Medievalist Comics and the American Century by Chris Bishop

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medievalist Comics and the American Century by Chris Bishop David Sweeten (bio) Chris Bishop. Medievalist Comics and the American Century. University of Mississippi Press, 2016. 224 pp. $65. In the introduction to Medievalist Comics and the American Century, Chris Bishop discusses historical methodology more than one might expect when cracking the cover of a study on comics. More than a simple close reading of a selection of American comics with medieval aspects, this book endeavors to prove that "these comics are not merely happenchance artifacts, but that each individual success or failure was both a result and an indicator of the centrality of certain American preoccupations within a broader cultural context" (4). In each of his chapters Bishop locates a nexus of medievalist associations, or the lack thereof, and then maps this nexus onto the production and reception of a medievalist comic. While Bishop states his work plays "in the slipstream between history and literature, particularly popular literature" (5), the composition of each chapter leans more heavily on the former in developing a historical locus for the chapter's namesake. These loci provide the strongest moments of this book and new angles to the larger discussion of American comics production, but these moments often come at the cost of in-depth discussion of the comics themselves. Throughout this book Bishop tackles, implicitly and explicitly, medievalism studies, and there are some issues in the handling of these matters; Richard Utz handily quantifies these issues in his review of Bishop's book in Arthuriana, especially in his discussion of the final chapter "The Stories Upon Which We Agree."1 I will leave these matters to Utz's review, but where Utz approaches the book from the perspective of a medieval scholar commenting in a journal of medieval studies, I will focus instead on what Bishop's book brings to comics scholars. The strength of Bishop's approach lies with the case studies in its chapters, placing transmission, reception, and historical context in conversation. Bishop's first five chapters plot how the transmission of cultural artifacts reflects larger social dynamics in the twentieth century. In his discussion of Prince Valiant, Bishop follows the production history of adventure comic strips and the market demands of early comic publishing against the nostalgic context of Pyle's Arthurian retellings, leading to a nexus between publisher William Randolph Hearst's fascination with the Middle Ages, his connections to John F. Kennedy, and the idealization of Kennedy's own "Camelot." The chapter on Green [End Page 127] Arrow follows the transmission history of Robin Hood from late medieval tales to a representation of early American ideals and finally into a comic character perpetually difficult to market. This difficulty continued until DC developed Green Arrow, in particular when the character was refashioned into a social commentator aligned with the iconoclast movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bishop changes tactics slightly in his chapter on Thor, noting how Norse mythology at large had become a battleground for political and nationalist movements in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, reflected again in the fight over Thor as intellectual property between publishing companies and, more specifically, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Bishop suggests that the continued attempts to bring Thor to the comics page represents the commodification of cultural identity for German and Norwegian immigrants in the United States, and this process continued with other Norse sagas and texts like the Nibelungenlied. As a character created whole cloth rather than transmitted from an earlier medieval tradition, the chapter on Conan centers on how Robert E. Howard's musclebound barbarian descends from the American mythology of the Wild West. Moreover, Bishop demonstrates the role of comics in drafting characters into more prominent positions of popular culture, Howard's character becoming more popular after he was translated to the comics page. Bishop's analysis of Red Sonja plots an interesting parallel with the treatment of women in medievalist texts and comics, noting how each is predicated on an assumed tradition that, even with the best intentions, denies female characters agency yet is affected by the growing Women's Movement in the 1960s, demonstrated in Red Sonja as "a persistent tension between...