Danger, Disease, and Death in the Graphic Urban Imagination

Abstract

This chapter explores how diverse storytelling modes invoke the modern discourses of urban threat. The Eternaut, created by writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld and illustrator Francisco Solano López, stages an alien invasion in the city of Buenos Aires. Dengue by Rodolfo Santullo and Matías Bergara tells a story of invasion and disease transmission in Montevideo. Urban detective literature and the mystery/occult story are fused in Jacques Tardi’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Ade`le Blanc- Sec, whose action unfolds in Paris. Created by Japanese artist Tsutomu Nihei, Blame! fictionalizes the verticality and immense scale associated with Tokyo in a visual dystopian tale. Adapting a now discredited theory on the Jack-the-Ripper serial killings, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel From Hell links the slums, architecture, and patriarchal violence of Victorian London. Fábio Moon, and Gabriel Bá’s Daytripper treads fearlessly into serial confrontations with mortality in and beyond the context of São Paolo.