Contemporary Comics Storytelling

Introduction

1 Introduction Many reasons for the rise of comics to a medium of cultural prominence have been put forward in recent years. Paul Douglas Lopes in Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (2009) emphasizes one: “While comic books originally were based on short stories in serial format, now comic books present long-arced narratives with complex storylines. Now the fastest growing market for comic books, graphic novels , presents this art in book-length format, again allowing for complex and compelling storytelling” (2009, xvi). Lopes then goes on to discuss how sophisticated storytelling in comics moves beyond genre boundaries and attracts the widespread attention of “cultural gatekeepers,” like journalists and professional reviewers, prize committees and librarians. Lopes embarks on a social history of comics in his book. What I am interested in, however, is precisely the “complex and compelling storytelling ” that Lopes does not explore much further. How do comics tell their stories? How do they achieve complexity, playing with genre frames, immersing readers in fictional worlds, and helping them to construct the fictional minds of characters? Contemporary Comics Storytelling suggests a cognitive approach for analyzing comics in all their richness and complexity. As my case studies will show, contemporary comics use their complexity to engage with the legacy of postmodernism,1 its subversion, self-reflexivity, and moral contingency, by positing their own alternatives. This book is an investigation into how the storytelling of comics stands at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It has a narratological and a literary agenda. Dubbing comics “narratives” is hardly contested ; dubbing comics “literature” certainly is (see Meskin 2009 for an overview of this discussion). Let me explain what I mean by that. Literature can be defined through different features: formal complexity, multiple meaning potentials, an imaginative reconsideration of the familiar , an intervention in a cultural debate, the institutionalization of a 2 Introduction canon, the social practice of creating texts as “literature,” and accumulating cultural capital by reading them, to name but a few.2 On this account , literature is not tied to the written text (in fact, films can be seen as literature, too)3 or to the vexed distinction between high culture and low culture, which can (a priori) assign entire media, like comics, to the ghetto of prestigelessness and irrelevance. Texts and their features, the way they engage readers, and how they participate in cultural conversations all come together here. Seeing comics as literature means considering how these aspects interact. A cognitive perspective on comics outlines the formal complexities and multiple meaning potentials involved when comics engage their readers and help them to revisit the familiar imaginatively. This does not necessarily take the shape of formalist defamiliarization; it can also be engendered in immersive renditions of storyworlds and thought experiments played out, such as what if fairy-tale characters lived in contemporary New York? What if there was a superhero aware of his fictionality ? What if you could dispense your own justice aided by one hundred untraceable bullets? Comics like Fables, Tom Strong, and 100 Bullets are literary because they make their readers think, even as they enjoy the read, and because they contribute through their imaginative revisiting of the familiar to the ongoing cultural conversation. Institutionalization and cultural capital in comics might be following hard on the heels of these features, as the New York Times’ assessment that comics might be the “new literary form” (McGrath 2004) suggests. After waiting on the sidelines for decades, comics have also become more visible in academia in recent years. Comics are no longer confined to afterthoughts and asides (as in the writings of Roland Barthes 1984b, Seymour Chatman 1978, and Edward Branigan 1992) or to the occasional foray into the unknown (as, for example, in Umberto Eco 1972 and 1976); now they have journals, book series, and mla discussion groups devoted to them.4 Special issues of established journals attest the interest of a larger academic audience,5 and publications like the Comics Studies Reader edited by Heer and Worcester (2009) point toward the emergence of a canon of comics criticism. However, as Heer and Worcester document with their collection, comics studies are highly divergent in their approaches. The essays, articles, and excerpts in their Comics Studies Reader range from the history of the medium to formal categorization Introduction 3 and analysis, and from cultural studies accounts to the appreciation of individual works. This book considers the formal...