Negotiating Culture through Comics

Negotiating Culture through Comics At the Interface Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board James Arvanitakis Katarzyna Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter S Ram Vemuri Simon Bacon Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig Kenneth Wilson An At the Interface research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/ The Education Hub ‘The Graphic Novel’ 2014 Negotiating Culture through Comics Edited by Maciej Sulmicki Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087 ISBN: 978-1-84888-256-0 First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2014. First Edition. Table of Contents Introduction: The Serio-Comic Maciej Sulmicki Part I Glocalisation of the Comic Book Up in the Sky, Feet on the Ground: Cultural Identity in Filipino Superhero Komiks Emil M. Flores Part II vii 3 Filipino Humour and the Filipinisation of Foreign Tropes in Macoy’s Taal Volcano Monster vs. Evil Space Paru-Paro Carljoe Javier 19 Humour and the Contested City in Indian Graphic Novels Mridula Chari 35 Questioning West and East: Otherness in the Graphic Memoir Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and the Subversion of the Western Gaze Thayse Madella 55 Illustrating Individual Identity Narrative Possibilities in Australian Autobiographical Comics Elizabeth MacFarlane 71 Comics and the Autobiographical Identity Valerie Bodell 89 ‘Perseveration on Detail’: Shame and Confession in Memoir Comics Sarah Richardson 105 Part III The Graphic Novel as a Mediator of Reality Space and Subjectification in Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones, The Saga of the Swamp Thing, and V for Vendetta Michael J. Prince 125 Victoria, Boadicea and Adolescent Boys: Alan Moore’s Portrayal of Victorian Women Maciej Sulmicki 139 The Imaginary Lives of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft: Fiction and Biography in Comic Books Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Francisco Saez de Adana 155 Introduction: The Serio-Comic Maciej Sulmicki Comic books have become an important cultural artefact of contemporary culture. They function not only as popular (in the sense of both widespread and not excessively ambitious) entertainment, but also challenging works setting out to pose questions and present problems relevant to the modern reader (such texts are more often called graphic novels). The division between the two categories is far from monochromatic, with various shades of comic graphic novels and serious comic books in between. The element all forms of sequential art have in common is that they are considered to be more accessible than solely textual formats. In effect, they can serve as a tool for negotiating various aspects of culture, literally and metaphorically illustrating the issue(s) in question. The comic book format itself is not bereft of cultural significance. Although the depiction of stories through pictures has been practiced since prehistory, the systematized format consisting of scenes divided by gutters and equipped with speech balloons is a late nineteenth-century invention which began appearing in separate volumes (rather than as an element of newspapers) in the first half of the twentieth-century. 1 In such a stand-alone form it is largely an American invention, popularized in the 1930s and 1940s as depicting the adventures of superheroes. Even then, the seemingly escapist subject matter was employed to convey messages on the problems at hand, i.e. as war propaganda and encouragement to buy war bonds. At the same time, the popularity of protagonists endowed with superhuman powers could be seen as reflecting a yearning on the part of the readers for a definite advantage over the other side of the military conflict. A similar trend of comic books focusing on contemporary issues and concerns has been visible since the 1970s (during the so-called Bronze Age of Comic Books), and has been accompanied by less schematic formats and scripts on a larger scale since the mid-1980s. The so-called Modern Age popularized not only more intellectually and artistically ambitious superhero adventures, but also the use of the comic book format to present stories focusing to a greater extent on psychological processes and social interactions than on action and adventure. Comic books and graphic novels became more and more widely acknowledged as a valid medium for exploring controversial or delicate subjects, as well as for the artist to investigate his or her own self. The negative associations of comics with juvenile delinquency popularized in the 1940s and 1950s 2 have at the turn of the twenty-first century been, if not replaced, then at least supplemented by an awareness of sequential art being a capacious format, encompassing both low-, medium- and highbrow subject matter. At the same time, literary criticism and cultural studies have acknowledged comic books as a valuable source of information on forms of artistic expression as well as psychological and sociological processes and phenomena. Negotiating Culture through Comics is in viii Introduction: The Serio-Comic __________________________________________________________________ itself further proof of the relevance of the comic book format to the modern world, both in the spheres of art and academia. The studies included in this volume focus primarily on texts (and images) from the twenty-first century as a category of works simultaneously addressed towards the modern reader, reflecting the mores of (at least a part of) the contemporary world and acknowledging earlier literary heritage, including that of the comic book genre. The geographical scope of the source texts is on the other hand much broader, encompassing various parts of the world: from the Antipodes, through the Philippines, India, the Middle East and Europe all the way back to the cradle of comics – North America, passing through South America along the way. The first part of the volume discusses the ways the comic book and graphic novel formats have been appropriated to reflect different cultural heritages than those of Europe and North America. Four chapters examine examples from different parts of Asia, including texts written by emigrants and expatriates. The latter category is a particularly interesting example of negotiating culture through comics as the texts in question consciously attempt to find a middle ground in terms of form of expression. Artists may also use the found form as a medium for reflecting on the process of confronting and conjoining sometimes conflicting cultural codes. However, even if the artists refrain from such musing, the four chapters of the first part of this volume provide ample analyses of how the global format of the comic book is adapted to local needs. The first two chapters present two different approaches to the representation of Filipino culture in comic books. Emil M. Flores in ‘Up in the Sky, Feet on the Ground: Cultural Identity in Filipino Superhero Komiks’ focuses on the works which directly transpose the American superhero model into the Philippines, while Carljoe Javier in ‘Filipino humour and the Filipiinisation of Foreign Tropes in Macoy’s Taal Volcano Monster vs. Evil Space Paru-Paro’ reflects on the indigenous elements integrated into a globalized story model of Japanese origin – the invasion of a Godzilla look-alike. Both chapters describe and dissect the ways in which international formats are utilized and subverted through adaptation to Philippine history, culture and sense of humour. In the case of superhero komiks, examples from different parts of the spectrum are mentioned, ranging from loose references in American comics through transpositions of the lycra-suited superhero model to a Philippine setting, all the way to an attempt to make both the background and the characters more local than global. Carloe Javier focuses on a single text, dissecting the tropes, language and references used by the author to show how Macoy’s work is at the same time global in nature and local in its particulars. Mridula Chari in the third chapter, ‘Humour and the Contested City in Indian Graphic Novels’, examines the portrayal of Kolkata and New Delhi in Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007) and Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm (2010). The analysis spans several levels: from the inhabitants of the Maciej Sulmicki ix __________________________________________________________________ city, through the language used to represent their thoughts and speech to the indigenous elements of the works which may be difficult to decipher to an outsider, accustomed to the American superhero comic book format. The two graphic novels are shown to be a way of reflecting on Indian history through somewhat skewed reflections of two of India’s largest cities. The fourth chapter, ‘Questioning West and East: Otherness in the Graphic Memoir Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and the Subversion of the Western Gaze’ by Thayse Madella, adds a new aspect to the analysis of interactions between the oriental and the occidental through focusing on a narrative of uncertainty of status. The protagonist of the comic, Marji, is shown to undermine the clear-cut distinctions between East and West through exhibiting her own growing awareness of the stereotypes and standards between which she must find her own self. Identity construction is demonstrated to be inherently linked with the cultural setting in which it takes place, but not necessarily determined by this context. As in the case of The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, Delhi Calm and the Filipino comic books, Persepolis provides examples of different embodiments of glocalisation, the process of global models being confronted with and adapted to local circumstances. The second part of the volume concentrates on a micro rather than macro scale, exploring sequential art’s role in exploring the self through autobiographical comics. Elizabeth MacFarlane in Chapter Five analyses ‘Narrative Possibilities in Australian Autobiographical Comics’. The three works which serve as examples are Mandy Ord’s Rooftops (2007), Mirranda Burton’s Hidden (2011) and Pat Grant’s BLUE (2012). Although they are not equally overtly autobiographical, all three are said to be hybrid in nature, conjoining not only text and image, but also the private and the public. The medium is shown to offer unique possibilities to an author who wants to convey his or her feelings and experiences without limiting the perspective to solely that of the narrator and his or her words. At the same time, it enables a more personal mode of presentation than films usually do by filtering the external world through an idiosyncratic style of drawing. The drawings are fully foregrounded as drawings in comics with metatextual elements, i.e. presenting the characters’ interaction with the drawn reality or showing them to be drawing something themselves. Focusing on similar processes on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Valerie Bodell in the sixth chapter, ‘Comics and the Autobiographical Identity’, proves that identity is in fact a multifaceted construct through an analysis of Harvey Pekar’s series of autobiographical comics, American Splendor. An interesting strategy is implemented by Pekar through the use of different styles of drawing (by different artists) in different issues of the series. Such changes of appearance help to underline the variability of human nature. Admittedly, the same approach is visible in long-running series of superhero comics, but – Bodell argues – in this case the variation of drawing styles is done in a more deliberate manner, x Introduction: The Serio-Comic __________________________________________________________________ employing the tools available only to a graphic format in order to better explore the many selves which make up oneself. Sarah Richardson’s investigation of ‘Shame and Confession in Memoir Comics’ closes the discussion of sequential art’s role in self-presentation, selfdiscovery and self-judgment. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991) is a particularly vivid example of the potential stemming from the combination of words and images, presenting (pain)fully human words alongside zoomorphic characters. Spiegelman’s graphic novel is set against Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) which employs a strategy of recreating and revealing family histories similar to that employed in Maus. Shame in this case is not linked with the comic book format itself (N.b.: Maus was one of the ‘serious’ comics which helped to establish the medium’s status as a rightful art form), but with disclosing the secrets of the authors’ fathers’ lives. Richardson demonstrates the difference between reconstructing history in order to establish facts and re-presenting individual pasts as subjective, possibly even self-contradictory truths. The stress in the latter case is put on the process rather than the ultimate result. All three chapters in the second part of the volume show that comic books can serve as a form of therapy: for the author through the process of writing and drawing, for the reader through the process of reading and seeing. The final part of Negotiating Culture through Comics provides examples of how the role of culture and society in forming the individual is illustrated in comic books. The graphic novel is also shown to be a functional medium for conveying different ways of perceiving reality. In Chapters Eight and Nine, Michael J. Prince and I take a closer look at several comic books written by Alan Moore. Although Moore is nominally responsible for only the verbal and structural parts of the works, he in fact also plays a crucial role in preparing the drawings through providing (often detailed) descriptions of what should be presented how in each frame. Nevertheless, the graphic artists transfer these directions to paper in their own style and possibly add elements of their own. Chapter Eight, ‘Space and Subjectification in Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones, The Saga of the Swamp Thing, and V for Vendetta’, pays close attention to the visual level of the comics in question, identifying, inter alia, smooth and striated space. The three texts provide for an interesting case study, as they were written and published at a similar time (1983-1984), but still employ significantly varying attitudes and depictions of the subject position and subjectification. Chapter Nine, ‘Victoria, Boadicea and Adolescent Boys: Alan Moore’s Portrayal of Victorian Women’, discusses in turn Moore’s presentation of female characters in comic books set in the nineteenth century: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2003) and From Hell (2000). In both texts, females function as both victims and heroic characters. It is not obvious, however, to what extent they serve primarily as decorations, and which function is the dominant one in the light of the writer’s Maciej Sulmicki xi __________________________________________________________________ declarations and deeds. In order to answer this question, both the primary and secondary female characters are taken into account. The closing chapter by Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Francisco Saez de Adana analyses ‘The Imaginary Lives of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft: Fiction and Biography in Comic Books’. The term ‘imaginary lives’ was invented by Marcel Schwob and elaborated on by Jorge Luis Borges. Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and their works have inspired numerous comic books which provide ample material for the study of how imaginary lives blend with the iconic authors’ real biographies. The chapter also indicates how the thickening web of intertextual references and reworkings creates new links between texts and authors, at the same time enforcing already existing ones. History and literature are in effect perceived anew through the mediation of the graphic novel. The ten chapters of this volume provide a complex view of the phenomenon of the comic book in the contemporary world, the functions the medium serves and its variations in individual parts of the globe. Although academic studies of sequential art are a relatively new phenomenon (as is the comic book in relation to its older brother, the novel), they can already be seen to fill in a significant gap. The contributors to Negotiating Culture through Comics show that much like comic books serve as a medium for portraying and better understanding the world and especially its inhabitants, so do analyses of graphic novels help identify how such texts function and what role they play for the writer, the readers and the society in which they function. Notes 1 Cf. Chris Ryall, Scott Tipton, Comic Books 101: The History, Methods and Madness (Cincinnati: Impact, 2009), Part 1.1. 2 C. W. Marshall, George Kovacs, Introduction to Classics and Comics, ed. C.W. Marshall and George Kovacs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), vii. Bibliography Marshall, C. W. and George Kovacs. Introduction to Classics and Comics, edited by C. W. Marshall and George Kovacs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ryall, Chris and Scott Tipton. Comic Books 101: The History, Methods and Madness. Cincinnati: Impact, 2009.