Studies in Comics - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012

Comics are persistently labelled a kind of literature, but so-called literary treatments of the form are often questionable, focusing on story, content and themes. The fact that comics tell diverse, interesting stories makes them no more 'literary' than film, opera or, indeed, soap opera. It seems perverse for scholars bent on demonstrating the efficacy of visual storytelling to claim that it is storytelling which makes comics literary, thus aligning narrative in general with the verbal medium. This article sets forth a more scrupulous framework for approaching comics as literature. Through a close analysis of various examples, this article challenges the habitual sidelining of text within comics. It demonstrates: first, how comics can be heavily dependent on text; second, how that text can be properly – that is formally – literary; and, third, how the medium can deploy the linguistic element of its content in ways that create literary, textual effects that are in fact unique to the comics medium. In carefully distinguishing between elements such as theme and plotting, which are common to all narrative media, and these truly literary devices, this article ultimately concludes that in order for the comics medium to be given its due as a potentially literary form, proper attention needs to be paid to the way it incorporates literary language. In service of theoretical precision, critics must not confuse narrative properties with literary ones, but must rigorously insist on the correct frame of reference in order to promote serious academic study of this diverse and complex narrative form.

I attempt to place graphic literature in a long, polysystemic view of the culturally ascendant genres in global literary history. Linked to the structuralist 'dominant', Ireneusz Opacki's concept of the 'gatunek koronny'/'royal genre' suggests that, at different times, certain literary genres dominate their historical genre system, exerting sway over other contemporary genres. I would argue that in 'the visual turn' the next iteration of 'normal literature' will be irrevocably marked by a new royal genre, namely graphic literature. Comparatively, the scale of this change is on the lines of two other great royal genres of the past: the epic for the classical period, and the novel for modernity. Retranslating Opacki's gatunek koronny and supplementing Hardt and Negri's concepts of Empire and Multitude, I elaborate a new genre system terminology: 'king genre' (epic), 'empire/queen genre' (novel), and 'paradigm genre' (graphic literature). In addition to their sequential differences, I draw out salient parallels between the three genre systems, including their epigenesis (unpredictable emergence), their polygenesis (independent emergence in multiple locations), close interrelationships with their contemporary technologies of media, and their thematic connections to empires and the global condition of war. Graphic literature has a particular affinity to non-fiction, particularly life writing, and, although still melded to the ongoing print paradigm, will interface well with new media. Since all three genre systems have developed a range of short and long forms, the term 'graphic novel' will be an awkward term going forward.

There has been a trend in comics narratology to focus on the analysis of structures or systems of enunciation, or what Émile Benveniste terms histoire or 'what is told'. Instead, this article will approach comics narratology as the relationship between histoire and discours: between 'what is told' and 'telling to' after first outlining a summary of approaches to narrative, which group around a difference in focus on histoire relative to discours or on histoire alone. Following Barker, it will consider the enunciator, enunciatee, context and medium to be topics affecting both the form and content of what is expressed, bringing alterity to bear on the semic analysis of structure. To demonstrate the importance of this relationship, it will analyse two comic strips: Seth's Clyde Fans Book One (2004) and Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2007).This analysis will scrutinize the ways in which two different types of self-constraint are utilized by Seth and Madden in order to produce their strips. Seth employs a rule in Clyde Fans, which can be summarized as nothing un-American, nothing post-1959. This rule represents both a social identification of the experience of pre-1959 America with a specific canon of images and technologies, and articulates Seth as a subject submitting to constraint by this perceived canon. Similarly, Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story represents a self-aware project that seeks to apply 99 different constraints to a single script. However, unlike Seth, Madden's self-constraint derives from self-observation, or an attempt to adopt the perceived social position of a generalized other in each of his drawings, represented by both drawing style and genre .Both these works demonstrate ways in which social constraint represents self-constraint in the expressive form of the strips themselves. This analysis is not possible considering histoire alone. These examples demonstrate how the relationship between the physical form of the strips, the semic level and subjective constraints at the level of discours contribute to their meaning. This suggests an alternative approach to comics narratology, from the point of view of the relative consideration of histiore and discours, rather than approaches that consider histoire alone, which have dominated comics narratology in the last two decades.

In the study of visual design, comics have been infrequently analyzed. Major theoretical contributions have come from non-academics until recently. While Groensteen and Cohn have developed 'standard stimulisequence' systems for analyzing comics, I propose that a more comprehensive technique would be to follow Magnussen in applying the theories of C. S. Peirce, specifically the Peircean visual design paradigm as explained by Amare and Manning. This study will expand on Peeters' four-category framework to show a variety of complex and explanatory relationships that can exist between the rhetorical content of a comic and the panel design.

The serialized comic book The Walking Dead, written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Charlie Adlard, has been published by Image Comics from October 2003, and is still being released in monthly instalments as of this writing. It has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series in 2010, and has recently been adapted as a successful TV series by AMC. A videogame is forthcoming in late 2011, the television series has been extended for a second, longer season, and there is even an official Walking Dead board game in the works. While indicative of the more general popularity of zombie fiction in contemporary mainstream culture, the Walking Dead phenomenon points towards interesting questions that are raised by its intersection of genres, as well as by its unique combination of an apocalyptic narrative and seemingly endlessly ongoing serialization. In this article, the intersection of seemingly incompatible genres will be my main focus, using Lacanian theory to engage with the ways in which The Walking Dead conflates the western with the zombie genre. This combination of genres is all the more thoughtprovoking as the western genre traditionally stages the Grand Narrative of patriarchal power from within the historical context of colonialist imperialism, whereas the zombie genre is associated with the destabilization of such forms of power. I will also engage with the serialized form in which this narrative is presented, arguing that the series' systematic lack of formal closure is fundamental to its larger decentering effect.

This study considers aspects of personality development present in the autobiographical visual narratives of childhood created by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean in the graphic works Violent Cases (1987) and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch (1994). In particular, Carl Jung's theories of individuation are implemented to investigate the use of light and shadow in the presentation of childhood memory and adult narrative perspective. Archetypical expressions, such as the shadow and the trickster form the basis of dialogue between the conscious ego and the unconscious psyche in the works. This dialogue results in transcendent symbols of interrelationship between the ego and the psyche. Exploration of the graphic narratives illustrate the ways in which early childhood forms an identification with the shadow, while later childhood and adulthood assimilate the personal shadow and reject the shadow's collective aspects in order to regulate society. The sequential narratives present Jungian 'active imagination' in motion through the adult contributions of narrator and artist, illustrating development towards balanced selfhood. An investigation of the 'dark reflections' present within these works results in a deeper understanding of imagery associated with individuation and affirms the process of visual narrative as a mode for psychological exploration. The place of psychological autobiographical graphic narratives within the wider genre of autobiographical graphic narratives is also discussed, highlighting a need for further consideration of genre classification.

Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Bandes Dessinées and Comics, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, July 2011

Hypercomics: The Shapes of Comics to Come, Pump House Gallery, London, 12 August – 26 September 2010

The Rut by Dave McKean: Hypercomics: The Shapes of Comics to Come, Pump House Gallery, London, 12 August – 26 September 2010

British Comics: A Cultural History, James Chapman (2011) London: Reaktion Books, 304pp., Hardback £25.00, ISBN: 978-1-86189-855-5

Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comics Books, Jean-Paul Gabilliet, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (2010) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 410 pages ISBN 978-1-60473-267-2, Hardback, $55.00 (£57.95)

Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels, A. David Lewis and Christine Hoff Kraemer (eds) (2010) New York: Continuum, 384pp., ISBN: 9780826430267, Paperback, £19.99

A Taste of Chlorine, Bastien Vivès (2011) Jonathan Cape Publishing, London: 144 pp., ISBN 9.78022E+12, h/bk, RRP £16.99