Comic Conventions Research Articles

Psychiatrists and Pop Culture: A Dynamic Duo

Psychiatrists and Pop Culture: A Dynamic Duo

Material form as a structural force in Nicki Greenberg’s The Great Gatsby and Hamlet

Comics or ‘sequential art’ has historically been considered an art of time. Yet, many recent artists privilege comics’ spatial extensions over the dimension of time. This article explores the role played by space in structuring comics. It does so by analysing two comics by Australian artist Nicki Greenberg, The Great Gatsby (2007) and Hamlet (2010). These two adaptations, which marry conventions of comics with a photo album and a theatrical stage, exploit the tension between material forms outside the comic, the material forms that influence the comic’s creation, and the material form taken by the work itself. They are examples of innovative comics made possible when material form is viewed as a structural force. Through analysing Greenberg’s methods for adapting existing works ‘through’ other material forms, I argue that material form is a structural force that can be analysed alongside optional conceptual structures such as the panel and gutter.

Introducing Robert Berry and ULYSSES “seen”

Introducing Robert Berry and ULYSSES “seen” Mike Barsanti (bio) I first met Rob Berry in the fall of 2007. I was in the last few weeks of my job at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, where, among many other roles, I was the unofficial “resident Joycean.” This meant that when people called with ideas for strange Joyce projects, they were forwarded to me. And I spoke to pretty much all of them, because you never know . . . Rob pitched me on the idea of adapting Ulysses into a comic—not for print, but for people to read on their phones. I told him he was crazy. It was one of the weirdest ideas I had heard. There were many reasons it was a bad idea, just starting with the fact that I had never heard of people reading comics on phones, not to mention the sheer scale of the project, not to mention the fact that it seemed completely unmarketable and unfundable. Then I looked at his drawings for “Telemachus.” It gave me something new. I saw Stephen and Mulligan moving around the top of the Martello Tower, and the high wall of the parapet was drawn to make the scene look a little like gladiators in an arena. And as we talked about the full scope of the project, the possibilities of comics as a way to represent Ulysses seemed enormous. “How else could you represent ‘Circe,’” I remember thinking. I had some misgivings. My own reading of Ulysses turns upon Joyce’s undermining of the literary concept of “character”—that his characters are not stable, discrete, airtight vessels of thoughts and experiences, and their individual discreteness or “integrity” is always eroding before your eyes. Characters think each others’ thoughts, share each others’ dreams, and bleed into the narrative voice. The visual conventions of comics dictate clear distinctions between narration, dialogue, and internal thought—distinctions that Joyce gleefully confounds. I also had come of age as a Joycean with the idea that he was not a “visual” author—so how could you use this visual format? And yet. ULYSSES “seen” has given thousands of people a way in to Joyce’s masterpiece. It has created many new readers, emboldened people who felt they could never make it through, and provoked others into clarifying what they think is really happening (if such ideas are even possible) in the passages we have adapted. With these new drawings, based on the “Penelope” episode, Rob is (again) taking some surprising and counter-intuitive risks. Molly Bloom has always been a provocateur (provocateuse?), a flashpoint for readers, who have read her in wildly different ways—a toxic and retrograde amalgam of gender stereotypes, or a feminist hero, or [End Page 711] somewhere in between. Rob’s Molly captures this ambivalence, I think, in ways that are at the same time hilarious and unsettling. Molly is a pin-up, a giantess, a woman comfortable in her body and its power, simultaneously posed and un-posed, self-consciously performing for a male gaze (think of the photograph Bloom shows off in the cabman’s shelter), but also “natural,” as you might imagine Molly Bloom in the bedroom of 7 Eccles Street. Like ULYSSES “seen,” it is not intended as a translation, but rather as a provocation, that can bring some of the issues at the heart of the great book into view. [End Page 712] Mike Barsanti The Free Library of Philadelphia Mike Barsanti MIKE BARSANTI is the Director of Foundation Relations for the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation. Behind this innocent title lurks a long career in Joyce studies, including an M.A. from the University of Miami in the days of Bernie Benstock and Zack Bowen, a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and many years as a curator and programmer at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. He curated the 1998 exhibition “Ulysses in Hand: The Rosenbach Manuscript,” which was presented at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin—the first time any part of Joyce’s manuscript was seen in his native city. He has been an advisor and editor of the ULYSSES “seen” project from its earliest days. Copyright © 2016 The...

Ocho apellidos vascos and the Comedy of Minor Differences

This article examines the content, contexts, and intertexts of the Spanish romantic comedy Ocho apellidos vascos (Dir. Emilio Martínez-Lázaro, 2014). The film was the Spanish box office smash of 2014, and indeed of all time: within one month of its release it had attracted more spectators than any film screened in Spain except for Avatar. Critics spoke of “a social phenomenon,” trying to account for its huge success with national audiences. That success, the critics understood, had something to do with the ethnicities of the film's two lovers—one Andalusian, the other Basque—and the setting of the film, a post-ETA Basque country. Finally, it was said, Spain was able to laugh at the longest-lasting historical trauma that it had endured in the post–civil war era, and by all accounts Basque audiences laughed along with the Spanish. In this article, we consider the ways in which the film makes use of comic conventions to broach problems of difference and conflict. The conflict in question is one that, until recently, has resolutely resisted comic treatment in Spanish film. However, as we demonstrate, Ocho apellidos vascos has not emerged in a vacuum but is, in fact, in dialogue with comic traditions that run from Berlanga to contemporary Basque television and the current trend of “post-humor” in Spanish and Catalan popular culture, particularly as disseminated on the Internet. If Ocho apellidos vascos has reached and satisfied such a wide audience in Spain, it is because it articulates a key message about regionalist and nationalist identifications in a post-ETA landscape. Drawing on psychoanalytical and other theories of humor and comedy, we show how the film is a careful work of compromise, eliding conflicts and dressing up minor differences as major ones.

On the comics-nature of the Codex Seraphinianus

Abstract 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.

Mechanism and Comic Conventions: An Analysis of Bergson's Laughter and The Importance of Being Earnest

Mechanism and Comic Conventions: An Analysis of Bergson's Laughter and The Importance of Being Earnest

Releasing the potential of Shakespearean comic book adaptations in the classroom: A case study of Romeo and Juliet

Abstract The increasing number of comic book adaptions of Shakespeare’s plays is unsurprising given their prevalence within school curricula. Graphic novel adaptations are often seen as a stepping stone to the ‘real’ text, a way of introducing young people to works whose language, settings and complexity may, initially, be off-putting. Retelling Shakespeare’s plays in a comics format has, therefore, become a popular approach to attempt to engage students and to make the work more accessible, especially to ‘reluctant readers’. Romeo and Juliet is among the most frequently taught of Shakespeare’s texts, and is often used as a first introduction to studying Shakespeare. The four adaptations compared in this article illustrate the variety of ways in which Shakespeare can be reinterpreted in a comics format and used to support young people studying his plays. Classical Comics offers the most conventional representation, drawing obviously on long-standing comic traditions of the western hemisphere. A different approach is taken by the Manga Shakespeare version, which is set in present day Tokyo. This incorporates many elements of Japanese manga, while remaining accessible to readers without previous experience of manga, for instance, the action flows from left to right across the page and the book is read from ‘front to back’. The Manga Edition has many similar features, but retains the original setting of the play. Finally, Gareth Hinds’ recent adaptation clearly draws on European comic conventions, but also incorporates elements of manga, most noticeably in action scenes. Comparing these diverse approaches, this article considers how comic book adaptations can do more than simplify the text and make Shakespeare more attractive for young people. It considers ways in which they can act as an effective pedagogical device to support young people of differing abilities and levels of reading experience studying Shakespeare’s play. It also considers the extent to which these texts have a value in their own right, rather than simply being viewed as inferior versions of the original that merely engage and simplify Shakespeare’s plays and can be discarded as soon as they are no longer required.

Reinvention in Terence’s Eunuchus

The Eunuchus thematizes the problem of not being first and offers a distinctive solution. In the prologue, Terence laments his position as a latecomer to comedy and complains that there is nothing new to say. Characters within the play resent being typecast and fated to repeat the same old part. But through reinvention, these characters alter their standing, asserting both their autonomy and individuality. In the same way, Terence will insist on his agency as a playwright to blend and manipulate familiar comic conventions in order to create something new. What gets called contaminatio is a solution, not a problem.

The Dark Knight under revision

The intellectual property structure of mainstream superhero comics publishing companies opens the door for artists and writers to generate multi-layered narratives that build on pre-existing stories in a way that rewards long-term readers for their deep understanding of the mythologies attached to iconic superheroes. I read several excerpts from comic books featuring one of the most well recognized superheroes, The Batman, in order to demonstrate the ways in which the formal conventions of popular superhero comics invite fans to engage in active and playful reading practices. The copyright arrangement that provides opportunities for remediation of old stories and images within the publishing company universe creates an opportunity to consider the potential benefits of an expansion of the public domain.

What they will: comic grammar in Twelfth Night

This article will examine modal auxiliary verbs, particularly “will”, to explore the nature of volition in Twelfth Night. Criticism of the play often tends to ascribe volition only to the audience of the play, as though “what you will” only applies to the viewer and not to the inhabitants of Illyria, who are, in this view, casually trundled about by fate or comic convention. However, while the characters may speak in the language of fate, throughout the play they nevertheless find ways to act upon their desires. In Twelfth Night, hope itself is a willed action, not a passive state, and the characters find ways to live in the future tense – in the space created by “I will” – as a strategy for survival.

“VERY NEARLY SMILING”: COMEDY AND SLAVE REVOLT IN THE BARNABYS IN AMERICA

Undeservedly neglected, Frances Trollope's anti-slavery fiction contributes significantly to the discourse on abolition and race in the 1830s and '40s. The Barnabys in America; or Adventures of the Widow Wedded (1843) reveals the anxieties surrounding these subjects, interweaving its comedy with an indictment of slavery that many US readers would have considered threatening rather than amusing. Trollope not only includes a successful slave revolt, a subject scrupulously avoided in most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and US fiction, but presents this violence as the novel comes to a comic close. The Barnabys suggests that, while slave rebellion seems anomalous within comic conventions, it is also an ironic inevitability in a society where slavery uneasily co-exists with a rhetoric of freedom.

Jedi like my father before me": Social identity and the New York Comic Con

Few venues exist for adults to play dress-up, with Renaissance festivals, comic and other media conventions, and live-action role-playing games comprising the bulk of these venues. This sort of behavior is expected of people in their formative years—children and teenagers—where they try on and receive feedback about their selves. What might be the reasoning behind the behavior of adults doing so, especially after primary socialization has occurred?

Spaces of Sincerity and Deception: The Representation of Desire in Cesc Gay's En la Ciudad and Ficción

This article uses comic theory in order to explore the intersection between romantic and Aristotelian comedy in the films En la ciudad (2003) and Ficción (2006). The films, which construct their characters' identities almost exclusively through discourses of intimacy, love, and desire, use comic conventions in order to articulate two narrative spaces: the space of deception and the space of sincerity. These two spaces, which are superimposed on the 'real' spaces of the city of Barcelona and the Catalonian Pyrenees, and the purely cinematic spaces created through mise en scène, framing and other formal devices, represent two contradictory options in the handling of intimate protocols. In the space of sincerity, associated with the genre of romantic comedy, the characters open themselves to the power of their desires; in the space of deception, characteristic of Aristotelian comedy, they hide their feelings from each other and from themselves for the sake of social propriety and responsibility. As a result of this double approach, the films reflect a contemporary Spanish society in which the reality of the proliferation of choices in the sexual realm clashes with the weight of still powerful traditional models of relationships.

The Taming of “Gentleman” Lucentio: Clothing Control in Early Modern Englandand The Taming of The Shrew

A motif of in The Taming of the Shrew serves to function not merely as a comic convention but as a representation of clothing control discourses of Elizabethan England. Tracing out the ways in which such discourses developed in the Tudor and other contemporary sociological works and moral tracts, this paper establishes a perspective in which the conventions and their attempted regulations are seen to have constituted a site of cultural conflict engendered by the social mobility of the period. At one end of the conflict were the governmental reinforcements of regulations and their moral supporters that sought to maintain traditional status distinction, and guard against economic hazards caused by over-spending on luxuries. At the other end emerged the riches, a class of merchant-citizens, with their aspiration to dress above their traditional status and even to purchase the status of gentry. Re-located within this context, the male characters in the Lucentio-Bianca plot, as a group, represent the most active, and problematic, site of social mobility of early modern England; that is, the increasingly flexible boundaries between and gentry. Appellated as Gentleman, Lucentio in particular embodies the upward traces of social mobility: the eldest son of a merchant-citizen ennobled by education and/or inheritance of wealth. Furthermore, dressed in sumptuous apparel apparently above his status, he becomes a transgressor of the Sumptuary Laws and a target of contemporary moral tracts that specifically denounced the youths of gentry and upper citizenry who studied/sojourned in Italy and brought their habit of conspicuous consumption, as well as their learning in Machiavellism, back home. As a whole, the Padua society in the play is represented by its rich citizens and finally characterized by its indulgence in conspicuous consumption. In the midst of social struggle fought between traditional and emergent order of status and corresponding conventions, a contemporary London audience might have found in the riches of Padua a portrait of London merchants and their sons transgressing the traditional social hierarchy and bringing in a new order of the day.

The Best Man in the Play: Female Agency in a Gender-Inclusive Comedia

As an example of how a newly reformulated, gender-inclusive Comedia canon demands that we reevaluate earlier assumptions made about the male-authored canon, this study engages two examples of the popular comic convention of the crossed-dressed woman—Tirso de Molina's Don Gil de las calzas verdes and Ana Caro's Valor, agravio y mujer —in dialogue with one another. This comparative reading suggests problems in traditional Comedia scholarship, in which the female protagonist of male-authored popular comedy indicates a "pro-woman" authorial stance. Because this critical tradition's influence is still notable today, we may continue to profit from the opening-up of the canon by recognizing the voices of women writers as fundamentally different, by reconsidering the male canon as equally gender-inflected, and by revising earlier critical assumptions that the dramaturgas have revealed to be anachronistically progressive. (REB)

Comic Visions and Revisions in the work of Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi

Lynda Barry's "autobiofictionalography" One! Hundred! Demons! (2002) and Marjane Satrapi's memoir Persepolis (2004) recast the visual and narrative conventions of comics to provide critical commentary on issues ranging from the social construction of gender to the forces subtending forms of prejudice. The works literally as well as figuratively draw out the ways in which the transition from childhood to adulthood becomes overdetermined by narratives of development that set gendered roles, articulate racial demarcations, inscribe religious differences, and authorize imperialist vision; they also highlight the ways in which figures resist, subvert, and capitulate to forces of social coercion and normative visions.

Paul Auster's City of Glass: The Graphic Novel

In adapting Paul Auster's postmodern detective story City of Glass as a graphic novel, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli succeeded in producing a visual translation of an often non-visual text. Focussing on Auster's text rather than Auster's story, it is argued, the artists make inventive use of visual metaphors, visual styles, and comic conventions to translate Auster's words into pictures. The text's investigation into, and interrogation of, language is brought to bear on the comic version's own visual language, and City of Glass: The Graphic Novel emerges as valuable source material for a future poetics of comics.

When Male Characters Pass as Women: Theatrical Play and Social Practice in the Italian Renaissance

This article examines male cross-dressing in Italian Renaissance comedies with a particular emphasis on II Ragazzo by the Venetian writer Lodovico Dolce.Without challenging the traditional readings of cross-dressing plotsthat view their licentiousness and their reversals of gender and sexual roles as comic conventions typical of this genre and of the festive time of carnival, it is suggested that such plots offered a particularly rich opportunity for imaginative play. This study posits a connection between a historical social formation-the changing sexual status of young males as they pass from feminized youth to full masculine adulthood-and the representation of male characters dressed as women.The texts of these comedies, seen in their social and historical context, provide an interesting basis for discussion of issues of gender and masculine identity in a highly structured patriarchal society.

European ethnic scripts and the translation and switching of jokes

AbstractMany European jokes depend on local ethnic scripts that by convention pin a comic characteristic on a particular ethnic group such as the canny Cardi in Wales, the slow Swiss in France, the stupid Belgian incessantly eating freedom fries in the Netherlands. How are such jokes to be translated into the language of another country with a different culture and comic conventions? Sometimes it is straightforward because similar jokes about the same group exist throughout Europe as with, say, jokes about cowardly Italians. In other cases there exists a similar set of jokes told about a local group so that, say, British jokes about the stupid Irish can easily be turned into jokes about Belgians, Ostfrieslanders, Gallegos, Pontians in the appropriate country. Problems arise only if a script is unique to one group or country, in which case the device of indirect explanation by internal conversation is used. One of the people in the joke reveals to another the nature of the script on which the joke depends, and thus the joke teller conveys the information to his audience without appearing didactic or giving too much away. It is fairly easy to convey implicit cultural assumptions in this way, far easier than it is translate a complex play on words. Language is far more idiosyncratic and arbitrary than culture.

Die gebruik van strokiesprente deur T.O. Honiball vir die ontwikkeling van visuele en kulturele geletterdheid

Critics have different views and perspectives on the literary quality of comics. Since television and computers became part of learners' everyday lives in South Africa, educators have had to include media education in curricula. In the teaching of Afrikaans it is possible to use the comics of T.O. Honiball as instruments in teaching visual and cultural literacy. These texts can add to the readers' enjoyment and empower the learners intellectually and emotionally to understand and interpret the cultural frame of reference of the Afrikaans language classroom. The purpose of this article is to analyse the visual conventions of comics as used by Honiball, as well as examples of the cultural aspects of humour portrayed by the artist, especially with regard to the comical portrayal of body language and facial expressions. By looking at the different agents of communication in the literary process, i.e. the contexts of the sender and the qualities and intertexts of the texts, these comics are shown to be part of mass folklore as discussed by Dorson (1972). The main argument in this paper is that Honiball's comics can be useful in the teaching of Afrikaans in secondary schools, and a few examples of teaching strategies regarding this will be shown. Key Words: T.O. Honiball, lterary value of comics, teaching strategies Journal for Language Teaching Vol.38(1) 2004: 159-171