Comic Hero Research Articles

How a Female Cartoonist Has Become Even More Famous Than Her Male Peers: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach

Political cartooning has always been a male-dominated profession. Though this could be partly explained by the fact that many female cartoonists suffer sexism at work, it reignites the dreaded “women aren’t funny” argument, a preconception that largely stems from the stereotype of a polite, reserved woman. Indeed, women such as star architect Zaha Hadid have launched their careers into the stratosphere in spite of discrimination. A systematic analysis of a female cartoonist’s work may thus not only shatter tired gender stereotypes, it may explain why there are apparently fewer female humorists in general. This study, informed by insights from cognitive corpus pragmatics, aims at explaining why Doaa Eladl is the Arab world’s most famous female cartoonist. Part of her success, it is suggested, lies in challenging some societal and cultural stereotypes that women are often pinned with, but also in having an idiosyncratic style. She frequently uses taboo metaphors and discusses sensitive topics such as female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexual harassment. But far more interesting is her occasional resistance to the “women as object” metaphor. To reach wider audiences, Eladl often publishes English-language versions of her cartoons and employs metaphorical source domains from Christianity. She has comic heroes that have become the reader’s dear friends, but also meme-like cartoons that contain Photoshopped stills. All this has implications for gender studies, humor research, metaphor scholarship, and media (digital or otherwise).

Class Acts: TV Larrikins and the Advent of the Ocker, 1957–1984

ABSTRACTStephen Fry has described the typical American comic hero as a freewheeling “wisecracker” compared to the English type, who is apt to be an aspirational lower-middle-class failure. With Fry as a prompt, we consider humour and class in the evolution—or devolution—of that representative local hero, the larrikin, during Australian television’s first three decades. This was a period that saw a realignment of the nation’s political, economic and cultural affiliations away from Britain towards the US, and in which the ocker came into sudden prominence as a less benign version of rowdy male identity. If media larrikins such as Graham Kennedy and Paul Hogan excelled at the kind of sketch-based humour that had its origins in vaudeville and were unsuited to sitcoms, ocker characters such as Wally Stiller from My Name’s McGooley and Ted Bullpitt from Kingswood Country found a home there. Our analysis of larrikin and ocker humour is triangulated with that of Norman Gunston, as played by Garry McDonald: a desperately aspirational failure with his own mock variety show who emerged from the dialogue between these two comic types. We conclude with some thoughts on post-ockerism and the emergence of the bogan.

ЭТИМОЛОГИЯ ИМЕН И ФРАЗЕОЛОГИЯ В СЕРБСКОМ ЯРМАРОЧНОМ КУКОЛЬНОМ ТЕАТРЕ «КУКУ ТОДОР»

The Serbian comic hero of folk puppet fair performances "Kuku Todor" has an interesting relationship with the semantics of words and phraseology of the Serbian language. In this work, an attempt is made to deal with the etymology of the name Kuku Todor. Todor is a character whose main characteristics are stupidity and cunning, frivolity and impulsiveness. The author comes to the conclusion that the uniqueness and observance of the tradition of the visual in the performances of this genre also affects the uniqueness of the consequences in the linguistic environment of the people where they appear. "Kuku Todor" is one of the few puppet shows in Serbia, which is interesting, original, uniquely connected with the phraseology of the Serbian language. The name of the protagonist of this performance is based on the holiday “Horse Easter”, and funeral lamentations, and colloquial exclamations, and a parallel with the Russian Fyodor Stratilat. Thus, a peculiar cyclicity arises in the language. The cause becomes the effect, and the effect becomes the cause. The cyclicity in the dramaturgy of this performance, as well as the cyclicity in the mise-en-scene of puppets in a screen-cabin, is also manifested in the language itself. This cyclicality is taken as the principle of constructing the performance. It is taken from the very nature of the relationship between life and death. More precisely, in the course of the ritual sacred rite, among other things, lamentations appeared, which became an integral part of the performance and returned to speech in a new, more common form.

Гений поэтической выразительности. Часть первая (На материале публицистической статьи С.Н. Сергеева-Ценского «Гоголь как художник слова»)

In the aspect of the “scientific-research dialogue” of the author of this study with the writer of the twentieth century Sergei Nikolaevich Sergeev-Tsensky, his publicistic miniatures “Gogol as an artist of the word” (1952), “Talent and genius” (1957), included in the collection “Work hard and joyfully”. It is emphasized that the writer’s work the of the twentieth century Sergeev-Tsensky was written as a pedagogical parting word to future generations and as a call to cherish and study their native Russian language, to cherish the Russian word on the material of the “genius of artistic expression” Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. The stylistic and poetic findings of the writer in various stories, in the poem “Dead Souls” and in the dramatic work – the comedy “The Government Inspector” are considered. The ways of creating a literary portrait and landscape, the language system means in depicting the psychological details of the portrait and landscape characteristics of comic heroes (on the example of the portrait of Sobakevich), as well as the speech characteristics of the “The Government Inspector” are investigated. Attention is drawn to Gogol’s techniques of “style play” and some deliberate violations of lexical norms in the construction of portrait characteristics in order to emphasize very significant psychological details. As an addition to Sergeev-Tsensky’s reasoning, the specifics of Gogol’s descriptiveness in the real and the fantastic synthesis are specified on the example of significant details, for example, the story “Viy” from the “Mirgorod” cycle. The fear of the author of “Mirgorod” and “Taras Bulba” of confusion in the minds of the characters of Divine and demonic forces is emphasized.

Andy Blake; or, the Irish Diamond

This scholarly edition of Andy Blake includes an introduction arguing for its claim to be Dion Boucicault’s first Irish drama. It also emphasises Agnes Robertson’s part in developing Boucicault’s comic heroes, while playing a boy. Consideration of the French source text reveals a connection with a revolutionary figure, the gamin de Paris, and demonstrates how Boucicault’s adaptation added a backdrop of British military imperialism.

Neomythology: A New Religious Mythology

The purpose of this paper was to present the link between the myths in the plots of modern entertainment products, such as science fiction novels, movies, comic books and video games, with the motifs of New Religiosity. The plots employed in these products are of a mythical nature. This re-emergence of myth is once more taking centre stage today. The social sciences and humanities concerned with this phenomenon call it “neomythology”. Neomythology, in whatever form, as a comic book, video game, etc., shows gods and supernatural heroes or villains interacting with one another in certain ways. The ways these mythical elements are combined and displayed confirm that neomythology belongs to New Religiosity and repeats motifs of New Religions and New Age myths, such as the secularization of the absolute, that is to say, the placing of the transcendental element in the material and explainable world, the absolutisation not only of the acquisition of power but also those who bear it, the correlation of magic and technology, and the reuse and utilization of the mythology of the past and of traditional religious teachings, in order to produce a new myth.

"Dynamite Scrupulously Packed": A Revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year

The essay proposes a reinterpretation and revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s 1919 novel Bertram Cope’s Year and argues that it deserves permanent currency within the canon of gay fiction. My reinterpretation and revaluation of it is based on the premise that readings of it over the past 50 years (since Edmund Wilson’s 1970 essay on Henry Blake Fuller’s fiction in the New Yorker) have failed to understand its representation of homo-sexuality. Criticism of the novel has been based on post-Stonewall assumptions of what a 'gay novel’ should be and what cultural work is should perform. The post-Stonewall paradigm of the gay novel is that it is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman, focused on a protagonist who, through a process of self-discovery, arrives at an acceptance and affirmation of his sexual identity. The prototype is Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, with E. M. Forster’s Maurice a precursor. To appreciate Bertram Cope’s Year, we must, I argue, abandon post-Stonewall presuppositions of what we should expect from a gay novel. Bertram Cope’s Year is not a coming-of-age novel. Rather it is a comic novel formed from Fuller’s successful fusion and subversion of the romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, and the campus novel. Bertram Cope is a comic hero who ultimately triumphs over the efforts of a college town, presided over the matchmaking socialite Medora Phillips, to marry him to one of the three young ladies in her circle. He is rescued from this unwanted marriage by his boyfriend, who arrives to save him from the unwanted marriage. Fuller successfully exploits the conventions of the comic novel to tell a story that anticipates one of the aspirations of the gay liberation movement half a century later. As such, it deserves permanent currency.

Construcción afectiva de la corporalidad: la vieja y su joven amante en Pluto de Aristófanes (vv. 959-1096)

After Plutus’s recovery of his eyesight and the subsequent redistribution of wealth, an old woman, probably a hetaira, is suddenly abandoned by her young lover, who is now financially solvent and in no more need of her (Aristophanes’ Plutus, ll. 959-1096). The expression of her complaints —in front of Chremylus, the comic hero, and also of the young man, who approaches the hero’s house in order to express his gratitude to the god— results in an episodic scene devoted to the exposition of material precariousness of her decayed body. Behind this comic denigration, usual against old and ugly persons, there are also exposed various forms of body apprehension very subtly, on which this paper intends to explore. We refer to the affective and sensitive construction of corporality, to the dynamics of body language, to the physiological imprint of immateriality (such as pleasure or pain), among several aspects that prove the author’s special interest in the body.

Solid‐Phase Synthesis and Purification of Protein–DNA Origami Nanostructures

AbstractInvited for the cover of this issue are C. M. Niemeyer and co‐workers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The cover picture shows a comic hero with magnetic superpowers who pulls pure, protein‐decorated DNA origami nanostructures out of a crude reaction mixture. Read the full text of the article at 10.1002/chem.201805506.

The (alleged) sacrifice and procession at Rural Dionysia in Aristophanes’ Acharnians

The following article challenges the traditional reading of the Rural Dionysia scene in Aristophanes’ Acharnians. It is often assumed that the text contains a reference to an animal sacrifice, which is arguably absent from this comedy. Moreover, the vast majority of scholars claim that the lines 244 ff. were uttered after the procession of worshippers reached the altar in the orchestra. However, as I argue, these verses were most probably spoken by the characters in front of the door of the comic hero’s house and only subsequently did the procession form and move towards the altar.

“The zone of interest”: honouring the Holocaust victims

Amis has always found the question of the Holocaust’s exceptionalism fascinating and returns to the subject in “The Zone of Interest”. After analysing how the enormity of the Holocaust conditions literary representation and Amis’s own approach to it, this article focuses on one of the main voices of the novel, Szmul, the leader of the Sonderkommando, whose members were Jewish prisoners forced to clean the gas chambers and dispose of the bodies. Through him we confront directly the horrors of the Holocaust. One of Amis’ greatest achievements is precisely that he humanizes and rehabilitates the figure of the Sonder by transforming Szmul into a comic hero who, in spite of the atrocities he witnesses, reaffirms the unconditional value of life and fights to give meaning to his terrible predicament. The novel is dedicated to the writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, whose voice can be heard throughout the text.

The Dead Republic, by Roddy Doyle: The Wisdom of Comic Heroism

Roddy Doyle is a writer who has reflected that human existence is an interplay between comedy and tragedy, and that therefore all kinds of evils—fanaticism, absolutism, dogmatism—result from cultivating only the tragic perspective. This becomes obvious in The Dead Republic (2010), a novel in which Henry Smart’s comic attitude to life allows Doyle to offer the reader a detached and non-sentimental view of contemporary Irish history. Both John Ford and the IRA want to reshape Henry’s story as a Republican hero to fit their own notion of Irishness and it is precisely in Henry’s response to this perversion of Irish history, politics and national identity that he reveals himself as the perfect comic hero and debunks all efforts to mystify the past.

Character of Apai Saloi in Iban Folktales

Apai Saloi is a comic hero in Iban folktales. Back in the old days, Apai Saloi folktales are often told to youngsters by an elderly caretaker at night. This kind of folktales contains lots of moral value in it. Based on the preliminary study done, Apai Saloi is famous with his foolish and stupid deeds. The objective of this paper is to investigate on the character of Apai Saloi in selected documented Iban folktales because the looks and characteristics of Apai Saloi was remained unknown. This paper explains in detail the analysis of Apai Saloi in 15 stories to measure what is major characteristic of Apai Saloi by using conceptual method in determining the highest ranking of Apai Saloi characteristic in the selected documented stories. Finding shows that Apai Saloi character is proven to have a significant characteristic that was able to pull the interest of the targeted members of the readers. The study will provide new possibilities to be further developed to form a character design of Apai Saloi to present Iban culture to a greater audience and most importantly to promote local culture as well as to educate people from in and out of Sarawak about the importance of preserving local content.

L’anticorps (sportif) et le contre-pied (subversif). Biopolitique du corps antisportif dans la bande dessinée franco-belge

In most cases, adventure comic heroes have bodies fit for sports. However, in humorous comic strips, in particular, some heroes, or rather anti-heroes, cannot be said to have the body of a sportsman – they even oppose that ideal in any and every way. This paper examines such bodies from a semiotic perspective in order to determine what they are and what they do compared to fitter bodies, as well as reveal their subversive agenda. The present work deals with several Franco-Belgian comic classics (Gaston, Achille Talon, Iznogoud, Asterix and Obelix) and aims to show how such bodies subvert social activities, the bourgeois lifestyle, sports practices, and the exercise of power. Their subversion is political, or rather infrapolitical, and may belong to biopolitics as defined by Foucault.

Researchers Explore Carbon Footprints of Superheroes

A tongue-in-cheek exercise about comic book heroes aims to inspire people to consider the amount of greenhouse gas emissions they themselves cause.

Comic Book Heroes Teach Economic and Political Freedom

This research analyzes the use of comic book heroes to persuade students that being economically and politically free, are far superior to socialism's tenants of self-sacrifice for the good of the community that always end in tyranny.

Rethinking Aristophanes’ Comic Hero: Utopianism, Ambiguity, and Athenian Politics

Abstract This paper aims to reconsider the so-called ‘comic heroism’ in Aristophanes’ extant plays. The comic hero does not always express the collective self-image, like Dicaeopolis in Acharnians and Trygaios in Peace; Knights, as early as 424 bc, is a telling instance of Aristophanes’ will to introduce a much more nuanced picture of both the imaginary and the real Athens. Clouds and Wasps also provide further variations. But the real turning point comes in 414 with Birds, whose much disputed political meaning deserves the closest attention. After the ambiguous, disquieting Peisetaerus, comic heroes will not entirely disappear from Aristophanic comedy, yet their nature will never be the same again. Good ideas may come from a clever woman (Lysistrata), a cowardly god (Dionysus in Frogs), or even Apollo’s shrine (in the late Plutus), no longer from the Attic ‘common man’ of the earlier plays. The political evolution of Athens during the Peloponnesian War appears to have altered Aristophanes’ (alleged) trust in some kind of ‘saviour’ emerging from the erratic mass of Athenian male citizens.

Rereading Superman as a trans f/man

While a noteworthy body of scholarship exists that "queers" the superhero, few attempts have been made to "trans" such famous comic book characters. I offer an introduction to trans identities via my own personal narrative and a cursory example of trans reading practices within the fields of comics and fandom studies. Writing as a trans f/m (fan and man), I set out to trans superheroes and also to rethink the temporal space of boyhood, which is typically positioned as the supposed beginning of one's manhood and one's passion for comic book heroes. As an example of this reading strategy, I offer a reinterpretation of the Superman origin story that explicitly highlights the hero's own innate transness.

Comic Heroes and Green Tories: Stephen Leacock and Thomas King Creating Ethical Space on Uncommon Ground

Comic Heroes and Green Tories: Stephen Leacock and Thomas King Creating Ethical Space on Uncommon Ground

SuperQueeroes – Our LGBTI* Comic Book Heroes and Heroines Schwules Museum*, January 22-June 26, 2016

SuperQueeroes – Our LGBTI* Comic Book Heroes and Heroines at the Schwules Museum* in Berlin presents the first exhibition of queer comics in Europe. The exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of comics with LGBTI characters and narratives, primarily from Europe and America. As a foundational endeavor, SuperQueeroes raises important questions regarding the curation of both comics and the history of sexuality, whose critical examination remains relevant for the future work on queer comics that the exhibition will likely inspire.