Sandman, and other characters in
this issue, including the monstrous servants of Dream, Brute and Glob, all appeared
in a 1970s storyline from a short-lived Jack Kirby and Joe Simon-led Sandman resur-
rection. Gaiman’s reinterpretation is almost a parody of this fairly obscure six-issue
run. Concurrent to Gaiman’s series, from 1993–1999 writers Matt Wagner and Steven
T. Seagle brought back Wesley Dodds, in noir-themed series Sandman Midnight The-
atre. In a one-shot crossover from 1995, co-written by Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner,
Dodds encounters the Dream King, and it is suggested that he becomes a superhero
as a direct result. Thus, Dodds’ mystical ability to dream prophetically is another
real world effect of Dream’s period of imprisonment, and retroactive continuity ties
the many incarnations of DC’s Sandman together.
The Sandman’s place in the DC universe is much more closely tied to horror
comics, such as House of Mystery (1951–2011), from which Gaiman borrowed his
depictions of the biblical brothers Cain and Abel and Lucius the Librarian, than the
superhero titles for which the industry leader is most well-known. These compendi-
um comics are structured as compilations of tales, often linked by no more than the
narrator. The characters of Cain and Abel, and Lucius, all take on the role of narra-
tor at points, as they did in their past incarnations in the horror and mystery series
from which Gaiman borrowed them. The Sandman is, of course, more than a mere
narrator: as the Dream King, his role is almost a curator of dreams. However, what
is most innovative about the Sandman’s role within his own title is often his ab-
sence. First Dave McKean removed the Sandman from the cover of his own comic
to explore wider themes, then Gaiman made him almost incidental in issues such
as “The Hunt” (#38), which tell short stories about people’s dreams.
The creators and editors of the series trusted their audience to follow a complex
narrative, in which the characters and layout shape-shift, and linear narratives are
not guaranteed to follow issue-by-issue plotting. There is no fixed rhythm to the
panel arrangement in The Sandman, it ebbs and flows with the narrative; as with
more traditionally laid-out comics, sometimes the narrative comes to an abrupt halt
for a full page illustration of a specific moment or movement, and sometimes it
progresses in a steady pattern. The reader of The Sandman, however, would find it
hard to predict at any given point what will await them when they turn the page:
images bleed into the gutters, panels overlap one another, sometimes there are no
panels at all, only borderless illustrations mixed in with the typography. The stylis-
tic rendering of the comic also adjusts constantly to the content; for example, in
“Parliament of Rooks” (#40) Cain, Abel and their mother Eve take turns to tell baby
Daniel Hall stories, and the art veers suddenly from detailed naturalism to chibi
manga to reflect the content of the tales.
It is impossible to give a fair account of all the artists who have contributed to
the rich and distinctive history of this series in a brief chapter like this, but particu-
lar mentions must be made. Firstly, Dave McKean’s collage-style covers have since
been gathered together in their own publication, and deserve a detailed perusal for
the thematic illusions his imagery draws out from the comics they introduced. The
pencillers who established the iconic appearance of the characters Dream and
Death, Sam Keith and Mike Dringenberg, also deserve special mention. Characters
are not identified simply by appearance in this series, as the interchangeable vis-
ages of the maid, mother, and crone that represent the three Fates demonstrate in
“Imperfect Hosts.” As the personification of dream throughout the universe, Mor-
pheus is drawn in numerous ways throughout the series. Just as different artists
came on board the project for different story arcs, or even for a single issue, as their
particular talents and styles were suited to the material, the Prince of Stories also
adapts to suit the dreamer he encounters. Throughout it all, however, Dream can
always be identified by his speech – which is rendered in white lettering on a black
background, always by Todd Klein (bar only two issues) who remained on the
project throughout its run. The most frequent image of Dream himself, as an inhu-
manly pale and thin man with a shock of black hair, resembles the lead singer of
the band Bauhaus, Peter Murphy, while his sister Death replicates Siouxie Sioux’s
famous black eyeliner and hair. Although the creators of the series are not them-
selves part of goth subculture, they acknowledge that their creations Dream and
Death draw upon its aesthetics.
Gothic, according to Anne Williams in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, is
“broader than genre, deeper than plot, and wider than a single tradition” (1995,
241). The Sandman is Gothic on many levels; visually alluding to a range of sources
and styles, from nineteenth century neo-Gothic architecture to German Expression-
ist cinema, and also modern subcultural Gothic traditions. In narrative, Gaiman also
works with the themes and structures of Gothic literature. Since its inception in the
mid-eighteenth century, Gothic fiction has used the literary devices of the ‘found
manuscript,’ parody, and pastiche. Horace Walpole initially claimed The Castle of
Otranto (1764) was a translation of an original old Italian manuscript, and Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is framed through letters describing a ship captain’s
encounters with Victor and his creature. The fact that the story is retold, at increas-
ingly further removes, often undermines the reliability of the retelling, but this style
can also be used to quite opposite effect; in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson presents the short story as part of a lawyer’s
collection of papers to suggest an authenticity to the tale.
The story structure of The Sandman is similarly labyrinthine; reframing Shake-
speare’s plays, classic myth, and modern urban legend, demonstrating the way sto-
ries are passed through multiple versions over time, and interweaving the perspec-
tives of multiple actors within the course of events. In this last practice we can see
further links to Alan Moore’s frequent use of this trope, particularly in works like
Watchmen, in which he includes extracts from other, fictional, books from within
the world of the main narrative. The Sandman can also be read as a form of Gothic
family saga; as is traditional in the genre, the patriarchal Dream is very concerned
with honor, and with protecting his house and the rules of the Endless. The Sand-
man’s most overt Gothic references include allusions to poetry by Edgar Allan Poe
(Season of Mists ‘Chapter 2’#22), and suggestive hints linking the depiction of Roder-
ick Burgess and Ruthven Sykes (‘Sleep of the Just’) to the British occult traditions
of Aleister Crowley, and Dennis Wheatley novels. However, we can find Gothic ev-
erywhere: in the science fiction of Alien (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979), in the horror and
gore of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (c. 1605), and the philosophy of Hell in Milton’s
Paradise Lost. What links all these disparate narratives are themes of identity and
outsider status, and what draws them together in Gaiman’s Sandman, is a central
core of Gothic mystery surrounding not only individual identities, but what it means
to be part of a wider identity as a human being.

The Sandman series has drawn high praise from diverse sources, from fellow comic
creators to novelists and pop stars. Horror author Peter Straub praised its “originali-
ty and imagination” from a genre perspective (Bender 1999, xiii). Many contributors
to the series, as well as external critics and fans, have praised the originality of
the series from a formal perspective; for artist Bryan Talbot, the series represented
“something that nobody’s done in the comic form before. The character was very
different than any other character in comics” (Sanders 2006, 19). The Sandman was
an extraordinary success for a young author, quite new to the comics industry, espe-
cially considering the complex themes and very British humor of his work. When
asked about the complexity of his work, Gaiman has said “I don’t understand why
people write down. Who are they writing down to?” (Sanders 2006, 18). Gaiman’s
phrasing suggests that authors who would seek out popularity by pursuing the low-
est common denominator misunderstand their audience, writing to an imaginary
reader rather than trying to make a genuine connection with like-minded people.
Gaiman’s collaborative working history, and his many friendships with musicians
and film-makers formed through mutual creative admiration, demonstrates his in-
terest in making meaningful connections through art. Given the author’s respect for
the reader within the marketplace, and his willingness to cross boundaries of form
in creating art, the intricacy of Gaiman’s world-building can be read as anti-elitist
construction. The details are designed to enable engagement from a multitude of
perspectives, because of his inclusion of a wide range of literary traditions and
styles, rather than acting as an exclusionary practice that re-inscribes canonical
education as necessary to understanding his literary, historic and artistic allusions.
The complexity of Gaiman’s fictional work thus echoes his refusal to simplify the
experience of being a reader, or an author.
This approach has certainly been artistically and commercially successful. Gai-
man’s fantastical and supernatural fictions for adults and children have won him
multiple Hugo awards, a couple of Nebula and Locus awards, a Bram Stoker award,
and the British Science Fiction award, among many more nominations. He is a re-
cipient of the Newberry Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American
literature for children, awarded by the Association for Library Service to Children
(part of the American Library Association). He has adapted his own work, other
contemporary authors, and ancient classics such as Beowulf for the screen, often to
great acclaim. The Sandman issue “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was the first, and
only, comic to win the World Fantasy Award in the short story category.
However, Gaiman’s use of myth and fable in his work has not always been so
well received, though Gaiman is very aware of his role as a white author telling
stories such as Sandman’s “Ramadan” #50, engaging with cultures and myths from
much further afield than his European roots in novels like American Gods (2001)
and Anansi Boys (2005). In Anansi Boys, Gaiman reverses the dominant mode of
writing by white authors, in which the reader can assume characters are white un-
less a descriptive passage indicates otherwise, by indicating instead when a charac-
ter is white. Yet, Gaiman admits that when creating “Tales in the Sand,” the instal-
ment in which Nada is introduced, that he did no detailed background reading; he
refers to “African myths” in general, conflating the many varied nations and people
of an entire continent, giving no specific sources (Bender 1999, 50). When dealing
with European history, by contrast, Gaiman highlights his careful research and ac-
curacy of depiction; after setting “Thermidor” in the French Revolution he says
“then I had to go out and research it like a son of a bitch. I remember buying every
book I could find on the subject” and goes on to name specific authors and titles
(Bender 1999, 144). As inclusive and diverse in approach as Gaiman aims to be,
there is still work for him to do to decolonialize his perspectives.
Gaiman aimed to “produce good literature” in creating The Sandman, meaning
work that stands up to repeated reading by well-educated audiences, according to
his favored definition (Bender 1999, 48). Despite its originality within the comic
market, The Sandman is, overtly and deliberately, written to be canonical English
literature. Gaiman draws for inspiration on diverse sources, certainly, but his most
frequent references and recurring characters are from the canon of western litera-
ture: Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Homer. Rocco Versaci claims that
work by creators like “Gaiman, Moore, and Sikoryak assaults the canon, but the
assault is less on the content of the canon than on […] the assumptions of canon-
makers that ‘literature’ embodies only certain forms, and that comic books are cer-
tainly not one of them” (2007, 29). This recognizes that Gaiman is a white Western
man, predominantly writing about white Western men, who re-inscribes and recon-
textualizes the traditional canon, just in new forms.
Canonical approaches to art and literature “are constructed and reconstructed
by people, people of particular stations in life, people with certain ideas, and tastes
and definable interests and views on what is desirable” (Lauter 1991, 261). In the
late-twentieth century, a reconstruction of the literary canon away from dominance
by the linear narrative novel has gotten underway in the critical press, as well as the
seminar rooms and lecture theatres of the academy. Gaiman is pleased and proud
to be an acknowledged part of this movement, because academia “treats art as if it
matters […]. I think we need the best critical minds to point to what we do and
explain it to ourselves” (Sanders 2006, iv). This ‘we,’ here, is all-encompassing, as
Gaiman suggests – humans need artists to explain what we do, and artists need
critics to explain how they did that in turn. Works like The Sandman have been
instrumental in changing attitudes to what art is, and can be, precisely because
authors like Gaiman work intertextually with the existing canon; the graphic form
challenges the boundaries of the canonical text, but the content remains recogniz-
able as ‘literature.’
With all the references to other authors, and particularly their writing process-
es, The Sandman is about the telling of stories, the art and craft of authorship, of
living as an author, and of living surrounded by stories as readers and listeners too.
Gaiman has said that it was early on in the creation of the series, in “24 Hours”
(#6), when “I realised on a gut level, not just an intellectual level, that I was writing
a story about stories” (Bender 1999, 36). Gaiman is, as he tells us himself here,
constantly telling other people’s stories. Sandman, charting the story of Morpheus,
Lord of Stories, who claims to have no tale of his own, is at its core about identity
and how it is shaped by stories, and thus how it shapes stories in its turn. However,
which stories get told, and how those stories get told, depends upon the author and
the circumstances of their publication; the intersections of creation, capitalism, and
identity are complicated and powerful.
In The Sandman, the dangers and pleasures of dreaming and storytelling are
constructed very differently for male and female characters. It is a white male story-
teller like Gaiman, a man who values dreams and longs to master them, who is
the central individual through whom Morpheus seeks his enlightenment: William
Shakespeare. Shakespeare is given agency to shape stories on the page, and in his
own life, though he fails to make the most of his reality: it is implied that his son’s
death and his daughter’s unequal marriage are in part due to his parental negli-
gence as he prioritizes his authorship. Shakespeare remains conscious, not a dream-
er, a colleague of the Dream King rather than his victim, unlike Nada or Constan-
tine’s friend Rachel who, under the influence of Morpheus’ sand, dreams her life
away unproductively. Hippolyta Hall, who becomes trapped in the Dreaming, cre-
ates a child – that most female of accomplishments. The child, Daniel, is claimed
by Morpheus as his successor, his mother is given no choice in the matter, unlike
Shakespeare, who strikes an acknowledged bargain with the Lord of the Dreaming.
In Lucien’s library of lost books, books that only exist in dreams, specific men-
tion is made of unwritten titles by famous authors including Chesterton, Tolkien,
and Conan Doyle (“Chapter 2”). None are female. And yet, what an ideal opportuni-
ty to highlight all the literature only dreamed of and never written because of wom-
en’s traditional confinement to domestic duties or because the author was not
taught literacy skills or, to look beyond gender, because the author’s physical dis-
ability was a barrier to participation. It is telling that Morpheus is originally unable
to empathize with Nada, a black woman, but is brought closer to this through the
perspective of a white woman, Calliope. Though this narrative may be realistic, as
far as ancient gods and goddesses can be, in that the perspectives of those who are
very different from us are easier to understand when retold from a perspective more
familiar to us, this structure serves to further alienate the character of Nada. The
black woman’s voice is interpreted not only through the voice of the white male
author, which is unavoidable here, but also through other characters who do not
share her culture. The African storyteller who first introduces her tale in ‘Tales in
the Sand’ is a fleeting character who never recurs. The limits of understanding the
perspectives of others are an interesting theme in a narrative about storytelling, as
they highlight the limits experienced by the author himself.
The Sandman himself becomes increasingly knowledgeable about the limits of
identity over the course of the journey. He eventually recognizes his own error in
his initial refusal to change, a refusal to take on board any other perspective but
his own. After all his effort to change, to recognize the effect of change in himself,
Morpheus has limits as to how far he can stretch the boundaries of his self-concep-
tion: he chooses another white male to be his heir. As Gaiman is part of the cultural
lineage of Shakespeare, though he has the privilege of power to take on the forms
of other cultures, it is perhaps unsurprising that his creation echoes him in this
way. That Neil Gaiman is a self-proclaimed feminist, an egalitarian, an international
traveler and global citizen, actively promoting the equality of LGBTQ and racial
minorities within the white male-dominated western creative tradition is, of course,
a part of what enables his work to be original, risk-taking, and non-traditional. The
Sandman in form, content and style was anti-reactionary, bold and inclusive. As a
work of art in an oft maligned form it transcended the limitations of form that its
creators recognized were not inherent to the comic book, but imposed upon it. How-
ever, The Sandman has not simply become canon through its critical and profitable
success, but has always been canon in some less tangible manner connected to
identity and cultural tradition. This is not to deny its material intervention in in-
creasing the acceptance of the graphic form in literature. As a work very deliberately
constructed to be ‘good literature,’ it was composed by an author steeped in a par-
ticular tradition in order to belong within, and become part of, that tradition. That
it can do so is, therefore, a testament to its innovation and to the author’s skills
in adaptation, but also Gaiman’s ability, as a man who embodies certain cultural
expectations, to inscribe himself into the expected forms of the existing canon.
5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited
Bender, Hy. The Sandman Companion. New York: Vertigo, 1999.
Carroll, David. “Trailblazers: interview with Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis.” Bloodsongs #8,
Ed. Steve Proposch <http://www.tabula-rasa.info/AusComics/Hellblazers.html>. 1997.
Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
Sanders, Joseph L., ed. The Sandman Papers: An Exploration of the Sandman Mythology. Seattle:
Fantagraphic Books, 2006.
Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. London: Continuum,
2007.
Wagner, Hank, Christopher Golden and Stephen R. Bissette, ed. Prince of Stories: The Many
Worlds of Neil Gaiman. New York: Macmillan, 2008.
Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.
5.2 Further Reading

McCabe, Joseph. Hanging Out with the Dream King: Conversations with Neil Gaiman and his
Collaborators. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005.
Prescott, Tara, ed. Neil Gaiman in the 21st Century: Essays on the Novels, Children’s Stories,
Online Writings, Comics and Other Works. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015.
Prescott, Tara and Aaron Drucker, ed. Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the
Comics, Poetry and Prose. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012.
Rauch, Stephen. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern
Myth. Cabin John: Wildside Press, 2003.
Schweitzer, Darrel, ed. The Neil Gaiman Reader. Cabin John: Wildside Press, 2007.
The Comics Work of Neil Gaiman. Special Issue. ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies. 4.1
(2008).
Erin La Cour
26 Alison Bechdel: Dykes to Watch Out For
Abstract: In a field that is more and more concerned with promoting comics au-
teurs, it is striking that Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is largely
praised and studied on its own. The fact that its discourse on archiving, visibility,
and sexual identity are its most celebrated aspects, coupled with Bechdel’s pre-Fun
Home status as a celebrated underground comics artist, make the lack of attention
paid to her earlier work, Dykes to Watch Out For, as well as her subsequent Are You
My Mother? A Family Drama, all the more surprising. Through an examination of
possible explanations, this chapter posits that rather than genre or form, literariness
or timeliness, Bechdel’s “lesser” two works have been neglected due to their focus
on women’s and lesbians’ stories. Rather than simply calling for a redress, this
chapter argues that a critical reevaluation of these works is politically necessary
due to their discursive questioning of archival erasure.
Key Terms: visibility, archive, lesbians, women, critical reception

When Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was published by Houghton Mifflin in June
2006, Alison Bechdel became the latest member of a handful of comics artists whose
work has been embraced by prestigious literary establishments in North America
and Europe. Joining the ranks of the critically acclaimed Maus by Art Spiegelman
and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Fun Home not only spent two weeks on the New
York Times Best Seller List, but also won #1 Best Book of the Year by Time, #1 Non-
fiction Book by Entertainment Weekly, and was a finalist in the Autobiography/Mem-
oir category of The National Book Critics Circle Award. Later that same year, a trans-
lation of Fun Home was published in France, first as serialized installments in the
newspaper Libération and later in its entirety in book form by Éditions Denoël, gar-
nering it both critical popular and academic praise in Francophone literary- and
comics circles. In 2007, it was chosen as an official selection at the Angoulême Inter-
national Comics Festival, a significant feat, considering both the prestige of the
festival and its continued infamy for excluding women comics artists. This recogni-
tion not only worked to further legitimize the study of Fun Home at the university
level in France and beyond, but also prompted other translated editions and award
nominations by literary-, comics-, and LGBTQ+ institutions to proliferate soon there-
after, which further increased Bechdel’s visibility in both public and academic
spheres. Like Maus and Persepolis before it, Fun Home now often appears on univer-
sity syllabi in courses in various fields from literary- to media- to gender studies in
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-030
530 Erin La Cour
many Western countries and in 2013 was adapted into an award-winning Off-Broad-
way musical that later moved to Broadway in 2015.
What many critics and academics alike have often overlooked in their praise of
Fun Home, however, are the facts that Bechdel had already been producing and
self-syndicating the bi-weekly comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For for 25 years, from
1983–2008 (which she recently revived in the wake of the Trump-era, adding several
new strips to her impressive previous 527), and that because of Dykes she was al-
ready a firmly established member of the underground comics scene in the US.
Indeed, Bechdel’s notoriety, both critically and academically, has had little to do
with Dykes or with her 2012 counterpart to Fun Home, the memoir Are You My Moth-
er? A Comic Drama, neither of which to date has successfully achieved the wide-
spread visibility, and much less the accolades, of Fun Home. In a field that is more
and more concerned with promoting comics auteurs, it is striking that Bechdel’s
“middle work,” as it were, is praised and studied largely on its own; quite rarely
does one read an academic or popular article on Fun Home with more than just a
passing reference to either Dykes or Mother, both of which are rarely written about
without a direct – and often disparaging – comparison to Fun Home.
While it is hardly surprising that Mother is often directly compared to Fun
Home, not least because it was marketed in relation to it by publishing house
Houghton Mifflin, the attention paid to Dykes is of a different nature: it is often
positioned as a mere precursor to Bechdel’s more “serious” work. Because Dykes is
both fictive and in strip form, it is regarded as simply not carrying the believability
and thus the cultural cachet of either Fun Home or Mother, both of which are mem-
oir and marketed as “graphic novels.” That strips are still considered “low brow” in
comparison to “graphic novels” (which are often positioned as a new literary subset
of memoir and/or autobiography, perhaps not on par with works in the literary can-
on, but good enough to be taught in literature courses) could be seen as the obvious
answer as to why Dykes has been so overlooked, even after its collection in multiple
anthologies, notably including the 2008 publication The Essential Dykes to Watch
Out For. However, such an argument does not account for the different but largely
equal dismissal of Mother. While works labeled “graphic novels” are often praised
for their “literariness,” Mother has often been criticized for being “too” literary in its
exploration of the work of British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.
Moreover, like Dykes, the publication of Mother could be seen as simply not as polit-
ically timely in its subject matter as Fun Home and other “graphic novels” like Maus
and Persepolis. While Fun Home debuted in the early days of individual US states
writing gay marriage into law, Maus at the outset of the field of memory studies’
inquiries into postmemory and Holocaust representation (c.f. Spanjers 2019), and
the banned-in-Iran Persepolis in the midst of heightened tensions with the West
post-Iranian Revolution, Dykes, with its broad timespan, and Mother, with its rela-
tively timeless discourse on mother-daughter relationships, present a different, yet
still urgent, politics.
Dykes’ fictiveness and strip form and Mother’s literariness and untimeliness,
however, simply do not go far enough in exploring the lack of critical attention
these works have received. For while Fun Home, Maus, and Persepolis all lend them-
selves well to discussions on both personal and collective memory due to the dis-
course on witnessing and testimony they engender and the archives they create, so,
too, do Dykes and Mother. Therefore, although there is an ever-increasing promotion
of comics auteurs, it becomes apparent that, more than the genre or form of Dykes
or the literariness and untimeliness of Mother, these works have not achieved the
success of Fun Home precisely because of their author and, importantly, her narra-
tive. For while Fun Home (and countless other “graphic novels,” including the afore-
mentioned Persepolis) was written by a woman and, being memoir, features the
author as the protagonist, it does not focus on women’s experiences and relation-
ships to the extent that Dykes and Mother do; more than just an exploration of
Bechdel’s relationship with her father and their shared homosexuality, Fun Home is
in large part a critical study of the gay male experience in the decade leading up to
and the decade after the Stonewall riots.
Building upon critical theory concerned with the visibility of women and lesbi-
ans, including Bechdel’s “The Rule,” which was presented in Dykes and later recast
as “The Bechdel (-Wallace) Test,” I will elucidate how women- and lesbian-centered
stories are simply just not as prominent as stories about men due to their perceived
lack of appeal to consumers of popular culture. I will thus posit that rather than
being about genre or form, literariness or timeliness, it is the prominence of wom-
en’s and lesbians’ stories in both Dykes and Mother that is the prime factor in the
dearth of scholarship on and critical attention paid to them. By examining discourse
on the form of the “graphic novel,” I will first underline how formal arguments
cannot uphold the general denigration of strips, paying careful attention to the con-
flation of the “graphic novel” with the “serious” genres of memoir and autobiogra-
phy. Next, using Bechdel’s own discourse as presented in Fun Home, I will elucidate
how contemporary memoir and autobiography complicate any easy distinction be-
tween fiction and non-fiction in examining, compiling, and critiquing archives and
archival documents. Finally, I will examine the archive that Dykes creates in order
to argue for its – and Mother’s – importance as discursive cultural objects.

While in 2001 Dykes was named “one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics
genre, period” by journalist Judith Levine for Ms. magazine, the feminist publication
co-founded by political activists Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Hughes, more main-
stream popular and academic accolades have been harder to come by. Due in large
part to the creation and perpetuation of the term “graphic novel,” other comics
forms, including strips and comic books, have often been overlooked as culturally
532 Erin La Cour
unimportant due to an insistence on form underlining content; where the “graphic

novel” is commonly defined as a full-length work of artistic and/or literary merit,
strips and comic books are often seen as one-off, throw-away pieces of popular
culture entertainment. Even within the field of comics studies, there is a seemingly
endless debate about the delineation of the various forms of comics, especially be-
tween scholars who advocate for the term “graphic novel” as separate from comics
and those who question the motivation behind this terminological distinction. As
comics scholar Ed S. Tan notes, those in the former category uphold the idea that
“historically speaking, graphic novels may be seen as an art form that has grown
out of and subsequently outgrown the comics genre” (2001, 31). This theory is un-
abashedly adhered to by the self-proclaimed coiner of the term, comics artist and
scholar Will Eisner, who not only argues that the “graphic novel” is a medium dis-
tinct from comics but, that as a new and emergent medium, is one that has sur-
passed comics’ scope to leave “the comics ghetto far behind” (qtd. in Hornsche-
meier 2003, back cover).
On the other side of this argument, however, are scholars who assert that the
“graphic novel” is not at all a separate medium from comics, but rather, that the
term only marks a desire to escape the ubiquitous lowly status of comics that per-
sists across various disciplines and popular culture alike – that the label “graphic
novel” asserts prestige. In his introduction to the edited volume The Graphic Novel,
cultural studies scholar Jan Baetens directly points to this side of the argument
when he writes:
[…] the “graphic novel” is, at least theoretically, used to make a clear-cut distinction between
the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” between comics’ pulp fiction and more or less high-art
visual narratives in book-form whose ambition it is to save the literary heritage in an illiterate
world. (2001, 7)
Baetens’ snide commentary about the binaries of good and bad, literature and pulp
fiction, and high and low art quite clearly point to the impetus for the adoption of
the term, especially by literary scholars: a fear of the perceived simplicity of comics
and, simultaneously, the desire to salvage the study of literature in an increasingly
visual culture. Indeed, while comics artists who advocate for the term “graphic nov-
el” are likely to be more, if not mostly, concerned with sales figures (like Eisner
himself, who, in an anecdote in his keynote lecture at the 2002 University of Florida
Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels said he invented the term in 1978 precise-
ly for this reason (Eisner)), literary scholars seem to need to justify their interest in
and promotion of these works in terms of the discourse on high and low culture. As
comics scholar Catherine Labio writes:
The eagerness with which the phrase “graphic novel” has been adopted in academic writing
points to a stubborn refusal to accept popular works on their own terms. “Comics” reminds us
of this vital dimension. “Graphic novel” sanitizes comics; strengthens the distinction between
high and low, major and minor; and reinforces the ongoing ghettoization of works deemed
unworthy of critical attention. (2011, 126)
The idea that comics can only enter the category of “literature” when recast as
“graphic novels” is problematic in at least three more regards than pointed out in
Baetens’ and Labio’s arguments above: (1) many works labelled as “graphic novels”
are not fiction, and thus cannot properly be called “novels” (including, of course,
Fun Home and Mother); (2) many works labelled as “graphic novels” are, in fact,
collections of comic book series, and thus the term points to a simple marketing
ploy; and (3) the definition of “literature” has become more and more indistinct
with the ingratiation of various other medial forms when it suits a particular literary
establishment (e. g. when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016,
which was highly critiqued, but certainly refocused popular attention on the Nobel
establishment).
While certainly this terminology and its promotion have significant faults in
logic, what seems a through line in the discourse is an impetus to retain a certain
claim to “seriousness” for literature – an argument that in studies of comics has
quite simplistically tied form to content, as well as seriousness to genre. Indeed,
regardless of the inclusion of “novel” in the “graphic novel,” the term has largely
become conflated with memoir and autobiography, two personal narrative genres
that have long been seated in the debate about the ability to represent the truth of
a life. Early discourse on memoir and autobiography focused on carving out an
assertion of truth through distinguishing such “life writing” from fiction, an asser-
tion that was largely hinged on the ability to offer a verifiable account of the events
of a person’s life, supported by evidence such as documents, history, and chronolo-
gy – the “facts” presented within non-personal, biographical writing. As such, this
evidence was positioned as the truth in personal narrative for its factual reliability,
and therefore necessarily more truthful than the personal testament of the individu-
al, which in its subjectivity in relation to both memory and emotion has been per-
ceived as at best faulty, and therefore necessarily subject to fictionality. Current
discourse in memoir and autobiography studies has largely left this fact-versus-
fiction argument behind to focus instead on identity and subjectivity as it is con-
structed through the narrative process, as well as the limitations of experiential
truth in its negotiation between evidence and emotion.
In the following pages, I will offer a brief discussion of how Bechdel addresses
this discourse in Fun Home in order to demonstrate how she offers an interesting
perspective on what constitutes truth in her exploration of the presumed binary of
fact and fiction. As I will elucidate, her exploration of identity’s and subjectivity’s
ties to experience and retrospection disrupts the privileging of the evidential over
the memorial and thus speaks to a notion of truthfulness that necessarily establishes
a contentious relationship to fact in that it works to undermine the fact/fiction di-
vide. This truthfulness, as between or outside of evidential or memorial truth alone,
speaks to and illuminates the discursive importance of individual, experiential
truth.
534 Erin La Cour

In Fun Home, Bechdel relates the story of her life by taking her readers through
vignettes of different periods of her self-discovery in nonlinear time, which are jux-
taposed with a retrospective look at how she came to uncover her father’s closeted
homosexuality. Presented as a sort of double coming-out story – although Bechdel
in effect outs her father post-mortem – Fun Home explores the complications in
claiming sexual identity in two generations of heteronormative American society
and points to the interconnectedness of human experience within trauma, “the way
in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which
trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possi-
bility and surprise of listening to another’s wound” (Caruth 1996, 8). In order to tell
her story, Bechdel utilizes comics to profound effect in that she works in different
styles of drawing to represent different moments of revelation, sometimes overlap-
ping them in order to illuminate the discourse on truth as it is related to experience,
document, and memory. In this way, her work is a prime example of how comics is
at once self-reflexively able to comment on the aim and ability of personal narrative
to represent experiential truth, and, more importantly, to speak to our obsessive
search for discovering the truth even in its impossibility.
Of particular note is Bechdel’s use of various pieces of canonical literature that
not only offer an intertextual subtext to her story, but work to draw her readers’
attention to the way in which documents affect feeling and memory. While she notes
that literature played a great role in her relationship with her father, a teacher of
high school English, and parallels her relationship with him to the myth of Icarus
and Daedalus throughout her work, the most noteworthy intertextual references are
those that she chooses to include but not to overtly discuss. Already in the first
panel of the first page of her work, readers are met with a young Alison, who inter-
rupts her relaxed and reading father to play a game of airplane. In the third panel
on this page, readers are able to see Alison’s father’s discarded copy of Anna Kareni-
na on the floor next to the two as they play. This intertextual reference is not men-
tioned in the text, but reveals to the reader a wealth of information. As the story
unfolds, it is clear that Alison’s father, Bruce, is like Anna Karenina; he is (likely)
conducting a secret, adulterous love affair, has a child who is suspicious of him and
a spouse who turns a blind eye, and most importantly, has a reason to conceal his
affair: the fear of societal scorn. Because this instance of intertextuality is coupled
with other moments of Bechdel directly addressing how her relationship with her
father was influenced by his love of literature, she points to the confusion and inter-
relation of fact and fiction in experience. Since the book’s appearance in the panel
is not addressed, she leads her readers to wonder whether she has in fact recalled
this as a memory or whether she is using it as a narrative ploy.
This question of intent arises in large part due to Bechdel’s quest to understand
whether her father’s death was a suicide and not an accident as reported. Through-
out her narrative, she looks for clues to her father’s intentions in what he was read-
ing, making specific note that “There’s no proof [of his suicide], but there are some
suggestive circumstances […]. The copy of Camus’ A Happy Death that he’d been
reading and leaving around the house in what might be construed as a deliberate
manner” (27). This directive comment, coupled with more understated moments of
intertextuality, leads readers to further ponder whether Bechdel is using intertextu-
ality as a guide for them – or for herself. For example, when she describes her
father’s obsession with restoring their home, she notes, “It was his passion. And I
mean passion in every sense of the word” (7). Underneath this text, the reader finds
an image in which Bruce is carrying a column for the porch of their house. The
manner in which his figure is bent, as well as the angle of the column as he carries
it, calls to mind the ubiquitous image of Christ carrying the cross on his back. And
just in case the reader has missed this overt allusion, Bechdel includes a floating
text box to the right of her father’s figure that reads “Libidinal. Manic. Martyred”
(ibid.). Unlike the subtle comparison of Bruce to Anna Karenina, this image is quite
the heavy-handed nod to her readers. Here, Bechdel rather obviously suggests that,
like Christ, her father has a cross to bear and will unjustly die. In offering her read-
ers a slow-pitched “aha moment” of discovery of her narrative technique, she push-
es us to ponder her – and our own – obsession with the narrative recovery of experi-
ential truth.
Perhaps Bechdel’s most poignant commentary on personal narrative’s obses-
sion with the truth comes through her childhood writings, which she has rewritten
and inserted throughout her work. Having (self-diagnosed) obsessive-compulsive
disorder, Bechdel began to keep a journal after her father told her to “Just write
down what’s happening” (140) in an effort to help curb her obsessive actions. In
this statement alone, Bechdel can be seen as commenting on personal narrative by
calling her readers’ attention to the subjective reality of “what’s happening.” Fur-
ther, she illustrates this subjectivity through re-creating the diary pages for her
readers to see. In every entry, she writes “I think” after nearly every sentence, re-
gardless of whether she is describing actions or feelings, and eventually creates a
symbol representative of the words that she can use to cover any moment of uncer-
tainty. She notes, “It was sort of an epistemological crisis. How did I know that the
things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true?” (141). The confusion of truth
she expresses both as a child in her diary and as an adult in her commentary are of
particular interest in that she chooses to place the symbol over not just events,
which calls into question how memory influences the truth in experience, but also
over the names of the people in her life: her mother, father, friends, and even her-
self. In so doing, Bechdel further calls into question personal narrative’s aims of
recounting experiential truth by questioning the relational ties we have to one an-
other.
Bechdel explores these questions more fully through the use of photographs in
her narrative. While in her main storyline she utilizes the feeling of familiarity of-
536 Erin La Cour
fered by cartoon images, she also plays with the goal of personal narrative through
her inclusion of photographs of her family, which she has drawn more photorealisti-
cally. Unlike the cartoonish images, the drawn photographs work to exclude the
reader from close association with the represented figures and serve to remind the
reader that this is her memoir about her life; as Bechdel claimed in an interview
with literary scholar Hillary Chute, including the photographs was “a way to keep
reminding readers, these are real people. This stuff really happened” (Chute 2006,
1009). Where Bechdel uses this trope by including school portraits, family photo-
graphs, and passport documentation in order to assert the credibility of her work,
she simultaneously toys with their credibility by reading into them. The clearest
display of this comes with the inclusion of the only two-page spread in her work.
Here Bechdel draws attention to the conflict between memory and document by
presenting the reader with an intimate photograph of what she imagines is her fa-
ther’s young lover. Held by Bechdel’s cartoon hands, the photograph of her then
seventeen-year-old babysitter, Roy, recumbent on a bed in a hotel room, relaxed
and stripped down to his underwear with the sunlight reflecting off his hair, serves
as a marker of the rupture between lived experience and document. Coupled with
the commentary by Bechdel, ranging from memories of the trip to comments on the
quality of the photograph, this image serves to show her trying to understand not
only what the photograph depicts, but what it means. Of it, Bechdel said, in the
aforementioned interview with Chute:
It was a stunning glimpse into my father’s hidden life, this life that was apparently running
parallel to our regular everyday existence. And it was particularly compelling to me at the time
because I was just coming out myself. I felt this sort of bond with my father, like I shared this
thing with him, like we were comrades. (2006, 1006)
The overlapping of the cartoon hand and the photograph juxtaposes the believabili-
ty of memory with documentary evidence, for while she has the proof of the photo-
graph, it does not account for the father that she knew, for her experiential truth,
nor, for that matter, does it serve as evidence that her father was in fact having an
affair with Roy. In this way, the image of the photograph that Bechdel says sparked
her to write Fun Home (2006, 1005) also works to reveal the hermeneutic impossibil-
ity of both evidential and experiential truth. This point, which Bechdel reaches us-
ing comics’ form, firmly underlines the aims of personal narrative. As queer theorist
Valerie Rohy notes:
Surely truth and falsehood are among its central concerns: a father’s closetedness, the rift
between “public appearance and private reality,” a mother’s theatrical performances, child-
hood experiments in cross-dressing, the “falsehood” of the diary that omits them, and the
historical struggles of “erotic truth” against censorship. (2010, 344)
While Bechdel quite clearly explores truth claims in her narrative on a personal
level, as Rohy points out, Fun Home also serves as a platform for Bechdel to discuss
the discourse on truth in a manner that unseats evidence or experience as the sole
purveyor of it.
What Bechdel ultimately accomplishes in Fun Home is thus both an archive of
documents and experience and a questioning of what they hide and reveal. By up-
setting any notion of privileging certain information over others, she obscures archi-
val authority through dismantling its claims to truth even as she writes her life and
her father’s into the archive of queer experience. In this way, she reveals the tenet
of what philosopher Jacques Derrida terms “archive fever” by illuminating, as Rohy
puts it, “the contradictions inherent in that project: inscription and defacement,
preservation and destruction, truth and lies, fact and fiction, history and literature,
authenticity and embellishment” (2010, 353).

Keeping the idea of presenting a serious encounter with the politics of “truth” and
the points of overlap between fiction and non-fiction in mind, it is fruitful to consid-
er the archives that Bechdel’s Dykes and Mother help create. While Mother, being
memoir, utilizes similar strategies to Fun Home, Dykes, as a work of fiction, operates
in a different manner. However, as literary and cultural critic renée c. hoogland
underlines, using Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen’s notion of “transposed impersonali-
ty,” “any fiction […] is bound to be transposed autobiography” (qtd. in hoogland
2007, 138). This assertion, while certainly arguable, is perhaps most easily under-
stood to be likely within fictional works that purposely comment on contemporane-
ous real-world events, as Dykes did in having its characters react to the sociopolitics
of their day. Coupled with the fact that Bechdel herself has asserted Dykes’ journalis-
tic quality, what Chute calls “an appraisal that indicates a certain mode of commu-
nication and a descriptive project of representation: translating the everyday reali-
ties of a certain slice of gay life to the page” (2010, 177), the archival nature of Dykes
becomes more apparent. In the following section, I will therefore turn attention to
Dykes to explore how it works as both a personal and collective archive. As a de-
cades-long product of cultural production and critique, I assert that Dykes, regard-
less of its form’s conflation with a lack of seriousness that is scorned by literary
scholars – and perhaps even because of it – constitutes an archive of queer experi-
ence.
As in any institutional archive, which Derrida notes “produces as much as it
records the event” (17), the archives produced in and through fiction and non-fiction
comics categorize various traumas, memories, and documents in order to cull some
understanding of the authorial self and a collective past. And yet, because many
creators working in this field have become conscientious of this desire in building
an archive, they often self-reflexively speak to this problematic by exhibiting and
questioning the hierarchy ascribed to certain archival material. In this way, while
538 Erin La Cour
these archives mimic those of institutions, in their questioning of their own archival
practices these new archivists reveal the practices unquestioned and maintained by
the institutions. However, what remains at stake in archival discourse is a hier-
archy – and indeed often an erasure – of certain voices and stories. As literary critic
Ann Cvetkovich notes, even in our current climate in which LGBTQ+ stories are
more visible, “questions remain about what counts as a trauma history and whose
feelings matter in the national public sphere” (qtd. in Bauer 2014, 266–267). As I
will demonstrate through a close reading of “The Rule” and the politics it engen-
dered, the silencing of women’s and lesbians’ stories is precisely what Dykes aims
to redress.
In 1985, near the start of the strip’s history, Bechdel published “The Rule” an
idea she attributes to her friend Liz Wallace in the strip’s title, announced on the
marquee of the theatre in the first panel: “Dykes to Watch Out For Presents ‘The
Rule’ With Thanks to Liz Wallace.” As two women characters walk under the mar-
quee in the second panel of the comic, one asks the other if she would like to see a
movie. The character who will later be known as Ginger responds by saying that it
depends – that a film must meet three explicit criteria for her to want to see it, and
thereby financially support it. She explains the requirements thus: a film must (1)
have at least two women in it who (2) talk to each other (3) about something other
than a man. Throughout the strip we see typical posters of tough-guy-centric Holly-
wood films: The Mercenary, The Barbarian, and The Vigilante, and are finally down-
trodden by Ginger’s claim that the last film she “was able to see was Alien” – at
which point we, along with both characters, realize that the women in the film do
not talk about a man but about a monster, which ultimately can be read as one and
the same (as in the film the women do not talk about their own lives except as it
pertains to another character/monster). Known colloquially as the “Bechdel test,”
the ideas put forth in “The Rule” are largely attributed to a passage from Virginia
Woolf’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own (Bechdel 2013), in which she writes about the
absurdity of thinking of women’s lives as trivial in comparison to men’s and, impor-
tantly, about their positioning in literature as always relational to men. She writes:
All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of
fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to re-
member any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends.
There is an attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine
and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without
exception they are shown in their relation to men. (2013, 69)
Highly popularized by “The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies,” a short video pro-
duced by Feminist Frequency, a non-profit organization that aims to “[analyze]
modern media’s relationship to societal issues such as gender, race, and sexuality
[…] [and to] encourage viewers to critically engage with mass media,” the “Bechdel
test” has far surpassed its origin as “a little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist
newspaper,” as Bechdel called it in a 2014 interview with journalist Kinsee Morlan
(“Comic-Con”). In her article “Comic-Con vs. the Bechdel Test,” Morlan underlines
both the “ridiculously low bar that a surprising number of contemporary works fail
to reach” as well as the growing cultural relevance of Bechdel’s “joke”: the need for
“representing women as normal people who do normal things” (ibid.). Even though
the 1980s Hollywood film industry is certainly the target of the “Bechdel test,” it
works as a feminist anthem that far surpasses the confines of a specific period,
industry, or medium. Indeed, as aforementioned, it not only carries the torch from
Woolf by expanding from a feminist literary critique to a filmic one, but has been
applied in popular cultural critique (most notably in 2013 when wide-spread debate
ensued after art-house movie theatre Bio Rio in Stockholm implemented a grading
system for the films they showed based on the test), as well as academic discourse
on the representation of women in various other forms of popular media.
This was, to an extent, Bechdel’s impetus for creating Dykes. In a 2015 interview
with psychiatrist Adam R. Critchfield and psychologist Jack Pula, she claimed:
Drawing comics about people who looked like me and my friends, making those images visi-
ble, was kind of a way for me to make myself feel okay. Now, I came from a generation where
it was much easier to come out than it had ever been, but it was still different from the way it
is now. You were kind of a freak if you were a lesbian in 1980. So I was willing to go along
with that, I was willing to be out and accept what came with that territory, but I felt as if I did
not want to have to go on with that. I was just this nice girl from a small town in Pennsylvania,
why couldn’t everyone see that? I wasn’t a monster. So the comic strip was kind of a way to
demonstrate that I was just a regular person. Trying to win people’s confidence. I guess it was
kind of pathetic in that regard. (Chritchfield and Pula 2015, 399)
What Bechdel speaks to here is an oppression of and fear of lesbians and their
stories, particularly in heteronormative American discourse. Following from Bonnie
Zimmerman’s assertion that the oppression of lesbians concerns “speechlessness,
invisibility, and inauthenticity” (qtd. in Shaw 2009, 90), media and communications
scholar Adrienne Shaw asserts that Bechdel’s main concern in Dykes was to render
visible the everyday of lesbian life. She writes:
For instance, episode 264 deals with the Ellen (April 30, 1997) coming out episode and the
variety of responses members of the queer community had to this form of visibility. This epi-
sode problematizes visibility as, on the one hand, media representations of any sort may be
desirable, but mainstream media, as Mo expresses in the final panel, can also downplay the
uniqueness of lesbian culture. (Shaw 2009, 90)
In fact, in Dykes Bechdel consistently aims to explore the varieties of personalities,

experience, and politics of her characters. Although her strip was meant, as afore-
mentioned, to make lesbians visible as part of the cultural fabric, it was not meant
to make them uniform or impervious to critique; instead, throughout her work, she
presents her characters as having different and often controversial opinions on top-
ics as diverse as gay marriage, childrearing, clothing choices, and transgender in-
clusion to name but a few. To underline this point, in her “Cartoonist’s Introduc-
540 Erin La Cour
tion” to her 2008 The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, which includes a wide
selection of her work (yet notably not the two aforementioned episodes), she la-
ments in the bottom right panel of page eleven, “Good Lord. How many young wom-
en have told me that these were the first lesbians they ever met? That my cartoon
characters were – oh, I can hardly say the words – choke – role models!” (xvii). She
continues on the next and final page to question her initial impetus of creating
visibility by stating, “Once you speak the unspeakable… it becomes spoken! Con-
ventional. Boring!” and concludes that, in order to keep the conversation going, she
must get back to the drawing board (xviii).
Throughout Dykes and her subsequent commentary on it, Bechdel worked to
create an honest appraisal of the everyday life experiences of lesbians in the 1980s
and 1990s, a time of rapidly shifting social consciousness, in an effort to present an
archive of lesbian experience in all its “inscription and defacement, preservation
and destruction, truth and lies, fact and fiction, history and literature, authenticity
and embellishment” (Rohy 2010, 353). While inscribing women and lesbians into
the archive, she was conscientious of defacing them as uniform, a stereotype. By
acknowledging this both in and outside of her work, she thereby productively enters
into the discourse on “archive fever” as problematic in its dual desire to at once
make visible and yet to erase through subsuming lesbians into an easily digestible,
inauthentically identifiable whole.
5 Conclusion
In the aforementioned 2015 interview with Critchfield and Pula, Bechdel lamented:
It is weird to me, I always had this fantasy that Dykes would cross over, would become some-
thing anyone would read, and while it did at the end of its run achieve some crossover status
it never really did. And it would not have achieved even that had it not been for Fun Home,
my book about growing up with my gay dad. (Critchfield and Pula 400)
And yet, on the “About” page of her website dykestowatchoutfor.com, Bechdel

writes that Dykes had crossed over, at least the lesbian audience threshold, to “be-
come a countercultural institution among lesbians and discerning non-lesbians all
over the planet” (2001). Whether corrective or promotional, the statement nonethe-
less points to the issue that this chapter’s investigation of Bechdel’s three works
raise: that Dykes’ and Mother’s focus on women’s and lesbians’ stories simply do
not appeal to a wider audience in the same manner in which stories about gay men
do. As hoogland notes in her article “Hard to Swallow: Indigestible Narratives of
Lesbian Sexuality”:
lesbianism represents a specific mode of psychosexual Otherness, whose position within the
Western symbolic is very unlike that of male homosexuality. As Judith Butler has pointed out,
gay males generally “enjoy” cultural reality as “prohibited objects.” Lesbian sexuality, in con-
trast, is neither named nor prohibited within the Law. Rendered invisible, indeed, “unthinka-
ble” within dominant grids of cultural intelligibility, lesbianism belongs to the unconscious
abject of the Western imagination. (2007, 471)
This is exactly what is at stake in Bechdel’s work – and its reception. As the banner
quote on her page of her agent’s site proclaims, “The secret subversive goal of my
work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings” (“Alison
Bechdel,” Tuesday Agency), a clear indication that her goals in representing women
extends beyond her own personal interest in being perceived as a “regular person,”
as well as beyond a plight for lesbians alone.
While Fun Home continues to be praised for its overt politics in presenting a
gay man having to hide his sexuality, as well as chronicling a host of LGBTQ+ litera-
ture and queer experience, it nevertheless falls victim to Bechdel’s own test: in Fun
Home Alison and her sexuality are, from the very start of the comic, cast in compari-
son to her father and his sexuality. Reflecting on this, Bechdel notes:
I do not think people, in general, can handle too much specificity. The book about my dad
was about families. I hate the word universal, but it was about a more universal experience
than about life in a lesbian community, although I don’t personally think that one is more
universal than the other. But maybe people’s tolerance for identification and empathy, it’s not
what you would hope. (Critchfield and Pula 2015, 400)
That “universality” continues to evade stories about women and lesbians is certain-
ly not only a recurring theme in Bechdel’s work, but precisely why her “lesser”
works beg serious critical reevaluation. For while Bechdel here is pointing out that
Fun Home can be read as a universal story about families, she does not cast Mother
in this light regardless of the fact that, like Fun Home, it is also a story about her
family – and therefore could also be read as “about families” in general.
Returning to the question of the “graphic novel” and its ties to “seriousness,”
it is important to further ponder the points Labio raises in light of discourse on
women’s and lesbians’ stories. Does the presence of a man “sanitize” everyday life
stories of women and lesbians? Do men’s stories, as part of the system of the “ma-
jor,” rescue the “minor” stories of women and lesbians from the “ongoing ghettoiza-
tion of works deemed unworthy of critical attention” (2011, 126)? While these ques-
tions unfortunately and certainly still need to be addressed, Bechdel adds to them
a poignant complication. More than a simple reminder of the plight of women’s and
LGBTQ+ rights, her work raises questions about the double-edged sword of visibili-
ty. As hoogland notes in the quote above, visibility is not the sole answer to political
recognition: for gay men to be equated with a problematic place within society redu-
ces them to a unified, stereotyped Other. By offering “too much specificity” in her
presentation of individual, diverse women and lesbians – as well as gay men and
others – Bechdel calls attention not just to the problematic invisibility of particular
lives and stories, but discursively questions how visibility can enact an erasure.
542 Erin La Cour
6 Bibliography
6.1 Works Cited

“Alison Bechdel.” Tuesday Agency. https://tuesdayagency.com/alison-bechdel. (1 October 2018).
Baetens, Jan. “Introduction: Transatlantic Encounters of the Second Type.” The Graphic Novel.
Edited by Jan Baetens, 7–9. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001.
Bauer, Heike. “Vital Lines Drawn From Books: Difficult Feelings in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and
Are You My Mother?” Journal of Lesbian Studies 18.3 (2014): 266–281.
Bechdel, Alison. “About.” Dykes to Watch Out For. 2001. http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/about.
(1 October 2018).
Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
Bechdel, Alison. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
Bechdel, Alison. “The Rule.” Dykes to Watch Out For. http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/the-rule.
(1 October 2018).
Bechdel, Alison. “Testy.” Dykes to Watch Out For. 8 November 2013.
http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/testy. (1 October 2018).
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Chute, Hillary. “An Interview with Alison Bechdel.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 1004–
1013.
Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia
Critchfield, Adam R. and Jack Pula. “On Psychotherapy, LGBT Identity, and Cultural Visibility: In
Conversation with Alison Bechdel.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 19.4 (2015): 397–
412.
Eisner, Will. “Keynote Address, Will Eisner Symposium.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics
Studies 1.1 (2004). http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/eisner/index.shtml.
(1 October 2018).
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1996.
hoogland, renée c. “Feminist Theorizing as ‘Transposed Autobiography.’” Journal of Lesbian
Studies 11.1–2 (2007): 137–143.
hoogland, renée c. “Hard to Swallow: Indigestible Narratives of Lesbian Sexuality.” Modern
Fiction Studies 41.3 (1995): 467–481.
Hornschemeier, Paul. Mother Come Home. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2003.
Labio, Catherine. “What’s in a Name? The Academic Study of Comics and ‘The Graphic Novel.’”
Cinema Journal 50.3 (2011): 123–126.
Levine, Judith. “The Dykes Next Door.” Ms. October/November 2001.
http://www.msmagazine.com/oct01/dykes.html. (1 October 2018).
Morlan, Kinsee. “Comic-Con vs. the Bechdel Test.” San Diego City Beat. 23 July 2014.
http://sdcitybeat.com/culture/features/comic-con-vs.-bechdel-test/. (1 October 2018).
Rohy, Valerie. “In the Queer Archive: Fun Home,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16:3
(2010): 341–361.
Shaw, Adrienne. “Women on Women: Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Community, and Lesbian Comics.”
Journal of Lesbian Studies 13.1 (2009): 88–97.
Spanjers, Rik. Comics Realism and the Maus Event: Comics and the Dynamics of World War II
Remembrance. PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2019.
Tan, Ed S. “The Telling Face in Comic Strip and Graphic Novel.” The Graphic Novel. Edited by Jan
Baetens, 31–46. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2001.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. http://central.gutenberg.org/wplbn0000691014-a-room-of-
one-s-own-by-woolf-virginia.aspx?&trail=collection&words=. (1 October 2015).
6.2 Further Reading

Baetens, Jan. “Of Graphic Novels and Minor Cultures: The Fréon Collective.” Yale French Studies
114 (2008): 95–115.
Bechdel, Alison, and Marny Hall. “Ordinary Insurrections.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 5.3 (2001):
15–21.
Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies
52.4 (2006): 767–782.
Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” WSQ: Women’s Studies
Quarterly 36.1–2 (2008): 111–128.
Hirsh, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 103–128.
Huffer, Lynne. “Masturbating Dykes: Cixous, Irigaray, Leduc.” Sites: The Journal of Twentieth-
Century/Contemporary French Studies revue d’études français 6.1 (2002): 155–167.
Pearl, Monica B. “Graphic Language: Redrawing the Family (Romance) in Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home.” Prose Studies 30.3 (2008): 286–304.
Watson, Julia. “Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 27–58.
Young, James E. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of
History.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 666–699.
Gerry Canavan
27 Chris Ware: Jimmy Corrigan –
The Smartest Kid on Earth
Abstract: This chapter discusses Chris Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The
Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) in the context of its internal repetition of particular
tropes and images, which ultimately produce a moment of textual decision for the
reader as to whether they believe the story has ended happily or unhappily. It also
discusses Jimmy Corrigan in the context of Ware’s characteristic style and his larger
career arc, as well as in the context of the late 1990s/early 2000s transition in graph-
ic narrative from a relatively niche publishing concern aimed at teenagers and the
counterculture towards a global literary-artistic movement aimed at highly educated
middle-class professionals that no longer needs to “justify” serious consideration.
Ware emerges with Jimmy Corrigan as perhaps the key figure in this moment of
transition, and remains one of the most acclaimed artists working in the medium
today, even as he has moved into yet more formally experimental work like Building
Stories (2012).
Key Terms: art, irony, confessionalism, postmodernity, depression, suicide, Super-

man

Franklin Christenson Ware – typically credited as Chris Ware, but sometimes also
“F. C. Ware” or “C. Ware” – stands as one of the best-known and most-celebrated
comics creators emerging in the 1990s and 2000s, after Art Spiegelman’s Maus
transformed both production and reception of the form. (Spiegelman, in fact, would
be an early mentor of Ware’s, publishing some of his very early work in his maga-
zine RAW.) Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Ware attended the University of Texas at
Austin, where he produced strips for The Daily Texan from 1987–1991 (some of which
would be collected in later releases of his work, most notably the “Quimby the
Mouse” strips). Not long after graduation and the RAW publication, he began pub-
lishing an ongoing serial with Fantagraphics Books, The Acme Novelty Library
(1993–present), where the work for which he is still best known, Jimmy Corrigan:
The Smartest Kid on Earth, was first developed over the next seven years. Ware has
since emerged, alongside other late-1990s comics artists like Seth and Daniel
Clowes, as one of the leading lights of this post-Maus generation of comics storytel-
lers, and perhaps its most acclaimed visual artist.
Ware’s comics work, like the work of other creators in that transitional 1990s
moment when comics were still emerging as a ‘serious’ form of literary-cultural pro-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-031
546 Gerry Canavan
duction, is shot through with anxiety about its predecessors as well as about its
own artistic seriousness. His comics thus careen from self-conscious self-parody of
his attempts to tell an adult, emotional story using the seemingly inherently ‘adoles-
cent’ comics medium (Savlov 2000, n.pag.), to sustained commentary on the history
of comics, to frequent interrogation of the possibilities and limits of the comics
form. Ware notes:
Artists like Dan Clowes, Jason Lutes, and myself, are all trying to tell a serious story using the
tools of jokes. It’s as though we’re trying to write a powerful, deeply engaging, richly detailed
epic with a series of limericks. (Juno 1997, 33)
Ware sees his own work as successfully pushing through that tension between form
and content: “I’ve just tried to expand the possibilities for the [comics] form, just to
get in a little more sense of a real experience” (Juno 1997, 33).
Like the highly metafictional and self-referential Maus (↗22 Art Spiegelman,
Maus), Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan frequently deploys both explicit and formal reference
to the larger history of comics, especially with regard to its deployment of not only
Superman but also Charles M. Schulz’s Charlie Brown (whose iconic depiction Jim-
my Corrigan evokes, especially in his child form). These self-justifying elements of
comics production would be less important to later artists working in the field, as
the idea of “comics for adults” becomes more and more legitimate – as in Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), which betrays little such anxiety about its own literary-
artistic worth – but in the 1990s context in which Ware began his career it was still
an urgent problem for comics that aspired to be ‘literature,’ and remains, albeit to
a lesser extent than in Jimmy Corrigan, a fixation in his work today. Along the same
lines, Jimmy Corrigan’s ironic treatment of itself and its joking attitude towards its
own literary-artistic ambition may be one of the few elements of the text that has
become somewhat dated since its original publication; in the moment of the New
Sincerity, unironic, even dorky, commitment has become valorized over ironic and
cynical detachment. You see an anticipation of the New Sincerity’s sense of dorkish
attachment, though, in Ware’s against-the-grain nomenclature for his own job, car-
toonist:
I proudly consider myself a cartoonist and all that that implies. I don’t think that there’s any-
thing wrong with the name. What bugs me is trying to slap a more self-consciously dignified
title on the vocation, like ‘sequential artist.’ Such re-christening arrogantly turns one’s back
on those who’ve come before, and magnifies the power of the ‘bad word’ – there’s no better
way to empower something than to bury it. (Savlov 2000, n.pag.)
Jimmy Corrigan proves the key character of the early Acme Novelty issues, appearing
in issues 1, 5, 6, and 8–14. Most of this material, minus some paratexts and ‘joke’
strips, eventually appeared in the collected editions of Jimmy Corrigan, though very
little of issue 1 and none of issue 10 appear in the final published book. Most of
what was cut centers on the improbable and bizarre adventures of Jimmy as a boy,
the eponymous ‘smartest kid on Earth’; the finished novel is set in a much more
realistic narrative mode, with the fantasy sequences limited to the pathetic escapism
of the self-loathing adult Jimmy. There are two main editions of Jimmy Corrigan, the
hardcover (published in 2000) and the paperback (published in 2001); the hardcov-
er contains some paratextual elements on a full-cover slipcover that the paperback
omits, while the paperback contains a two-page coda involving the character of
Amy that is unique to it alone. In the main, however, the two editions are identical.

Very loosely based on Ware’s own experience of being contacted by, and eventually
meeting in person, the father whose absence had shaped his childhood and sense
of self – a semi-autobiographical context that is explained in a confessional ‘apolo-
gy’ that appears as an appendix following the end of the novel in all editions –
Jimmy Corrigan tells the story of an excruciatingly lonely man whose life is struc-
tured by alienation and disconnection. As the story opens, the childlike Jimmy lives
alone, and seems to rely entirely on his overbearing mother and co-workers for
social interaction; his only other outlet are fantasies (often grotesquely violent and/
or sexual in nature) that the comic typically depicts without formal visual differen-
tiation, bleeding the fantasies into the presentation of the “real” narrative of the
text in ways that can be challenging for first-time readers of the book to navigate.
Jimmy’s most characteristic fantasy involves the passionate sex he imagines might
erupt from encounters with any woman he meets, in blatantly pornographic scenari-
os – though, sweetly, the casual sex he imagines usually progresses to a fantasy of
marriage, children, and growing old together. In this sense we can say that Jimmy
really longs for narrative, as much or more than he longs for sex or companionship;
he seeks a position in the future from which he can retrospectively look back on his
own past and declare that the pain he has suffered was okay, even good, because
it led him to a place of happiness in the end.
Jimmy receives a letter from his father – James, who also goes by Jimmy –
whom he never knew, asking if the two men can meet; Jimmy agrees and goes to
visit the man for Thanksgiving, without telling his mother where he has gone. The
two meet and Jimmy stays in his father’s apartment – but the visit is incredibly
awkward, to the point where Jimmy unsuccessfully attempts to book an earlier flight
home. That night, Jimmy’s father goes out for a bit, apparently on a date, and is in
a serious car accident that lands him in intensive care in the hospital; Jimmy goes to
the hospital to wait for information, where he meets his adoptive sister, an African-
American woman named Amy, whom he has also never met, and whose existence
he did not even know about before this weekend. Jimmy Sr. dies, and in his grief
548 Gerry Canavan
Jimmy reaches out to take Amy’s hand, who in the shock of the moment rejects him
and pushes him to the floor; Jimmy then leaves the hospital and takes a train home
instead.
When he arrives back in Chicago, an epilogue recounts that Jimmy now feels
worse than ever: apparently concluding that his fantasies of human connection will
never be fulfilled, and even losing his doting mother to an unexpected suitor she
surprisingly announces she will be marrying, he seems to abandon all hope for any
sort of future other than the horrid repetition of the same desperately lonely day
over and over again. He contemplates suicide. But the ending pages suggest, albeit
in highly ambiguous fashion, that Jimmy’s life is about to turn around – he meets
a new co-worker, Tammy, who has just moved to Chicago from North Dakota, and
who like him is very lonely, to the point where she too has come in to the office on
Thanksgiving Day just to have something to do. (She is even a redhead, just Jimmy’s
type.) The book thus ends on a kind of sad dare: having trained the reader to under-
stand Jimmy as utterly pathetic, deluded, and doomed to perpetual failure, the read-
er is presented yet again with the same sort of casual encounter with a woman
Jimmy has fantasized about time and again throughout the novel, and is implicitly
asked if they can believe that this time it might all turn out the way Jimmy wants.
The book thus ends on a ‘duck/rabbit’ image of either hope or despair, whose prop-
er interpretation hinges on the way the reader ultimately resolves the tension be-
tween certain narrative and compositional patterns in the novel, as will be dis-
cussed in further detail below.
Jimmy’s story is counterposed by the story of Jimmy’s grandfather – alas, anoth-
er man named James Corrigan, and the third Corrigan in the book to go by Jimmy
as a child – being raised by his father without a mother in turn-of-the-century Chica-
go. The long interlude set in this period, which divides the two halves of Jimmy’s
visit with his father in the present moment, echoes a number of the themes of the
main narrative, most strikingly in a dreamlike scene where this Jimmy is taken by
his father to the top of the Expo building at the 1893 World’s Fair and abandoned
there. “So I just stood there, watching the sky, and the people below, waiting for
him to return,” writes the first-person narrator in a somber, melancholic voice that
is totally out of tone with the stilted dialogue and flat inner monologue of any of the
Jimmys we encounter in the mainline narrative. “Of course, he never did.” Elaborate
paratexts of the sort Ware has become famous for connect the moment of the
World’s Fair to Jimmy’s present in ways that are both thematic and plot-driven:
the soaring architectural ambition of the 1893 Columbian Exposition is ironically
juxtaposed with the brutalist apartment complexes and disposable fast-food restau-
rants that litter the contemporary landscape, while intricate family-tree diagrams
tell the story of how Jimmy’s grandfather and his father met the women with whom
they had children and how their lives proceeded afterwards. In one such diagram,
we even discover that Amy is a Corrigan by blood, not just by adoption; she and
Jimmy share a great-grandfather, and so Jimmy’s father (totally unbeknownst to
anyone in the narrative) actually adopted and raised, as his daughter, his own first
cousin twice removed.
Amy’s status as a Corrigan brings new import to the inside back cover of the
novel, unique to the paperback editions, which depicts a lonely Amy, on the next
Thanksgiving, going in to work on the holiday. Amy seems to be infused with the
same fate of loneliness that confounded the various male Corrigans, which we have
come to understand as rising almost to the level of a familial curse – but Amy’s
actual future is depicted without the carrot of hope that is offered, via Tammy, at
the end of the main Jimmy narrative. Readers of the paperback edition are thus
confronted with new questions of interpretation to match the personal ending they
have crafted for Jimmy’s story. First, Amy’s apparent continued unhappiness calls
on us to reconsider any happiness we might have allowed ourselves to imagine for
Jimmy – it functions as a sort of reality-principle anchor that constrains our hope.
Second, it asks us why, if Jimmy seems to end the novel in a moment of narrative
suspension that might be the start of the life he’d always wanted, the same sort of
authorial grace isn’t extended to Amy – almost as if we have returned to Amy’s
narrative specifically to make certain she is still suffering. (A brief footnoted refer-
ence to Amy near the end of 2019’s Rusty Brown turns the screw in the other direc-
tion: we learn there that Amy has been a source of comfort and support to a co-
worker seeking her own birth mother, thus suggesting that Amy has not allowed
herself to become bitter or broken since the end of Jimmy Corrigan.)
A final, minor textual note inflects this question in another way. In the apology/
glossary, we are given a definition of the word “reproduce”: “To produce a counter-
part, image, or copy of, or, to bring to mind again, as in a memory” (juxtaposed
with its more artistic meaning, ‘to make valueless’). The original printing of the
novel announced, in the author’s note at the very bottom of the page, that “Mr.
Ware is married, yet has not reproduced,” while later reprints note the birth of
Ware’s daughter, Clara, in 2005. The semi-autobiographical, confessional nature of
the book and the intimacy of the portrayal prompts the reader to see Ware’s person-
al history as somehow strongly overlapping with Jimmy’s, perhaps inducing the
typical post-2005 reader to view the ending in slightly different terms than their
predecessors (and likely with rather more optimism, at least from the heteronorma-
tive standpoint of reproductive futurism).
At the same time, both Jimmy’s father and Jimmy’s grandfather married and
had children before losing their wives and seemingly winding up unhappy anyway,
Jimmy’s grandfather consumed by bitterness and meanness, Jimmy’s father by re-
gret – and so to a reader of a different stripe, even a happy reading of the Tammy
sequence might merely seem like the temporary suspension of a Corrigan family
curse of desperation, to which they (and we) are all hopelessly subject and to which
we all inevitably return. Much of the reader’s interpretation of these issues will like-
ly hinge precisely on whether they understand Jimmy to be exceptional – the sad
sack, the loser, the weirdo, the creep – or if they see Jimmy instead, as Ware seems
550 Gerry Canavan
to, as coextensive with themselves, as someone they might easily have been in an-
other life, or might yet become in this one, or might already be, if they’re being
perfectly and brutally honest with themselves. When teaching Jimmy Corrigan in the
classroom, this final divide seems consistently to dominate the room, drawing some
students to see Jimmy as an almost revolting, horrifying freak, while others identify
with him immediately, as if staring into a mirror.
The above summary does little justice to the narratively and philosophically disori-
enting experience of actually reading Jimmy Corrigan, especially for the first time.
The crisp, clear drawing and diagramming, the highly stylized, cartoonish character
models, the sublime tableaus and stunning colors belie the narrative complexity of
the book, as well as its emotional richness and its dark exploration of loneliness
and grief. The presentation of the narrative fluidly blends the narrative of Jimmy’s
travels with the bizarre and sometimes disturbing content of his (and later, his
child-grandfather’s) fantasies, often without visually marking the difference be-
tween the two modes in any way, thereby wrongfooting the reader as to the “reality”
of the events they are reading and forcing them to constantly adjust their under-
standing of the proceedings. The scene of Jimmy’s grandfather’s abandonment at
the World’s Fair, for instance, turns out to be a strikingly literal depiction of what
actually happened to him, despite being initially framed as a dream, including the
grandfather wearing his dressing gown; other events in the novel seem to have
‘really happened’ at first, until one realizes they cannot possibly be real events.
This deliberate confusion over the basic facts of the narrative extends to the
book’s internal chronology – events are depicted out of order, with some panels
existing in a sort of ‘permanent present’ that suggests the general unhealthy pat-
terns in Jimmy’s unhappy life, without being in any particular order or sequence –
with a “The Story So Far” page necessary midway through the novel just to help
the reader keep track of what they have read. Even the three principal characters
inculcate a sense of confusion in the reader first and foremost: not only are all three
men named Jimmy Corrigan, but they all look remarkably similar, as if each man
passes through the stages of the other two over the course of his life – with Jimmy
and his grandfather not only looking identical as children but possessing strikingly
similar fantasy lives, especially regarding unattainable red-headed women. Certain
key events in the narrative – like the sudden presence of the crutch Jimmy is using
to walk partway through the novel – are explained only within fantasy sequences;
we only finally see the ‘real’ event, Jimmy falling down a set of stairs while ap-
parently on his way to or from work, in an index entry marked “CRUTCH” in the
apology/glossary that follows the narrative, over a hundred pages later.
As noted above, other key plot and character elements emerge only out of tiny
details in the full-page diagrams that appear in different parts of the book. Such
diagrams tease the possibility of total, Godlike knowledge of these characters and
events, while at the same time often yielding only trivialities and irrelevancies; they
also render the book labyrinthine and ambiguous even at the level of form, as there
is no privileged or definitive path through the novel, since it offers multiple points
of entry, exit, and focalization. “Ware’s meticulous diagrams reveal and obscure …
at the same time,” observes Isaac Cates; “by stationing details in pointedly difficult
diagrams, he distances their effects and their meaning from a casual or preliminary
reading of his comic” (2010, 90). Even the book’s physical layout on the page be-
comes an exercise in challenging and subverting readerly expectations; the book
requires the reader to frequently reorient the text by 90 or 180 degrees to fully pro-
cess the images, or to move the book closer to one’s face to read sometimes tiny
print or images, again never quite sure which elements one is actually supposed to
pay close attention to in the text.
As in a hyper- (or “hysterical-”) realist text of the sort produced by David Foster
Wallace, Don DeLillo, or Thomas Pynchon in their prose fiction, the reader of Jimmy
Corrigan must also find ways to link the events of the narrative with the sometimes
strange material that appears as interruptions across the text, including on the out-
side and inside covers, in textual voices that seem to originate from neither Jimmy
nor Chris Ware. Taking advantage of the comics form, some of this structural “ex-
cess” takes the form of paratextual visual supplements to the narrative: some pages,
for instance, invite the reader to cut out and construct paper replicas of a merry-
go-round or Jimmy’s grandfather’s childhood home (the latter of which would re-
quire the purchase of several additional copies of the book to actually construct).
Another page takes the form of removable, tiny postcards, lauding great American
architectural landmarks with the utmost seriousness and pretension – all of which
are fast food restaurants.
The inside front cover – primarily a wall of text, arranged in multiple horizontal
and vertical orientations, leaving no white space undedicated to words – purports
to be a primer on how to read comics, quizzing the reader on their commitment to
callousness, lack of empathy, and dark humor; the first question asks the reader
their gender and notes that if they are female they should feel free to just put the
book away. While many readers might be inclined to “skip” such passages as extra-
neous to the main story, they do nonetheless contain insights into the structure,
plot, and themes of the novel that are valuable for those who do dive in. For in-
stance, the tiny text on the front of the paperback describing the book as “an actual
size full-color replica of the 2000 A.D. hardback cultural sideroad taken by an other-
wise perfectly respectable publisher briefly fleeced into believing literary picture-
books might actually score them some fast cash” gives away the ending of the nov-
el, telling us that this is a story of “our hero, who, though paralyzed by a fear of
being disliked, meets his father for the first, and only, time.” The ending is similarly
given away a few dozen pages in, in a timeline graphic that marks the development
of Jimmy, his mother, and his father from childhood to ‘now’: the tiny panels after
‘now’ show Jimmy and his mother still alive, but the father in a grave.
552 Gerry Canavan
In lieu of traditional plotting (or even traditional exposition), the reader is car-
ried through the novel by a number of visual motifs that recur over and over again.
Perhaps the key such motif is Superman, both as a token of Jimmy’s arrested devel-
opment and as a metafictional commentary on the centrality and inescapability of
superheroes in comics and visual narrative. Another intricate diagram on the sec-
ond page of the novel, taking the form of a floor plan of Jimmy’s apartment and
never alluded to in the text directly, reveals Jimmy as an adult reader of Superman
comics, with a hidden cache of longboxes in his kitchen; this comes immediately
after the text on the inside cover that explains, at extended length and with great
seriousness, the emotional and intellectual fragility of the comics fan. The introduc-
tory vignette – the only portion of the novel that focuses on the present-day Jimmy
as an actual child, despite the bitter laugh of the subtitle declaring him “the smart-
est kid on Earth” – features Jimmy and his mother visiting an incredibly poor, off-
brand “Super-Man” impersonator at a car dealership; the young Jimmy is nonethe-
less delighted by the experience and even gets to keep the mask as the impersonator
sneaks out of the Corrigan family apartment the next morning after a one-night-
stand with Jimmy’s mother.
Images of Superman then recur throughout the text: Jimmy imagines flying like
Superman, Jimmy and his father meet a boy playing with a Superman toy, and Jim-
my himself winds up wearing a Superman sweater for most of the last third of the
novel (which we first see him wearing while sobbing in a bathroom stall, pants
down around his ankles). A man dressed like Superman – or perhaps Superman
himself – leaps off a building to his death across from Jimmy’s workplace, after
leaving Jimmy a note on his desk that reads “I sat across from you for six months
and you never once noticed me! Good bye.” While this would seem to be a clear
case of one of Jimmy’s fantasies bleeding into the ostensible reality of the novel, we
later see the event reported on the front page of a newspaper, and Jimmy’s father
even apparently sees, holds, and reads the note himself. The initial suicide of Super-
man recurs at the end of the novel in another way, at a crucial moment in Jimmy’s
character development: we see a despondent Jimmy at the end of the novel looking
up at the same building and imagining leaping off it himself. As Jacob Brogan has
argued in his essay “Masked Fathers,” all of these many encounters with Superman
reinforce not only the Oedipal narrative inherent in the book’s father-son dramas,
but also in the relationship of Ware’s work to the superhero motif that has dominat-
ed and overdetermined the history and reception of comics as a form (see Brogan
2010); the displacement of Superman in the text suggests in turn the possibility of
an alternate history of comics that does not always put the superhero at its center
(while his repeated returns may indeed suggest the exact opposite).
A secondary visual motif deals with the portrayal of women in the novel: across
the novel no living woman, save Amy, is ever depicted straight-on such that the
reader can see her eyes. The suggestion is that Jimmy is so cowed by his shyness –
or, perhaps, that his thinking is so distorted by the pornographic fantasies that
imagine every interaction with any woman, no matter how temporary or incidental,
as potentially leading to torrid sex – that he is unable to connect with women or
even really see them at all through this veil. Related to this issue are Jimmy’s hyper-
bolic romantic fantasies, which as noted above typically extend past that initial
moment of casual sex into a romance that culminates in marriage, children, and
old age, trailing off as his lack of experience with the details of adult long-term
romance make the prospect increasingly hard for Jimmy to contemplate. The most
elaborate of these fantasies involves Amy, his adoptive sister, whom he cannot in-
corporate into his usual maladaptative fantasy pattern because of the suggestion of
incest; in order to find a way to fantasize about making an emotional connection
with Amy of the sort he is desperate to have with any woman, he has to first imagine
a sequence of events that involve:
– their unhappy separation, so he can tend to his aging mother;
– his marriage to another woman (a redhead, naturally, and their having a child);
– his staying behind to tend for his mother while the wife and child go on a cruise
ship, which sinks in a terrible disaster, killing them both;
– and then his mother dies;
– so he is able to seek out Amy again and tell her the story of his life;
– when suddenly a nuclear war breaks out and civilization is destroyed;
– culminating in Amy (wearing suggestively torn clothes) and a now-action-hero-
buff Jimmy raising their son in a log cabin after the apocalypse, the last man
and woman on Earth.
Both the length and the perversity of this fantasy put a potentially different spin on
Jimmy’s attempt to take Amy’s hand in the hospital, after they have discovered their
father is dead, which leads to her moment of recoil that breaks Jimmy’s heart; Jim-
my’s first attempt to emotionally connect with a woman on an adult level is imbri-
cated with his self-focused and wildly inappropriate sexual fantasies, a collision
which seems to at least partially justify her harsh rejection of him.
Some of the most telling moments in the novel occur at intersection points be-
tween these two repeated motifs. The fantasy thread and the Superman thread first
unite in an incredible sequence of a number of pages near the beginning of the
book, in which the narrative apparently cuts to several years into the future, depict-
ing Jimmy talking to his son, the amusingly named Billy (presumably referencing
Billy Corrigan of the Smashing Pumpkins). Jimmy tells Billy that this trip to see his
father, despite its awkwardness and sadness, represents a happy turning point in
his life because without it he never would have met Billy’s mother and Billy would
never have been born. While the father-son bonding goes on, however, Superman
suddenly interrupts the narrative, appearing in miniature form at Billy’s window,
thereby revealing the proceedings to be a dream rather than a genuinely proleptic
glance at Jimmy’s actual future. They are initially happy to see him – but Superman
then grows larger than life, becoming a giant who lifts up the house and drops it
554 Gerry Canavan
on its side. Billy is catastrophically injured, screaming in pain, which a distraught

Jimmy ends by dropping a brick on his head.
After his rejection by Amy and his miserable return home, the fantasy thread
and the Superman thread again reunite in the moment of Jimmy’s suicidal despera-
tion, where his powers of fantasy have left him entirely and he can only imagine
being lonely and unhappy forever. As he contemplates suicide, the redheaded Tam-
my introduces herself as his new co-worker, and the careful reader is stunned to
realize that despite the established pattern we are somehow able to see her eyes.
Tammy’s self-introduction to Jimmy not only emphasizes that she is new in town
and completely unattached, but includes multiple veiled invitations for her and Jim-
my to have dinner together (which Jimmy not only fails to employ as fodder for his
usual sexual fantasies, but actually seems to miss entirely).
When Jimmy ignores these invitations, Tammy tries to save face in a very Jimmy
way, suggesting her as perhaps the female version of him. In the last panel in the
book, though, her interest finally clicks for him, and Jimmy’s eyebrows shoot up in
surprise. The entire sequence suggests that Jimmy may finally be emotionally ready
to encounter a woman as a human being, as opposed to a sex object or purported
“prize,” and perhaps enter into a genuine relationship with her – or else that he is
about to fall back into his old patterns and ruin it all immediately. The reader must
decide. The next page is a full-spread reading “The End,” with a flying Superman
figure carrying a young Jimmy through the snow – an image that likewise suggests
either heroic final transcendence of Jimmy’s unhappy personal history, or else a
return to his dysfunctional psychological crutches, depending on the reader’s incli-
nation towards optimism or pessimism.
Other elements of the novel deconstruct even our attempts to read the novel as
a literary or artistic object. References to fruit, especially peaches, seem to carry
some sort of metaphorical weight, a feeling ratified by the presence of the word
“PEACH” in the glossary – but when we follow the indexical directive to “see SYM-
BOL” we find symbol defined as “something that represents something else, esp.
common in bad literature.” A comic in the original Acme Novelty Library run of
Jimmy Corrigan, omitted in the graphic novel version, takes the gag one step further
still, parodying the overblown college lectures and lazy student papers that will be
written on, say, peaches in Jimmy Corrigan, ultimately inviting the reader to send
away for the full Acme Novelty Library catalogue and “dissect them all,” lest they
miss out on all the “intellectual noodling” and “big fun.”
That question of fun is indeed a major one in the study of Jimmy Corrigan, and
in Chris Ware more generally; to many readers the book seems depressingly bleak,
even one-note, to the point where Douglas Wolk (2008, 347) titles his chapter on
Ware in his book Reading Comics “Why Does Chris Ware Hate Fun?” Attempts to
generate terms that encapsulate the themes of the novel are likely to generate a
downward spiral: loneliness, lovelessness, purposelessness, obsessive-compulsion,
misery, suicide, the cruelty of hope, and so on. While the book is funny, its laughs
feel bitterly and at times abusively self-deprecating; this is especially true for read-
ers who take a pessimistic attitude towards the ending and cannot bring themselves
to imagine Jimmy’s encounter with Tammy as resulting in anything but yet another
humiliation – who cannot imagine that Jimmy ever reaches that point of happiness
or peace that would justify, as in a story, his earlier suffering.
2.3 Reception, Impact, and Theoretical Perspectives
The paperback edition of Jimmy Corrigan lampoons the book’s reception in an early
page labeled “Popular Press Easily Duped” that notes it was “inexplicably accorded
the Guardian First Book Award, 2001” and “selected as one of the ‘best’ books of
the year by The Village Voice Literary Supplement and Time Out.” The quotations on
the page, ostensibly “selected as an aid to purchasing confidence,” run the gamut
from the extremely laudatory:
“Stupendous.” – Matt Groening

“Thunderous, heartbreaking.” – The Detroit Free Press
“One of the best comics in the world.” – Wired
“‘A work of genius.” – Zadie Smith
to the backhanded and critical:
“Weighed down by its ambition.” – The Seattle Stranger

“Nearly impossible to read.” – The L. A. Times Book Review
to the suspiciously specific:
“Third best book of the year.” – Entertainment Weekly

“Dilbertesque.” – The Boston Herald
“The colors are dreadful, it’s like looking at a bottle of Domestos or Harpic or Ajax. Awful
bleak colors, revolting to look at; it’s on its way to the Oxfam shop. Disgusting to look to it.
Really horrible.” – poet Tom Paulin, BBC Newsnight, December 18 2001.
Praise from Dave Eggers calling it “arguably the greatest achievement of the form,
ever” is quickly matched by a reviewer from San Jose Mercury News who says that
“Ware has a hyper, self-effacing streak that will be familiar to anyone who’s Dave
Eggers.” A comparison to Ulysses from The Wall Street Journal – “the joys of the two
works are the same … of being swept away by the dense poetry of an exciting and
powerful work of art” – is likewise matched by a parallel comparison from Ted Rall
at Slate: “Ware’s work is the comic equivalent of Ulysses – no one’s ever read it,
and those who have know that it sucks, but it sure looks great on your bookshelf.”
The back cover of the paperback likewise critiques the book’s supposed status
as an important literary-cultural art object as it seeks to bait the viewer into pur-
chasing The Adventures of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, copy #58,463.
556 Gerry Canavan
A comic shows the tragic arc of a copy of Jimmy Corrigan as it is printed in China
and slowly makes its way to a “Barnes Ignoble Superstore,” where it is slotted in
“Graphic Novel… GRAFfic NOHvel… It’s kid’s lit… You know – superhero stuff… for
retards!” over the book’s own internal cries of “no, god… please!” The book lan-
guishes there, alone, briefly teased by hope through a customer who is looking for
something called “Jimmy…or Billy… Corrigan” before it is thrown into a landfill.
(The customer is sold instead a book on the Smashing Pumpkins.) From the landfill,
the book is rescued by Chris Ware, who has been gathering all the discarded copies
of the book, seeing them as hungry mouths he now somehow must feed. The reader
is then implored to help:
Every 12½ minutes, someone, somewhere is throwing out their copy of Jimmy Corrigan: The
Smartest Kid on Earth. Discarded, unwanted, left alone, these increasingly irrelevant mementos
of the turn of the last century need your aid, your love, whether in a dumpster, or a garage
sale, or buried in an embarrassing section of a chain bookstore, and now, for just pennies a
day, you can sponsor one of these orphans…. Help save a dying, irrelevant art today… Please
donate… Before it’s too late!
Despite this self-effacing ironic detachment, however, both Jimmy Corrigan and the
emergence of Ware himself as an artist are nearly universally recognized as land-
mark moments in the development of graphic narrative as a global cultural form.
Ware’s prominence on the literary-artistic scene and widespread acclaim in main-
stream bourgeois culture – as opposed to popularity in the superhero niche and
related fantasy markets, like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman, or in the counterculture,
like Robert Crumb or Harvey Pekar – has few predecessors in the earlier history of
the comics form, besides of course for Art Spiegelman and Maus, and anticipates
the more recent canonization of creators like Alison Bechdel (↗26 Alison Bechdel,
Dykes to Watch Out For) and Marjane Satrapi (↗30 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis).
Part of what sets Ware apart even from these other celebrated creators is, first,
his refusal of the memoir form in favor of semi- or non-autobiographical fiction,
and, second, the sheer ambition of the “graphic” component of his “graphic narra-
tive.” Rather than the relatively austere black and white format favored by Spiegel-
man and Satrapi in their most celebrated works, Ware’s works are brightly colored,
large-scale, intricate, and incredibly stylized; post-Jimmy Corrigan, his book releases
spoke to his emphasis on exploring the artistic possibilities of the medium in over-
sized releases like The Acme Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Rainy
Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book (which collects one-off strips in prestige format)
and the remarkably ambitious Building Stories (which comes in a large box consist-
ing of fourteen individually bound comic works that can be read in any order).
Likewise, where earlier creators like Spiegelman and Crumb sometimes pro-
duced work that was deliberately, even aggressively ugly – to reflect the ugliness
they felt inside themselves – Ware’s work is incredibly pretty, almost to a similar
limit point of disorientation and disgust. “I want the pages to be as beautiful as I
can possibly make them,” Ware has said. “I want that to contradict the stories and
the frustrations of the characters” (Edemariam 2005, n.pag.). The release of Building
Stories coincided with art shows in the Chicago area that displayed original art from
that book, suggesting how Ware’s work straddles the line separating comics from
art as much as the one separating comics from literature. Ware has also been in-
creasingly called upon as an artist and designer for different products, which speaks
to his ongoing popularity among the literati of the middle and upper classes, fre-
quently contributing cover art to The New Yorker and even producing an animated
sequence for the brief-lived television version of the popular NPR radio show This
American Life. Ware’s work does not stand alone, by any means, either in its ambi-
tion to higher cultural appreciation or in its crossover appeal to the larger literary
community. But he is among the most widely appreciated and acclaimed artists
working in the medium today, and certainly in the running as the defining comics
artist of the contemporary moment, if not indeed the standout favorite.
Ware’s work also has unusual applicability to the concerns of literary scholars
working in and on the postmodern period, particularly with regard to the hyper-/
hysterical realism of Jimmy Corrigan and Building Stories and his general fascination
with the consumer detritus of the postwar period. Such detritus is frequently taken
up, rehabilitated, and critiqued in his works, perhaps no more so than in his ongo-
ing work-in-progress Rusty Brown, whose unlikable titular ‘hero’ neurotically seeks
to re-discover and re-collect the toys, comics, lunchboxes, and other accoutrements
of his childhood. Jimmy Corrigan strongly leverages this same sort of nostalgia in its
reader, while also bringing nostalgia under serious critique; we bemoan the grand
architectural ambition of the lost heroic age of high modernism (tokened by the
World’s Fair) while simultaneously being forced to reconsider its racism, its clas-
sism, its sexism, its inadequacy, its general cruelty, and the many world-historical
disasters and (literal and symbolic) ruins left in its wake.
This tension runs across his work. “I think there’s an implicit respect for the
reader/viewer in this ‘earlier culture’ that isn’t obvious today in the overt sexuality
and ‘coolness’ of everything from architecture to music to graphic design,” Ware
told The Austin Chronicle in 2000. “I feel like so much of today’s world is simply
mocking its inhabitants – it preserves and extends adolescence as long as possible,
regardless of its unsightliness” (Savlov 2000, n.pag.). This sense of the extension
of adolescence, of course, extends even to his own work as a comics artist; Ware
immediately goes on to note his sense that it is “embarrassing to admit that one
still reads comics at age 30,” even if he dyspeptically notes that it’s somehow okay
for “many 40-year-old businessmen to drive fast red cars and listen to rock music”
(Savlov 2000, n.pag.). Even the old-timey, throwback format of The Acme Novelty
Library in which Jimmy Corrigan first appeared speaks to this dialectic between en-
nobling and toxic nostalgias, as Gene Kannenberg notes: “In both the advertise-
ments and editorial material, Ware simultaneously embraces and undercuts the
American consumer culture, and the entertainment industry which is part and par-
cel of that culture, as a utopian ideal” (2009, 321).
558 Gerry Canavan
Ware’s work – characterized by the sort of metafictional narrative and self-

aware autocritique I have emphasized in this short study – makes it a natural fit for
academic study among scholars of both high art and consumer culture, in no small
part because the work is not didactic but instead incredibly fraught, complex, and
polyvalent, yielding few ‘bumper-sticker’ political or aesthetic slogans, manifestos,
or even clear and unambiguous meanings. The introduction to the definitive edited
collection on the work of Chris Ware – The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way
of Thinking, edited by David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman, for which Ware provid-
ed art – highlights the many literary, cultural, and artistic movements for which
Ware seems to be the contemporary answer and continuation, from the avant-garde
cubists to Ezra Pound to Calvino, Barth, and Kafka to the art of Philip Guston and
Joseph Cornell, and even to the ragtime music of Scott Joplin, all before one even
begins to place Ware within the long history of comics itself as a medium among
turn-of-the-century predecessors like Winsor McCay (↗18 Winsor McCay, Little Nemo
in Slumberland) and George Herriman (↗17 George Herriman, Krazy Kat).
Ware’s innovativeness and self-conscious, self-critical derivativeness combine
to create in his work an immense and rich network of connections, forebears, and
possible descendants that puts Ware at the heart of a huge number of important
ongoing scholarly conversations in the study of art, literature, and design (as the
different essays in this book further demonstrate). Ware’s work has naturally been
at the forefront of the emergence of comics studies as a discrete subfield in the
academy, as well as in more theoretical discussions and debates around the primacy
of language and writing over and against other modes of communication and sche-
matization. The grandiose diagrams that permeate his work suggest, for scholars of
nonverbal rhetorics and communication, the possibilities inherent in thinking about
communication beyond the word, an orientation that suggests Ware as much a co-
theorist as an object of study. The quotation from which the edited volume takes its
name is illustrative of Ware’s intervention in this kind of debate: “Writing and draw-
ing are thinking. We’re told in school that they’re skills but that’s wrong. Drawing
is a way of thinking. It’s a way of seeing” (Ball and Kuhlman 2010, xix). The richness
and variety of Ware’s ways of thinking, and of the types of thoughts that they in
turn make possible, all but guarantee that Ware will remain at the center of literary,
artistic, and critical-theoretical scholarship for decades to come.
3 Bibliography
3.1 Works Cited
Ball, David M. and Martha B. Kuhlman, eds. The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of
Thinking. Art by Chris Ware. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Brogan, Jacob. “Masked Fathers: Jimmy Corrigan and the Superheroic Legacy.” The Comics of
Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking. Eds. David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman.
Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 14–27.
Cates, Isaac. “Comics and the Grammar of Diagrams.” The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a
Way of Thinking. Eds. David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman. Jackson, MS: University Press of
Edemariam, Aida. “The Art of Melancholy.” The Guardian, October 31 2005.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/31/comics. (13 June 2019).
Juno, Andrea. Dangerous Drawings. New York: Juno Books, 1997.
Kannenberg, Gene. “The Comics of Chris Ware.” A Comic Studies Reader. Eds. Jeet Heer and Kent
Worcester. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 306–324.
Kuhlman, Martha B., and David M. Ball. “Introduction: Chris Ware and the ‘Cult of Difficulty.’” The
Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking. Ed. David M. Ball and Martha B.
Kuhlman. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. ix–xxiii.
Savlov, Marc. “The Past Has Never Been Better for Chris Ware.” The Austin Chronicle,
September 8 2000. http://www.austinchronicle.com/books/2000-09-08/78513. (13 June
2019).
Ware, Chris. “Comics Art 101.” The Acme Novelty Library #11. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1998.
Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Hardcover edition. New York: Pantheon
Books, 2000.
Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Paperback edition. New York: Pantheon
Books, 2001.
Wolk, Douglas. “Why Does Chris Ware Hate Fun?” Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and
What They Mean. New York: Da Capo Press, 2008. 347–359.
3.2 Further Reading

Ware, Chris. The Acme Novelty Library (ongoing, 1993– ). Seattle: Fantagraphics Books (1993–
2001) and self-published (2005). Original site of publication of much of Ware’s major work,
including Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories, and many of the as-yet uncollected “Rusty
Brown” stories.
The Acme Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun
Book. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005.
Ware, Chris ed. The Best American Comics 2007. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007.
Ware, Chris. Building Stories. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.
Ware, Chris. “The Last Lonely Saturday (Part One).” The Guardian, September 2014 − September
2015. http://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2014/sep/13/-sp-chris-ware-the-
last-saturday-graphic-novel. (September 2016).
Ware, Chris. Quimby Mouse. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2003. Collects comics from Ware’s
University of Texas – Austin Daily Texan strip, primarily 1990–1991 (some 1992–1993).
Erik Grayson
28 Daniel Clowes: Ghost World
Abstract: This chapter discusses Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World (1997) as a cultural
and critical phenomenon and focuses on the book’s treatment of teenage alienation
at the close of the 20th Century. It also discusses the novel’s place both in Clowes’s
oeuvre and the larger history of graphic novels, with particular attention to its posi-
tion as one of the major works responsible for elevating the graphic narrative from
an underground art form to one that has been embraced by mainstream readers,
critics, and scholars.
Key Terms: adolescence, alienation, Existentialism, nostalgia, postmodernity

Born in Chicago in 1961, Daniel Gillespie Clowes is a Harvey and Eisner Award-
winning cartoonist, PEN Award-winning graphic novelist, illustrator, and Academy
Award-nominated screenwriter. Along with Chris Ware (Acme Novelty Library), Peter
Bagge (Hate), Chester Brown (Ed, the Happy Clown; Yummy Fur), Jim Woodring
(Frank; Jim), and Julie Doucet (Dirty Plotte), Clowes (Lloyd Llewellyn; Eightball) en-
tered the popular and critical consciousness out of the late 1980s/early 1990s alter-
native comics renaissance centered around publishing houses such as Seattle’s Fan-
tagraphics Books and Montreal’s Drawn and Quarterly. Deeply influenced by Robert
Crumb, the Hernandez Brothers, and Harvey Kurtzman-era Mad magazine, Clowes
studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he provoked the chagrin of his
instructors by refusing to abandon what they dismissively referred to as his “Betty
and Veronica style” of drawing (Howard 2010, 51). Shortly after graduating, while
futilely searching for illustration work in New York, Clowes submitted Lloyd Lle-
wellyn, a comic he drew as a way to develop his craft, to Fantagraphics “just to get
some feedback,” and he was shocked when he was enthusiastically offered a book
deal with the publisher (Battles 2010, 3). Clowes’s relationship with Fantagraphics
subsequently continued after the cancellation of Lloyd Llewellyn in 1988, when he
began producing Eightball (1989–2004), a solo anthology series in which much of
Clowes’s best-known work – including Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993), Ghost
World (1997), and David Boring (2000) – originally appeared.
Ghost World, arguably Clowes’s most well-known work and the basis for the
Academy Award-nominated film of the same name (2001) starring Thora Birch, Scar-
lett Johansson, and Steve Buscemi, marks an important transitional phase in the
artist’s career. Displaying a clear indebtedness to the caricatures of Mad and the
grittily surreal style of Robert Crumb, Clowes’s earliest work is a mélange of acerbic
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-032
562 Erik Grayson
social criticism (“Devil Doll?”), misanthropic satire (“Art School Confidential”), and
grotesque surrealism (Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron). Like his close friend Chris
Ware, Clowes also used his early work to advocate for the comics medium as a form
with significantly more artistic potential than the mindlessly disposable entertain-
ment for children with which mainstream readers frequently associate it. Thus,
much of Clowes’s early work pulses both with the evangelistic energy of a true be-
liever in comics as art and the passionate vitriol of an artist working in the shadow
of mass-produced corporate pap. Early issues of Eightball feature these various pre-
occupations prominently, as many stories either center on, or include references to
comic books, comic artists, and the assorted hangers-on associated with both the
indie comics scene and the oft-derided realm of mainstream comics. In many ways,
Ghost World inhabits the same thematic territory as Clowes’s earlier work, but intro-
duces a degree of unironic sensitivity and a new warmth into the artist’s playfully
misanthropic universe to create what Nick Hasted has described as a “mix of irony
and feeling, sympathy and satire, the self-conscious and the sub-conscious” (Has-
tad).
Ghost World is therefore in many ways less a departure from Clowes’s early
work than an evolution of his craft. While Enid and Rebecca, the novel’s two central
characters, may not be the “constricted, lonely, obnoxious” males Andrea Juno
identifies as inhabiting Clowes’s earlier work, they nevertheless live among such
figures in the same universally bland, gradually disintegrating landscape of late
20th-century urban America. The girls must wade through the same piles of soulless
kitsch culture, bump into the same grotesque “creeps” in the same cramped comic
book store aisles, and navigate the same frustratingly narrow social avenues Clowes’s
earlier comics skewer. But they do so with a modicum of enthusiasm (albeit tem-
pered with teenage irony) for such experiences and a genuine sympathy for the
outsiders they encounter. Clowes’s book soon garnered widespread critical acclaim
for its realistic depiction of American youth at the close of the millennium and its
apparent ability to capture the elusive zeitgeist of Generation X. Bolstered by the
success of the comic’s film adaptation, Ghost World joined Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning Maus (1992; ↗22 Art Spiegelman, Maus) at the vanguard of a new era
in comic storytelling, paving the way for other comics artists such as Marjane Sa-
trapi (↗30 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis), Chris Ware (↗27 Chris Ware, Jimmy Corri-
gan), and Alison Bechdel (↗26 Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For) to publish
with major imprints and appear prominently in the book review pages of national
newspapers and magazines.
Ghost World was originally published in serialized form between June 1993 and
March 1997 in Eightball issues 11–18. Several differences exist between the serialized
version and the graphic novel, almost all of which aim to bring the novel a visual
consistency. In addition to dropping the dark blue, light blue, and orange coloring
used in the majority of the serialized installments in favor of the light green hue
employed in the final two chapters as the background color for the entire book,
Clowes also simplified some of his characters’ facial designs to achieve a more uni-
form style. The most significant difference between the serialized and graphic novel
versions of Ghost World is the addition of five illustrations to the prefatory pages of
the book that presumably shed light upon events that occur prior to the beginning
of the novel proper. Several editions of Ghost World have appeared: the original
hardcover (1997), two paperback editions (2001 and 2005), a hardcover ‘Special Edi-
tion’ (2008) and an annotated version published in The Daniel Clowes Reader (2013).
The original serialized version also appears in The Complete Eightball (2015). Both
the Special Edition and The Daniel Clowes Reader include a speculative strip entitled
“Where Are They Now?” that considers where Enid and Rebecca may be in the years
after the conclusion of the events in Ghost World, which does not appear in other
published versions of the graphic novel.
Set against the backdrop of a sprawling, nameless Californian city, Ghost World
chronicles the disintegration of a friendship between two teenage girls over the
course of the summer following their graduation from high school. Enid Coleslaw
and her best friend Rebecca Doppelmeyer inhabit the fringes of their middle class
urban world, united by a coolly detached cynicism, a shared desire for authentic
existence amidst a sea of affected personalities, and a genuine need for emotional
support in the absence of strong familial or romantic connections. Together, Enid
and Rebecca exist in the slipstream between the countercultural indie world and
that of the established mainstream, displaying a familiarity with both yet fully at
home in neither.
A large cast of secondary characters weaves in and out of the novel’s central
storyline, providing Enid and Rebecca with ample fodder for the sardonic commen-
tary that peppers their conversations, while also reinforcing the girls’ sense of alien-
ation from both the mainstream and the indie communities. Despite earnest promis-
es to remain together, it becomes increasingly apparent over the course of the
summer that Enid and Rebecca are growing apart and that their friendship very
likely has an imminent expiration date. With the responsibilities of adulthood loom-
ing on the horizon, Enid halfheartedly eyes college, while Rebecca drifts almost
unknowingly towards an uninspiring but conventionally pragmatic existence as a
clerk at a bagel shop. As Rebecca inches slowly towards the sort of blandly main-
stream existence she and Enid had scoffed at, Enid wrestles with the ubiquitous
ennui she perceives in the world, ultimately rejecting both the Siren-like lure of
nostalgia and the pull of quiescent financial security to which Rebecca succumbs.
564 Erik Grayson
Indeed, Enid’s painful journey away from her friend and towards authenticity forms
the core of Clowes’s narrative.
Clowes introduces the twin themes of a fracturing friendship and the struggle
to carve an authentic existence out of the liminal space on the border between main-
stream and indie culture on the first page of Ghost World, when Enid and Rebecca
bicker over the latter’s owning a copy of Sassy:
Enid: Why do you have this?

Rebecca: What?
Enid: I hate this fucking magazine! These stupid girls think they’re so hip, but
they’re just a bunch of trendy stuck-up prep-school bitches who think
they’re “cutting edge” because they know who “Sonic Youth” is!
Rebecca: You’re a stuck-up prep-school bitch!
Enid: Fuck you! I can’t believe you bought this! (9.2–4)
Here, Enid’s disgust at Rebecca’s choice in reading a glossy, teen-oriented magazine

ostensibly devoted to alternative music reveals both the former’s animosity towards
mainstream appropriation of indie culture as well as her own discomfort with her
best friend’s apparent proximity to the mainstream. Likewise, the scene also reveals
both Enid’s own status as an indie-oriented yet still privileged prep-school graduate
as well as Rebecca’s irritation with what she perceives as Enid’s snobbery. While
the rift in the girls’ friendship is barely perceptible in this opening scene, the fissure
nevertheless attunes the reader to the tensions that will eventually fracture the bed-
rock of their relationship.
Later in the novel, for example, Clowes depicts Enid in her bedroom, where she
is listening to music and reading while waiting for her hair dye to dry. When Rebec-
ca enters Enid’s room, she is shocked by her friend’s appearance and exclaims “Oh
my God” before asking “[i]s that really your hair?” (21.2). Enid, who has dyed her
hair green, dons a motorcycle jacket reminiscent of those worn by The Ramones
and leaves with Rebecca. As the pair walk to a diner, Rebecca teases Enid, asking
“[s]o what brought this on? You haven’t had a punk day in, like, forever! … Did you
have to buy a new thing of green dye or did you have some left over from when you
were twelve?” (22.1). Borrowing a line from the cult film Beyond the Valley of the
Dolls to serve up a dollop of ironic postmodern pastiche, a frustrated Enid replies
“[f]uck you, bitch…This is my happening and it freaks me out!!” (22.1). Although her
comments are likely closer to good-natured ribbing than acerbic criticism, Rebecca’s
accusation of immaturity nevertheless reveals her continued dismissal of Enid’s at-
tempts at self-definition. Enid’s abrasive response suggests both an understandable
feeling of hurt as well as a candid admission of the performative (as opposed to
authentic) aspect of her engagement with punk style.
As Ghost World progresses, the growing schism between Enid and Rebecca
comes to extend far deeper than petty disagreements over cultural preferences. At
one point in the middle of the narrative, Enid exclaims “I’ll be lachrymose” if she
cannot find a record she treasured as a child, a word choice that upsets Rebecca
(54.8–9). Shortly thereafter, as the girls share a meal at a hot dog stand, Enid de-
scribes a mutual friend as “a taciturn fellow,” a comment that sparks another reveal-
ing argument between the two:
Rebecca: Where did you get all these words?

Enid: Oh, just because of studying for that stupid test my dad wants me to
take…
Rebecca: I thought you weren’t going to take that test.
Enid: Yeah, well…My dad already paid for it, and he’s really been pestering me
and everything…it’s a total drag…
Rebecca: You are such a fucking liar.
Enid: I’m not lying. I just…
Rebecca: You tell me every stupid detail of your life but you don’t even mention
that you’re studying for this test?
Enid: That’s because you’re acting like such a creep about it − I’m only taking
a stupid test […] Look, Why are you so freaked out? Because of the one
percent chance that I might possibly go to college?!
Rebecca: No, because you’re acting so weird about it! What is it, some big secret?!
It’s like you’re trying to sneak away or something… (57.2–6; 58.1–3)
Shortly thereafter, when it appears that the disagreement has been overcome, Enid
uses the word “contentious,” prompting Rebecca to extend her middle finger at
Enid while derisively telling her to “[h]ave fun in college” before walking away
(58.7; 59.1). In this particularly painful exchange, Rebecca’s apparent discomfort
with Enid’s newly expanded vocabulary recalls her earlier chagrin with Enid’s indie
and punk posturing, while also uncovering the deeper anxieties that will ultimately
bring about the end of their friendship. Rebecca’s fear of abandonment coupled
with Enid’s very real vision of a future that does not include remaining in the same
community as Rebecca, it would seem, have been corroding the foundations of the
relationship for some time.
Despite Enid failing her college entrance exam, by the end of Ghost World the
formerly inseparable friends are practically strangers to one another. In the final
few pages of the book, we follow Enid as she visits Rebecca at work. Defoliated trees
suggest late autumn, when Enid’s college-bound peers would have left town and
subtly indicate the passage of time. While their uncomfortable exchange does not
carry even a hint of animosity, it is clear that Rebecca and Enid have not spent time
in one another’s company since the summer. Enid’s attempts to revive familiar
shared jokes fall flat and Rebecca’s suggestion that “we still have to go to that weird
shoe store sometime” rings hollow. Following a lonely stroll through the same
streets she and Rebecca had walked through so recently, Enid takes one final look
at her old friend through the diner window, ambiguously says “you’ve grown into
a very beautiful young woman” to no one in particular, and boards an outbound
566 Erik Grayson
bus, destination unknown (77.1; 80.4). Enid’s departure in the closing frame of Ghost
World has been the subject of significant debate among readers, but, as Clowes told
Joshua Glenn in an interview, “I tried to make it a hopeful ending…she was going
on to do something interesting, certainly more interesting than Rebecca” (Glenn
2010, 107). The end of Ghost World, then, is less an ending than a gesture towards
a new beginning in which Enid has finally taken a decisive step towards self-deter-
mination.
On a visual level, Daniel Clowes sets the emotional tone for his narrative by cultivat-
ing a dreamlike environment in which grotesque misfits populate a slowly decaying
America. The anxiety and sense of alienation produced in the reader by encounter-
ing Clowes’s unsettling vision lays the groundwork for the narrative exploration of
those themes in Ghost World. One of the simplest yet most significant graphic fea-
tures of Ghost World is the monochrome in which Clowes bathes his images. In his
discussion of color in graphic novels, Jan Baetens identifies Ghost World as deliber-
ately “blurring … the boundaries between black and white and color” by “mix[ing]
black and white with a very particular kind of pale blue” that helps establish the
mood of the book (2011, 114). This recalls what Clowes has described as “the kind
of light in the streets of a big city … when people come home from their work and
put on their television screens” (ibid.). Thus, the entire story appears to take place
just outside the illuminated sphere of daily life, in the otherworldly glow of the
omnipresent television – middle America’s dominant form of escapism.
Clowes’s use of blue to suggest the dreamlike mood one might feel while walk-
ing down a street that has been depopulated by the lure of passive entertainment
is hardly explicit. But nevertheless, his evocation of post-industrial American urban
decline in Ghost World is quite clear. Of course, prior to writing Ghost World, Clowes
had long used his native Chicago as a model for the deteriorating cityscapes within
which many of his early stories unfold. For instance, in a short comic entitled “Chi-
cago,” appearing in Eightball #7, the author’s comic book stand-in declares that
“Chicago is a beautiful place; a dark and decaying testament to the sad beauty of
bleakness and unfulfilled promises” (24.5). Significantly, the urban backdrop
against which Ghost World is set bears a strong resemblance to the urban environ-
ments in which many of Clowes’s early comics take place. Despite being set in an
unspecified Californian city, Ghost World shares some of the Midwestern gloom of
Clowes’s Chicago. While the Windy City is overrun by “those ‘ye olde’-type bars and
restaurants with the intentionally goofy W. C. Fields-inspired names” and filled with
“fake signs reading ‘Beer − - 5¢,’” Enid and Rebecca dine at restaurants such as
Hubba Hubba, the Original 50s Diner, which peddle a similar brand of pathetically
ersatz nostalgia (23.2–3). Likewise, the decaying façade of Angel’s Diner in Ghost
World (the word “Breakfast” on the marquee of the restaurant gradually loses letters
over the course of the narrative) recalls the entropy inherent in the crumbling con-
crete landscapes of Eightball. A far cry from the sun-drenched Technicolor beach
parties of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, Ghost World’s California is a de-
pressing maze of graffitied walls, run-down diners, and unvarying strip malls.
If Clowes’s depiction of human civilization in Ghost World is bleak, so is its
portrayal of humanity itself. Tellingly, in an interview with Darcy Sullivan, Clowes
recalls that in his early work he “used to have a real specificity to [his] characters,”
which was an extension of the style of “grotesquely detailed faces” he drew as a
child as “an act of aggression against humanity” (144). As a transitional work in
Clowes’s oeuvre, Ghost World includes both the simplified drawing style one associ-
ates with Clowes’s later works such as David Boring as well as the often ugly, hyper-
detailed faces found in the early Eightballs. Importantly, Clowes reserves his newly-
developed simpler style for Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, while contin-
uing to render the appearances of their supporting cast in his familiar style of gro-
tesque realism. Frequently, Clowes uses chiaroscuro to heighten the ugliness of the
ancillary figures in the comic. The contrast between the “aggressive” detail in which
the peripheral characters are drawn and the softer style in which Enid and Rebecca
are presented provides the readers of Ghost World with a visual analogue to the
girls’ worldview. Nearly everyone they encounter – from Bob Skeets, a self-pro-
claimed psychic with a bulbous nose, sunken eyes, and a dramatic overbite, to Mel-
orra, the girls’ perky classmate whose furrowed brow and oversized eyes give her a
look of perpetual shock – seem alien. Among the sea of blemishes, sagging skin,
deep wrinkles, impossibly toothy grins, and dripping sweat, Enid and Rebecca ap-
pear to be the only normal people in a world populated by freaks and – to borrow
one of Enid’s favorite descriptors – creeps.
Indeed, Clowes’s use of color, decaying backdrop, and grotesquely rendered
faces as a means to focus the reader’s attention on Enid and Rebecca is crucial to
understanding Ghost World as a study in character. In response to a question posed
by Austin English, Clowes explained that, in the issues of Eightball in which Ghost
World appeared, he had “got[ten] really into the idea of just creating characters
where the plot wasn’t as important as the characters. … And that was the whole
idea behind Ghost World. To focus on the characters” rather than on an intricate
plot (2010, 89). Put differently, by using the visual qualities of the graphic novel to
suggest feelings of alienation, loss, and melancholy, Clowes is able to dispense with
exposition-oriented plot in favor of an episodic structure wherein his two adolescent
protagonists grapple with those emotions. In this way, as many commentators have
noted, Ghost World encourages readers to focus on Enid Coleslaw’s inner world
rather than the external world in which she and Rebecca live. As Marjorie Baumgar-
ten writes in her discussion of the film adaptation of the book, “Enid has much in
common with The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield: Neither has any patience
with phonies or pretense. The comparison of Ghost World to J. D. Salinger’s master-
568 Erik Grayson
work is not idle praise: I think Ghost World offers one of the best portraits of teen
anomie this side of Catcher in the Rye” (Baumgarten 2001). To be sure, Ghost World
resembles works like Salinger’s in its intense focus on the psychological and emo-
tional experience of adolescent alienation amid a world of frustrating inauthenticity.

Daniel Clowes was already what Austin English called “the most well-known alter-
native cartoonist around” by the time Ghost World was published as a graphic novel
in 1997, and the overwhelmingly positive critical response to the book was nearly
unprecedented in the history of American comics (2010, 100). In addition to winning
near universal praise in the comics community (Ghost World was awarded the 1998
Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel), Clowes’s book received high praise
from such mainstream outlets as Vogue, The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph,
Time, The Village Voice, Newsweek, and The Onion, all of which are quoted praising
the work on the back cover of the graphic novel. Many early commentators were
particularly impressed with the freshness and authenticity of Clowes’s dialogue. For
example, Newsweek praised Clowes for his “spot-on depiction of the girls – right
down to the cadence of their endless bickering and caustic asides” (Van Boven 1998,
70), while The Washington Post celebrates how “Clowes’s pitch is uncannily accu-
rate” and “for once in a comic story, people are portrayed as they really act and
talk” (Musgrove 1998, 1). As mentioned above, critics tended to compare Ghost
World to Catcher in the Rye, highlighting the former’s potential status as a contem-
porary version of the latter. Not surprisingly, Ghost World appears on several “Best
Of” lists including Paste’s “20 Best Graphic Novels of the Decade” (Edgar and Bickel
2009) and Details’s “Top Ten Generation X Books” (Davies 2009).
Thanks to its broad popular and critical appeal as well as its sensitive and frank
exploration of adolescent angst in late-20th-century America, Ghost World appears
on many high school and college syllabi, and it has also been the subject of signifi-
cant scholarly discussion. The dominant theme in the nascent arena of Ghost World
criticism appears to be the alienation Enid and Rebecca experience in the novel,
which resonates both with scholars interested in existentialism as well as those
examining the postmodern condition. In their essay “Jean-Paul Sartre Meets Enid
Coleslaw,” Laura and Paul Canis argue that “Clowes’s drawings convey in a really
visceral way that unpleasant, skin-crawling, nauseous feeling of pure alienation, a
sense of dread or desolation over one’s existence” that Sartre identifies as the start-
ing point for the absurd individual’s journey towards authentic existence (2005,
135). In such a reading, Enid’s endless attempts to find the right “look” to express
herself as well as to distinguish herself from “the grotesqueries of the offbeat char-
acters” she and Rebecca encounter in Ghost World are “the grim first baby-steps of
existentialist enlightenment” (Canis 2005, 145). As Enid and Rebecca grapple with
feelings of abandonment and disconnectedness, and struggle to find purpose in

an apparently absurd world, the pair are faced with a fundamentally existential
predicament: to don the mantle of a responsible adult and assimilate into the world
they have spent the entire book mocking, or to refuse such compromise and seek
an authentic existence determined by one’s own values. Enid’s ultimate refusal to
become “a beautiful young woman” with a nine-to-five job like her best friend may
be read as an act of existential self-determination, a brave rejection of the nostalgia-
drenched bad faith of her hometown and an affirmation of her own inherent value.
Researchers concerned with such existential questions as good and bad faith, ab-
surdity, nausea, or the search for meaning will no doubt continue to turn to Ghost
World for years to come.
For Pamela Thurschwell, Enid’s feelings of alienation are the result of her “am-
bivalent relationship to postmodern commodity culture” (2010, 242). Living amidst
“the sprawling wasteland of coffee chains, malls, computer stores, and the soul-
destroying service jobs that define them,” Enid alternates “between a desire to
abandon her past and a desperate need to cling to it” (Thurschwell 2010, 242). In
such a reading, Enid’s discomfort stems not from her own struggle to live authenti-
cally, but from the unrelenting artificiality of the world around her. Much of this
artificiality is the result of nostalgia’s inability to overcome temporal displacement.
In other words, Enid turns to the past to find a fulfillment she lacks in the present,
but can only access poor approximations of the authentic experiences she seeks.
Unable to access diners that have been around since the 1950s, for instance, Enid
and Rebecca are left with Hubba Hubba, a comically inadequate simulacrum. Like-
wise, having been born in the early 1980s, Enid is about a decade too young to have
worn the “old 1977 punk look” she adopts early in the novel when such fashion was
still novel (25.5). In her desire to capture authenticity from the alienating world of
simulacra in which she lives, Enid places great value on cultural artifacts as a way
to access the genuine. In the “Punk Day” episode, for instance, the acute reader
will note that Enid’s copy of the Ramones’ 1977 album Leave Home includes the
song “Carbona, not Glue,” a track that Sire Records voluntarily removed from the
album after its first pressing to avoid a lawsuit from the Carbona corporation. This
tiny detail reveals that Enid owns a copy of the original release of the album, thereby
underlining her devotion to increasing her proximity to the authentic. Of course,
just as holding on to her beloved Goofie Gus or Patience and Prudence album does
not allow her to relive her childhood, neither does owning a rare version of a classic
punk album make her outfit any more authentic. For scholars interested in such
postmodern concerns as simulations and simulacra, historicity, nostalgia, and the
realities of late capitalist consumer culture, then, Ghost World provides endlessly
fertile ground for research.
The impact of Ghost World on the history of the graphic novel can hardly be
overstated. Along with Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan), Joe Sacco (Palestine), and Art
Spiegelman (Maus), Clowes is widely regarded as having helped usher in a new era
570 Erik Grayson
of graphic storytelling in which graphic novels and memoirs are no longer strictly
relegated to the fringes of popular culture. In his steadfast use of the comics medi-
um to explore issues of emotional richness, philosophical depth, and psychological
complexity, Clowes is a central figure in the evolution of the adult comic, from the
lunacy of Mad and the drug-addled alternative comix of Robert Crumb through the
punk-infused Hernandez Brothers and Spiegelman’s emotionally-moving memoirs,
to Ware and Satrapi. Still active today and enjoying a broader audience than ever,
Daniel Clowes is poised to continue shaping his beloved medium far into the future.
As arguably his most popular work, Ghost World remains a major touchstone in the
critical and cultural discussions the graphic narrative now enjoys.
4 Bibliography
4.1 Works Cited
Baetens, Jan. “From Black & White to Color and Back: What Does it Mean (not) to Use Color?”
College Literature 38.3. (2011): 111–128.
Baumgarten, Marjorie. “Ghost World.” The Austin Chronicle. 24 August 2001.
Battles, John. “The Lost Dan Clowes Interview.”Daniel Clowes: Conversations. Eds. Ken Parille and
Isaac Cates. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010. 3–11.
Canis, Laura and Paul Canis. “Jean-Paul Sartre Meets Enid Coleslaw: Existential Themes in Ghost
World.” Comics as Philosophy, Ed. Jeff McLaughlin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2005.
Clowes, Daniel. “Chicago.” Eightball #7. 21–24. The Complete Eightball. Seattle: Fantagraphics
Books, 2015.
Clowes, Daniel. Ghost World. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1997.
Davies, Richard. “Top Ten Generation X Books.” ABE Books blog. <https://www.abebooks.com/
blog/index.php/2009/12/10/top-10-generation-x-books/. No date (25 June 2017).
Edgar, Sean and Gib Bickel. “The 20 Best Graphic Novels of the Decade (2000–2009).” Paste.
https://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2009/11/the-20-best-graphic-novels-of-the-
decade.html?p=2. 27 November 2009 (25 June 2017).
English, Austin. “Parody and Perplexity with Dan Clowes.” Daniel Clowes: Conversations. Ed. Ken
Parille and Isaac Cates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 83–102.
Glenn, Joshua. “An Interview with Dan Clowes: He Loves You Tenderly.” Daniel Clowes:
Conversations. Ed. Ken Parille and Isaac Cates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
103–113.
Hasted, Nick. “Mr Clowes and His Comic Cult.” The Guardian. 2 June 1997.
Howard, Dave. “An Interview with Dan Clowes.” Daniel Clowes: Conversations. Ed. Ken Parille and
Isaac Cates. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010. 50–68.
Juno, Andrea. “Dan Clowes.” Daniel Clowes: Conversations. Ed. Ken Parille and Isaac Cates.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 69–82.
Musgrove, Mike. “It’s So Graphic!” Washington Post Book World. 26 July 1998. X01.
Parille, Ken and Isaac Cates, ed. Daniel Clowes: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2010.
Sullivan, Darcy. “Back to the Drawing Board: How Dan Clowes Creates His Worlds on Paper.”
Daniel Clowes: Conversations. Ed. Ken Parille and Isaac Cates. Jackson: University Press of
Thurschwell, Pamela. “The Ghost Worlds of Modern Adolescence.” Popular Ghosts: The Haunted
Spaces of Everyday Culture, Ed. Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. New York:
Continuum, 2010. 239–250.
Van Boven, Sarah. “A Certain Comic Genius.” Newsweek 27 April 1998. 70.
4.2 Further Reading

Clowes, Daniel. Eightball (1989–2004). Seattle: Fantagraphics Books.
Clowes, Daniel and Terry Zwigoff. The Ghost World Screenplay. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001.
Parille, Ken, ed. The Daniel Clowes Reader. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013.
Luisa Menzel
29 Martin Rowson: The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Abstract: Martin Rowson’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is
the first book-length comic adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s highly influential novel
(1759–1767). This chapter sets out to map Rowson’s graphic novel within his three-
fold oeuvre of political cartoons, prose and poetic projects, and foremost his litera-
ture adaptations. The adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s novel is presented specifically
as an instance of intermedial travel literature: the recipient of the adaptation is
taken on a journey through different modes of intermediality. The methodology of
Rowson’s comic work is set in relation to his graphic adaptation theory which he
released three years after the second edition of Tristram Shandy was published.
Key Terms: adaptation, intermedial travel literature, Shandeism, graphic novel,

scholartism

Martin Rowson’s comic was published in 1995 after Antony Farrell of the Lilliput
Press had first suggested he should adapt Laurence Sterne’s novel (Rowson 2003,
118). Rowson was encouraged to adapt Sterne’s seemingly confusing and experi-
mental work because he had already produced an acclaimed rendering of T. S. El-
iot’s poem-manuscript “The Waste Land” in 1990, another landmark challenging
readerly expectations. Rowson’s Waste Land adaptation encountered manifold diffi-
culties, ranging from a legal dispute about the use of the original text to the uncer-
tainty of booksellers under which label to present the work to potential buyers;
neither of these problems was to be expected from an adaptation of Tristram Shandy.
Rowson states that various aspects made it difficult to rework the novel since he
had always adored Sterne’s novel and wanted to do it justice in his comic (Rowson
1995, 66). Also, his editors wanted him to reduce a novel that was originally pub-
lished in nine volumes (the modern Oxford Classics edition is 539 pages strong) to
a comic book of a mere 160 pages (Rowson 1995, 64). In the research for his project,
Rowson became aware of the novel’s potential “for subverting the accepted struc-
tures of comic book narrative and design” (1995, 64). In consequence, he intended
to undermine canonized narrative structures of comics just as Sterne parodied con-
temporary understandings of the emerging novel (Rowson 1995, 64). The outcome
is a meta-comic, “Tristram Shandy told through the visual medium of a comic book
[as] a stroll through the novel” (Rowson 1995, 65).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-033
574 Luisa Menzel
Martin Rowson’s oeuvre so far is three-fold, with all three parts strongly influ-
encing each other: first and foremost, he is a “visual journalist” (Rowson 2016) for
The Guardian, publishing political opinion cartoons. His cartoon style evolved over
the past three decades to a dynamic, often colorful brushwork often outlined in
black ink which sharpens the aggressive imagery. One of his most famous cartoons
is the black and white inking “Campbell Toilet” (2002). Scatological humor appears
in several of his works, as in an early cartoon of Marx and Engels exploring a toilet
cistern (Killane 1983, plate 1) or throughout Rowson’s adaptation of Gulliver’s Trav-
els. Toilets as confined stages for emotional and literal distress of well-known per-
sons are popular icons as “I see my job as giving offence, because satire, to borrow
H. L. Mencken’s definition of journalism, is about comforting the afflicted and af-
flicting the comfortable” (Rowson 2009, 22). In Giving offense (2009), Rowson elabo-
rates on his standpoint on political satire and its impact. His political opinion car-
toons account for the largest proportion of his work, he is well known in England
for his cartoons and frequently participates in academic conferences, cartoon festi-
vals and workshops. His literary works and comics delight a growing number of
recipients, some of which likely first encountered his political works. He sees him-
self very much in the tradition of the British political cartoon and satire, of which
William Hogarth, George Cruikshank and James Gillray are his favorite representa-
tives. Rowson is indebted to Hogarth in many respects, probably foremost in learn-
ing how to stage complex settings for political messages in an entertaining satirical
way (Rowson 2003, 109).
The second part of his oeuvre, his literary projects, range from prose (Snatches
2006) to satirical poetry (Limerickiad I–VI 2011–2016). All of them are accompanied
by graphic images rich in reference. Snatches, a collection of connected short sto-
ries, “covers all human history, but only in snapshots, with streaks of alternative
history […] to show up the absurdity of what actually happened” (Newman 2006).
The story “Inferno,” already by its name an intertextual reference to Dante’s Divine
Comedy, sports several condemned characters consoling Stalin in hell. The story is
illustrated by a black-and-white ink vignette showing a close-up of a sniffing demon
blowing his nose in his handkerchief. The demon is reminiscent of Gustave Doré’s
Lucifer illustration to Dante’s Canto XXXIV, strongly suggesting an Alighierian inter-
pretation of the short story.
Limerickiad is a collection of limericks on selected works of literary history, the
poems being originally published weekly in the Independent on Sunday. In the lim-
ericks, Rowson varies between comments on a single work or summaries of it, anal-
yses of an author, a whole genre or a culture. The limerick form fits Rowson’s style
well, as it allows him to mix academic and profane language into an irreverent form
of edutainment.
The third part of his work, the literary adaptations, go far beyond mere graphic
realisations of the literary originals. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land becomes a “post-
modern dialectic” (Rowson 1995, 64) in film noir atmosphere. His appropriation of
the modernist poem refrains from using direct quotes from Eliot for copyright rea-
sons (Rowson 1995, 63) and requires some prior knowledge to detect the transfers
made. Rowson’s Gulliver’s Travels on the other hand is actually a sequel and update
to Swift’s satire and a mirror of contemporary British politics.
As we will see in the following, the meta comic Tristram Shandy mocks the
academic reception of the adapted work in a highly sophisticated form of edutain-
ment. The lack of a label for these kinds of interdisciplinary scholarly-artistic works
and practices could, as I want to propose, be met with the concept of scholartism
for the methodology and scholartist for the person working with it. Rowson’s mock-
scholartism very much resembles Sterne’s, who did not only satirize contemporary
discussions on e. g. forceps but also formulated his own standpoints (Stephanson,
97–98). In this sense, the comic Tristram Shandy can be understood as the first book-
length visual study of Sterne’s, which works with the references of the original and
incorporates the stages of the creation process of the adaptation and negotiations
with the publishers (V/xvii, panel 8) deliberately into the work.

Rowson’s adaptation The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman of Tris-
tram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, delightfully combines the true Shandean spirit
with critical academic and artistic discussions through both imagery and text, plus
manifold references and allusions to works of European artists, especially William
Hogarth. The cover illustration of the 2010 edition of the comic shows grinning Tris-
tram in profile like an iconographic star, holding the knob of his walking stick up
as if it were a microphone. His bust is framed by an oval spotlight on marble ground
(referencing the famous marble pages in Sterne: III/xxxvi), with a few marble veins
crossing the profile. In contrast to the covers of other adaptations, e. g. Bill Sienkie-
wicz’s Moby-Dick from the Classics Illustrated Series, only Rowson’s name as author
appears together with the title. The book spine indicates that it is a “GRAPHIC NOV-
EL,” the original’s author’s name, Laurence Sterne, is only given in the editor’s
blurb on the back.
The comic is closely based on Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman (1759–1767). The structure, language, content, humor, and even the
drawing style in black cross-hatching as well as the font used by Rowson form a
detailed likeness of the novel’s characteristics (↗6 Adaptation). Generally speaking,
Tristram Shandy, the novel, is well suited for a graphic adaptation, since it already
plays with aesthetic elements triggering a visual perception of the page and its lay-
out, e. g. asterisks appear as text signs or surrogate phrases. As Piazza et al. note,
“Tristram Shandy could be considered as the first example of hypertext because it
allows the reader to take part in the ‘visual achievement’ of the book.” The partici-
576 Luisa Menzel
pation of the reader is an essential part of both Tristram Shandy the novel and the
comic.
Thus, Rowson has the advantage of adapting a novel consciously formatted to
create an extraordinary reception experience by “exploiting [contemporary] typeset-
ting conventions” (Alspaugh 2009, 132), including unexpected graphic images and
incredibly short chapters calling into question the function of chapter divisions. To
fully understand the extend of Sterne’s design, it is helpful to look at the original’s
page layout, which is available at www.tristramshandyweb.it, a project initiated by
Patrizia Nerozzi Bellman in 2000 and hosted by the International University of Lan-
guages and Media, Milan. Under the tab “TS” the web site displays all nine volumes
of the novel, with all chapters and original pages. Especially several shorter chap-
ters grouped on a double page (e. g. I/ch. iv, 11) border on concrete poetry and do
very much resemble panels, provoking a corresponding perception strategy in the
recipient. Rowson likewise uses this structure in his comic, visibly recreating the
structuring of the novel into chapters in his page layout.
Rowson sticks to the original text and structure as much as possible, but neces-
sarily omits two and a half volumes and many subplots to meet his editorial and
spatial constrains (Rowson 1995, 64). Tristram Shandy, the novel, is a highly unusu-
al literary work; Sterne developed a narrative style consciously dismissing plot
structure and substituting digressions for action. However, it is loosely framed: The
narrative starts with Tristram Shandy as autodiegetic narrator explaining his par-
ents’ mental and physical states at the moment of his conception and their influence
on the course of his life; his intention to tell his life story from his conception on-
wards, thereby ridicules Horace’s ab ovo (Horaz and Schäfer, 12). Tristram tells the
reader about the lengthy marriage contract of his parents, his birth and growing up
at Shandy Hall, York, and his voyage to France in order to cure his failing health in
the dry and warm climate, though he feels death is approaching. Since the autodie-
getic narrator Tristram as well as his father Walter Shandy love to digress, the recip-
ient soon learns that patience is key to cherish the meandering storytelling style.
Fifty percent or more of the novel consist of conversations between his father Walter
Shandy and his Uncle Toby as well as stories and philosophical thoughts related by
Walter, including the slow progress of his educational Tristrapaedia project. More-
over, Tristram relates the long-winded story of Toby’s recovery from his war wound
(received in the Siege of Namur) with the help of extensive reading about and re-
modeling of the battlefield as well as Toby’s complicated and persistently failing
courtship of the neighboring Widow Wadman. She would actually like him to marry
her, a plan constantly foiled by Toby’s innocence and naivety.
In the course of the novel, Sterne uses and mocks many contemporary authors,
scientists, and philosophical, religious and scientific theories. The same goes for
scholarly forms and formats as well as the emerging conventions of the still nascent
novel genre: e. g. Sterne satirises the use of footnotes for obtaining validity by filling
them with lengthy and pompous references to fictional authorities, further diverting
the reader from the main story.
Rowson follows Sterne’s plot and chiefly uses direct quotes for his texts, albeit
sometimes in abbreviated form. Many digressions with no connection to the main
plot as well as closed subplots are omitted; the focus is put on the narrative struc-
ture and humour of the novel. Being limited in page number and project time by
his editors, Rowson also chose to leave out parts of volume five of the novel as well
as the entire volumes six and eight of the total of nine. Yet for all the cutting, an
additional narrative superstructure that is not part of the novel is juxtaposed with
the Sternean plot, namely a character named ‘Author’ and his sidekick dog Pete
commenting on the creation of the comic and its content. The recipient is taken on
a journey through the panels, which become a spatialized version of Sterne’s narra-
tive structure. Rowson had the ambition to make the reception process “a stroll
through the novel, with Tristram telling his story as he walks, from left to right
through the panels, from the beginning to the end (with a few meanderings off the
beaten track along the way).”(Rowson 1995, 65) For example, a panel below another
one may function as an architectural basement of the upper one (I/ch. 21/panel 18–
19) or a picture within a panel may function as a panel itself and contain communi-
cation directed at the panel surrounding (preceding?) it (IX/panel 19). With the eye
jumping back and forth between the panels to achieve closure, the journey becomes
its own reward. Though being true for comics in general, connecting the proverb
with the aforementioned ‘stroll’ fits Rowson’s style. Many of his jokes are created
from cheap word play, he points out in connection to creating The Waste Land,
where he was “chucking in every tenuous connection, reference and bad joke I
could think of (dried tubas appeared as running gag, for instance)” (Rowson 1995,
63). Rowson coerces the recipient into an educational travel through the work, ulti-
mately turning the intended “stroll” into a Grand Tour (1995, 65). Richter asserts
that idea: “Most of today’s readers haven’t had the education Sterne’s readers had
[…] I would contend that Rowson’s travesty frames give us back an aspect of the
text that most of my own generation can never directly experience” (2000, 88).
The travel theme is also made evident by the autodiegetic comic narrator Tris-
tram Shandy, who provides a running commentary both in the figurative and literal
meaning of the phrase. Tristram literally travels through the panels and acts as
tour guide for his narrating party and the recipient. His anachronistic party, namely
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce (Rowson 2003, 118–19) and Death (VII/panel 1), acts as
critical and interested tourist group. As tour guide through the comic, Tristram’s
roles are diverse: he contextualizes actions, comments to make scenes more com-
prehensible and shows his narrating party the way to the next panel, e. g. by shrink-
ing and guiding them onto a staircase descending into Toby’s pants (I/ch. 21/panel
18). The staircase leads to a decayed Piranesian vault depicted in the next panel (I/
panel 19). Tristram provides various means of transportation for the narrating party,
among them boats (I/panel 5; III/panel 91), animal spirits (a Dürer-inspired lion,
elephant and rhino in I/panels 7–8), a sedan chair (III/panel 111), a carriage (VII/
panel 7) and a rocket (I/panel 32). Possibly planned as a comment on impatient
578 Luisa Menzel
recipients, many of the allegedly quickly going vehicles fall prey to accidents, forc-
ing the narrating party to continue on foot.
Rowson’s curious selection for the party can be related to a misled reading of
the novel Tristram Shandy as a modern work, as debated in Parnell (1994, 222) and
Wolff (1995, 773). Rowson’s characters Woolf and Joyce are associated with interior
monologue and stream of consciousness, which the historical Woolf and Joyce
helped to develop. The artist counts on the recipient recalling this: character Woolf
calls it a “Novel” (I/panel 6) whereas Joyce cries “’Tis a Stream of Consciousness,
Begob!” (I/panel 8). The discussion sensitizes the reader for the dangers of interpret-
ing an 18th-century work through anachronistic literary theory. The character of
Death on the other hand functions mostly as Tristram’s “stooge” (Rowson 2000:
90), but is also foreshadowing Tristram’s fictional and Sterne’s real illness. In addi-
tion, he presents the recipient with a not too serious literal version of a Barthian
death-of-the-author approach to the comic. In effect, Rowson’s narrating party facil-
itates the recipient’s attempts at closure (Abbott) and emplotment (Deciu Ritivoi,
232), with the companions working as personified reading strategies as well as com-
ic relief. The narrating party around Tristram never interacts with the characters
whose actions they comment upon. The Author and Pete are only occasionally ac-
knowledged by Tristram (IX/panels 2, 6, 7 and IV/ch. 18) and once also Pete by
Death (IV/panel 1). This more or less consistent ignoring of certain characters by
others in the same panel is distantly reminiscent of the theatrical aside and height-
ens the complexity of communications.
Tristram and his party accompany us through the story of his conception, the
dispute between the obstetrics-supporting father Walter Shandy and Mrs Shandy,
who prefers female midwifes, and Tristram’s birth. The story follows Tristram’s
naming, complicated by Walter Shandy’s belief in the impact of first names on the
course of life and the tragic irony of Tristram then being christened “Tristram” in-
stead of “Trismegistus.” Several entertaining digressions follow, including one on
Uncle Toby’s groin wound received during combat and his inclination to overcome
the trauma by modelling fortifications. Now and then the Author and his sidekick
Pete also quarrel over the structure of the comic. One of these discussions ends in
the innards of a whale with Tristram’s party and a group of literary critics. At this
point, narratives set inside big sea beasts like the biblical story of Jonah and the
whale and Collodi’s Pinocchio come to mind, and Rowson’s treatment of the episode
is surely highly allusive. As Joseph Campbell (2008, 74) summarizes, “[t]he idea
that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is
symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale.” When the
whale spits the characters out again in a hiccup, any reader familiar with the novel
will recognize it as a visual metaphor for the birth scene, since the novel’s narrator
labels himself a “hiccup” and “mistake” (II/liv).
Tristram’s actual birth follows all the aforementioned digressions, with baby
Tristram’s nose having been crushed by the delivery forceps. This leads to Walter
Shandy’s breakdown, as short noses have been considered problematic in his family
for generations. The reader then enters the major digression “Slawkenbergius’s
Tale” (from the novel’s fourth volume) on a stranger’s huge nose and the impression
it made on the inhabitants of Strasburg as he passed through, presented in the
comic in panels looking like printed plates drawn in the styles of artists such as
Albrecht Dürer, Aubrey Beardsley, and George Grosz. The ambiguity and absurdity
of the Shandean nose topic is made all the more intriguing since Rowson’s Tristram
wears a tricorn sitting so low as never to reveal his nose. It follows Tristram’s angst-
ridden carriage ride to escape Death, Author and Pete arriving in a Dantesque hell,
where Sterne, Jonathan Swift and Rabelais play strip poker (VII/panel 17), and back
again to Shandy Hall. The artist finally kills the last famous joke of the novel, its
self-description as a “cock and bull story” (VII/panel 28) and is rewarded with being
exiled to a depiction of William Hogarth’s print “Time smoking a picture” (VII/
Finis).
“In general, intermedia theory can work with all kinds of comics, but it works
particularly well with adaptations because the very process of adaptation is prem-
ised in the transposition of material from one medium to another […].” (Stein 2015,
426) Based on Hutcheon (2013, 16–17), Stein (2015, 426) further argues that “adapta-
tion is conceptualized as both a process and a mode of revisionary engagement.”
Rowson invites the recipient to reflect on elements of his adaptation process. For
example, in the first volume, panel 40–43, Pete the dog lies in a meadow and at-
tempts to kill a small snake crossing his way. The alleged snake turns out to be a
text sign, pleading with Pete: “RELEASE ME, CUR! I’M A TYPOGRAPHICAL CONCEIT
ON MY WAY TO VOLUME VI!” and another typographical illustration from Sterne’s
novel, an asterisk, springs up like a flower and supports the purported snake with
“YUP! THAT’S RIGHT!” The communications of the signs/creatures are addressed to
Pete as well as the recipient, encouraging both to self-reflexively regard the signs
as autonomous objects of reflection about Rowson’s adaptations. Wolf (2009: 2) re-
fers to the development from the first communication to the reflection on the media
and means of the communication as ‘meta-ization.’ Rowson uses Sterne’s typo-
graphical signs as triggers calling the recipient’s attention to the meta-izing charac-
ters Pete and Author and making her apply meta-ization in her reception process as
well.
To tackle the relationship of the different communication layers involved in the
meta-ization process, one can build on Stein and especially Wolf. On the semiotic
level, “[…] comics are intramedial because they frequently reference other comics as
well as their own medial form, back-referencing preceding panels and pointing for-
ward to upcoming panels” (Stein 2015, 421). Wolf divides self-references into extra-
compositional self-references to elements outside the “immediate work” and intra-
compositional self-references (2009: 19–20), which correspond to Stein’s referencing
of former or following panels (2015: 421). The novel’s famous “Slawkenbergius Tale,”
a mise en abyme on noses, is presented by Rowson in five images of five distinct
580 Luisa Menzel
Fig. 29.1: Martin Rowson, The Life and Opinions of Tristram

Shandy, Gentleman. London: SelfMadeHero, 2010.
Volume IV, “Slawkenberguis’s Tale,” “Plate II.”
artistic styles, with the images centered within the page and depicted as printed
graphic, in the comic called ‘plates.’ The ‘plates’ appear as if they were printed in
an art catalogue, accompanied by a title, credits and an explanatory text on the
opposite or preceding page. When the recipient gets to “Plate II,” she encounters the
subtitle “Engraving by Albrecht Durer from the so-called ‘Cardinal’s’ edition of Hafen
Slawkenergius de Nasis, Dresden, 1518. Royal Collection.” The “Plate” shows an ad-
aptation of Dürer’s 1513 copper engraving “Ritter, Tod und Teufel,” with the figure of
a dog added on the left and derived from one of Dürer’s three master engravings,
“Melencholia I” 1514. Since Rowson presents the panels as printed reproductions of
drawings imitating the style of engravings, the recipient could suspend all disbelief
and accept the panel as an actual engraving. Despite the panel’s integration into the
comic, it can also function as an autonomous piece of art, especially since all of
Dürer’s three master engravings were executed in such a remarkable quality (fig. 29.1).
In a similar vein, Rowson’s “Plate III” is reminiscent of William Hogarth’s series
of prints, like “A Harlot’s Progress” 1732, another historical example that exceeded
established conventions of engravings as popular art (Hallett 1998, 449). Rowson,
in presenting his version in a format that allows the reader to perceive it as part of
the comic or as an independent work of art, alludes to this revaluation of a previous-
ly ‘lesser’ art form and thus also to the changing status of comics.
In “Plate II,” “Slawkenbergius’s Tale” functions as an extra-compositional self-
reference (Wolf 2009, 19–20) to the adapted Sternean work. Rowson’s Tristram Shan-
dy also includes extra-textual self-references to other works by himself (e. g. to his
appropriation The Waste Land in V/panel 8), which opens the door to that literary
work for the Tristram Shandy comic characters. The recipient is thereby implicitly
invited to explore Rowson’s other work as well.
The third “Plate” of “Slawkenbergius’s Tale” (see Illustration 2) is very closely
based on William Hogarth’s “Southwark Fair.” Over Rowson’s “Plate III,” an adapt-
ed part of the “Tale” is printed in four columns divided by vertical lines; an arrange-
ment often used by Hogarth (e. g. in “A Rake’s Progress”). The text’s appearance is
diversified by the combination of italic handwriting and stresses in straight capital

letters. The variation of the font highlights the visual aesthetics of the text and in-
vites the recipient to ignore the meaning of the letters to transform the columns into
frameless panels filled with abstract architectural elements. Here, Rowson seemed
to have applied especially Hogarth’s principle of variety from his theoretical treatise
Analysis of Beauty (Hogarth [1753], ch. 2). Hogarth suggests the human eye prefers
composed variations of shapes to sameness as the latter is less entertaining.
After the brief excursion to the sub-plot of Slawkenbergius in five plates, the
recipient is abruptly thrown back into the meta-narrative of autodiegetic narrator
Tristram and his party, as they are recovering and smoking between uncle Toby’s
fortification models on Shandy Estate with the Author character and his companion
dog Pete (IV/panel 1), unseen by the characters Walter and Toby above in a bedroom
of Shandy Hall (IV/panel 4).

To understand Rowson’s graphic aesthetics, it is necessary to once more go back to
the aesthetic principles guiding the text that he adapts. Sterne’s novel has a specific
layout and typographic illustrations that are also functioning as punctuation marks,
which results in a multi-modal Gesamtkunstwerk. Though Samuel Johnson (1934,
449) predicted the novel would not last long, its popularity never faded, owing to
the delightful systematic distractions in the Shandean spirit. Shandeism is the natu-
ral philosophy of the triune Kunstfigur Sterne/Tristram Shandy/Yorick, employed to
make “the wheel of life run long and chearfully round” (Sterne cited by Howes 1984,
52) by enjoying “the radical instability […] of words” (Myer 1984, 7–8), preferably in
double entendre (Berthoud 1984, 37). Rowson has been fascinated with these as-
pects for decades and described his aim in adapting the novel as follows:
Tristram Shandy [sic] wasn’t so easy. I like – love – the book. I came to enhance Sterne, not
mock him. Luckily Sterne’s own abiding irony and mischievousness had done part of my work
for me: we were in this together against the unsuspecting reader. Pulling off my cap and bells
for a moment and replacing it with a beret (worn at an angle and sheathed in Gauloise smoke)
I might, in a stern (Sterne?) moment, suggest the synonym “deconstructionist” or even (replac-
ing the beret and Gauloise with a Stetson and cigar) hoarsely whisper “postmodern.” (Rowson
1995, 66)
The last sentence suggests that Rowson’s own mind-set and humor is added to the
Shandean spirit in the adaptation, and it does also show that repeating Sterne’s
method of blurring the borders between author, narrator and main character is es-
sential to the adaptation as well as to the reception process. Rowson’s quote sug-
gests that he created a Kunstfigur similar to Sterne’s, the two uniting their humor –
contrary to Rowson’s statement – not against, but for the curious reader, to dazzle
and puzzle her.
582 Luisa Menzel
Fig. 29.2: Martin Rowson, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
London: SelfMadeHero, 2010. Volume IV, “Slawkenberguis’s Tale,” “Plate III.”
With the subplots enriched with modified artworks by various artists, which in turn
offer more references possibly connected to the subplot, the recipient nearly gets
submerged in this maelstrom of visual-narrative activity. The recipient is, for exam-
ple, invited to mind the details in the third “Plate” of “Slawkenbergius’s Tale,”
based on William Hogarth’s 1733 engraving “Southwark Fair” (Ungar 2016) and
showing the amusements of such a fair. Hogarth’s engraving was sold together with
the series “A Rake’s Progress,” since “Southwark Fair” was considered “a natural
sequel to the series” (Ungar 2006). In Hogarth’s London scene, turmoil on a larger
scale dominates the different groups of lower-class fairgoers; especially the entan-
gled bunch of people just about to fall off the roof on the left side of the picture.
The aggravated crowd in Rowson’s third “Plate” instead shows clerics of several
ranks in the front rows; they are debating the nose of the stranger that “Slawkenber-
gius’s Tale” is all about. Rowson takes up the Hogarthian theme of society’s mad-
ness by showing his figures going crazy over an irrelevant question, just as Hogarth
hints at the insanity of social politics promoting fairs but ignoring the bad living
conditions of the poor. Rowson’s written hint in the right column above the image,
“Makes everyman a BEDLAM’s FOOL,” refers to the Bedlam/Bethlam Hospital Lon-
don, an infamous mental asylum (fig. 29.2).
The high frequency of changing panel forms and their irregularity and richness
in graphic detail often directs the eye to the adjoining panels and to the page layout
(e. g. I/panel 28–31), ever so often quickening or slowing down the reception speed,
reminding the recipient that Rowson as much as Sterne made part of their works
about the process of ‘reading.’ Rowson certainly pushes the recipient to her limits
in having her figure out the narrative level of the respective panel, but falls some-
what short of his self-proclaimed aim of undermining traditional comic narrative
structures (Rowson 1995, 64).
Rowson’s uses of language and graphic aesthetics are heterogeneous and clear-
ly divided by their respective functions. (Mock-)learned language and colloquial
phrases in the meta-narrative of Author and dog Pete are used to comment on and/
or contrast with the (strongly abbreviated) original text by Sterne. “‘N’ we’re taking
advantage of this caesura in the narrative to review our own progress in the great
task at hand!” exclaims Author, making Pete think “Sez who? And what narrative?”
(I/panel 40). The integrated text from the novel is graphically “akin to traditional
typefaces” (Alspaugh 2009, 132), whereas comments by Author, Pete and minor
characters like the walrus Edgar (who secretly slipped into the pond of a Dürer
adaptation in IV/”Plate II”; vol III/panel 90 ff) are in typical comic lettering. The
Author assumes the role of a sometimes clueless enthusiast, while Pete often criti-
cises the proceedings. The dialectic relationship of the two mirrors Tristram’s father
Walter Shandy and his uncle Toby Shandy in their dependence on each other’s
input and strongly differing ambitions and rhetoric.
Rowson seems to have favorite artists and writers that he borrows from quite
often and openly: apart from the already mentioned Dürer and Hogarth, here are
also frequent variations of Roy Liechtenstein’s “Pop” cover for Newsweek 1966 (II/
panel 13), Piranesi’s etchings (e. g. “The pyramid of Cestius” in VII/panel 13 and
variations of Carceri in VII/panel 12, I/panel 1), and slightly adapted quotations
from Dante’s La Divina Commedia (VII/panels 13–15, 17), as well as single references,
e. g. to Hokusai’s Wave (II/panel 97), Joseph Wright of Derby’s “An Experiment on
a Bird with an Air Pump” (I/panel 126), Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (IV/panel 107) and
style references to Krazy Kat (I/panel 40). He obviously chooses realistic or comic
graphic works as artistic sources, preferably in cross-hatching, as they are easier to
adapt than the oil paintings or water colors by the artists he refers to and therefore
faster recognizable by the recipient.
Rowson thereby integrates crucial elements from the compositions and styles
of drawing of these artworks and renders the resulting images more dynamic
through his cartoon style which “is visceral and deliberately offensive” (British Car-
toons Archive). He cultivates a “resolute vulgarity” (British Cartoons Archive) in
order to provoke with political cartoons; in Tristram Shandy, the comic, he rather
dismantles Sterne’s verbal metaphors by visualizing them.

Rowson’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (2010 [1995]) re-
ceived more academic attention than his preceding literary adaptations, The Waste
Land (1990, discussed by Williams and Brunner 2016; McHale 2010; Glaubitz and
Tabachnick 2013) and Gulliver’s Travels – adapted and updated by Martin Rowson,
2012, which was the subject of many newspaper and blog reviews but did, surpris-
ingly, not yet receive any scholarly attention. Tristram Shandy, the Comic was also
generally reviewed positively in a lot of blogs (e. g. Kirkus Media ed; Stuart) and
became the topic of interviews with Rowson, such as the episode with Rowson and
Steve Bell for the BBC series Rude Britannia (Gordon 2010).
584 Luisa Menzel
Leann Davis Alspaugh’s contribution (2009), like all other academic papers on
Rowson’s Tristram Shandy, treats the work rather favorably:
The conjunction of Sterne and Rowson is remarkably successful, especially as both the novel
and the comics version emphasize form to such a degree that meaning threatens to dissolve
amid the virtuosic effects. Through their use of techniques of accretion, allusion, and closure,
both Sterne and Rowson shed new light on the act of reading and the construction of meaning.
(2009, 132)
Alspaugh notes how “Rowson’s graphic novel treatment of Tristram Shandy, the
novel– where the iconic meets the canonic” directs the “performative act of read-
ing” (2009, 134). Though not taking a direct intermedial approach, Alspaugh’s appli-
cation of Wolfgang Iser’s act of reading to the reader’s travel between the genres
(Iser 1987a, 142), references and gaps highlights the importance of the reader’s cul-
tural sophistication and willingness to follow Tristram’s lead (Iser 1987b, 84). The
comic is by no means elitist, nor does Alspaugh (2009, 131) imply that: the reader
can indulge in the “penchant for weirdness, exuberance, and earthiness” which
Rowson shares with Sterne. Friant-Kessler and Lasne (2006, 243) similarly take a
reader-response approach, arguing that along with Rowson, who keeps his work in
the Shandean spirit, the full understanding of his adaptation can only be achieved
by spotting the variety of sources referred to which add up to “un objet esthétique
architecturé.” For achieving the impossible in his project, Rowson’s work is com-
mended via the positively answered question:
“En effet, n’est-ce pas une gageure que de passer d’un médium à un autre en incluant l’arrière
plan épistémocritique, les digressions philosophiques et tout ce qui fait l’esprit de ce texte?”
[Is it not in fact practically impossible to change from one medium to another and also include
the epistemocritical background, the philosophical digressions and everything that makes up
the spirit of this text? (translation mine)] (Friant-Kessler and Lasne 2006, 253)
David H. Richter concentrates on the elements of temporality of the comic, especial-

ly narrative time:
The opposite of narrativity would be stasis: those occasions when the narrative [...] comes to
a dead stop [...]. This too is an important element in Sterne’s text. It is with a sense of being
somewhere as opposed to getting anywhere that we listen [...]. (Richter 2000 70)
In Rowson, stasis is also often achieved in conversations between Author and dog
Pete. Richter reads the graphic novel as “an antinovel not about writing but about
reading Sterne’s Tristram Shandy” (Richter2000, 71). He argues that Rowson decon-
structs his reading of Sterne’s text and does that to write about it as well as about
the difficulty in telling the story. He thereby repeats Sterne’s deconstruction and
achieves a “dédoublement,” a term coined by Derrida (Richter 2000, 73). The dédou-
blement here is a “deconstructive textual self-replication” (ibid.) and could be car-
ried on by an artistic recipient of Rowson’s work and result in an adaptation of the
recipient’s dédoublement of Rowson’s dédoublement, etc; creating an endless mise

en abyme.
Peter de Voogd comments shortly on both Rowson’s and Michael Winterbot-
tom’s topic selections for their adaptations:
The most recent adaptations in a visual medium, by the cartoonist Martin Rowson and the film
maker Michael Winterbottom, follow the pictorial tradition by curtailing Sterne’s text consider-
ably. Rowson’s cartoon version skips most of the later volumes of Sterne’s book, putting in
their stead brilliant modern equivalencies of Sterne’s self-conscious play on contemporary
modes of narration (thus we get “Oliver Stone’s Tristram Shandy From a place called Namur
to Hell and Back starring [...] Meryl Streep as ‘Trim,’” Rowson, frame 56). […] Both [Rowson
and Winterbottom] focus on a selection of set pieces, and stress the wildly digressive nature
of the narrative, representing Sterne’s text in a sequence of caricatural frames and scenes.
Interestingly, both reworkings of Tristram Shandy ignore the “sentimental” and “moral” as-
pects of Sterne’s text, and emphasize the bawdy and scatological potential instead. (de Voogd
2006, 16)
Though Rowson’s focus lies on the satirical, the occasional appearance (166 of 588
panels) of the sentimental character Uncle Toby softens the satirical frame. His na-
ïve emotional manner and morals are opposed to Walter Shandy’s rationalism and
especially evident when Toby whistles a few tunes of “Lillabullero” for calm (I/
panel 139; III/panels 17, 24–29).
Rowson’s Graphic Response (Rowson 2013) and his plenary lecture “From the
Pedestal to the Panel: Literary Adaptation and the Aesthetics of Sequential Art” at
the Anglistentag 2012, Potsdam (Röder: xi) make the following points:
– Comics as a genre is innately a genre of adaptation.
– Studying comics as a rather new genre is difficult if attempted with standard-
ized analytical tools developed for other genres by persons unwilling to break
fresh ground.
– Not all literary works are per se suitable for adaptation and not all adaptations
are comparable to the original form they adapted, as both works are foremost
independent works of art.
Literary adaptions in comic book format have become an established part of the
comics landscape (Baetens and Frey 2015, 201) and are a very diverse and compre-
hensive form of intermedial adaptation of literary texts in general (Blank 2015, 12).
Rowson’s Tristram Shandy is certainly a very close adaptation of Sterne’s in medial
terms, as a glance at the material interface (printing ink on paper), the format
(book), title and text (the latter selected and partly changed in Rowson) suggest.
“Adaptations and appropriations can vary in how explicitly they state their intertex-
tual purpose” and in the label used for these phenomena (Sanders 2006, 2–3). With
(hopefully) more adaptations to come from the artist, his theory of literary adapta-
tion and comics will very likely evolve and so will his comics. Especially Rowson’s
varying use of the terms “comic book” (Rowson 2003, 113), “comix” (Rowson 2012,
586 Luisa Menzel
panel 8) and “graphic novel” (Rowson 1995, 63) as well as his unease in the applica-
tion of adaptation vocabulary (“I’m currently adapting (translating? transliterat-
ing?),” (Rowson 1995, 63) give reason to expect some further discussion from the
artist in future works.
5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited
Abbott, H. P. “Closure.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred
Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2008. 65–66.
Alspaugh, Leann D. “Treading Upon the Shroud: Martin Rowson’s Graphic Novel.” Shandean 20
(2009): 131–45.
Alspaugh, Leann D. “‘Hogarth’s Witty Chissel’: Hogarth’s Frontispieces for Tristram Shandy.”
Shandean 24 (2013): 9–30.
Anon. THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN: KIRKUS REVIEW. https://
www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/martin-rowson/the-life-and-opinions-of-tristram-
shandy-gentleman/. [1997] 20 May 2005 (25 Sep 2016).
Baetens, Jan and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2015.
Berthoud, Jacques. “Shandeism and Sexuality.” Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries.
Ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer. London: Barnes & Noble, 1984. 24–38.
Blank, Juliane. Literaturadaptionen im Comic: Ein modulares Analysemodell. 1. Aufl. Berlin:
Bachmann, 2015.
British Cartoons Archive, ed. “Martin Rowson. About” University of Kent.
http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/artists/martinrowson/biography. No date (28 Sep 2016).
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd rev. Novato: New World Library, 2008.
Deciu Ritivoi, Andreea. “Identity and Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.
Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2008. 231–235.
De Voogd, Peter. “How to read Tristram Shandy.” XVII-XVIII. Revue de la société d’études anglo-
américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. 63 (2006): 7–17.
Friant-Kessler, Brigitte and Sandra Lasne. “La Lettre, l’esprit et l’image: Tristram Shandy de
Martin Rowson entre texte(s), contexte(s) et hors-texte(s).” BSEAA 62 (2006): 241–260.
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford:
Glaubitz, Nicole. “Vernacular Modernism: Martin Rowson’s ‘The Waste Land.’” Proceedings.
Potsdam. Ed. Katrin Röder and Ilse Wischer. Trier: WVT, Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2013. 245–252.
Gordon, Joe. Rude Britannia. http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2010/rude-britannia/.
14 June 2014 (24 Sep 2016).
Hallett, Mark. “Hogarthomania and Print Culture.” Art History 21.3 (1998): 449–453.
Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty: Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of
taste. http://www.tristramshandyweb.it/sezioni/e-text/hogarth/analysis_html/title-
page.htm. 1 Jan 2016 [1753] (23 Sep 2016).
Horatius Flaccus, Quintus, and Eckart Schäfer. Ars poetica: Lateinisch. Rev. und bibliograph.erg.
Aufl. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994.
Howes, Alan B. “Laurence Sterne, Rabelais and Cervantes: The Two Kinds of Laughter in ‘Tristram
Shandy.’” Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries. Ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer. London:
Barnes & Noble, 1984. 39–56.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey. Mountain View:
Mayfield Publishing, 1987a.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London: Routledge, 1987b.
Johnson, Samuel. “Conversation with Boswell (March 20, 1776).” Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Vol II.
Ed. George B. Hill, L. F. Powell. Oxford: Claredon, 1934.
McHale, Brian. “Narrativity and Segmentivity, or, Poetry in the Gutter.” Intermediality and
Storytelling. Ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. 27–48.
Myer, Valerie G. “Introduction.” Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries. Ed. Valerie Grosvenor
Mye,. London: Barnes & Noble, 1984. 7–12.
National Gallery of Art. “Dürer, Albrecht – Melencholia I 1514.” http://www.nga.gov/content/
ngaweb/Collection/highlights/highlight35101.html. No date (2 Aug 2017).
Newman, Kim. “Snatches, By Martin Rowson,” The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/
arts-entertainment/books/reviews/snatches-by-martin-rowson-343560.html. 6 February 2006
(4 May 2017).
Parnell, J.T. “Swift, Sterne, and the Skeptical Tradition.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture
23.1 (1994): 221–42.
Piazza, S., I. Grassi, and I. Mastroianni. Laurence Sterne and William Hogarth in Parallel.
http://tristramshandyweb.it/. No date (1 March 2017).
Richter, David H. “Narrativity and Stasis in Martin Rowson’s Tristram Shandy.” Shandean 11
(2000): 70–90.
Röder, Katrin, and Ilse Wischer. “Preface.” Proceedings. Potsdam. Ed. Katrin Röder and Ilse
Wischer. Trier: WVT, Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2013. XI–XII.
Rowson, Martin and Kevin Killane. Scenes from the Lives of the Great Socialists. London:
Grapheme Publications, 1983.
Rowson, Martin. “Hyperboling Gravity’s Ravelin: A Comic Book Version of Tristram Shandy.”
Shandean 7 (1995): 63–86.
Rowson, Martin. “Re Richter’s Rowson.” Shandean 11 (2000): 90–91.
Rowson, Martin. “A Comic Book Version of Tristram Shandy.” Shandean 14 (2003): 104–121.
Rowson, Martin. Snatches. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
Rowson, Martin. Giving Offense. London, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009.
Rowson, Martin. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. London: SelfMadeHero,
2010.
Rowson, Martin. The Limerickiad. Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2011.
Rowson, Martin and Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels. London: Atlantic, 2012.
Rowson, Martin. The Waste Land. London, New York: Seagull Books, 2012 [1990].
Rowson, Martin. “Towards a Theory of Literary Adaption in Comic Book Format: A Graphic
Response.” Proceedings. Potsdam. Ed. Katrin Röder and Ilse Wischer. Trier: WVT, Wiss. Verl.
Trier, 2013. 237–243.
Rowson, Martin. “Power, Parody and Pay − Serious Art? No, But Cartoons are Serious Business.”
Artenol Journal. www.artenol.org/martin-rowson.html. 2016 (28 Sep 2016).
Rowson, Martin, “Campbell Toilet.” Culture Northern Ireland. http://
www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/visual-arts/cartoonist-martin-rowson-his-four-
favourite-works. No date (28 Sep 2016).
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006.
Sienkiewicz, Bill, Dan Chichester and Willie Schubert. Herman Melville: Moby Dick. Adapted By
Bill Sienkiewicz. New York: Berkley First Publishing, 1990.
Stein, Daniel. “Comics and Graphic Novels.” Handbook of Intermediality. Ed. Gabriele Rippl.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 420–438.
588 Luisa Menzel
Stephanson, Raymond. “Tristram Shandy and the Art of Conception.” Vital Matters: Eighteenth-
Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death. Ed. Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall. Toronto,
ON: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 93–108.
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. London, New York:
Penguin.
Stuart, Alasdair. The Friday Review: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
https://www.ninthart.org/display.php?article=193. 2002 (24 Sep 2016).
Tabachnick, Steve. “The Gothic Modernism of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land and What Martin Rowson’s
Graphic Novel Tells Us about It and Other Matters.” RWT 8.1–2 (2000): 79–92.
Ungar, Benjamin N. “Take Me to the Southwark Fair: William Hogarth’s Snapshot of the Life and
Times of England’s Migrating Early 18th Century Poor.” The Site for Research on William
Hogarth. http://www.william-hogarth.de/Southwark.html. July 2016 (4 July 2017).
Williams, Frederick and Edward Brunner. “Eliot with an Epic, Rowson with a Comic: Recycling
Foundational Narratives.” Son of Classics and Comics. Ed. George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 179–99.
Wolf, Werner. “Metareference across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and
Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” Metareference across media: Theory and case studies.
Ed. Werner Wolf, et al. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 1–85.
Wolff, Erwin. “Nachwort.” Leben und Meinungen von Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. Erwin
Wolff. Trans. Otto Weith. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995. 773–793.
5.2 Further Reading

Henke, Christoph. “Self-Reflexivity and Common Sense in ‘A Tale of a Tub’ and ‘Tristram Shandy’:
Eighteenth-Century Satire and the Novel.” Self-Reflexivity in Literature. Ed. Werner Huber,
Martin Middeke and Hubert Zapf. Würzburg, Germany: Köngshausen & Neumann, 2005. 13–
37.
Ljungberg, Christina. “Intermedial Strategies in Multimedia Art.” Media borders, Multimodality
and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström and Jørgen Bruhn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010. 81–95.
Rowson, Martin. “Drawing out the dark side.” Index on Censorship 43.1 (2014): 34–40.
Tabachnick, Steve. “The Gothic Modernism of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land and What Martin Rowson’s
Graphic Novel Tells Us about It and Other Matters.” RWT 8.1–2 (2000): 79–92.
Thon, Jan-Noël. “Who’s Telling the Tale? Authors and Narrators in Graphic Narrative.” From Comic
Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative.
Ed. Stein, Daniel and Thon, Jan-Noël. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 67–99.
Harriet Earle
30 Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis
Abstract: Marjane Satrapi’s 2000 comic Persepolis tells the story of her childhood
in post-Revolution Iran and the ways in which this experience affected her as an
adolescent in Austria and into maturity. Using simple black and white images and
a clear chronological timeline, Satrapi brings together her own story and that of her
country to create a book that is both educational and entertaining. In her work, she
does not shy away from some of the more controversial issues facing Iranians, most
notably the veil and the modesty laws that drastically altered daily life for women
in the country. Over the course of her story of education (Bildungsroman), Satrapi
develops an understanding of, and objections to, the Iranian Islamic regime that
she presents in an unrefined, naïve voice in the first section of the book; these
objections are fully realised by the end, culminating
Key Terms: Bildungsroman; Women’s Writing; Political Narratives; Iran; Life Writ-
ing

As many of the other chapters in this guide show, comics as a form is able to tell
big stories and make grand statements in ways that are different from – and comple-
mentary to – other artistic forms. Marjane Satrapi’s 2000 comic in two parts, Perse-
polis, is able to do both through the lens of a young girl’s maturation and education.
Made up of A Story of a Childhood and A Story of a Return, Persepolis follows the
early life of Marjane ‘Marji’ Satrapi. Born in Rasht, Iran, in 1969, Satrapi grew up in
a middle-class family with politically active parents whose Marxist beliefs led them
to support the revolution against the Shah in the late 1970s. Persepolis begins in
1979, with the installation of Muslim fundamentalists in the Shah’s place, and opens
with the 10-year-old Marji and her classmates being forced to wear a veil in public.
A strong-willed and rambunctious child, Satrapi traces her adolescence through nu-
merous run-ins with the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution for flouting modesty
regulations before moving to Vienna in 1983, to attend the Lycée Français de Vi-
enne. She returned to Iran to study for a Master’s degree from the Islamic Azad
University in Tehran before leaving Iran permanently and moving to France, where
she now resides.
When speaking about her oeuvre, Satrapi initially appears modest. In a 2007
interview with Robert Root, she suggests that she turned to creating comics because
she is “a very lousy writer”:
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-034
590 Harriet Earle
I have actually tried, you know, at one time to write. If I had to write this short article or
something, here I am good. But for a novel, just forget about it. I lose all my sense of humour,
I lose completely all my decency, and I become completely lousy and pathetic […]. Drawing
gives to me the possibility of this sense of saying what I want to say. (Root 2007, 150)
In a 2012 interview with The Washington Post, Satrapi suggests that it wasn’t until
reading Maus that she fully understood the way that comics can tell stories (Cavna
2012). When beginning to read her work, it becomes quickly clear that, for Satrapi,
comics is not just a “means to an end” to allow her to express what she wants to
say, but that she appreciates the finer nuances of the form and is willing to work to
use them for her own ends: “comics is the only media [sic] in the world that you
can use the image plus the writing and plus the imagination and plus be active
while reading it” (Root 2007, 150). As I will discuss in this chapter, Satrapi’s decep-
tively simple artwork is in stark contrast to the rich and complex narrative web that
builds on the hidden complexities of the comics form to create a book that works
on multiple levels and with a wide range of themes.
Like many of the comics discussed in this volume, Persepolis has grown in stat-
ure since its initial publication. A francophone animated film adaptation debuted
at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize. An English-language
version was released in 2008 and was subsequently nominated for the Academy
Award for Best Animated Feature. In addition, following the 2009 Iranian presiden-
tial elections, Satrapi gave permission for two pseudonymous Iranian artists to re-
lease Persepolis 2.0, a ten-page account of the re-election of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. The original artwork of Persepolis is presented with new words to
reflect the changed political climate and was speedily disseminated internationally
as a webcomic. Persepolis is the only one of Satrapi’s works to be published in
several parts (four in France; two in the UK/US). She has written two further comics
and a number of books for children. Both Embroideries (2005) and Chicken with
Plums (2006) take as their starting point Satrapi’s Iranian heritage and tell richly-
woven personal narratives, before diverting into different narrative strands. Em-
broideries is something of a comics play, with a group of women discussing various
topics with humor, tact and raw honesty. Chicken with Plums introduces Marjane’s
great-uncle, Nasser Ali Khan, who was a musician in Iran. After breaking his tar (a
long-necked, stringed instrument native to the Caucasus) and being unable to find
a satisfactory replacement, Khan takes to his bed and waits to die. The comic fol-
lows his last eight days and recreates his life through a series of carefully wrought
flashbacks; it was made into a critically acclaimed film in 2011.
The turn of the twentieth century proved to be an important period of growth in
both comics representation of conflict and comics as Life Writing (↗9 Life Writing).
Although Art Spiegelman’s Maus, often written about with hagiolatrous fervor by
comics scholars, was already thirteen years old at this point (↗22 Art Spiegelman,
Maus), it still dominated the ranks of comics memoirs. Persepolis’s publication coin-
cided with the release of several other key autobiographical comics, including Epi-
leptic (originally L’Ascension du Haut Mal) by David B. (2002) and One Hundred
Demons by Lynda Barry (2002). Although autographics were not a new concept,
their popularity and positive reception was certainly on the rise; today it is not
hyperbolic to say that a large percentage of the comics canon is occupied by auto-
graphics and, furthermore, the form is being used to tell bold, multifaceted narra-
tives to great effect. Comics as an academic concern has gained similar ground, and
it is highly likely that academic interest and the broadening scope of comics art
have developed in tandem, rather than as separate, coincidental events. Persepolis
sits firmly within a key period for the development of the form and is a central voice
in the debate on how comics tells stories and why.
Persepolis contributes to the discussion of women and Islam. The debate sur-
rounding the wearing of the veil by Muslim students had been ongoing in France
since 1989, when Muslim schoolgirls had refused to remove their hijab, despite the
fact that, in accordance with the French constitutional concept of Laïcité, the hijab
is banned as an “ostentatious display of faith.” Much of Persepolis is concerned
with the policing of the female body and its publication therefore seemed timely.
To this day, the issue of Muslim women and modesty regulations continues to cause
consternation in France.

Persepolis is a comic of two halves (or four quarters in the French version). The
Story of a Childhood follows Marji from the beginning of the Islamic Revolution to
her departure for Vienna in 1983; The Story of a Return traces her teenage years in
Vienna, her return to Tehran, an unfortunate marriage and eventual divorce, and
ends with her departure for France. The two books mirror each other structurally.
In each volume, Marji must learn to adapt to a new situation. In both volumes, she
finds this impossible and, after a series of run-ins with those around her (and, more
crucially, the apparatus of the state, both directly and indirectly), she is forced to
relocate. At the end of book one, this means going home to Tehran; at the end of
book two, she begins to make a new home in Europe.
Throughout both volumes, Satrapi introduces a number of characters who are
integral to her process of maturation. Her Marxist intellectual parents, outspoken
grandmother and revolutionary Uncle Anoosh all instill in Marji a strong political
streak and an understanding of the importance of being politically and culturally
aware of one’s past and present. In Vienna, her sexually liberated friend Julie and
pseudo-intellectual school friends introduce Marji to new theories and ways of exist-
ing, though she soon sees through their veneer of worldliness to their political na-
iveté and showy, yet misguided Communism. Marji’s first husband, Reza, is the one
592 Harriet Earle
who (inadvertently) confirms Marji’s incompatibility with the Iranian regime. They
marry young to avoid the strict rules against male-female interaction outside of mar-
riage but divorce after only three years. Marji’s free-spirited, bold nature does not
make her a good match for the patriarchal regime of Iran, nor does it make her an
ideal match for a man raised in such a society.
Her story is one of movement from East to West and from childhood to matura-
tion and many of the coordinates by which Satrapi steers her narrative are distinctly
Western. Persepolis follows the form of the Bildungsroman; taken from the German
for “novel of education,” this is a nineteenth-century novelistic style, with Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) being usually credited as the first of this
genre. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the Bildungsroman is a form “on the border
between two epochs, and at the transition point from one to the other” (Moretti
2000, viii). It is focused on the journey of the protagonist from child to adult, in
terms of literal age, emotional maturity and social position. In his seminal study,
Moretti argues that this form grew in nineteenth-century Europe, because it was a
society that “held fast to the notion that the biography of a young individual was
the most meaningful viewpoint for the understanding and evaluation of history”
(2000, 16). He writes:
One must learn first and foremost to direct the plot of [his own] life so that each moment
strengthens one’s sense of belonging to a wider community. Time must be used to find a home-
land. If this is not done, or one does not succeed, the result is a wasted life: aimless, meaning-
less. (Moretti 2000, 19)
There is a definite geographic aspect to the form, then. The young protagonist must
be able to root themselves very literally within a geographic social area, as well as
within their correct hierarchical position. But more than that, the individual must
recognize themselves as the first agent of their own life. It is for the individual to
carve out their position within their community. While their first engagement with
it is largely without their input, their continued development is entirely driven by
personal drive. Unable or unwilling to do so, Satrapi establishes herself as part of
a different strand of the Bildungsroman, which we can ostensibly trace back to Mark
Twain’s Huck Finn and similar outsiders within their own homes: she is unable to
forge a path within her ancestral community of Iran and so must step aside and
move into another in order to complete the process of maturation and finally earn
a position as member of – and actor within – society.
In most other ways, Satrapi’s maturation follows a clear path. Understandably,
given her age, much of her narrative trajectory is framed around her school life and
her interactions with school authorities, many of which are not positive. Her formal
educational experiences teach her how not to be and what not to do; they do not
appear to teach her anything positive, though these experiences are undoubtedly
formative. It is the education that she receives outside of the formal classroom that
proves the most important to Marji’s development. Her parents do not shield her
from the political conflicts in the city and include her in discussion on the revolu-
tion; Uncle Anoosh is similarly honest and open with her. Arguably, her family’s
encouragement of Marji’s questioning and outspoken nature is what makes her un-
suitable for the rigid educational system of the Iranian state. Nevertheless, she and
her classmates are able to work together, to move beyond the constrictions of their
sex, to learn in community with each other.
A key example of this occurs during Marji’s time as an art student at university
(‘The Socks’). In an anatomy class, the female students are presented with their
artist’s model – a woman covered entirely by a chador: “We looked.... from every
direction… and from every angle… but not a single part of her body was visible. We
nevertheless learned to draw drapes” (Satrapi 2008, 201). When presented with a
(fully clothed) male model, Marji is chastised for looking at him. She protests, ask-
ing “What would you have me do? Should I draw this man while looking at the
door?!” to which she is told “Yes” (2008, 302). In contrast, Marji and her fellow
students come together to create a learning collective without restriction: “We
would go to one another’s houses, where we posed for each other [… W]e had at
last found a place of freedom” (2008, 306). When the official state apparatus does
not support the education and communal growth of women, they come together to
subvert it. Satrapi uses two half-page panels to show this dichotomy: one that
shows a group of women in chadors with only their (very similar) faces visible. The
other shows the same group of women without veils, with a variety of hairstyles,
necklines that display décolletage, collarbones and shoulders, their individuality
boldly displayed in their physical appearance. Satrapi captions the panels: “Our
behaviour in public and our behaviour in private were polar opposites […]. This
disparity made us schizophrenic” (2008, 307). Marji and her friends must navigate
between two conflicting positions – the state’s patriarchal control and removal of
personal agency versus their own fervent desire for expression and community – in
an attempt to forge their positions within the wider social order.
The issue of the veil will return further on, but first this discussion of the Bil-
dungsroman must be brought to its logical conclusion. According to Kenneth Mil-
lard, the central issue at play in the contemporary Bildungsroman is the tension
between the historical (and furthermore communal) pressures on the individual.
Millard states that “it is in the tension between the autonomy of the individual and
the shaping pressure of history that the ideology of each [text] lies” (Millard 2007,
10). For Millard, this tension in the central conflict of the text is essential in main-
taining the relevance of the Bildungsroman in modern society, which exists by very
different moral and social rules to the societies in which the genre originally flour-
ished. Such shifts are clearly shown in Persepolis, which frames itself around Marji’s
political and social education in a culture drastically different from nineteenth-cen-
tury Europe. Furthermore, current criticism has shifted to structural and narrative
features. Julia Round writes:
[This new shift in critical focus] defines the plot events in terms of self-understanding rather
than personal growth; emphasizes the dual position of the protagonist (as both reflective nar-
594 Harriet Earle
rator and developing subject); and notes a circular (rather than linear) narrative structure.
These later critics also agree that the genre model can also be applied to more recent works
and can be used as a “heuristic tool” to compare texts (Round 2010, 190–191).
This shift in critical attention is especially useful for the study of comics and the
Bildungsroman. Charles Hadfield claims that comics have a special ability to be
self-reflexive, which often emerges as an awareness of the text’s material nature.
Annette Fantasia notes that this concern with the textural “suggests that [comics]
is well suited for representing the Bildungsroman, since, even etymologically speak-
ing, the genre itself is evocative of the tactile; the German term ‘Bildung’ comes from
the Old High German word ‘bilidōn,’ which means to ‘form’ or to ‘shape’” (Fantasia
2011, 85).
As many other chapters in this collection will attest, many aspects of the narra-
tive are created through the formal construction of the text. The thematic contradic-
tion of the Bildungsroman – a story that is simultaneously about both child and
adult – can be aptly tackled in a form in which two contradictory images can sit
(literally) side-by-side and remain there, in a static panel, while the action of the
narrative continues in another (literal) space.
Throughout Persepolis, the veil becomes the central icon for the rigid regime
and its oppressive views of women and femininity. The first chapter, aptly titled
‘The Veil,’ opens with a line of identical girls in black veils staring bleakly from the
panel. To a group of small children, separated from their male classmates and
friends, the veil is not an important item of religious attire to be respected and
revered; it is a jump rope, a ‘monster of darkness’ costume, a toy (Satrapi 2008, 3).
Satrapi makes it clear that they did not understand why they had to wear the veil.
Any explanation of its significance was either missing or lost on the children, who
would have seen their male friends being treated differently, which is doubly con-
fusing. Visually, the veil receives no special attention: it is simply a black shape
that covers and surrounds the face of the female characters. There is no delicacy of
detail. Satrapi thereby demonstrates her disdain for the veil through her minimalist
artistic rendering of it. Women who wear a chador (fully covering robes, held closed
manually at the front) become black blobs, without any definition of body shape or
limbs. They aren’t even distinguishable as human. The policing of the female body
and the misogynist modesty regulations of the regime thus form one of the main
conflicts of the text. Marji is unwilling to conform to the strict modesty regulations,
especially as they only affect women and even more so when the regulations impede
her ability to move through the world as an active agent.
The veil is repeatedly shown to strip women of their individuality. But more
importantly, it is a symbol for the state’s silencing and suppressing of free thought
and creativity in both women and men. Though women are undoubtedly hit harder
by the revolution, religious men are depicted with beards that obscure their mouths,
a metaphorical silencing of open (potentially dissenting) speech. On her return from
Vienna, Marji is dismayed to find her former close friends have adopted a seemingly
superficial interest in Western beauty ideals: “They all looked like the heroines of
American TV series, ready to get married at the drop of a hat, if the opportunity
presented itself” (Satrapi 2008, 261). However, this adoption of the practices of the
West, which the regime considers decadent and against their faith, is “an act of
resistance on their part” (2008, 261). Later, on entering the university, Marji is
taught new ways to wear the maghnaeh, the hooded headscarf required at the uni-
versity, while keeping a little hair on show; again, such small sartorial changes
become an act of resistance in a regime where the policing of bodies can have capi-
tal consequences. These markers of resistance to the de-individualizing normativity
of the veil grow and develop in importance throughout Persepolis as a way to visibly
communicate political agenda and individual identities. In a culture where the fe-
male body has been stripped of political power and agency, Satrapi demonstrates
how women are re-politicizing themselves quite literally through their clothing; and
this physical re-politicization is made visual on the comics page. This representation
complicates, if not displaces, the Western stereotype of the veiled Muslim woman
as passive in her oppression.
In his seminal 1993 book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud spends a great deal
of time discussing the nature of the icon and the importance of abstraction in the
creation of comics art. He writes, “By stripping down an image to its essential
‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t”
(McCloud 1994, 30). This amplification through simplification allows the art to be
representative of things that we recognise (faces, objects, places) but without un-
necessary information that can confuse or cloud the ultimate aim of the narrative.
The meaning is therefore amplified and made clearer and more explicit in the sim-
ple images. Persepolis is an excellent example of this stripped-down style, rich with
symbolic meaning. The limited facial details allow Western readers to relate to the
characters despite the obvious, potentially obscuring differences between the West
and Iran. It is often the case that simpler images can be more powerful and, in a
text that is loaded with political and historical discussion, the unadorned style al-
lows the true weight of the narrative to be brought to the fore.
Of course, the simple lines and limited use of detail to denote individuals’ char-
acteristics means that, in scenes with large numbers of veiled female characters, it
is extremely difficult to distinguish individual characters. In the earlier parts of the
book, much of the time Marji is the only child present in gatherings of adults and
her relative size allows her to be easily distinguished. Without her veil, she is denot-
ed by her bobbed hair. However, a classroom of veiled girls is depicted as a sea of
blackness with equally indistinguishable morose faces. This is used to excellent
effect by Satrapi, who exploits the sameness of her drawings to highlight the remov-
596 Harriet Earle
al of autonomy caused by the wearing of the veil. As I have already discussed, the
artistic rendering of the veil as a black sheet without definition becomes a key iconic
aspect of the narrative. Furthermore, Satrapi’s glib comment that the art students
‘learned how to draw drapes’ is heavily ironic (2008, 299). In conflating drapes and
veils, two items that are designed to conceal, she is making clear her opinion of the
veil as something to depersonalize women, rather than a garment of modesty as
others in the text claim.
For Rocio Davis, “Satrapi’s artwork is minimal and stark, with curved figures
rarely involving much detail, yet simultaneously humorous and painful in its depic-
tion of escalating violence and madness” (Davis 2006, 271). In a style that is reminis-
cent of both Art Spiegelman (in Maus) and David B. (in Epileptic), her work has the
shape and solidity of an Expressionist wood cut, an aesthetic brought to promi-
nence in the works of Frans Masereel. A notable comparison can be made to the
illustrations of Ludwig Bemelmans in his Madeline series; his naïve, deliberately
childish figures represent the characters not as they are, but as they may have
drawn themselves. Additionally, the dream sequences in which Marji converses with
God are especially similar to David B’s work, in which he fills the background of
the panel with bold geometric designs and shapes to emphasize the narrative’s
dreamlike quality.
We can trace a distinct trajectory through Persepolis from childlike innocence
to maturity through the artwork. The exaggerated height differences between child
and adult, the unnatural body shapes of women in positions of authority, and the
dream sequences demonstrate an intelligent, curious child – but a child nonethe-
less. The child’s view of the world is gradually replaced by a more mature Marji,
who grows both in height and in intellectual curiosity; though the artistic style does
not necessarily change, the narrative and proportions between characters become
more realistic. The artistic style thereby mimics Marji’s developing understanding
of her place in the world. Fernanda Eberstadt calls this “a faux-naif pastiche of
East and West” (Davis 2006, 271). She adds that Satrapi “deploys all the paranoid
Expressionism latent in the comic strip’s juxtapositions of scale […], but when Sa-
trapi depicts a schoolyard brawl, it’s straight from Persian miniature” (2006, 271).
Her art is therefore a representation of her identity: she is both Iranian and Western.
The Expressionist style that has been used to great effect by many Western comics
artists is paired with the flat, chaotic style displayed in much Persian art.

Persepolis has received widespread acclaim in the West, while both the book and
the film remain banned in Iran. At the time of its first publication in France, Satrapi
was unknown as an artist and, in promoting her work, L’Association were taking a
risk. As the work received critical acclaim, Jean-Christophe Menu said:
The phenomenal success of Persepolis [...] is hallucinant. We could not have expected that.
We thought to take a big risk when we published the first volume at 3,000 copies. Four years
later, we had already sold more than 200,000 copies of the four volumes. (Bellefroid 2005, 13)
It quickly became clear that Persepolis was likely to be a ‘breakout’ comic, one that
would move beyond the smaller comics community and achieve popularity within
the wider literary world. While such success is no longer unusual, it is only over
the past fifteen years that this has been the case; the first such comic appeared in
1986 with the publication of Maus. In France popular opinion of comics has long
been one of appreciation and acceptance – but Persepolis met with some curious
criticism in the Anglophone market. No one was necessarily disputing Satrapi’s
skill, but the ‘comic book’ label was met with some disdain. For example, a reviewer
in The Nation wrote:
It has never been a habit of mine to read comic books, so I was, at first, slightly taken aback
by Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi. But she is such a talented artist
and her black-and-white drawings are so captivating, it seems wrong to call her memoir a
comic book. Rather, it is a “graphic memoir” in the tradition of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s bril-
liant story of the Holocaust. (Emerson 2003, n. pag.).
It is an often-repeated claim, and one that surely makes most comics readers scoff
in derision: a good comic is no longer a comic – it is something more. And Persepolis
has faced comments of this nature since its first publication.
Misguided or inappropriate comments aside, Persepolis won a large number of
literary awards and accolades following its publication. Time magazine called it
one of the Best Comics of 2003, with the added description “sometimes funny and
sometimes sad but always sincere and revealing” (Time 2003, n.pag.). In 2004, Sa-
trapi won the American Library Association Alex Award (an award given for the
best book for young adult readers) and the Young Adult Library Services Association
Best Book for Young Adults Award, as well as a smattering of smaller awards in
similar fields. Glowing reviews appeared in the international press, and Persepolis
began to appear on reading lists at schools and universities. Of course, there is
always the risk of a backlash for any text that is used in an educational context,
and Persepolis has been challenged multiple times. In March 2013, the Chicago Pub-
lic Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett determined that the book “contains graphic
language and images that are not appropriate for general use” and it was removed
from classrooms (Ahmed-Ullah 2013, n.pag.). In other schools, the text was chal-
lenged for containing references to gambling and politics.
But Satrapi’s real impact on the literary world goes far beyond the narrow-mind-
edness of school administrators and the pseudo-meritocracy of literary awards. Per-
sepolis has introduced countless readers in the West to the history of Iran in a way
that is both palatable and affecting. She has paved the way for women in the Middle
East to tell their stories and, through her later books, builds on the rich cultural
history that Persepolis sets in motion to create an Iran in comics that cuts through
598 Harriet Earle
the various layers of media rhetoric and image-policing – the Iran that she, as an
educated woman, knows and loves. Her work is often mentioned in the same breath
as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, which chronicles the author’s experiences
as an academic in Tehran in the years after the Revolution. Nafisi’s personal story
is interwoven with stories of her book club, who met privately to discuss works of
Western literature banned by the regime. Nafisi uses the classics of the Western
literary world as a framework and an illustration of her story.
It is through our common reading of these books that Western readers can begin
to understand the vastly different cultural milieu and Nafisi’s place within it. Both
Satrapi and Nafisi are part of a growing Iranian diaspora of women writers, many
of whom are using similar frameworks of Western modernity to tell their stories.
Satrapi’s framework, however, is different. Comics is not a nationally or culturally
defined form. It does not carry the same colonial weight as the novel, nor is it as
public-facing and collaborative as drama. In choosing to tell her story in the comics
form, Satrapi does not face the questions of literary colonialism that are implicit in
Nafisi’s work.
And what is it that Persepolis does for comics – what has Satrapi added to the
wider comics field? Persepolis is a key text in both comics as memoir and women’s
comics. As Trina Robbins writes:
Big chunks of women’s comix tend to be about the artist’s dysfunctional family, miserable
childhood, fat thighs, and boyfriend problems. Although [Aline] Kominsky seems to have in-
vented the form, the autobiographical comic actually harkens back to the confessional style
of mainstream romance comics. (Davis 2006, 268)
In Persepolis, we can trace all of these aspects – family strife, boy troubles, and
body image issues – but they are set against the backdrop of a violent and tumultu-
ous political shift. Satrapi demonstrates the importance of comics, not only as a
form for confession and personal stories, but also as a form for bold narratives of
trauma, political movement and violence. More importantly, she demonstrates that
comics can be both. In an editorial for the New York Times, Satrapi wrote:
I had […] to try to explain to people what Iran was really like. That not every woman in Iran
looked like a black bird. That the axis of evil also included people like myself. That it was a
very bad idea to give democracy as a present to people by bombing them (Darda 2013, 31).
In the opinion of many readers and critics, Satrapi is wholly successful in this aim.
Using a form that, despite its oftentimes simple presentation, can create incredibly
nuanced and affecting stories, Satrapi introduces her country to a wider audience
and strengthens the platform for women’s comics in general and Iranian women’s
narratives in particular.
4 Bibliography
4.1 Works Cited
Ahmed-Ullah, Noreen. “CPS tells schools to disregard order to pull graphic novel.” The Chicago
Tribune, 15 March 2013.
American Library Association. Frequently Challenged Books.
www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks. No date (15 May 2017).
Arnold, Andrew. 2003 Best and Worst: Comics. http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/
0,8599,452401,00.html. Time. 16 May 2003 (15 May 2017).
Bellefroid, Thierry. Les Éditeurs de Bande Dessinée. Brussels: Niffle, 2005.
Cavna, Michael. “Interview with Marjane Satrapi.” The Washington Post, 27 April 2012.
Darda, Joseph. “Graphic Ethics: Theorising the Face in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” College
Literature 40.2 (2013): 31–51.
Davis, Rocio. “A Graphic Self.” Prose Studies 27.3 (2006): 264–279.
Emerson, Gloria. “The Other Iran.” The Nation. 29 May 2003.
Fantasia, Annette. “The Paterian Bildungsroman Reenvisioned: ‘Brain Building’ in Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” Criticism 53 (2011): 83–97.
Hadfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2006.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. London: Harper Perennial, 1994.
Millard, Kenneth. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edingburgh UP,
2007.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. New York: Verso,
2000.
Root, Robert. “Interview with Marjane Satrapi.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 9.2
(2007): 147–57.
Round, Julia. Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels. London: Continuum,
2010.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. London: Vintage, 2008.
Tarlo, Emma. “Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: A Sartorial Review.” Fashion Theory 11.2 (2007): 347–
356.
Trousdale, Rachel. “A Female Prophet? Authority and Inheritance in Marjane Satrapi.” Drawing
from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art. Ed. Jane Tolmie. Jackson: University Press of
Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006):
965–979.
Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge:
Da Capo Press, 2007.
4.2 Further Reading

Abrahamian, Ervand. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Kapuściński, Ryszard. Shah of Shahs. London: Vintage, 1992.
Chaney, Michael. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2007.
600 Harriet Earle
Bashi, Parsua. Nylon Road: A Graphic Memoir of Coming of Age in Iran. New York: St Martin’s
Griffin, 2009.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. London: Harper Perennial, 2003.
Soltani, Amir and Khalil. Zahra’s Paradise. New York: First Second Books, 2011.
Oliver Moisich
31 Grant Morrison: Flex Mentallo
Abstract: A prolific and controversial writer of comics, Grant Morrison employs a
multitude of postmodernist narrative devices in his stories. Readers of his comic
books are often left with no transparent understanding of the narrative’s plot and
themes – Morrison obscures plot with occult symbolism, multi-layered realities, and
a notable lack of explanation. This article looks at Grant Morrison’s four-issue mini-
series Flex Mentallo (1996) to distil these devices into an overview of how Morrison
structures his works. In particular, the article examines ontological metalepses be-
tween diegetic spaces without clearly defined boundaries, and whether narratology
holds any model to survey these storytelling practices. The article also examines
aspects of historiographic metafiction, comics history, and autobiography in Flex
Mentallo and in which way these aspects lead into a deliberate confusion of ontolog-
ical hierarchies.
Key Terms: Grant Morrison, Ontological metalepsis, Historiographic metafiction,

Postmodernism, Comics History

Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison has been heralded for his offbeat but engag-
ing stories. In his over thirty years as an author of graphic narratives, Morrison
has exhausted the toolbox of postmodernism, among which readers find recurring
fictional appearances of himself in his own work. While Morrison’s postmodernist
interaction of an author with their fiction is surely not unique in pop culture, Morri-
son may be unique in believing that his writings cause a bleed between fictional
and real-life entities. In Supergods, he recounts a longer period of sickness around
1993 that only started after he struck King Mob – a pivotal character in Morrison’s
The Invisibles – with “bacterial gods from a diseased twin universe” (2012, 281).
Morrison’s alter egos appear in several of his works, such as King Mob in The Invisi-
bles or Morrison himself in Animal Man. More than a neat trick to remind the reader
of comics’ affectionate relationship with metamediality, Morrison-as-character in
Morrison’s own comics reveals a crucial aspect of his body of work. The author feels
in tune with a collective psyche, to the degree that his non-comic book Supergods
transforms seamlessly from comics history into autobiography. In the book, Morri-
son extends the mythological reading of superheroes to a theory of fiction’s omni-
potence, in which imagination can have actual effects on reality (2012, 274).
The 1996 four-issue series Flex Mentallo (art by Frank Quitely) is a prime exam-
ple of Morrison’s method of operation. It intertwines comics history with Morrison’s
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-035
602 Oliver Moisich
personal biography – his alter ego in Flex is named Wally Sage (“sage,” of course,
meaning “wise mystic,” a shaman). That name, though, is more of a “secret identi-
ty” (1.14.5) than an actual name, just to drive home the point that Wally is actually
the author himself. Morrison devotes one of Supergods’ chapters to Flex Mentallo.
In his own words,
[t]he book was part biography, real and imagined – the story of a life I might have led if the
Mixers had been successful. I saw it as the memoir of an “Earth-2 Grant Morrison,” so I gave
him my own childhood, and he inhabited a rough facsimile of my West End terraced town
house. He was with me with my cat and visiting girlfriend, my comic books, aliens, and white-
hot blitzkrieg visionary nights. (2012, 270)
As it turns out, half of the chapter is not about Flex at all. Instead, Morrison recounts
the so-called “Kathmandu Experience,” a drug-induced trip on the roof top garden
of a hotel that turned out to be one of the formative events both of his personal life
and for his storytelling themes and methods. His view on life after this trip must be
described as a new age hodgepodge: that transubstantiation occurs by growth and
decomposition and that everything is connected with everything else, both in the
flesh as well as ideologically; that we are all “different heads of the same hydra”
(2012, 274–275). Morrison seeks to advance this supposed multidimensional superor-
ganism by implementing his arcane and occult views into his comics. The writer is
also an open practitioner of ‘chaos magick,’ an amalgam belief borrowing from di-
verse fields such as Shamanism, Discordianism, Scientific Theory, and Magic Ritual-
ism. In Morrison’s spiritual belief, comics are sigils, symbols placed on paper in
order to trigger desired outcomes in the real world. Morrison says that he uses chaos
magick as a tool, not as a belief system; he describes himself as a hard sceptic who
would not use it if he were not convinced of the results (Singer 2012, 11). Singer also
points out that “any attempt to study his writing must also seek to understand his
cosmology, given the powerful and reciprocal influence each exerts on the other”
(2012, 10).
Thus, the key phrase for the study of his writing in this paper will be ‘to trigger
desired outcomes in the real world.’ In his examination of Flex Mentallo as a queer
character, Will Brooker distils the difficulty of talking about ‘reality’ in Morrison’s
work by putting the word in quotation marks: “In the ‘real’ world, Flex Mentallo
was invented [...] by the Scottish writer Grant Morrison” (2011, 25). Comics such as
Flex Mentallo and Multiversity contain several realities, of which our reality – the
one in which this very book has been written, printed, and is read right now –
may or may not be a mere version of several other realities. Singer describes this
phenomenon as ‘worlds-within-worlds’ (↗8 World-Building), a variant of historio-
graphic metafiction with realities “ascending or descending through different levels
of magnification and nesting” (2012, 19). Even though many of Morrison’s comics
adhere to a hierarchy of realities (The Invisibles’ “Arcadia” story arc, Animal Man’s
encounter with Grant Morrison, Doom Patrol’s “The Painting That Ate Paris” story
arc, to name only a few), it is exactly the point of Flex Mentallo to obfuscate levels
and relationships of realities. Motions of ascent and descent are replaced with intru-
sion and fusion. Morrison applies this ontological confusion to several of Flex Men-
tallo’s layers – the miniseries’ plot handles realities with deliberate obscurity.
Flex Mentallo is also a meta-commentary on historical developments in Ameri-
can comics and seeks to liberate the superhero genre from the gravitas and self-
importance that governed it in the late 1980s and 90s. The comic aims at a return
to inherent mythological properties of the American superhero. Morrison considers
Flex Mentallo part of his ‘hypersigil’ trilogy – a more complex variant of sigil prac-
tice – along with The Invisibles and The Filth. He wrote Flex out of a desire to return
to the childlike wonder associated with the superhero: “an embracing of diversity,
a sense of camp and the plain sense of silliness which went missing when comics
began to take themselves seriously” (Brooker 2011, 34). Morrison is a fervent propo-
nent of combining superheroes’ inherent silliness with realism in order to overcome
the adolescent pessimism that struck the genre in the 90s (↗15 Superheroes). The
sigil/comic that is Flex Mentallo contains a plot that is half-historical, half-autobio-
graphical, and thus, again, blends realities, of cultural-economical proportions on
one side and of individual proportions on the other.
Much has been made of the four-issue miniseries that is (and at the same time
is not really) about Flex Mentallo, ‘America’s merriest crime fighter.’ Flex has been
recognized and characterized as a sexually ambiguous figure (Brooker 2011); a recu-
peration and embrace of the superhero genre (Landon 2007); a complete lack of
rejuvenation of the very same thing (Singer 2012); a symbol of pornographic libera-
tion (Roddy 2015); a part of Morrison’s autobiographical implementation into his
own creation (Ecke 2013); and the series’ various allusions, references, parodies,
and possible tie-ins with other DC series have been collected by at least two online
sources (Craft; Woodward). This chapter will demonstrate how Morrison’s storytell-
ing uses ontological metalepsis in order to break up hierarchies of reality and fic-
tion. Most of Morrison’s works create an atmosphere of unhinged reality; for exam-
ple, Karin Kukkonen works with Morrison’s Animal Man as a case of metalepsis and
fictionalised reality (2011a 1, 6; 2011b). Yet, Flex Mentallo’s realities are certainly
among the most tangled of all of Morrison’s worlds. I will first show how Flex con-
catenates historiographic metafiction, comics history, and autobiography and, in
turn, creates several layers of reality. The second part will then discuss how Morri-
son uses these concepts to generate ontological metalepses and, through ellipses in
storytelling, entangles the comic’s ontological layers. The third and last part will
then examine how this entanglement leads into ‘reality’ becoming a moot concept
in Flex Mentallo.

Flex is notoriously complex and opaque, but an attempt at an overview of the story
follows here. Flex Mentallo is the titular character of this miniseries. He rarely wears
604 Oliver Moisich
anything but leopard briefs, combat boots, and leather gauntlets, and his superpow-
er can be vaguely described as bending reality by flexing his muscles. The series
starts as Flex searches for his long-lost friend The Fact, who drops cartoonish-look-
ing bombs across the city. Flex is puzzled by his former colleague’s appearance
because unlike him, Flex had been imagined into ‘reality’ by his creator, Wally
Sage, while all his former pals remained ‘fictional.’ The narrative quickly changes
to this very creator, Wally Sage, who is in a desperate existential crisis and tries to
commit suicide by pill overdose in a dark alley. Another subplot involves a team of
superheroes called The Legion of Legions, which flee from a cataclysmic event
called The Absolute. The diegetic lines are blurry and overlapping, but the Legion
likely exists within Flex’s former reality, because like Flex, they were created by
Wally Sage when he was a child. Flex’s search for The Fact leads him to a police
station, a hospital, an underground public bathroom, a fetish sex club for superhe-
roes, and a ‘ceramic world,’ which is associated with both a fish bowl in Wally’s
room and the inside of Wally’s head.
While Flex’s story is reminiscent of noir crime fiction, Wally’s unending mono-
logues are biographical in nature. Early on, Flex receives a ‘magic word’ by an old
janitor, which Wally then puts into a crossword puzzle. This ‘solution’ makes The
Legion of Legions burst out of his body and into ‘reality.’ Flex also encounters a
‘villain’ who, it turns out, is none other than teenage Wally. Young Wally’s intention
was to destroy the superhero reality of Flex’s world, but he is stopped by Flex, a
police lieutenant named Harry and a supposed supervillain named The Hoaxer. The
Fact deliberately led Flex to teenage Wally to foil his plans and to encourage adult
Wally into making The Legion become ‘real.’ Notably, Flex Mentallo is more of a
side character to his creator Wally Sage. Broken up by Wally’s stream of conscious-
ness as well as the Crisis on Infinite Earths-esque Legion, Flex Mentallo is about
reality and fiction, about masculinity and adolescence, about Morrison’s life and
comics history – and it is about a muscular Superman in leopard briefs.
Morrison started using Flex when he was at the helm of the Doom Patrol series,
a comic about the ‘world’s strangest heroes.’ Nothing more than a background char-
acter, Flex first appeared in Doom Patrol #35 as a throwaway figure, a homeless
man in a cabaret hall (Morrison, Case, Nyberg 2005 [1990], 29). One issue later, he
is revealed to be none other than “Flex Mentallo. Man of Muscle Mystery!” (Morri-
son, Jones, McKenna 2005 [1990], 57). After a short appearance in Doom Patrol #37,
we experience how Flex Mentallo came to his powers in issue 42 (Morrison, Dringen-
berg, Hazlewood 2006 [1991]). A parody of Charles Atlas advertisements from comic
books of the past decades, “The Insult That Made a Man out of Mac” is the story of
a scrawny boy at the beach, unable to defend his girlfriend from nearby bullies.
Mac is disgruntled by his physical ineptitude and wants to be a “real He-Man” (2006
[1991], 14). A mysterious man approaches Mac from the Men’s restroom and advises
him to order a book called “Muscle Mystery for you!” (15). A joking remark by the
deliveryman pokes fun at the Silver Age narrative device of nuclear explosions as
origins of super-abilities: “Weird, tingly kind of package for you, young feller. I
hope it ain’t radioactive.”
Exactly what kinds of mysteries lie within Mac’s muscles is a question left unan-
swered, beside the fact that it can be used to “read into minds, see into the future,
into other dimensions, even” (16) and to create Flex’s hero halo “Hero of the Beach”
(18), shimmering above his head in large, golden letters. Mac fends off the bullies
and leaves his shallow girlfriend on the spot. He stays at the narrative’s center for
two more issues, where the reader learns that he once had a crew of heroes com-
prised of The Zipper, The Atomic Pile, Mr. 45, and The Fact (20). It is also revealed
that Flex is actually a fictional character within the Doom Patrol continuity. His
creator Wally Sage is held captive in the Pentagon and dies in Flex’s arms, upon
which Flex uses Muscle Mystery to turn the Pentagon into a circle (Morrison, Case,
McKenna 2006 [1991], 73/81).
Absurdity and parody prevail in Morrison’s run of Doom Patrol, and Flex Men-
tallo’s appearance is no exception. The hyper-masculinity, the unidentified book
salesperson, details of pterodactyls and sinking ships in the background of the
beach, paired with a sense of earnest care for the character: These things convey a
surreal mixture of seriousness and farce, a simultaneous deconstruction and cele-
bration of the superhero genre that Morrison would extend over to Flex Mentallo in
1996. Despite its seemingly self-contained continuity, Flex Mentallo sees the return
of the Fact as an important character, and the return of Wally Sage, who might as
well be the protagonist. It is a testament to Doom Patrol’s and Flex Mentallo’s rela-
tive obscurity that the Charles Atlas company had not been aware of Morrison’s
parody until they were notified of the comic’s existence years later. Their legal ac-
tions made Flex Mentallo unavailable for years, even after a court ruled in favor of
DC Comics in 2000 (Sullivan 2000). DC reprinted Flex Mentallo only in 2012, with
new coloring by Peter Doherty, replacing Tom McCraw. The reprinted collected edi-
tion contains no pagination which renders it necessary for this paper to cite Flex
Mentallo page numbers according to issue number, page number, and panel num-
ber of the original 1996 issues.
2.1 Historiographic Metafiction
Linda Hutcheon’s term historiographic metafiction characterizes the playfulness

with which postmodern literature takes history and mashes/meshes it together with
the imaginary:
Historiographic metafiction refutes the natural or common-sense methods of distinguishing

between historical fact and fiction. It refuses the view that only history has a truth claim, both
by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by asserting that both history
and fiction are discourse, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major
claim to truth from that identity. (2004, 93)
606 Oliver Moisich
In part, Hutcheon’s argument reiterates the ontological doubt of postmodernist writ-

ing that succeeds the more modernist epistemological doubt. What kinds of realities
are there? Which worlds are possible? A question that addresses the plot of Flex
Mentallo more directly: “What happens when different kinds of worlds are placed
in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?” (McHale 1987,
10). Fictional accounts embedded in real history abound in contemporary literature,
but Morrison’s works differ in that they never attempt to clarify which part of the
story is history and which parts are not. Rather than embed fiction in reality, his
comics dissolve reality in fiction. Flex is the most concise example of this practice,
as Singer points out that “the miniseries introduces even more ontological confu-
sion to Flex’s already questionable existence” (2012, 141). This confusion is quite
apparent in the introduction to the 2012 collected edition, which details the fake
stages of Flex throughout actual United States (US) comics history (the introduction
was first printed in Flex Mentallo #2 and #4).
The opening text collides Flex’s ‘real,’ on-paper appearances in Doom Patrol
with a fabricated history of publisher “Manly Comics.” In it, his first appearance
dates back to 1941 in a comic book called Rasslin’ Men, which soon led to his own
series Flex Mentallo in 1942. Artist Chuck Fiasco remembers a weird trip during
night-time that gave him the idea for Flex. By now, Mentallo’s number of progeni-
tors has risen to four, two fictional authors and two real ones: Wally Sage, Chuck
Fiasco, Charles Atlas, and Grant Morrison. The idea that Flex Mentallo was created
as a Manly Comics rival to DC’s Superman is a nod to Fawcett Comics’ Captain
Marvel. The rest of the character’s “history” coincides with actual comics history
just as much (↗2 History, Formats, Genres): the war years brought incredible profit
and new sidekicks (“I used to get down on my knees every night and pray that
Hitler would live forever!”), the Werthamite comics panic of the after-war years (“If
they hadn’t bought the ‘satire’ bullshit we fooled ’em with, we’d all have died in
the chair,” Morrison et al. 2014, n. pag.), the reboot of a Silver Age Flex akin to
Silver Age Flash, and another reboot in the “hypothetical DC ‘universe.’” The paro-
dy is as clear as day, with many unexplained and wacky story titles such as “Who
Stole the President’s Face?” and character names that sound like they might come
from an unexplored niche of Jack Kirby comics: Fightin’ Skull, Mr. Quizmatix, Kirby
Kosmos. The historiographic aspect of Flex Mentallo shifts even more if we consider
that he is supposed to be a fictional character within the DC Universe’s fiction and
only becomes ‘real’ after Wally Sage used his psychic powers. However, the in-uni-
verse comics history follows developments of our real, actual comics history, there-
by confounding fact with fiction.
2.2 Comics History
Several other allusions to events, themes, and aesthetics throughout comics history
show up in the pages of Flex Mentallo. There are obvious references on the covers
to:
1) The Golden Age – a colorful Flex reaching out to the reader “You! Buy this
Comic now or the Earth is doomed!!” recreating the cover of Flash #163;
2) The Silver Age – an astronaut in space reads a Flex Mentallo comic book; this
cover represents the central arena of the Silver Age, space adventures and sci-
ence;
3) The Bronze or Dark Age – Flex’s dark silhouette against a flash of lightning, an
homage to Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns;
4) Morrison’s proposal for a renaissance, a cover that shows Flex in free fall and
composed out of several Flexes in differing styles, representing a convergence
of pluralities in order to engender a New Age of comics.
There are other details on the covers that represent the historicity of comics
throughout their “ages.” Each cover contains a seal of approval by the “World Body-
Building Association,” which mimics the Comics Code Authority (CCA) seal of ap-
proval. The CCA seal on the cover of comic books was there to help parents distin-
guish between comics that were “bad” for their children and comics that followed
the code. Comics without the code sold badly, so publishers had to relent or face
bankruptcy (Gabilliet 2010, 43). Flex parodies the CCA seal and its fading impor-
tance throughout the years. The Golden Age cover of issue 1 has the seal on top of
the title, big and in garish colors. On the cover of issue 2, the seal is already smaller
and not as garish, but still prominent. The cover of issue 3, representing the violent
Dark Age when the Comics Code lost almost all of its influence (Gabilliet 2010, 90),
uses the seal as nothing more than embellishment. On the same cover, we can also
spot signatures by Morrison and Quitely, along with various price stickers with re-
ceding value, the last one from a place called “Fat Tony’s Taco and Comic Shack.”
The comics culture of the 1980s and 90s experienced an economic bubble in
which fans started collecting old comics. Prices increased, and publishers tried to
bank in on the collection craze by issuing multiple variations of the same comic.
The market was entirely oversaturated, so prices dropped dramatically (Gabilliet
2010, 86), and issue 3’s cover of Flex is a stark reminder of US comics’ economic
bubble. As concerns thematic references to the Silver Age, Wally reminisces that it
was around that time “when it started to go a bit weird” and superheroes experi-
enced “strange transformations, multiple realities, dreams, hoaxes… it was like the
hard body began to turn soft” (2.16.2). The same page shows wild Flex Mentallo
reincarnations without naming them or linking them to the story – the portrayals
include an ape, a zebra, a bee-man, and an alien, all wearing Flex’s trademark
leopard briefs.
Issue 2 also acknowledges the emergence of underground comix in the second
half of the 1960s with a Robert Crumb-style drawing (2.12.1) of a young man overdos-
ing on drugs (↗23 Robert Crumb). Flex Mentallo, ever the honorable superhero, tries
to save him, but fails. The allusion to underground comix is further strengthened
by the fact that the scene takes place in an underground public bathroom. A well-
608 Oliver Moisich
hidden Golden Age allusion lies in the character Shazam, the wizard from DC’s
Captain Marvel comics, who teaches Bill Bailey the magic word (his name ‘Shazam’)
that turns him into a superhero. In Flex, he is merely an aging janitor who passes
Flex a crossword puzzle (1.21.5). The last unsolved word “SHA_A_” (1.21.1) as well
as his dialogue – “I’m the mightiest man in the universe, son” (1.20.3) and “Better
to live and suffer as a man than to be a God looking down on others” (1.21.4) – are
all clues as to his identity. The name, and the magical word, is not uttered once,
though, and this fact becomes an important ending plot point, when Wally enters
the word “SHAMAN” instead of “SHAZAM” into the crossword (4.22.5). Evidently,
Morrison points out the potential of the occult in his comics by equating the shaman
with a magic word that turns an ordinary boy into a superman.
Morrison’s playfulness also reveals a critical view on more recent trends in com-
ics: “[A] recurring theme in Flex Mentallo is the stagnant pessimism of the Dark Age
superhero comic” (Brooker 2011, 34). The series employs this pessimism both in
dialogue and in visual allusions – sometimes with nods to Alan Moore’s and Dave
Gibbons’ Watchmen, such as a character holding up a sign announcing the end of
times like Rorschach (1.15.1). The focus on Watchmen makes sense in the light of
Morrison’s problem with modern comics: Watchmen is a comprehensive deconstruc-
tion of the entire superhero genre (↗15 Superheroes) and it is therefore not far-
fetched to view Flex as the reconstruction counterpart: “What Morrison seems to
want is not a comic that is written for children instead of adults, but rather, comics
that allow for a childlike embrace, whether the reader is old or young” (Landon
2007, 211). Page 1 and 2 of Flex Mentallo #1 adapt Watchmen’s classic 3 × 3-panel grid
structure. While Moore and Gibbons’ page layouts often zoom out from an extreme
detail to long shot, Flex Mentallo’s first two pages destroy any sense of magnitude.
The Fact throws a bomb, which explodes and changes into a constellation of stars,
which changes into a galaxy, which changes into a drawing of The Fact on an egg,
which is cracked by a chef and put into a frying pan. Here we can see how Morrison
and Quitely prepare the reader for the ontological confusion that persists through-
out the series by providing proportional confusion. Why is there an entire galaxy
on an eggshell? How can the Fact be part of a ‘galaxy’ that he created himself? Why
does the ‘bang’ of a bomb apparently result in a ‘big bang’? Morrison is content
with leaving these questions unanswered in order to obscure any dimensional logic.
2.3 Autobiography
Much of Morrison’s self-fictionalization in Flex Mentallo has been thoroughly ana-

lyzed by Jürgen Ecke in “Grant Morrison’s ‘Fiction Suits’: Comics Autobiography as
Genre Fiction/Genre Fiction as Comics Autobiography.” Morrison’s work is notably
intertwined with his own life. In Morrison’s case, the relationship between biogra-
phy and literature must therefore necessarily be examined as life influencing work
and vice versa; it may even find recognition as a twisted version of the popular Life
Writing genre in comics, represented by such writers as Alison Bechdel or Craig
Thompson (↗9 Life Writing). Morrison takes the deconstructionist concept of histo-
ry as interpretation and expands it to historiographic metafiction as interpretation.
This sentiment applies for his character Flex as much as it applies for his “fiction
suit” Wally Sage. What is to be believed and what is not seems a superfluous ques-
tion here; Singer remarks that Morrison calls the “craziest” parts of his stories the
most autobiographical (2012, 9). In Supergods, Morrison himself writes that “I want-
ed to answer the question that writers are always asked: ‘Where do you get your
ideas?’ [...] This was my chance to show what I meant when I talked about realistic
superheroes” (2012, 267). The quotation is echoed in Flex by Wally Sage: “I went in
through the castle in the gold fish bowl, that was it. Right into my head, into every-
body’s head” (4.14.3).
Ecke centers on Wally’s existential crisis throughout the series and notes that
“since repressed creativity must necessarily result in repetition, much of the rest of
Flex Mentallo after this first chapter can be seen as exercises in didactic redundan-
cy” (2013, 309). While the Sage-as-Morrison characterization might be fairly obvious
from issue 1, the maturing progress of the character is not: “Historiographic metafic-
tion, while teasing us with the existence of the past as real, also suggests that there
is no direct access to that real which would be unmediated by the structures of our
various discourses about it” (Hutcheon 1988, 146). The strategy that reveals Morri-
son’s active investment with this discourse lies not only in Flex Mentallo’s four-part
structure, but also in Morrison’s equation of comics history with his own biography.
Much of Wally’s young life stages coincide with the aforementioned superhero com-
ics ages:
1) Golden Age – early childhood, discovery of comics:
Morrison’s uncle introduced him to American comics and the occult. (1.17.5, see
also Meaney 8:19) Flex #1 retells the early mythopoeic influence of comics on
Morrison: “I mean, when you think about it … They’re, like, archetypal … they
come right up from the depths, those things … how can they say that stuff’s
stupid?” (1.18.2).
2) Silver Age – late childhood, loss of innocence:
“Changing from a child to a teenager” (2.8.5), Morrison remembers anxieties in
this issue. His parents, protesting against “the bomb” (2.17.2) bring about cold
war paranoia in the young boy, while they argue in front of him: “Why didn’t
they stop my mum and dad fighting?” (2.17.4). He starts having surreal night-
mares about atomic explosions (2.2.3, later revealed in 4.10.4), but at the same
time, he also starts drawing his own comics (2.8.5).
3) Dark Age – adolescence:
The artist discovers the erotic potential of the medium. Morrison talks about
this (Meaney 2010, 9:36), but also equates it with Flex’s discovery of a superhero
fetish sex club in the sewers: “[...] Supernova masturbating with the light-up
610 Oliver Moisich
end of her solar-scepter. Who needs girls when you’ve got comics?” (3.11.2).
Morrison’s opinion about the “realistic” superhero stories becomes evident
when he writes “Now the superheroes are as fucked-up as the fucking rejects
who write about them [...] All the heroes are in therapy and there’s no one left
to care about us” (3.11.5).
4) Renaissance – transcendence:
Morrison comes to terms with his adolescent pessimism and recognizes the “pa-
thetic fucking power fantasies for lonely wankers” (4.17.6) as potential for ca-
thartic experiences and imaginative wonder: “Why should I want to commit
suicide? I’ve got a brilliant life. It was him. It was me aged 16. He’d have killed
me if it wasn’t for Flex” (4.18.5) and “Do you believe in superheroes? Imagine
it real. [...] Imagine the music we could make …” (4.19.2).
At the center of this congruence between personal history and cultural history
stands Morrison’s firm belief that superheroes possess actual psychological and
mythopoeic powers in the real world: “It’s not that I needed Superman to be ‘real,’ I
just needed him to be more real than the Idea of the Bomb that ravaged my dreams”
(Morrison 2012, xv), and “Could it be that a culture starved of optimistic images of
its own future has turned to the primary source in search of utopian role models?”
(2012 xvii). Ecke reminds us that “all the other characters appearing in the Flex
Mentallo story need to be considered as being equally metonymic of Wallace’s [Wal-
ly Sage’s] self” (2013, 304).
While this statement might more or less apply to all forms of writer/writing
relationship, it is vital for the comprehension of Morrison’s work – Superman in All-
Star Superman is manifest hope; Batman in Batman and Son is manifest paternal
authority; The Fact, Flex Mentallo, and the Legion are manifest transcendence. The
interaction with his own creation – by way of a fictionalized figure – establishes
Morrison’s desire to return superheroes to positive symbolism. This desire brings
with it a confusion of ontological levels, the attempt to break “barriers between the
real and the imaginary” (4.15.4). Morrison therefore mends two functions of the
author into one:
The author, in short, is another tool for the exploration and exploitation of ontology. S/he
functions at two theoretically distinct levels of ontological structure: as the vehicle of autobio-
graphical fact within the projected fictional world; and as the maker of that world, visibly
occupying an ontological level superior to it. (McHale 2004, 202)

How does Morrison realize the mingling of comics history and autobiography, of
fact and fiction in Flex Mentallo’s literary techniques and aesthetics? The comic
makes use of a trope well known to readers of postmodern texts – metalepsis, the
‘jump’ between at least two diegetic spaces. What’s more, Morrison challenges the
concept by displacing any feeling of reality or ‘ground truth,’ that is, a diegetic
space that serves as deictic center for both his characters and his readers, thus
confusing (and subsequently dissolving) any notion of ontological hierarchy. This
chapter’s main argument is that existing narratological theories of metalepsis need
conceptual expansion in order to describe the ontological vertigo that Flex Mentallo
incites via its narrative. Throughout Flex, Morrison uses – and often purposefully
ignores – traditional comics narrative devices to dizzying effects. Stylistic choices
in both the verbal and the visual mode set up a commingling, dissolving, and con-
founding of diegetic spaces that result in creative metaleptic situations and, eventu-
ally, a resulting sense of ontological vertigo.
Narratology understands ontological metalepsis in two ways: 1) “the literal move
of the narrator to a lower narrative level of embedded story world, or of a character
to a lower (intra)diegetic level” (Fludernik 2003, 384); 2) “the narratee on the story
level or the protagonist as narratee on a superior (discourse) level” (385). Fludernik
also calls the former narratorial metalepsis and the latter lectorial metalepsis. These
two ontological types of metalepsis are independent from two non-ontological
types, authorial metalepsis – the narrator reminds readers that he is merely narrat-
ing and has no power over the story, (384) – and rhetorical/discourse metalepsis –
the narrator narrates based on intradiegetic circumstances, i. e. changing the topic
while plot is stalled (386). Thus, metalepsis is a jump between “(a representation or
mental construction of) the real world and the fictional world” (Kukkonen 2011a, 7).
While Fludernik uses examples of metalepsis between story and discourse level,
Kukkonen notes that the model is easily transferred to different diegetic spaces (or
“worlds”) within story level, a mise-en-abyme of possible worlds (2011a, 8). Hence,
ontological metalepsis can move in two ways, descending from a higher level or
ascending from a lower level. A third way, horizontal metalepsis, explains characters
jumping between different works of art (Alber and Bell 2012; Kukkonen 2011a, 8). Yet
all of these characterizations of metalepsis rely on the assumption that there is an
immovable hierarchy of ontologies, which is where Flex Mentallo differs. Morrison’s
stories often take place within malleable dimensions: Arkham Asylum experiments
with space, We3 experiments with time, and Flex Mentallo experiments with both
space and time. Directions which at first seem coherent become anarchic – the
terms that come closest to describing such confusing ontologies would be Douglas
Hofstadter’s strange loop and tangled hierarchies. Hofstadter visualizes the concept
with Escher’s hands drawing each other (1979, 689): If they both draw each other
into existence, then which one started out first? McHale supports the validity of
Hofstadter’s account for narratology: when nested narrative and primary narrative
share one single continuity, they violate the hierarchy of ontological levels (2004,
120). Flex Mentallo displays, perhaps more effectively than Morrison’s other works,
how such nested narratives share one continuity and how specific aesthetic choices
frustrate any attempt at ontological order.
612 Oliver Moisich
An astute reader of Flex Mentallo should be quick to point out that diegetic
layers in the series actually seem quite obvious (↗8 World-Building). There is the
trope of creator-creation relationship between Flex and Wally, and the Legion of
Legions possibly share diegetic space with Flex (2.20.2, but the matter is treated as
relatively unimportant). So what exactly creates this ontological confusion if char-
acter relations are so transparent? On a first look, it is more or less clear that Flex
Mentallo and his peers are creations of young Wally’s imagination. The panel transi-
tions from 1.9.3 to 1.9.5 and back again from 1.10.3 to 1.10.5 (and yet another one
from 4.21.3 to 4.21.5) present ontological metalepses between the world of young
Wally’s drawings to Wally’s real world (or vice versa), marked by a transition in
style from Quitely’s hyperreal art to crude pencil drawings on a piece of paper. A
changing visual style that retains both characters and dialogue implies a metalepsis
from one world into another, in this case from Wally’s reality to Wally’s childhood
drawings (Kukkonen 2011b, 220). The assumption, then, is that the world around
Flex is subordinate to the world of Wally, because the former is a fictional imagina-
tion born from the latter – and yet, Flex remembers being brought into reality by
Wally. Not only that, but he remembers him dying when he says, “I was another
one of those characters but I was brought to life by Wally’s psychic powers. He
thought me off the page and into the real world so that I could help him. He died
in my arms” (1.11.1).
We can thus conclude that the events in Doom Patrol share continuity with Flex
Mentallo, even though they are directly addressed just once, in the panel above,
and nowhere else. We can also conclude that there are (at least) three hierarchic
worlds pertaining to the relationship between Flex and his creator: (1) Flex’s ground
reality from “The Insult That Made a Man out of Mac”; (2) Doom Patrol/DC multi-
verse/Flex Mentallo subvert reality, in which Flex is looking for The Fact and in
which Wally Sage was imprisoned under the Pentagon and died; (3) Wally Sage
reality, in which he attempts suicide in a back alley. The fact that there are two
Wallys, of which the first one might easily be dismissed as comics’ notorious disre-
gard for continuity, obscures these boundaries.
It does not end there, because Morrison applies more metalepses that are not
only an ontological “impossibility,” but illogical within the sequence of two panels.
Wally’s rambling across page 1.14 continues over to 1.15 – he lies down in a back
alley in 1.14.5, and in 1.15.1 his speech bubbles float around the corner of the same
back alley, or so it seems. The same picture clearly shows Flex walking along, and
it is revealed in 1.15.4 and 5 that the back alley is a different one than the one Wally
slumped down in. A confusing panel transition, as it only seems that Flex and Wally
share the same diegetic space, and only surrounding panels reveal the deceit. Kuk-
konen explains that “a metalepsis, which is the transgression of the boundary be-
tween the fictional world and the real world, should be depicted as a transgression
of the panel frame” (2011b, 216). This is not the case here – instead, the same panel
frame somehow contains characters of two different worlds. Kukkonen goes on to
show that the gutter between two panels is an evident space for metalepsis and
illustrates this with another of Morrison’s works, Animal Man (2011b, 216). However,
Flex Mentallo does not use the gutter to mark metalepsis. Rather, the transition
occurs inside the panels or in an ostensibly unmarked transition between panels.
More conventional, but no less confusing are panel transitions which jump rapidly
from Wally’s to Flex’s reality and back again – page 3.18 and 4.15. Readers of comics
are used to the page or double page as a single narrative unit of plot (a “scene”),
but Flex Mentallo eschews this unit in order to disrupt ontological hierarchy.
Two other characters also perform ontological metalepses with illogical ease.
Nanoman and Minimiss are two members of the Legion of Legions, and the two
micro-sized heroes disappeared when the cataclysmic event “The Absolute” hit the
Legion’s reality: “They’d shrunk to quark size, crisscrossing and weaving through
spacetime to build a whole universe from the ground up. They’re everywhere and
everywhen simultaneously. We’re made of them!,” as Wally remembers (4.15.1).
Lord Limbo, leader of the Legion, then advises his comrades to “prepare to become
fictional” (4.4.2). The Legion saved themselves from vanishing in their reality by
having Nanoman and Minimiss create another reality where they could be fictional.
Existing on a particle-sized level, Nanoman and Minimiss are both alive and dead
at the same time (4.4.2) and it is up to Wally to believe them into life. Nevertheless,
they must be fictional: “They [The Legion] bypassed the death of their reality by
becoming fictional in ours” (4.11.1). It is at this point that ontological vertigo sets
in – the idea that “reality” is brought into existence by fictional quarks, a reciproca-
tion of fictional Flex brought into existence by his “real” author. Wally’s conscious
act of recollection of this reality/fiction paradox motions him towards his shamanic
incantation at the end – “No more barriers between the real and the imaginary”
(4.15.4). To underline the omnipresence of Nanoman and Minimiss, Quitely puts
them into a few panels where they are easy to miss. A fly-size creature buzzing next
to Flex (1.4.2 and 1.4.3), in Wally’s apartment (1.6.1, 2, and 5), and back with Flex
at the police station (1.7.1, 3, and 4; 1.8.1, 3, 4, and 5; 1.11.2 and 3) bears a close
resemblance to Minimiss’s outfit.
The ‘conclusion’ that there are two Wallys – a ‘fictional’ Doom Patrol Wally who
died and a ‘real’ Flex Mentallo Wally who wants to die – is actually incomplete;
there are at least four of him. The climactic standoff between Flex and teenage Wal-
ly takes place in a castle, which is in a ‘ceramic world,’ which is in a fish bowl,
which is actually all in Wally’s head: “I had a little fish when I was a kid … a
goldfish. [...] His bowl had a miniature castle in it, made out of ceramic stuff” (2.2.2).
Upon entering his own head, Wally finds his childhood self, reminding him of Flex
Mentallo (4.11.5). Adult Wally, on the other hand, remembers this encounter from
his childhood (4.10.2). Does this confrontation imply that childhood Wally and teen-
age Wally are both as fictional as Flex Mentallo? Are they their own separate reality?
On his website The Annotated Flex Mentallo, Jason Craft counts seven separate reali-
ties, two of which are occupied by childhood Wally and teenage Wally, respectively.
614 Oliver Moisich
Of these three Wally’s, only two interact with each other, and only for a brief scene.
Still, even if it all takes place in Wally’s head, should Wally’s ground reality not
belong to that as well, then? Any attempt at mapping out Flex Mentallo’s diegetic
spaces must remain inconclusive, because hints of ontological boundaries in this
comic are, at best, ambiguous.

Flex Mentallo’s story is thus the reciprocal of a phenomenon McHale describes:
“There is an ontological scandal when a real-world figure is inserted in a fictional
situation, where he interacts with purely fictional characters” (2004, 85). The onto-
logical scandal lies in the interaction between Flex and his ‘factual’ creator – not
actually factual, but autobiographical, an emblem for the actual creator, and for
the entire history of superhero comics. Fictional characters become real and real
characters become fictional – the mise-en-abyme, French for ‘into the abyss,’ is thus
an abyss that is turned upside down. If we try to stare down into Flex’s ontological
depths, we become disoriented… the layer between reality and fiction becomes as
soft as Flex’s Silver Age permutations. Naturally, this is all an act of fictional repre-
sentation, not of reshaping actual reality: “A fictional character cannot literally com-
municate with his or her author, and an author cannot step into the fictional world
that s/he has created” (Alber and Bell 2012, 167).
However, Alber and Bell later concede that metalepsis asks the reader to imag-
ine these kinds of interaction, even if they are impossible (169). Moreover, they dis-
cuss whether a character appearing in several worlds can actually be the same
character (horizontal metalepsis; see also heterometalepsis/intertextual metalepsis,
Kukkonen 2011a, 8). They acknowledge that “the solution to the logical impasse is
to regard each individual within each possible world as a ‘counterpart’ of the others
as opposed to the same individual travelling between domains” (2011a, 8). Another
quote by McHale reveals the problem with this ‘logical impasse’ in Morrison’s fic-
tions:
Literary texts project at least one internal field of reference, a universe or semantic continuum
(loosely, a “world”) constructed in and by the text itself. In addition, they inevitably refer
outside their internal field to an external field of reference: the objective world, the body of
historical fact or scientific theory, an ideology or philosophy, other texts, and so on. (2004,
28–29)
Morrison’s most prominent narrative method is to obscure such fields of reference.

The seemingly objective world – Wally Sage as a writer of comics – is invaded by
his own creation. A valid objection is that McHale’s argument speaks about refer-
ents that exist in both fiction and reality, and Wally Sage is still a fictional character.
However, we have seen how Morrison incorporates himself and his biography into
this fictional character. While a “regular” reader of Flex Mentallo distinguishes be-
tween reality and fiction, the author purposefully does not. This is Morrison’s “hy-
persigil,” the shamanic quality of his writing: merging symbol with source. As
McHale later writes, “the real artist always occupies an ontological level superior to
that of his projected, fictional self, and therefore doubly superior to the fictional
world” (2004, 30). Morrison would certainly disagree with this sentiment. His ontol-
ogies are displacement; they are not constituted by what they are, only in how far
they differ from other ontologies.
If we suppose that normative ontological structures do not apply in Flex Mental-
lo, then we must in turn refuse metalepsis’ normative function: “In superhero com-
ics, however, they [metalepses] are employed more often than not in struggles for
superiority” (Kukkonen 2011b, 225). In Flex, the struggle is not one of superiority,
but of affiliation, reconciliation, recuperation; not a fight for superiority, but a fight
for plurality and transformation (see also Landon 2007, 207). Breaking the boundary
between the imaginary and the real is not intended as a deconstruction of epistemo-
logical certainty, but as a reconstruction of story/symbol as pragmatic/benevolent
tools for humanity’s psyche:
When you’ve been told there’s nothing left and your species is a bunch of useless bastards
who don’t deserve anything but extinction, suddenly the superheroes are there to say: “No,
no, listen, remember: You made us. We’re your last crude attempts to imagine where it might
go right.” (interview with Grant Morrison; Meaney 2010, 1:10:03)
Nevertheless, does Flex Mentallo succeed in this? In Singer’s opinion, Flex is too
obsessed with reflecting comics history to create a way forward: “In one sense the
‘first ultra-post-futurist comic’ ends exactly where it began, in self-reflexive games.”
(Singer 2012, 146) The futility of evolving comics echoes Alan Moore’s statement
that superheroes are a “cultural catastrophe” (Flood 2014) because they occupy cre-
ative space in a time in which they are anachronistic. Moore continues that the
superhero genre has been given an extended shelf life beginning from around the
time he stopped working for DC Comics in 1989.
Morrison, ever the opposite of Moore’s high-concept ruminations, sees practical
potential in superheroes. To him, the superhero is a tool, a symbol, an orientation
device for psychological and mythological discovery. Flex, and with him any other
story written by Morrison, exists as a vessel for self-reflexivity – not of the superhero
genre, but of personal transcendence. He invites the reader to use comics the same
way he does: as a medium of spiritual cleansing, of education, and of facilitating
knowledge, none of which contribute to the cultural cataclysm that Moore sees in
superhero comics. Quite the contrary: Grant Morrison suggests that the superhero
is not anachronistic to the 21st century as long as authors continue to challenge
genre tropes and relate narratives to topical issues. Singer may be right that Flex
Mentallo dabbles in generic self-reflexivity, but this generic self-reflexivity is only a
means to conjure up a deeper understanding of individual self-reflexivity.
616 Oliver Moisich
It is not the goal of this chapter to propose that what we call ‘real’ is an agreed-
upon and/or convincing, real-enough feeling, fiction. But that claim is indeed the
basis of many of Grant Morrison’s stories. The idea that there is no basic reality
from which all fictions emerge, diverge, or converge, is supported by works such as
Flex Mentallo, but also by the 52 universes of Multiversity, the secret police of The
Filth, the anarchist liberation of The Invisibles, and the Escher-like architecture of
Arkham Asylum. A model of scattered reality-fictions with no narrative compass that
can point readers to a ground reality is exactly the reason why many of Morrison’s
comics seem so opaque. This analysis demonstrates how Flex Mentallo entertains
such wild confluences of the seemingly real without giving support to any notion
of hierarchy. Flex, Wally, the Legion: their worlds are neither ascending nor de-
scending; they are not horizontal either because that would imply distinct bounda-
ries by which to place them next to each other. Ontological metalepsis is a key
principle of Flex Mentallo, and therefore by extension of all of Morrison’s works.
But the jumps between realities cannot be measured by any hierarchical standards.
In Douglas Hofstadter’s words:
What was once a nice clean hierarchical setup has become a Strange Loop, Or Tangled Hier-
archy. The moves change the rules, the rules determine the moves, round and round the mul-
berry bush … There are still different levels, but the distinction between “lower” and “higher”
has been wiped out. (Hofstadter 1979, 688)
This wipeout also affects Flex’s function as a hero. Contrary to what his appearance
might suggest, Flex overcomes obstacles not through physical power, but through
self-reflexivity and compassion. Singer cites Žižek’s term “embodiment in the real”
to describe Morrison’s characters: reading superheroes as “hyper-literalized repre-
sentations” (2012, 17) that embody deeper psychological states of the human mind.
Embodiment in the real originates from complex manifestations of emotions, mor-
als, ideologies, and, in the case of Flex Mentallo, histories, both cultural and bio-
graphical. With Flex, these histories of culture and biography have lost their dis-
tinction just as much as distinctions between the normative and the idiosyncratic;
between reality and fiction; and between body and mind – The Man of Muscle Mys-
tery, who changes the metaphysical through his physicality. The ontological crises
of Grant Morrison bear fruit to a renaissance of the imaginary. Flex Mentallo, the
comic book series, is Morrison’s manifesto that “fiction is offered as another of the
discourses by which we construct our versions of reality, and both the construction
and the need for it are what are foregrounded in the postmodernist novel” (Hutch-
eon 1988, 40). Meanwhile, the character of Flex Mentallo is perhaps Morrison’s most
emblematic character because he transposes the absurdity of a hairy, half-naked
muscleman into the embodiment for human transcendence.
5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited
Alber, Jan and Alice Bell. “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology.” Journal of Narrative
Theory 42.2 (2012): 66–92.
Brooker, Will. “Hero of the Beach: Flex Mentallo at the End of the Worlds.” Journal of Graphic
Novels and Comics 2.1 (2011): 25–37.
Craft, Jason. The Annotated Flex Mentallo. earthx.org/flex. No date (2 October 2016).
Ecke, Jochen. “Grant Morrison’s ‘Fiction Suits’: Comics Autobiography as Genre Fiction/Genre
Fiction as Comics Autobiography.” American Lives. Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter,
2013. 297–312.
Flood, Alison. “Superheroes a ‘cultural catastrophe,’ says comics guru Alan Moore.” The
Guardian. www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/21/superheroes-cultural-catastrophe-alan-
Moore-comics-watchmen. 21 Jan 2014 (15 October 2016).
Fludernik, Monika. “Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode.” Style 37.4 (2003): 382–400.
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men. A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated
by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods. Dir. Patrick Meaney. Halo-8 Entertainment, 2010.
Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988.
Kukkonen, Karin. “Metalepsis in Popular Culture: An Introduction.” Metalepsis in Popular Culture.
Ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011a. 1–21.
Kukkonen, Karin. “Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels.” Metalepsis in Popular Culture.
Ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011b. 213–231.
Landon, Richard. “A Half-Naked Muscleman in Trunks: Charles Atlas, Superheroes, and Comic
Book Masculinity.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18.2 (2007): 200–216.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.
Morrison, Grant. Supergods. What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from
Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012.
Morrison, Grant, Richard Case, and Mark McKenna. “Doom Patrol #43.” 1991. Doom Patrol Vol. 4:
Musclebound. Ed. Scott Nybakken, DC Comics, 2006. 60–84.
Morrison, Grant, Richard Case, and John Nyberg. “Doom Patrol #35.” 1990. Doom Patrol Vol. 3:
Down Paradise Way. Ed. Scott Nybakken, DC Comics, 2005. 10–35.
Morrison, Grant, Mike Dringenberg, and Doug Hazlewood. “Doom Patrol #42.” 1991. Doom Patrol
Vol. 4: Musclebound. Ed. Scott Nybakken, DC Comics, 2006. 8–32.
Morrison, Grant, Kelley Jones, and Mark McKenna. “Doom Patrol #36.” 1990. Doom Patrol Vol. 3:
Down Paradise Way. Ed. Scott Nybakken, DC Comics, 2005. 36–61.
Morrison, Grant, Frank Quitely, Peter Doherty, and Ellie De Ville. Flex Mentallo. 1996. Ed. Scott
Nybakken. DC Comics, 2014.
Roddy, Kate. “Eternal Superteens and Mutant Spermatozoa: Grant Morrison and the Comic as
Porneau.” Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 8.2 (2015). http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/
archives/v8_2/roddy. (27 September 2016).
Singer, Marc. Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics. Jackson: University
of Mississippi Press, 2012.
Sullivan, John. “Charles Atlas Complaint Held as Legal Weakling.” New York Times.
www.nytimes.com/2000/08/31/nyregion/charles-atlas-complaint-held-as-legal-
weakling.html. 31 Aug 2000 (13 October 2016).
Woodward, Jonathan. “Grant Morrison’s Flex Mentallo.” WPage, www.prismnet.com/~woodward/
chroma/crtflex.html. No date (2 Oct 2016).
618 Oliver Moisich
5.2 Further Reading

Callahan, Timothy. Grant Morrison: The Early Years. Sequart, 2011.
Genette, Gérard. Métalepse: De la Figure à la Fiction. Paris: Seuil, 2004.
Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
Kakko, Tommi, and Mervi Miettinen. “‘The Image Rules the World’: Focalization, Hallucinations
and Metalepsis in The Invisibles.” ImageTexT 8.2 (2015). www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/
archives/v8_2/kakko_miettinen. (5 October 2016).
Morrison, Grant et al. The Multiversity: The Deluxe Edition. DC Comics, 2015.
Wolf, Werner. “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case Study of
‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts.” Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality,
Disciplinarity. Ed. Jeanne C. Meister. Berlin: de Gruyter. 83–107.
Index of Subjects
2000 AD 350, 500 Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious
9/11 Report. A Graphic Adaptation, The 21, 75 Earth 62, 67, 611, 616
Around the World with the Yellow Kid 363, 364
A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle 388, arthrology 92
400 Association of Comics Magazine Publishers 57
A. D. New Orleans After the Deluge 75, 289, autobiography 12, 201–216, 427, 434, 477,
292, 293, 298–300 529, 530, 531, 533, 537, 601, 603, 608–
Abie the Agent 50 610
Academy of Comic Book Arts 76 Autographics 203, 591
Action Comics 59, 63, 65, 317 Avengers, The 63, 64, 192, 335, 336, 337, 338,
adaptation 21, 22, 38, 45, 55, 75, 99, 122, 133, 339
141–163, 184, 193, 195, 248, 321, 322,
350, 353, 365, 399, 411, 452, 464, 482, B.C. 53
500, 505, 509, 511, 519, 527, 562, 567, Ballad of Halo Jones, the 500
573, 574, 575, 579, 581, 583, 584, 585, Barney Google 50
586, 590 Bash Street Kids, The 54, 516
Adventures of Luther Arkwrigh, The 69 Bataan 334
advertising 364, 484 Batman 61–63, 67, 125, 130, 134, 135, 169,
aesthetics 1, 3, 4, 5, 134, 158, 169, 171, 172, 171, 191, 258, 311, 312, 314, 317–328, 333,
176, 177, 178, 214, 281, 300, 366, 373, 339, 343, 345, 348, 349, 350, 355, 406,
396, 426, 508, 510, 511, 522, 581, 582, 438, 439, 515, 610
585, 606, 610
Batman Returns 62
Alice in Wonderland 392, 394
Batman: Black and White 62
Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday 45, 349
Batman: Night on Earth 319, 320
Alphonse and Gaston 49
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns 62, 67, 171,
alterity 234, 279
313, 320, 328, 343, 345, 347–349, 444,
alternative comics 69–72, 145, 444, 481, 483–
607
486, 493, 561
Batman: The Killing Joke 62, 313
Amazing Spider-Man, The 26, 61, 63, 174, 176,
Batman: Year One 313, 327, 354
177, 192, 333, 344
Bayeux Tapestry 15, 18, 26, 29, 31, 38
Amazing Stories 53
Beano, The 54, 516
America’s Best Comics (ABC) 501
American Book Award 76 Beautia Sivana 222
American Humorist 363 Beggar’s Opera, The 43
American Splendor 71, 171, 482, 487 Best American Comics, The 73
Andy Capp 50 Beyond Time and Again 442
Animal Fables 56 Bildungsroman 502, 592, 593, 594
animation 16, 170, 388, 392, 398, 399, 464, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary 72,
468 206, 208, 210
anime 225, 234, 301 biography 12, 144, 248, 256–258, 275, 277,
anti-Semitism 446 291, 431, 434, 453, 509, 592, 602
appropriation 144, 147, 155, 157, 172, 176, 177, bisexuality 236, 239
178, 281, 365, 475, 476, 489, 492, 507, Bitch Planet 226, 227, 234
509, 511, 564, 574, 580, 585 Bizarre Sex 71
Arcade, the Comics Revue 72, 482, 484 Black Panther 182, 345
Archie Comics 28, 30, 59, 185, 483 Blackhawk 345
architecture 38, 392, 439, 503, 504, 522, 557, Blondie 53
616 Bloodstar 442
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-036
620 Index of Subjects
Blueberry 55 closure 20, 24, 128, 197, 198, 203, 204, 295,
Bringing Up Father 383, 438 297, 577, 578
British Invasion 66, 355 CND 455,
broadsheets 5, 12, 39, 41, 43, 44, 46, 344, Cold War 65, 133, 169, 194, 314, 332, 333,
393 336, 337, 339, 340, 345, 351, 455, 464,
broadsides 22 609
Bronze Age 64, 65, 69, 223, 224, 311, 313, collaboration 2, 127, 275, 276, 281, 282, 283,
314, 607 327, 424, 487, 514
Brought to Light. A Graphic Docudrama 74, collective memory 37, 291, 508, 531
294 colonialism 188, 189, 191, 196, 265–283, 598
Buck Rogers 53, 59, 185 Comic Book Legal Defense Fund 174, 482
Bugs Bunny 169 comic book stores 58, 65, 69, 311, 347, 562
Building Stories 182, 197, 198, 556, 557 Comic Cuts 344
Bumf Vol I. I Buggered the Kaiser 75 comic strip 1, 2, 11, 26, 27, 28, 29, 39, 43, 44,
Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende 48, 49–54, 64, 70, 74, 121, 122, 125, 133,
Schriften 58 168, 175, 182, 183, 185–188, 196, 233,
Buster Brown 49, 373 278, 295, 317, 364, 372, 379, 380–385,
388–391, 394, 396, 398, 399, 400, 401,
Calvin and Hobbes 50, 109 411, 422, 436–438, 440, 481–492, 495,
canon, canonicity 2, 73, 125, 127, 128, 129, 501, 513, 516, 530, 596
134, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 188, 189, Comic Supplements 168, 361
192, 195, 201, 266, 267, 327, 348, 351, Comic Weekly 362
381, 475, 477, 493, 515 Comics Code Authority 2, 55, 57, 58, 63, 69,
Canticum canticorum 22, 38, 39
70, 171, 174, 206, 222, 260, 312, 313, 333,
Captain America 61, 63, 64, 123, 131, 133, 135,
483, 484, 486, 515, 607
169, 311, 332, 335, 336, 337, 338, 350,
Comics Journal, The 409, 423, 424, 425, 432
442
comics journalism 73, 75, 169, 214, 273, 291,
Captain Marvel 63, 222, 606, 608
292
Captain Nazi 222
Comics Magazine Association of America
captions 41, 46, 54, 91, 148, 149, 440, 441,
(CMAA) 57
489, 490, 593
comix 3, 11, 26, 27, 30, 31, 57, 58, 65, 69–72,
caricature 25, 44, 73, 132, 169, 170, 176, 266,
73, 74, 96, 145, 152, 171, 174, 206, 223,
278, 334, 371, 399, 400, 408, 414, 415,
232, 290, 344, 347, 405, 433, 475, 483,
417, 418, 432, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441,
484–489, 492, 493, 494, 570, 585, 598,
461, 561
607
Catchpenny 289
Catwoman 63, 323 Committee on the Judiciary to Investigate
CCA see Comics Code Authority Juvenile Delinquency 55, 63, 174
censorship 71, 169, 173, 223, 258, 282, 312, Commodity Culture 569
492, 516 Conan the Barbarian 408, 410, 411, 419
Cerebus 73, 125, 405–429 consumer culture 365, 373, 395, 396, 557, 558,
Charge of the Light Brigade, The 462, 463 569
Charlton Comics 350 Contest of Champions 352
Chicago Daily News 56 Continuity 28, 51, 52, 53, 66, 123, 124, 125,
Chicken with Plums 590 126, 130, 131, 133, 134, 177, 182, 183, 184,
Children of the Dust 455 191–195, 320, 333, 336, 338, 339, 340,
Civil Rights Movement 486, 491 348, 350, 352, 353, 354, 419, 520, 521,
Clark Kent 61, 222, 605, 611, 612
Classic Comics 55, 149 continuity strips 51, 53
Classics Illustrated 55, 141, 149, 150, 151, 153, Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories,
155, 159, 575 A 4, 12, 29, 72, 144, 431–446
copyright 30, 48, 171, 175, 178, 195, 317, 363, Dr. Sinister 68
485, 491, 501, 575 Dracula 67, 322
Corsair 68 Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (also: Rarebit
counterculture 481, 485, 486, 490, 500, 556 Fiend) 388, 389, 390, 394, 397
crime comics 63, 222 Dropsie Avenue 435, 436
Crisis on Infinite Earths 69, 123, 184, 314, 351– dystopia 66, 226, 259, 320, 328, 348, 501
355, 604
critical literacy 295, 296, 298, 302, 304 Earthly Paradise 244
critical theory 175, 176, 531 Ebony White 441
cross-media 122, 141, 143, 159 EC Comics see Entertaining Comics
cultural memory 36, 37, 209, 271, 293 ecogothic 237
Curse of Capistrano, The 59 Eddie’s Friends 50
Cutter 225 educational comics 54, 56, 247, 248, 253, 258,
Cyclops 68 260
Egg Fu 63
dance macabre 39 Eisner Award 234, 477, 482, 561
Dandy, The 54, 516 ekphrasis 23,
Daredevil 63, 194, 313, 346, 347, 348, 350 Elfquest 224, 225, 226, 406
Dark Age 65, 68, 224, 311, 313, 314, 343, 348, Embroideries 590
351, 355, 607, 608, 609 emotional homelessness 243
Dark Horse Comics 171, 225 engravings 38, 41, 43, 44, 46, 508, 580
DC Comics 123, 124, 184, 192, 194, 195, 222, Entertaining Comics (EC) 56
224, 312, 332, 333, 334, 352, 354, 406, Epileptic (L’Ascension du Haut Mal) 596
407, 444, 500, 605, 615 ethnicity 189, 204, 219, 269, 274, 303, 367,
DC Thomson 54 433, 434, 435
Dell 333, existentialism 568
Dennis the Menace (British) 19, 54, 516 expressionist film 150
depression 238, 240, 241, 474
Detective Comics 62, 63, 317, 320, 321, 322, fake news 304, 306
323, 326, 327, 328 Famous Funnies 54
detective fiction 502 fan fiction 500
diagrams 293, 333, 548, 550, 551, 558 fanboys 445
Diana Prince 222 fans 2, 65, 66, 195, 228, 313, 323, 328, 347,
Dick Tracy 51 348, 352, 354, 372, 380, 382, 432, 441,
Didactics 252 442, 443, 445, 485, 492, 499, 523, 607
Dilbert 53 Fantastic Four 63, 64, 123, 192, 312, 333, 334,
direct market 311, 346, 347, 405, 406, 407, 337, 339, 345
423, 424, 483, 484 fantasy 174, 181, 225, 259, 334, 339, 405, 407,
disability 237, 526 408, 409, 410, 501, 514, 556
diversity 226, 228, 267, 277, 281, 296, 299, Fantomas 59
314, 603 Fat Man 63
Doctor Who 350 Father Christmas 451, 460
documentary 75, 169, 253, 289–306, 388, 486 femininity 222, 223, 237, 594,
Doll Man 63 feminism 227, 255, 344, 410, 412, 414, 415,
Donald Duck 50, 144, 175, 176, 182, 183, 489 420, 486
Doom Patrol 67, 602, 604, 605, 606, 612, 613 Fictionality 21, 22, 277, 533
Doomsday Clock 350 film adaptation see adaptation
Doonesbury 51, 52, 74 First Kingdom, The 406, 442
Dr. Cesspoole 63 Flaming Carrot 409
Dr. Hormone 63 Flash 63, 68, 69, 333, 345, 352, 353, 606, 607
Flash Gordon 53, 383 Green Lantern, The 63, 333, 345
Flash of Two Worlds 352, 353 Gretna controversy 303
Flashpoint – The La Penca Bombing 74, 354 grid 438–439, 608
folk culture 39, 490 grotesque 44, 68, 75, 294, 322–323, 389, 427,
Footnotes in Gaza 76 441, 487, 547, 562, 566–568
FoxTrot 50 Guardian First Book Award 76, 555
frame narrative 280, 472, 502, 505, 507, 508 gutter 19–20, 86, 197, 207, 297, 301, 460, 522,
free indirect speech 149 613
Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle für Serienbilder 58
Fritz the Cat 71, 482 Hägar the Horrible 50
From Hell 66, 171, 193, 499–511, 515 Happy Hooligan 49, 50
Frontier Combat 56 Harlot’s Progress, The 38, 580
Fungus the Bogeyman 451 Harvey Award 76, 561
Funnies 1, 12, 13, 53, 169, 176, 187, 301, 481, Havok 68
489 Hawkman 63, 345
Funny Folk 44 healing 212–213, 271
heteronormativity 222–223, 225, 234, 236,
gag-a-day strips 50, 51, 52, 53, 185 237, 270, 534, 539, 549
Garfield 50, 468 high and low culture 3, 73, 151, 155, 159, 233,
Gasoline Alley 28, 51, 52, 124, 128, 390, 406 445, 492–493, 532
gay marriage 530, 539 Histoire de M. Vieux Bois 47
gender 96, 132, 170, 188, 204, 219–230, 233, historicism 95–96, 454
234, 235, 242, 275, 314, 367, 379, 381, historiographic metafiction 502, 511, 602, 603,
383, 385, 405, 410, 412, 414, 416, 417, 605–606, 609
419, 427, 492, 510, 526, 538, 539, 551 Hogan’s Alley 48, 362–367, 371, 373, 375, 401
genre 1, 3, 6, 12, 13, 21, 23, 30, 31, 35–80, 97, Hollywood 64, 247, 281, 539
123, 127, 129, 133, 134, 145, 167, 169, 173, homosexuality 209, 234, 236, 237, 242, 244,
175, 181, 187, 192–198, 201–216, 220– 270, 275, 325, 348, 414, 418, 425, 486,
224, 228, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 239, 531, 534, 537, 540–541
253, 255, 256, 258, 260, 265, 266, 265– Holocaust 108, 207, 276, 291, 294, 464, 467–
271, 276–278, 281, 283, 289, 291, 292, 479, 530, 597
298, 301, 302, 304, 305, 306, 311–313, horror 55, 56, 57, 58, 63, 126, 173, 174, 175,
319, 325, 326, 331–333, 339, 343–344, 294, 322, 331, 332, 347, 395, 440, 456,
346–348, 350–351, 355, 368, 396, 423, 459, 476, 501, 502, 514, 515, 516, 521, 523
431, 456, 464, 501, 502, 508, 515, 522, Howard the Duck 411
523, 531, 532, 533, 574, 576, 584, 585, Hugo Award 76, 516, 524
592, 593–594, 603, 605, 608, 609, 615 Hulk, The 63, 192, 312, 333, 334, 337, 339
Gentleman Jim 451, 453, 459, 460 Human Torch, The 64
Ghost World 561–571 Hurricane Katrina 75, 292, 293, 298, 299–305
Gleeful Guides 433 hybridity 155, 281
Golden Age 64–65, 141, 154, 223, 311–314,
317–330, 333, 345, 351, 431, 514, 607– iconicity 295, 372
609 iconography 131, 266, 297, 306, 393, 504, 575
gothicism 150, 237, 442, 510, 515, 522–523, identity 64, 126, 189, 202, 204, 221–228, 237,
graphic space 239, 243 239, 244, 266, 267, 269, 271, 274, 303,
graphic style 204, 208, 212 312, 385, 400–401, 420, 445, 452, 523,
Graphic Women 243 525, 526–527, 533, 534, 596, 605, 608
Great Comic Book Heroes, The 2, 433 illness 205–207, 211–213, 232, 237, 239, 241,
Great Depression 54, 60, 435 255, 471, 578
Green Arrow 313, 345 illustrated books 23, 482, 488
image-text relations see text-image relations Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
immigrant narrative 232, 235, 272–273 Gentleman, The 146, 573–588
In the Shadow of No Towers 75, 129, 167–168, Life Force, A 436
207, 291–292, 294, 372 liminality 236
Incredible Hulk, The see Hulk, The limited series 66, 184, 193–196, 311, 349, 351,
independent comics 73, 220, 234, 311, 562– 444, 500
565 literacy 5, 36, 37, 43, 56, 295–298, 302, 306–
Industry and Idleness 38 307, 368, 526
inter-pictoriality 278, 281 lithography 46
intercultural transfer 155, 267, 271, 283 Little Nemo in Slumberland 49, 295, 383, 387–
interior monologue 111–112, 149, 548, 578 403, 501, 513, 558
intermediality 12, 68, 99, 143, 153–159, 169, Little Orphan Annie 51–52
253, 501–511 Little Sammy Sneeze (also: Little Sammy) 389,
internal focalization 149 391, 396–398, 400
Intersectional identities 227, 232, 239 Lois Lane 60, 222
intertextuality 67–68, 154, 278, 294, 295, 322, Lost Girls 48, 501, 502
324, 354, 382, 457–459, 501- 502, 508– Lucky Luke 55
509, 511, 514, 520, 525, 534–535, 574, 614
invisibility 177, 539, 541 MAD Magazine 57, 408, 483, 561
Iron Age 65, 69, 311, 313, 314, 355 Madeline series 596
Iron Man 63, 123, 192, 333, 335, 338, 339, 345 magical realism 294
Islam 291, 294, 301, 417, 589, 591 mainstream comics 2, 23, 30, 58, 65, 66, 70,
It Aint Me, Babe 71 72, 125, 125, 130, 168, 171, 172, 174–175,
177–178, 189, 194–195, 206, 220, 224,
It Rhymes With Lust 73
225, 228, 234, 269, 301, 311–313, 349–
351, 380, 406, 426, 445, 468, 481, 500,
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution 502
539, 561–564, 568, 598
Jerusalem 39
Man From U.N.C.L.E., The 337, 339
Jewishness 171, 271, 276, 312, 434, 435, 446,
Mandrake the Magician 59
468, 478
manga 1, 11, 27, 30, 183, 225, 248, 256, 259–
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth 16,
260, 281, 297, 522
76, 113, 545–559, 569
Manhunter 345
Joker, The 62, 67, 321–323, 327–328
marginalization 21, 67, 171, 220, 223, 227,
Judy 44–45
231–233, 236, 238, 244, 245, 268, 271,
Justice League of America 64, 192, 333, 345,
298, 299, 303, 340, 431, 432, 445–446,
513 493
marketing 28, 151, 191, 208, 311, 349, 352,
Katzenjammer Kids, The 49, 50, 51, 54, 130, 354, 355, 394, 444, 468, 483, 533
295, 373, 401 Marvel Cinematic Universe 142, 181, 340
Kingdom Come 355 Marvel Comics 28, 30, 59, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69,
Kirby Award 76, 515 103, 123, 133, 134, 142, 176, 181, 182, 191,
Kitchen Sink Press 174, 484, 486, 488, 502 192, 224, 311–314, 332–340, 344–346,
Krazy Kat 49–51, 372, 379–386, 481, 489, 558 352, 406, 408, 410, 444, 483, 500
Marvelman 500
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The 24, masculinity 96, 172, 219–228, 325, 332, 335,
105, 107, 113, 501 348, 499, 503, 604, 605
Leetah 225 Maus 72, 101, 102, 106, 108, 168, 170, 172,
lettering 152, 204, 240, 393, 423, 425, 440– 195, 205, 207, 208, 276, 278, 289–291,
441, 522, 583 294, 313, 427, 444, 456, 464, 467–479,
LGBTQ+ 71, 231, 233, 526, 529, 538, 541 515, 529–531, 545–546, 556, 562, 569,
Li’l Abner 53, 489 590, 596, 597
Max and Moritz 47, 49, 54 Neon Lit 151

McFadden’s Row of Flats 48, 363, 366–373 New 52, The 69, 124
medieval art 38, 39, 41 New Comics 54
Megalomaniacal Spider-Man, The 68 new journalism 74, 290
melodrama 439 new sincerity 546
memoir 111, 201–218, 232, 234–235, 240–241, New York 5, 168, 176–177, 191, 295, 312, 361–
275, 276, 282, 291, 530–531, 533, 537, 373, 388, 391, 393, 435, 446, 493, 502, 561
556, 570, 590, 597–598 New York Journal 48, 363
memory 36–38, 67–68, 202–203, 207, 209– New York World 48
210, 212, 242–245, 271, 275–276, 291, newspapers 12–13, 25, 28–29, 48–54, 69, 74,
293, 299, 320, 328, 353–354, 370, 434– 121, 124–133, 149, 167–168, 182, 185–186,
435, 460–461, 470, 473, 476, 499, 503, 196–197, 206, 233, 254, 277–278, 292,
507, 530–531, 533–536, 549 301, 317, 319, 322, 325, 344, 361–374,
mental health 56, 239–240, 576 379–380, 382, 384, 387, 393–397, 453,
meta-narrative 157, 581–582 456, 458–459, 467, 481, 483–484, 529,
metadaptation 511 538, 552, 562, 583
metafiction 352, 408, 410, 416, 420, 470, 474, Nick Fury 63, 314, 331–340, 350
511, 546, 552, 558, 601–603, 605, 609 non-fiction comics 73–75, 251, 272, 289–306,
metalepsis 100, 102–103, 603, 610–616 469, 531, 537
metamediality 601 nostalgia 129–130, 325–326, 453, 460, 462,
Mickey Mouse 13, 475 481, 486, 495, 557, 563, 566, 569
Middle Ages 20, 38 nuclear war 194, 259–260, 336–337, 451–464,
Mighty Thor, The see Thor 553, 604–605
migration (as topic) 206, 225, 267, 269, 271–
274 obscenity 171, 174, 372, 484
Miller vs. California 72 occult 501, 510, 515, 523, 601–602, 608–609
Millie the Minx 54 “On Writing for Comics” 502
Miracleman 66, 514, 518 One Hundred Demons 232, 591
Moche 37 Oor Wullie 50
modernism 82, 380, 557, 575, 606 Operation Pied Piper 457
Muenda “Morowa” Kogo 227 oral storytelling / orality 37–38, 60, 102, 253,
multiculturalism 225, 265, 268, 271, 273, 247, 280
382 “Orphan, The” 57
multiliteracy 296 Our Army At War 334
multimodality 88–90, 95–97, 103, 111, 135,
278, 296–297, 305–306 page layout 92, 146–147, 156, 158, 422, 439,
multiversity 69, 319, 348, 352–354, 602, 616 576, 582
Mutt and Jeff 49–50, 185, 317 Palestine 75–76, 105, 214–215, 269, 290–291,
mythology 43, 255–256, 280, 410, 504, 515, 301–302, 569
518, 601, 603, 615 parody 61, 70–71, 152–153, 178, 253, 255, 278,
339, 367, 371, 389, 405, 408, 410, 411,
Name of the Rose, The 500 414, 417, 419–421, 427, 483, 487, 489,
Namur the Submariner 63 521–522, 546, 554, 573, 603–605, 607
narrativity 21, 26, 100, 494, 584 pastiche 171, 511, 513, 522, 564, 596
narratology 5, 24, 26, 99–120, 157, 601, 6111 Peanuts 50, 125, 185
narrator 99–120, 149, 157, 172, 196, 202–203, Persepolis 213, 289, 290, 291, 294, 301, 427,
207, 256, 276, 279, 419, 473, 517, 521, 529, 530, 531, 556, 562, 556, 562, 589–
548, 576–578, 581, 611 598
Nemo in Slumberland see Little Nemo in Peter Pan 502
Slumberland Phantom, The 59, 278, 281, 322
photography 5, 21, 27, 75, 82, 83, 96, 125, 157, psychoanalysis 389, 394, 414, 530
171, 177, 204, 205, 209, 214, 215, 241, psychogeography 504, 510
245, 272, 277, 289, 290, 293, 295, 297, psychology 84, 387, 400, 499, 503
301, 304, 399, 423, 469, 474, 488, 495, Pulitzer Prize 76, 208, 477, 515, 562
535–536 Punch 25, 44
photorealism 188, 421, 536 punk rock 30, 494, 501565, 569–570
pictorial turn 5, 84–85, 95 Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea 75
Picture Stories from American History 56
Picture Stories from the Bible 56 queer comics 232–245
Pip, Squeak and Wilfred 50 queerness see LGTBQ+
Plastic Man 63
point of view 109–110, 113, 272, 303, 400, race 57, 67, 71, 132, 169–170, 172, 189, 204,
506, 509 219, 221, 224–226, 229, 235, 260, 266,
politics 26, 39, 44, 65, 70–71, 74–75, 131, 132, 268–269, 274–275, 278, 299, 303, 334,
133, 135, 136, 167–179, 184, 187–191, 194, 367, 379, 395, 400, 401, 437, 441, 446,
196–198, 204, 206–207, 214, 219, 221, 475, 476, 487, 492, 526, 538
223, 225, 233, 235, 255, 256, 259, 265– racism 56, 57, 65, 71, 169, 172–173, 176, 178,
266, 268–269, 271, 273, 276, 281–283, 188–189, 266–267, 273, 278, 345, 400,
289–290, 292–293, 295, 298, 303, 305, 482, 557
312, 314, 331–332, 340, 343–345, 367, Rain 228
373, 382, 405, 409–412, 417, 419–420, RAW 72, 168, 290, 468, 484, 545
422, 427, 451–452, 457–459, 462, 482, Raw Books and Graphics 72
484–487, 501, 502, 506, 509, 515, 520, readership 49, 55, 63, 73–74, 195, 201, 206,
529, 537, 541, 558, 573, 582–583, 590– 220, 222, 237, 239, 257, 282, 298, 311–
591, 593, 595, 597–598 313, 326, 344, 349, 352, 373, 400, 482
Poorhouse Press 433 reading diary 303
Popeye 51, 181, 185–188, 192, 489 Reading Lolita in Tehran 598
pornography 30, 71, 445, 483, 486–487, 492, realism 92, 171, 191–192, 233, 290, 294, 306,
547, 552, 603 332, 343, 348, 434, 437, 557, 567, 603
poststructuralism 22, 154, 202 reality effect 93
postcolonialism 190–191, 196, 265–283 rebirth 318, 578
postmodernism 22, 74, 85, 130, 151, 153–154, religion 37, 43, 204, 209, 282, 405, 406, 410,
290, 380, 405, 414, 427, 500, 511, 513, 412, 417, 427
557, 564, 568–569, 581, 601, 605–606, remediation 143
610, 616 Renaissance 38, 82
pre-Columbian era 31, 37 representation 13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 43,
pre-history 12, 35, 36 45, 50, 74, 84, 96, 97, 99–115, 148, 170–
Prince Valiant 51, 222, 383, 411 171, 178, 203–205, 208, 213, 216, 219,
printing press 37, 39, 43 224, 228, 232, 235, 239, 240, 244, 258–
Prisoner of the Hell Planet: A Case Study 72, 267, 273, 276–278, 280, 289–290, 294,
473–475 296–287, 300, 304–306, 319, 327, 367–
Progress of a Scotsman 44 368, 370–371, 374, 390, 410, 455, 461,
Promethea 501–502 467, 475–477, 508–509, 530, 537, 539,
propaganda 39, 44, 61, 63, 70, 169, 170, 178, 595–596, 611
266, 312, 335–336, 461 rhetoric 147, 149, 156, 170, 231, 237, 295,
Protect and Survive 451–452, 454–455, 457, 296–297, 302, 305–306, 325, 355, 558,
460, 463 583, 598, 611
Protest and Survive 454 Ridenhour Book Prize 76
Protestantism 39 “Rock-a-Bye Baby” 458
psalm 462–463 Roger the Dodger 54
romance comics 145, 598 Sexton Blake 49

Ronin 348 sexuality 37, 60, 65, 69–72, 170–173, 212,
Roy of the Rovers 55 222–228, 231–245, 270, 274–276, 325,
348, 381, 385, 414, 418, 419, 425, 436,
Saga of the Swamp Thing, The 347, 350, 500, 481–487, 500, 502, 506, 510, 529, 531,
514 534, 538, 540–542, 547, 553–554, 557,
Sandman, The 67–68, 76, 103, 107–109, 111, 591, 603
114, 313, 513–527 Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos 332–
satire 25, 43–44, 47, 52, 71, 74, 227, 266, 271, 334, 338
278, 281, 367, 373, 391, 405, 408, 410– Sgt. Rock 334
411, 418, 420–421, 423, 427, 453, 461, Shadow, The 53, 59, 322–323
481–483, 487, 489, 500, 516, 562, 574– Shadowplay − The Secret Team 74–75
576, 585, 506 Shandeism 581
Scarlet Pimpernel, The 59 Shazam Award 75–76, 515
scholartism 575 Sheena, Queen of the Jungle 59
science fiction 55, 56, 174, 181, 185, 227, 247, Shock SuspenStories 56–57
258, 260, 326, 334, 409, 501, 514, 523– shoujo manga 225
524 Showcase 345
Scraps 44 Silver Age 65, 129, 191, 311–314, 327–328,
secret identity 59–60, 175 331–340, 345, 353, 407, 604, 606–607,
Secret Wars 352 609, 614
Seduction of the Innocent 2, 55, 63, 173, 227, Sinister House of Secret Love 442
289, 295, 325, 333 slavery 172
self-fashioning 201 Snowman, The 451–452
self-referentiality 153, 209, 278, 339, 488, 511, Song of Songs 22, 38–39
546 South Asian comics 232, 236–239, 279–281
self-reflexivity 64, 125, 132, 134, 136, 281, spatio-topia 92
290, 291, 302, 304, 306, 320, 327, 339, speech balloons/bubbles 15, 20, 22, 36, 39,
351, 352, 396, 483, 499, 502, 507, 509, 41, 46, 54, 86, 91, 93, 125, 131, 146, 148,
511, 534, 537, 579, 594, 614, 616 214, 231, 234, 240, 241, 301, 306, 368,
semiotics 14, 82–84, 87, 90–92, 95, 143, 579 372, 373, 399, 416, 422, 425, 441, 459–
Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile 461, 491, 612
Delinquency 55–57, 63, 77, 80, 174, 179, Spider-Man 26, 61, 63, 68, 174, 176–178, 191–
333 192, 312, 333, 344, 346–347
sequential art 1, 4–5, 12, 15–29, 35–39, 41, Spirit, The 61–62, 431
43, 47, 85–87, 129, 131–132, 170, 196, Squadron Supreme 66
231, 240, 291, 396, 433, 437–438, 440, steampunk 501
445, 546 stereotypes 45, 70–71, 143, 171, 173, 176, 219–
seriality 1, 28–29, 36, 43, 54, 60, 66, 72–73, 220, 223–226, 240, 266, 278, 351, 367,
99, 121–136, 167, 175, 181–184, 188, 192, 373, 382, 387, 400, 476, 486–487, 492,
186, 233–234, 290, 311–313, 317, 337, 540–541, 595
363–364, 366–367, 370, 373, 381, 396, storyworld 17, 20–21, 99–103, 105–108, 110–
407, 442, 444–445, 468, 482, 492, 513– 115, 122, 124, 141, 144, 149, 175, 178, 181–
515, 519, 529, 545, 562–563 198, 312, 314
setting 20, 101, 123, 136, 146, 148, 157–158, strange loop 611, 616
167–169, 171, 186, 277, 279, 335–336, Strange Tales 331, 336–339
365–366, 381, 391, 395, 422, 425, 457, street literature 41
459, 504 Sunday supplements 13, 27–28, 49, 51–52,
sexism 71, 219–220, 223, 227, 235, 237, 381, 185, 361–365, 371, 373, 379, 384–385,
482, 557 422, 440
Supergirl 63, 135, 353 295, 299–300, 304, 306, 317–328, 372,
superhero genre 6, 12, 13, 19, 29, 55, 59–69, 414, 467–476, 507, 510, 534, 537–538,
71, 124–133, 142, 145, 149, 169–171, 174– 578, 598
177, 183–184, 191–196, 206, 220, 222– travel literature 573
224, 234, 248, 252, 260–261, 301, 311– “True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish
355, 397, 406, 408, 419, 421, 431, 445, Plot, A” 22
483, 500–501, 515, 521, 552, 556, 603– Twisted Sisters 71
610, 614–616
Superman 3, 56, 59–63, 65–67, 123, 135, 175– Uncanny X-Men see X-Men
176, 184–185, 191–192, 194, 220, 222, Uncle Scrooge 175, 183
311, 317–318, 327, 333, 350, 352–353, underground comix see comix
355, 438, 500, 546, 552–554, 604, 606, unreliability 108–109, 131, 271, 294, 344, 419,
608 503
surrealism 75, 144, 232, 272, 293, 380, 394, Ut Pictura Poesis 82
395, 494, 561, 562, 605, 609 utopia 66, 83, 123, 226–227, 317–319, 326,
survival 108, 168, 239, 436, 436, 439, 454, 328, 418, 486, 557, 610
462, 273, 478
syndication 53, 70, 168, 185, 530 V for Vendetta 106, 108, 500
Very Hungry Caterpillar, The 23
tabloids 39, 54 Vietnam War 194, 210, 333, 336, 344, 345,
Taboo 501, 502 350, 351, 486
Tales from the Crypt 56, 58 visual bias 292
Tales of Suspense 335, 337–339 visual culture 132, 487, 532
Tarzan of the Apes 59 visual language 12, 87–90, 225, 392, 439, 461
Teddy Tail 50 visual literacy 289, 295, 296, 306
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 443 visual media 19, 20, 143, 148, 155, 156, 158
terrorism 129, 171, 201, 213, 322, 328, 331, visual pedagogy 295
337–340, 372 visualization 75, 114, 145, 146, 148, 149, 208–
Tex Thompson 63 209, 211, 213, 272, 276, 297, 380, 460,
text-image relations 23, 25, 81–98, 108, 148, 583, 611
155, 245 Vulcan 68
There Will Come Soft Rains 457–458
Thor 63, 333, 334, 338, 346 Walt and Skeezix 52
thought balloons/bubbles 416 war comics 281, 332–333
Tijuana Bibles 70, 145, 483 Warren Magazines 408
Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Warrior 350
Woman, The 451 Watchmen 66, 68, 101–102, 106–107, 181,
Tits & Clits 71 191–195, 196, 313, 343, 345, 348–349,
tokenism 239, 424 351–352, 444, 461, 500–501, 523, 608
trade paperbacks 66, 193, 195, 406, 442, 444, webcomics 124, 129, 228
500, 547, 563 Wee Willie Winkie’s World 49
Trajan’s column 15, 38 Weird Science 56
transgender 221, 227, 228, 539 Weirdo 482–486
translation 3, 14, 90, 143, 151–152, 159, 254, Western comics (genre) 55, 63, 64
279, 522 Wet Satin 71
transmediality 99, 100, 103, 122, 135, 145, 159, When the Wind Blows 451–464
184, 191, 373 “Whipping, The” 56
Trashman 71 Wimmen’s Comix 71, 96, 223
trauma 62, 65, 167, 206–208, 212, 215, 234, witnessing 321, 531
237–239, 242–243, 271, 276, 292, 294– Women’s Comix Collective 71
Wonder Wart Hog 71 World, The (newspaper) 48, 361, 363, 364, 373
Wonder Woman 63, 170, 220, 222, 311, 312, worlds-within-worlds 602
333, 345, 354, 518
Wonderman 175 X-Men 63, 64, 68, 224, 258, 313, 440
woodcuts 41, 43, 289
wordless comics 23, 81, 152, 238, 272 yellow journalism 48
World Fantasy Award 76, 516, 524 Yellow Kid, The 35, 46, 48, 49, 295, 361–374,
World War II 2, 52, 55, 61, 63, 189, 220, 223, 393
293, 312, 331 332, 333, 336, 337 340, youth culture 56, 168, 192, 312
345, 452, 453, 457, 458, 461, 464, 469,
473, 477, 486, 502 Zap Comix 70, 481–484, 487
world-building 181–198, 225, 311, 313, 410, zincography 47
513, 514, 524, 602 Zorro 58, 322
Index of Names
Aaronovitch, Sam 58 Capp, Al 53, 489
Abel, Jessica 269 Carey, Mike 101, 514
Adams, Douglas 514 Charlier, Jean-Michel 55
Adams, Neal 319, 327, 345, 347, 408 Chast, Roz 73
Adams, Scott 53 Chevely, Lyn 70, 71
Ahmed, Naseer 276 Chick, Jack T. 440
Alighieri, Dante 152, 574, 579, 583 Chitrakar, Moyna 275, 281
Allain, Marcel 59 Claremont, Christopher S. 224
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji 275 Clowes, Daniel 545, 546, 561–571
Amend, Bill 50 Collette 244
Anand, S. 275, 281 Colón, Ernie 75, 144, 170
Arni, Samhita 275, 281 Corben, Richard 442
Atlas, Charles 604, 605, 606 Costanza, John 67
Cowles, Clayton 172
B., David 591, 596 Crane, Tristane 234
Bagge, Peter 68, 561 Crepax, Guido 150
Banerjee, Sarnath 271, 275, 281, 282 Crowley, Aleister 523
Barker, Matt 73 Cruikshank, George 44, 574
Barks, Carl 175, 183, 409, 423, 489 Crumb, Robert 70, 71, 152, 171, 206, 223, 482–
497, 556, 561, 570, 607
Barlow, Francis 41
Barry, Lynda 73, 203, 232, 591
Dalziel, Gilbert 35
Bathy, Asimba 268
Darwin, Charles 142, 154, 248, 251, 257
Battaglia, Dino 150
Davis, Jim 50
Baxendale, Leo 54
De Bevere, Maurice see Morris
Bellair, Jordie 172
De Landro, Valentine 226
Bemelmans, Ludwig 596
De Villiers, Karlien 275, 279, 282
Berger, Karen 514, 520
DeConnick, Kelly Sue 226
Birch, Thora 561
Deitch, Kim 71, 127, 130
Blake, William 84, 505, 508
Delano, Jamie 515
Block, Rudolph Edgar 363, 364
Delany, Samuel 234
Blyth, Harry see Meredeth, Hal Delisle, Guy 75, 269
Bowen, Elizabeth 537 Devraj, Rajesh 270
Brabner, Joyce 74, 211 DeZuniga, Tony 442
Bradbury, Ray 457, 458 Dillon, Steve 355
Briggs, Raymond 451–466 Dirks, Rudolph 49, 130, 373
Brown, Chester 51, 561 Ditko, Steve 63, 333
Browne, Dik 50 Doré, Gustave 24, 574
Bürger, Gottfried August 45 Doucet, Julie 561
Burns, Charles 73, 101 Drake, Arnold 73
Burr Opper, Frederick 49 Dringenberg, Mike 522, 604
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 59 Duchamp, Marcel 32
Burton, Tim 62, 320, 355 Dürer, Albrecht 577, 579, 580, 583
Busch, Wilhelm 47, 48, 49, 54
Byrne, Olive 170 Edwards, Dylan 234
Eisner, Will 2, 4, 5, 12, 29, 59, 61, 62, 72, 81,
Campbell, Eddie 499, 501, 502, 509, 510 85, 86, 92, 95, 144, 151, 231, 232, 234,
Caniff, Milton 133, 170 238, 240, 248, 266, 347, 431–449, 532
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110446968-037
630 Index of Names
Eliot, T.S. 573, 574, 575 Griffin, Rick 70, 484

Ellis, Warren 319, 355, 500 Griffiths, Bill 72, 486
Ennis, Garth 355, 500 Gross, Peter 101
Everett, Bill 63 Gruenwald, Mark 66, 68
Gull, William 502–510
Falk, Lee 59, 322
Farmer, Joyce 70, 71 Hamilton, Charles see Richards, Frank
Fawkes, Guy 501 Hardy, Oliver 53, 383
Feiffer, Jules 2, 433 Hart, Johnny 53
Feininger, Lyonel 49 Hearst, William Randolph 48, 363, 364, 379,
Feldstein, Al 57 384, 393
Feyerabend, Johann Rudolph 40 Heath, William 44
Finger, Bill 62, 317, 320, 322, 323, 324, 438 Heck, Don 63
Fisher, Bud 49 Hergé (pseudonym of Georges Prosper Remi)
Flix (pseudonym of Felix Görmann) 143, 144 181, 182, 188–192, 266, 278, 485
Folkart, Charles 50 Hernandez, Gilbert 484, 561, 570
Forney, Ellen 232, 239, 240, 241, 244 Hernandez, Jaime 484, 561, 570
Foster, Hal 51, 383, 411 Herriman, George 2, 49, 372, 379–386, 438,
Freud, Sigmund 328, 394 439, 481, 489, 558
Heuet, Stephane 150
Gaiman, Neil 66, 67, 68, 73, 76, 103, 109, 130, Hitler, Adolf 131, 169, 426, 461, 471, 475, 476,
313, 355, 500, 513–527, 556 606
Gaines, Maxwell Charles 54, 56, 248 Hogarth, William 18, 19, 38, 41, 43, 396, 398,
Gaines, William 56, 57 508, 574, 575, 579–583
Gallant, Gregory see Seth Hornschemeier, Paul 532
Garrett, John 463 Huynh, Matt 281
Gay, John 43
Gebbie, Melinda 48, 70, 500, 501 Iger, S.M. (Jerry) 59
Gerber, Steve 408, 411 Imchen, Meren 270
Gerhard 406, 415, 422, 425 Ireland, Billy 432, 440
Ghosh, Vishwajyoti 275, 276, 281, 282
Gibbons, Dave 66, 76, 101, 193, 194, 195, 343, Jack the Ripper 499, 502, 503, 505, 507–511,
444, 514, 515, 608 515
Gibson, Walter B. see Grant, Maxwell Jackson, Ted 304
Glidden, Sarah 105 Jacobson, Sid 75, 144, 170
Gillen, Kieron 172 Janson, Klaus 67, 171
Gillray, James 43, 495, 574 Johns, Geoff 350
Giraud, Jean see Mœbius Joyce, James 244, 442, 577, 578
Gloeckner, Phoebe 213, 232, 486
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 46, 143, 144, Kafka, Franz 144, 146, 148, 153, 389, 482,
152, 592 509, 558
Goez, Joseph Franz von 45, 46 Kahn, Jenette 346
Goodwin, Archie 345 Kamen, Jack 57
Görmann, Felix see Flix Kane, Bob 62, 130, 317, 320, 322, 323, 324
Grant, Maxwell (pseudonym of Walter B. Kanigher, Robert 220
Gibson and other authors of The Shadow) Kannemeyer, Anton 265, 269, 274, 275, 278,
53 279
Gray, Harold 51, 52 Kanter, Albert Luis 55, 141, 149, 159
Green, Justin 72, 206, 208, 210, 211 Karasik, Paul 151, 153
Green, Katie 211, 212, 213 Katz, Jack 442
Index of Names 631
Keene, Charles 44 McCay, Winsor 49, 295, 383, 387–403, 501,

Keith, Sam 519, 522 513, 558
Kelly, Mary (also Marie Jeanette Kelly) 503, McCloud, Scott 4, 5, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,
504, 508, 509, 510 23, 24, 35, 37, 73, 81, 85, 86, 87, 92, 108,
Kelly, Ryan 172 128, 188, 196, 197, 204, 231, 232, 238,
Kelly, Walt 382, 481, 489 242, 248, 291, 295, 297, 434, 452, 595
Ketcham, Hank 54 McCulley, Johnston 59
King, Frank O. 51, 52, 124, 128 McGregor, Don 345
McKean, Dave 27, 67, 146, 514, 516, 519, 521,
Kirby, Jack 63, 67, 225, 226, 333, 334, 335,
522
338, 345, 521, 606
McManus, George 383, 438
Klein, Todd 522
Mellings, Kelly 271
Knight, Stephen 502
Mendes, Barbara “Willy” 223
Kominsky, Aline (also Kominsky-Crumb) 70, 71, Meredeth, Hal (pseudonym of Harry Blyth) 49
171, 482, 486, 598 Messner-Loebs, William 409
Krueger, Jim 108 Metzger, Richard 442
Kubert, Joe 334 Mignola, Mike 515
Kumar, Amitabh 275 Miller, Frank 62, 66, 67, 68, 101, 113, 171, 172,
Kuper, Peter 146, 147, 149, 153 194, 313, 319, 327, 328, 343, 347, 348,
Kuriyan, Priya 277 349, 350, 354, 355, 424, 436, 441, 444,
Kurtzman, Harvey 408, 483, 486, 561 445, 515, 607
Milligan, Peter 107
LaBoucane-Bensen, Patti 271 Mizuki, Shigeru 96
Lamb, Bertram 50 Mocosco, Victor 484, 486
Laurel, Stan 53, 383 Mœbius (pseudonym of Jean Giraud) 55, 485
Moers, Walter 24
Law, David 54
Montellier, Chantal 153
Leavitt, Sarah 211, 212
Moorcock, Michael 408
Lee, Stan 63, 182, 191, 333, 334, 338, 339,
Moore, Alan 24, 48, 62, 66, 68, 74, 76, 101,
344, 345, 346 105, 106, 130, 171, 193, 194, 195, 294,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 18, 19, 81, 82, 83, 313, 343, 347, 349, 350, 355, 420, 424,
148 444, 499–512, 513, 514, 515, 523, 525,
Letham, Jonathan 73 556, 608, 615
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 43 Morris (pseudonym of Maurice De Bevere) 55
Lichtenstein, Roy 24 Morrison, Grant 62, 66, 67, 68, 130, 320, 327,
Liew, Sonny 105 328, 348, 353, 355, 500, 601–618
Lloyd, David 106, 501 Mouly, Françoise 72, 73, 168, 468
Loubert, Deni 408, 409, 423, 424 Muybridge, Eadweard 399
Low, R. D. 50
Luks, George Benjamin 48, 133, 361, 363, 364, Nafisi, Azar 598
366, 367, 371, 373 Natarajan, Srividya 275
Neri, Greg 296
Lutes, Jason 546
Neufeld, Josh 75, 289, 292, 293, 298, 299,
300, 302, 304
Magritte, René 23
Newton, Richard 44, 45
Mahler, Nicolas 153
Ninan, Aparajita 275
Mairowitz, David Zane 153, 482 Noomin, Diane 71, 223
Manson, Charles 69 Nowlan, Philip Francis 53
Marsden, John 270
Marston, Elizabeth 170 O’Malley, Bryan Lee 103
Marston, William Moulton 170, 220, 222 O’Neil, Dennis (Denny) 130, 319, 327, 345, 431
Mayhew, Henry 44 O’Neill, Kevin 105
Mazzucchelli, David 151, 153, 327 Orlando, Joe 442
632 Index of Names
Osrin, Ray 73, Sen Gupta, Aniruddha 277

Outcault, Richard Felton 35, 46, 48, 49, 133, Sen, Orijit 275
295, 361–377, 393 Sengupta, Partha 275
Seth (pseudonym of Gregory Gallant) 545
Parsons, Sam 74 Sezen, Beldan 232, 235, 236
Patil, Amruta 232, 236, 237, 238, 244, 269, Shakespeare, William 151, 152, 367, 513, 517,
280, 282 523, 525, 526
Patterson, Joseph Medill (Captain) 52 Shelton, Gilbert 70, 71, 484, 486, 494
Peeters, Benoît 5, 90, 91, 93, 100, 146, 147 Shuster, Joe 59, 60, 194, 220
Pekar, Harvey 71, 73, 171, 211, 424, 482, 483, Sickert, Walter 506, 509
487, 556 Siegel, Jerry 59, 60, 61, 194, 220, 438
Pepper, Frank S. 55 Sienkiewicz, Bill 74, 294, 575
Pérez, George 69, 123, 343, 352, 353, 354 Sim, Dave 73, 405–429
Peter, Harry G. 170 Simon, Joe 67, 521
Pini, Richard 224, 225, 226 Simonson, Walt 345
Pini, Wendy 224, 225, 226 Sinclair, Iain 509
PP, Abdul Sultan 275 Singh, Parismita 270, 280, 281
Prasad, Bhagwati 275 Singh, Saurabh 276
Pulitzer, Joseph 48, 361, 362, 363, 364, 373 Small, David 105, 208, 209, 210, 212
Smith, Jeff 106
Quitely, Frank 601, 607, 608, 612, 613 Smith, Jim 73
Smythe, Reg 50
Raymond, Alex 53, 383 Souvestre, Pierre 59
Spiegelman, Art 70, 72, 75, 76, 101, 129, 131,
Reid, Ken 54
151, 167, 168, 169, 172, 195, 205, 207,
Remi, Georges Prosper see Hergé
208, 213, 276, 278, 289, 290, 291, 292,
Richards, Frank (pseudonym of Charles
294, 295, 313, 372, 424, 444, 456, 464,
Hamilton) 49–50
467–479, 483, 484, 515, 529, 545, 546,
Robbins, Trina 2, 70, 71, 223, 224, 486, 598
556, 562, 569, 570, 590, 596, 597
Robinson, Jerry 324
Stack, Frank 211
Rodriguez, Manuel (Spain) 70, 71, 482, 484,
Steranko, Jim 339, 438, 440
486
Sterne, Laurence 146, 573, 575–585
Rogers, Roy 55
Stevenson, Robert Louis 523
Romita, John Jr. 177
Straczynski, J. Michael 176, 177
Ross, Alex 108 Swift, Jonathan 424, 575, 579
Ross, Charles H. 45 Swindells, Robert 455
Rowlandson, Thomas 43
Rowson, Martin 146, 573–588 Talbot, Bryan 69, 355, 523
Tan, Shaun 81, 107, 270, 272, 273
Sacco, Joe 75, 76, 105, 214, 215, 269, 272, Tardi, Jacques 153
273, 275, 278, 290, 291, 293, 301, 302, Tenniel, John 392
304, 569 Thatcher, Margaret 454, 501
Sajad, Malik 270, 276, 278, 280, 281, 282 Thomas, Roy 346, 411
Samara, Jocelyn 228 Thompson, Hunter S. 74
Satrapi, Marjane 213, 289, 290, 291, 294, 301, Thompson, Craig 101, 208, 209, 609
529, 556, 562, 589–600 Tomine, Adrian 268, 270, 274, 279
Schubert, Johann 42 Töpffer, Rodolphe 35, 46, 47, 132, 439, 442
Schulz, Charles 50, 125, 546 Totleben, John 66
Schwartz, Julius 345, 353 Townsend, Edward Waterman 363, 364, 366–
Segar, Elzie Crisler 51, 182, 185, 186, 187, 188, 371
489 Trudeau, Gary 51, 52, 74
Index of Names 633
Van Gogh, Vincent 240 Wertham, Fredric 2, 55, 56, 57, 63, 173, 174,
Varley, Lynn 67, 171, 349 175, 222, 223, 289, 295, 325, 333, 344,
Veitch, Rick 420 348, 606
Vess, Charles 76, 516 West, Adam 348
Vyam, Durgabai 275 Wilde, Oscar 154, 414, 415, 420, 426
Vyam, Subhash 275 Williams, Robert 223, 484
Wilson, S. Clay 70, 482, 484, 486
Waid, Mark 355 Windsor-Smith, Barry 408, 411
Walden, Tillie 232, 234, 235 Wolfman, Marv 69, 123, 343, 351, 352, 353,
Wallace, Liz 531, 538 354
Waller, Leslie 73 Woodring, Jim 561
Walpole, Horace 522 Woolf, Virginia 240, 538, 539, 577, 578
Ware, Chris 16, 73, 76, 113, 181, 182, 197, 198,
485, 545–559, 561, 562, 569 Yahgulanaas, Michael Nicoll 281
Watkins, Dudley D. 50 Yang, Gene Luen 204, 266, 274, 278, 279
Watterson, Bill 50, 109 Yates, Thomas 74
Wein, Len 442 Young, Charles (Chick) 53
List of Contributors
Juliane Blank is assistant professor of German literature at Saarland University.
Astrid Böger is professor of American Studies at Hamburg University.
Gerry Canavan is associate professor of Literature at Marquette University.
Erin La Cour is assistant professor of English Literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Corey Creekmur is associate professor of Film Studies, English, and Gender, Women’s and
Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa.
Sebastian Domsch is professor of English Literature and Culture at Greifswald University.
Harriet Earle is lecturer and researcher in American Comics and Popular Culture at Sheffield
Hallam University.
Lukas Etter is a postdoctoral research associate in English Studies at the University of Siegen.
Nicola Glaubitz is professor of English Literature at Kiel University.
Evan Gledhill is lecturer in Film, Theatre and Television Studies at the University of Reading.
Erik Grayson is associate professor of English Literature at Northampton Community College.
Dan Hassler-Forest is assistant professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University.
Sandra Heinen is professor of English Literature and Media Studies at the University of Wupptertal.
Eric Hoffman is an independent scholar and the author of several books of poetry.
Heike Elisabeth Jüngst is professor of Translation Studies at the University of Applied Sciences
Würzburg-Schweinfurt.
Martin Lund is senior lecturer in Religious Studies at Malmö University.
Luisa Menzel is a PhD student at Greifswald University.
Christina Meyer is lecturer in American Studies and visiting professor of Teaching English as a
Foreign Language at the Technische Universität Braunschweig.
Oliver Moisich is a doctoral candidate at the University of Paderborn.
Anna Oleszczuk is a doctoral candidate at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University.
Stephan Packard is professor of Popular Culture and Its Theories at the University of Cologne.
Joanne Pettitt is lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent.

636 List of Contributors
Monika Pietrzak-Franger is professor of British Culture and Literature at the University of Vienna.
William Proctor is principal lecturer in Comics, Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University.
Matt Boyd Smith is lecturer in Media Studies at Georgia State University.
Kay Sohini is a comics maker and PhD candidate in English at Stony Brook University.
Rik Spanjers is lecturer in Dutch Language and Culture at Utrecht University.
Daniel Stein is professor of North-American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of
Siegen.
Dawn Stobbart is associate lecturer at Lancaster University and at the University of Cumbria.
Jan-Noël Thon is professor of Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (NTNU), guest professor of Media Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany,
and professorial fellow at the University for the Creative Arts, UK.
Dirk Vanderbeke is professor of English Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
Marie Vanderbeke is project manager at the Professional School of Education, Ruhr University
Bochum.
Matt Yockey is professor of Film at the University of Toledo.

Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021930936

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Internationally renowned colleagues have agreed to collaborate on this series and

VOL 1 Gabriele Rippl (ed.): Handbook of Intermediality

Sebastian Domsch, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Dan Hassler-Forest

Part I: Systematic Aspects

Daniel Stein and Lukas Etter

Part II: Contexts and Themes

Heike Elisabeth Jüngst

Matt Boyd Smith

Part III: Close Readings

Evan Hayles Gledhill

Index of Subjects 619

Index of Names 629

List of Contributors 635

In consequence, it is questionable whether comics studies can succeed if it remains

occurring phenomenon – the way that people refer to something as a comic, or

live broadcasts, news as well as recordings of theatrical performances. Before they

2 How Many Mice Do You See? Medial Form

such as the notion of “family resemblances” proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, or

In his provocative deconstruction of attempts at comics definitions, Aaron Me-

down. This is an extremely obvious implication of temporality, and any viewer

But unless better examples are provided, it is difficult to think of an acceptable

row understandings of fictionality. The wide conception, developed by postmodern

3 The Birth of Comics: Medial Ecology

4 Comics as Cultural Practice

5.2 Further Reading

Key Terms: Comics, history, genres, formats, distribution

1 Pictorial Narratives Before the Rise of Comics

Further examples of sequential art that are frequently discussed as precursors

The Song of Songs consists chiefly of poetic monological or dialogical speeches

The performances of ‘news-singers,’ ‘bench-singers’ (‘cantabancs’) or ‘picture-singers,’ as they

Earlier broadsheets, e. g. propagandist prints in the course of the Reformation, had

2 The Two Births of Comics Proper

ed as Réflexions et menus-propos d’un peintre genevois (Reflections and Small Talk of

stricted to the newspapers he served. Ostensibly an “anti-establishment celebrity”

3 Early Comic Strips

Richards – schoolboy Billy Bunter (1908), Charles Folkart’s anthropomorphic mouse

And so, on Valentine’s Day 1921, an orphan unexpectedly appears in a basket on

4 From Comic Strips to Comic Books

5 Comics Under Attack

In 1955, parliament passed “A Bill to prevent the dissemination of certain pictorial

6 Superheroes Throughout Their Ages

Superman happens to live in an imaginary universe in which, as opposed to ours, causal

ca and Superman’s new hometown Smallville as the epitome of American values

ed or revised. The Human Torch, previously an android, returned as the brother of

As commercial products, comics necessarily undergo transformations to meet the

1980s: trade paperbacks were collections of up to six issues republished together

7 Underground Comix and Alternative Comics

8 Enter the Graphic Novel

9 Non-Fiction Comics and Comics Journalism

Shadowplay’s radical rejection of the realist mode of traditional documentary inau-

10 Praise and Acclaim

11.1 Works Cited

11.2 Further Reading

Key Terms: Image-text relations, visual studies, multimodality, comics, image-text

ever, it is important to situate the discussion of image-text relations in comics in

2 Early English-Language Approaches

– word specific; where texts are dominant and images illustrative

3 The Visual Languages of Comics

4 Comics as a Semiotic System

scholars is Thierry Groensteen, whose The System of Comics (Système de la bande