Studies in Comics - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015

This article analyses Marvel Comics’ Marvel Noir franchise, published between 2009 and 2011. Taking as its starting point the promise in a 2008 press release that in the comics, Marvel superheroes would ‘meet’ film noir in a new continuity set in the ‘roaring 30s’, the article considers the advertised ‘meeting’ from three different angles: (1) Marvel Noir’s relationship to ‘classic’ film noir; (2) intertextuality in Marvel Noir; and (3), the franchise’s engagement with space and history. In the first instance, drawing on recent film noir scholarship, the article argues that for historical reasons, Marvel Noir manages only to evoke a pastiched ‘image’ of noir drawn from a popular conception of what noir is. Second, it highlights how the heterogeneity of the franchise’s intertextual orbit further defers the ‘meeting’ and that, ultimately, because it builds upon and anticipates the seriality of regular superhero fictions, the real content of the stories is neither film noir nor other historical popular culture, but rather earlier Marvel stories. Third, it looks at how space and history are figured. Although a few exceptions that deal with racial formation are discussed, space appears as largely anonymous ‘images’ that deepen the image of noir while history is generally connoted through a vague sense of ‘pastness’. By way of concluding, the article notes that the postmodern depthlessness of the franchise’s ‘meeting’ with film noir is to be expected, given the style’s historical progresses. Rather, while Marvel Noir perhaps represents an attempt to escape the present through a postmodern play with nostalgia, intertextuality and surfaces, the choice of setting and the recurrent confirmation of the superhero genre’s primacy betrays a return of the repressed, in which the past becomes an unuttered hope for the future.

Research into religion and comics is flourishing and has called attention to the various ways in which religion features across the medium. However, consideration has not yet been given to the role of comics with religious dimensions in the Religious Education (RE) classroom despite significant attention having been paid to their use in schools through subjects such as English. Nonetheless comics are being used outside the classroom to communicate religious ideas and references to the medium are beginning to appear on exam specifications with the intention that candidates engage with religious representations in the media and popular culture. As such, seeking ways to bring comics with religious dimensions into a subject that concerns itself with ‘learning about’ and ‘learning from’ religion allows comic scholarship the potential to be genuinely impactful. A compulsory subject without a strict, prescriptive curriculum, RE is at once accused of indoctrination and called upon to be at the forefront of the battle against extremism. This article presents an overview of the contemporary RE climate in English state secondary schools, then builds on the rationale of why we should use more comics in RE and suggests approaches to using selected comics. The examples considered are necessarily broader than those typically discussed by scholars as they are chosen based on their pedagogical appropriateness. Consideration is given to the theoretical and practical challenges facing the rationale and it is concluded that in order to continue to explore, refine and validate the usefulness of comics in RE the body of sources used needs to expand and become representative in its breadth. Further, continuing to examine why and how we should use comics in the classroom has the potential to deepen and improve the quality of RE and provide comics scholarship opportunities to examine practical applications of the medium.

The publication of a series of Shakespeare Manga by the British company SelfMadeHero affords the opportunity to consider the motivations and methods behind such publications. Visual style, audience, expressions of identity and attempts to modernize through the youth appeal of technology, gore and a preponderance of the visual are all examined. The motivation behind these phenomena is not just an attempt to emulate a financially successful form of Japanese popular culture, but to appropriate some of the soft power that Japan has accrued through the almost worldwide success of its manga. Soft power is the ability to get what one wants through attraction, and Japanese manga’s infiltrating of not just western cultural products but imaginations confers soft power on Japan. These slim volumes promote Shakespeare while trying to lay claim to some of this soft power. Finally, a deliberation of whether these books are western or eastern leads to the conclusion that they are a part of a new Metaculture space that is both and neither at the same time.

This article examines Neil Gaiman’s Sandman as a series that invokes English Romanticism’s perspectives of dreams, heroism, the virtue of storytelling and Shakespeare’s source of authorship, bringing to the fore the series’ relationship with the European literary canon. I initially discuss how popular culture reconstructs possible ‘selves’ of Shakespeare in ways that are designed to suit particular artistic endeavours and/or modern subjectivity, and then focus on ‘how’ and ‘why’ traditional criticism identifies an autobiographical dimension in the playwright’s character Prospero, from The Tempest. Reading the character as metonymic in a Romantic vein, I construct a paradigm to shift current Sandman scholarship from the mythological level to the tropological level to examine its literary values and merit. I maintain throughout the article that Gaiman designs Morpheus with Romantic understandings of Prospero and, drawing from the larger DC Universe of superhero motifs, how Gaiman constructs Morpheus as an alter ego. Rather than a superhero, I argue that Morpheus is a Romantic hero bearing traces of the author’s autobiography. After examining Gaiman’s relationship with the narrative, I discuss the confluences between Gaiman and Samuel Taylor Coleridge locating Shakespeare’s imaginative source in d/Dream (Morpheus) – what Coleridge names the ‘Morphean Space’. Since The Tempest is believed to be Shakespeare’s final play wherein he announces his exeunt from The Globe Theatre and that Gaiman intended to end Sandman with his ‘The Tempest’, I conclude by explaining Gaiman’s use of an autobiographical simile.

This article discusses the portrayal of popular music in comics as both a product of sensory and emotive experience, and as a determinant of social identity and labour. To this end, it focuses on the Japanese serialized manga BECK and the Canadian graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim. These two works offer comparable perspectives on music and the social mythos of musicianship, as well as sharing similar young male protagonists and social contexts, despite their disparate settings in Tokyo and Toronto, respectively. Through a comparative reading of these texts, this analysis examines contemporary comic book techniques as well as the cross-cultural dynamics of Japanese and Anglo-American comic book cultures, specifically with regard to the portrayal of workers in fields of cultural production. In order to examine their interrelated depictions of music as both sensorial experience and enactment of collective identity, I first draw on the canon of comic book semiotics established by Scott McCloud, Ian Hague, and others to examine the techniques employed by these texts in communicating music as an emotive sensorial experience. In particular I will concentrate on their use of diagrammatic techniques and visual caricature as a means of communicating music – not through attempted synaesthetic effects, but rather through emotive evocation. Second, I look at their representation of musicianship as an area in which the mythology of artistic entrepreneurialism coexists with imperatives of collective identity and lifestyle. I examine the sociologically idiosyncratic manner in which these comics reflect and build upon these mythologies through the filters of class, cultural and generational identity, creating narratives that at times perpetuate – and at others subvert – the grand entrepreneurial narratives ascribed to musicianship within contemporary neo-liberal notions of creative labour.

Comics studies have not paid much attention to the functioning of comics publishers, although they remain a crucial factor in the selection, creation, distribution and promotion of comics. An important methodological framework, the gatekeeping research, may offer possibilities as is demonstrated in this historical study of two important comics publishers, Dupuis and Lombard (conducted in the summer 1985). On the basis of an exploratory gatekeeping study at the editorial offices of the two publishers and various contemporary interviews with both gatekeepers (editorial staff) and artists, the gatekeeping process is traced out: how were comics selected, how was the interaction between editors and creators, who were the gatekeepers, and what were their criteria for selecting comics suited for publication (in a weekly or as an album). The results of this research were published in 1986 as a master’s thesis in Dutch (in English the translated title is ‘The selecting comics publishers: A gatekeeping study of two big Belgian comics publishers Lombard and Dupuis’), but were never published in any other language afterwards.

Italian architect Luigi Serafini’s wildly inventive and anarchic Codex Seraphinianus has been entertaining and confusing readers since its publication in the early 1980s. It purports to be a ‘found manuscript’ akin to the Voynich manuscript, written in an alien but tantalizingly familiar-seeming language, and its small print runs and beautiful volumes have made it an object of desire and intrigue. Attempts have been made to decipher the text and numerals, and thereby to ‘read’ the book, but readers have been kept guessing. Serafini has revealed that the text itself is meaningless; but nonetheless the book is in many senses ‘readable’. In what ways can this be done? This article will argue that the text relies on conventions of comics and graphic novels to become accessible despite the alienness of its content; that whilst the ‘words’ have no semantics and no grammar, the text as a whole has a discourse structure, and shares a textual logic with comics that carries the sense that readers can make of it. This ‘comics-nature’ is the key to reading the Codex Seraphinianus. Such an exploration of how the Codex may be read as a comic can reveal to us some of the qualities of that comics-nature itself, and shed light on the reading approaches that readers take to graphic narrative in more familiar forms too.

In this article, I aim to cast doubt on the commonly told history of the development of North American comics ‘art’ as an emancipation from predatory ‘business’. To accentuate the point, I begin with a brief parody of this history designed to show its ironic formulaic quality and to highlight the centrality assigned to the metaphor of the ‘assembly line’ to describe the labour process in the ‘mainstream’ industry. I suggest that the image of the assembly line is a folk category, employed by members of the comics community to accentuate a contrast with a notion of art as single creative visions, a view supported by examples from the writings of Gary Groth and Dave Sim, leading figures during the 1980s in developing a critique of industry production practices. Their critique sharply contrasted ‘art’ and ‘business’ to help provide a legitimizing framework for independent and self-publishing, and for creator rights. However, I use a further example from Sim to show that the contrast was open to more flexible characterization, thus highlighting its rhetorical form. I conclude from this that the categories ‘art’ and ‘business’ have attached to them a set of commonly recognized attributes that may be mobilized to advance contrastive characterizations, but which are open to inventive modification in accord with specific argumentative purposes. It follows that inferences drawn about the artistic merit of the products of the mainstream industry based on its contractual relations and labour process rely upon this rhetorical contrast rather than features inherent in those industrial practices. Therefore, the adoption by comics scholars of a description of these practices through the image of the ‘assembly line’ uncritically adopts the same rhetoric presenting at best only a partial and selective account of the mainstream industry and the aesthetics of its products; a folk tale that comics scholarship needs to advance beyond.

Despite the insistence of many authors on the primacy of the visual in comics, there has been comparatively little attention given to the drawing practices that create comics texts. This article will argue for the value of, and make some initial proposals regarding the nature of, an account of comics production as a distinct drawing practice, not as a rejection of language-centred accounts, but as a necessary complement to the understandings they enable. Accounts of depiction by Kendall Walton, Michael Podro and Patrick Maynard describe a process of imagining into drawn marks, in which the viewer maintains an awareness of their own cognitive activity in taking the sight of the image before them as the sight of the depicted subject. Readerly awareness of this type is well-known to comics researchers through discussion of the cognitive effort involved in achieving what Scott McCloud famously describes as ‘closure’, yet such discussions generally begin with the assumption of the reader’s recognition of depicted scenes. A full account of this fundamental operation of comics reading also requires an account of the methods by which readers use what is perceptually presented to them to imagine events taking place within the images. Walton’s theory of ‘mimesis as make-believe’ will be used here to suggest the way in which fictional truths are generated by drawing styles common to comics. Drawing on the phenomenological grounding of Walton’s approach, I will argue for its compatibility with conceptual metaphor theory, and that the less obviously pictorial drawing conventions of emanata operate as visual metaphors that emerge from our embodied experience of the world.

The article looks at several examples of experimental comics storytelling, which are results of various comics courses at Malmö University. The article starts with an explanation of the basis of the narrative and graphic structure of comics before focusing on three examples. All examples use the particularity of sequencing images as their starting points but continue into quite different areas. While the options available in digital materials are worked with in two of the examples, the third focuses on expanding sequential pictorial storytelling into tactile print for blind people. The different examples show how much comics can be expanded on when experimenting on page styles and pacing of narration.

Existing literature on using graphic novels as a pedagogical tool rarely reports on the complexities of producing graphic narratives as part of disciplinary content. This article draws from a wider case study designed to explore the pedagogical potential of graphic novel texts in developing Grade 7 students’ multiliteracy skills over one school term in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Teachers’ practice did not include graphic novels so a professional development workshop was facilitated to develop strategies for the integration of graphic novel texts into the English Language curriculum. Then, teachers implemented a pre-designed teaching unit plan to formulate lessons for the study of one graphic novel text followed by the creation of conventional narratives, storytelling via words, which were then transferred into graphic narratives, storytelling via words and pictures. Lastly, students’ and teachers’ experiences, interpretations and text productions were captured through multiple data sources such as interviews, surveys and texts/artefacts. This article examines the experiences of and artefacts produced as a result of students’ making meaning of and creating graphic narrative texts. This raises questions about the ways in which conventional narrative writing strategies and knowledge might become transferrable to graphic narrative writing, and vice versa. It also raises questions about graphic novels as legitimate, stand- alone texts for making meaning and production in the research site where graphic novels had not been used prior to the intervention. A framework including sociocultural approaches to teaching and learning that emphasizes the importance of culture and context in constructing knowledge, frame the results and show the dissonance students experienced as they negotiated the diverse demands for transferring their conventional narratives into graphic narratives. In addition, the results show that some students engaged in an authentic, creative experience in which they drew on a myriad of multimodal and experiential resources. These findings contribute to the gap in the literature on the experiences of and texts/artefacts produced as a result of the integration of multimodal texts like graphic novels within the secondary English Language curriculum.

Since the turn of the millennium Swedish mainstream comics have moved from traditional towards the alternative, with best-selling artists working with autobiographical, political and feminist comics. A part of this development is credited to Serieskolan i Malmö/The Comics Art School in Malmoe, which was founded in 1999. The idea of educating comic artists initially met resistance within the field, and leading experts and artists proclaimed their distrust in the concept of comics education. However, this notion is, as this article explains, false. The majority of successful comic artists have undergone some kind of artistic training before entering the field, either by attending art or design schools, through specially designed courses within the studio system, or by studying at comic educational institutes, such as the SVA – The School of Visual Arts – or The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. The experience of teaching comics in Sweden during the last fifteen years shows that comic schools educating comic artists not only educate their students in the craft of making comics but also function as a platform for collaboration. By introducing courses on comics at university level in Malmoe (often called ‘the city of comics’), the mix of theory and practice creates opportunities for scholars, artists and practitioners to gain new knowledge.

Asian Comics, John Lent (2015) Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 342 pp., ISBN 9781628461589, h/bk, USD $60

Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives, Monica Chiu (ed.) (2015) Global Connections series: Hong Kong University Press, 336 pp., ISBN: 9789888139385, h/bk, USD $69