Understanding Genres in Comics by Nicolas Labarre

Abstract

Reviewed by: Understanding Genres in Comics by Nicolas Labarre Justin Wigard (bio) Nicolas Labarre. Understanding Genres in Comics. Palgrave Pivot, 2020. 157 pp, $59.99. Understanding Genres in Comics by Nicolas Labarre is a concise, theory-driven book offering a “socio-discursive approach” to, well, understanding genres in comics (1). It addresses what Labarre sees as a gap in comics studies—that comics genres are often utilized, deployed, and visible in the field, but ultimately, undertheorized. More specifically, Labarre focuses on the limitations inherent in common text-centric models of understanding comics genres, and instead suggests paying attention to social discourses embedded within, surrounding, and between comics. In this way, Labarre offers a model that focuses on social discourses surrounding comics, but also pays particular attention to genres’ uses within particular “cultural and industrial” contexts: what genres signify, what they offer to readers, producers, and critics, and why they matter in an increasingly genre-flooded field (2). In situating his work among other genre theorists and frameworks within1 and without2 comics studies, Labarre aligns his model most with Bart Beaty’s “comics world” approach to comics, focusing not just on the texts, but on their various connections, broadly conceived (11). However, Labarre is also deeply concerned with theoretical models— including his own—requiring and meeting a domain of validity: that these theories should be observed in practice and extrapolated to demonstrate future applications. Each chapter is structured similarly: a concise abstract, a different framework for understanding genres in comics, a case study of one particular genre of comics, and a summative conclusion. These case studies are how Labarre presents his domain of validity. This series of eight increasingly layered case studies demonstrates a different aspect of how genre manifests and is deployed, with each case study tackling a distinct genre: science fiction; funny animal; horror; crossovers; publishing imprints as genres; superheroes; digital amateur comics; and what Labarre terms “personal” or “private” genres. Alongside this, Labarre uses this broad and comprehensive approach to address serial comic books, graphic novels, newspaper cartoons, webcomics, franchise crossovers, and author-controlled comics properties (e.g., Mike Mignola’s “Mignolaverse”). This structure lends an ease to conceptualizing and working through Labarre’s theoretical intervention, creating a scaffolded effect with each successive approach to genres adding more depth to the reading at hand. Thus, Understanding Genres in Comics maps out an almost constellatory approach to understanding genres in comics through the social discourses they participate in, connecting inflection points of audience reception, comics peritexts and paratexts, publishing institutions, comics producers, historicization, economic practices, and semiotics. Perhaps the clearest example of the book’s construction and its theory’s stakes can be found in Chapter 4, “How Genres Emerge: Horror Comics.” To be clear, this is not an historical tracing of horror comics, but rather, an accounting of where and how genre classifications can be seen codifying through social discourses and peri/paratextual elements. In this case study, Labarre focuses on the consolidation of horror and weird comics into comics series like Yellowjacket Comics and Adventures Into the Unknown, and at the same [End Page 340] time, zeroes in on the paratextual elements of the comics anthology as signifiers of the horror genre: the relationship between the “host” introduction to the horror comic and the reader, fan letters which map out many of the horror trappings that affected them and editorial responses, and so on (52). Alongside this, Labarre looks to the oft-cited 1954 Senate hearings as yet another space where the horror genre in comics became more solid and visible, particularly through witness testimonials and intermedial language in the committee’s interim report which make distinctions between weird comics and horror comics. In this way, Labarre’s case study lays bare the connective tissue between “textual production on the one end and public discourses on the other,” and how this discursive interaction can lead to formulating genres (59). Each chapter, then, provides a new (or scaffolded) socio-discursive approach to understanding genre, applies it to a genre, and then can be extrapolated to approach other genres in comics. These smaller case studies are engrossing, roughly between twelve and twenty pages each, providing digestible engagements...