Comics and the Gothic

Abstract

This chapter commences with analysis of the gothic nature of criminology as a discipline. Gothic generates a sense of the sublime by exciting ideas of danger, terror, pain and horror. It is concerned with subjection and victimization and has the ability to inspire fear through the use of sublime effects in architecture and the manipulation of the psychological (Groom 2012). Johnson (2012: 168) argues that ‘prisons explicitly deal in fear’ and highlights the irony of prison security—given that ‘no one feels secure in prison’. Such concerns, as well as spectralization, repression, the uncanny, misunderstandings, possession, excess, monstrousness and hybridity, lend a certain gothic logic to its use in criminological studies. Having explored elements of the gothic, this chapter goes on to consider comics. According to Giddens (2012: 85), comics exist at the borders, they are between the ‘textual and the visual, and between the rational and the aesthetic’, they have an essential ‘in-betweenness’. Two particular aspects of comics are considered. Firstly, the impact of the Comics Code in constructing understandings of crime, justice and punishment; and secondly, the representation of black characters in comics. These connections are then fed back through the work of people like MF Doom and Rammellzee, which returns us to hip-hop, masks, fantasy and performance, cyborgs and hybrids. We are deep in the realms of viscous culture. Analysis of the thick and sticky connections between comics and gothic tradition operates as a viscous network through which an array of criminological concepts is explored, and as we shall see, a space where monstrous transformations occur.