Classics and Comics ed. by George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall (review)

Superman was inspired by Hercules, and Wonder Woman is an Amazon princess named Diana. Comic books (or graphic novels or sequential art, if you prefer) have long drawn classical material into their orbit. For many students, to say nothing of professional classicists, first contact with the classics comes while exploring the comic book universe. This collection of essays can persuade classicists who have yet to venture into comics to go boldly.

The editors lay out the book’s gambit in their introduction: comic books, at least in Anglophone North America, “have always languished in pejorative associations of low culture, categorized with or as pulp fiction” (vii). But, as the papers in the volume make clear, comic books have flourished in part by incorporating Greek and Roman “classics”, and however classicists may feel about their own discipline, outside of our club, the “classics” are often treated as a synecdoche for “high culture.” Although comics are now a medium of sophisticated storytelling, and can incorporate both faithful evocations and creative transformations of ancient art, history, and myth, exploring how they do so is also an opportunity to recast the mismatched cultural roles assigned to comics and classics. The papers in this book are at their most provocative when they combine detailed studies of comic book classicizing with this broader concern.

The papers are gathered in four parts: “Seeing the Past Through Sequential Art”, “Gods and Superheroes”, “Drawing (on) History” and “The Desires of Troy”. Those in Part One deal with “classics” and “comics” in their most abstracted form. For instance, Brett M. Rogers examines how Joseph Campbell’s analysis of classical hero myths has influenced the plots of superhero comics. Focusing on changes in storytelling about Spider-Man from the 1960s to the twenty-first century, Rogers makes a compelling case that imposing “classical” models on comic storytelling can be detrimental to its richness and relevance.

This must be, partly, because comics have developed a cache of stories and characters that in diversity, and internal contradictions, and in the creative rationalization of those contradictions is much more like the myth encountered in classical sources than Campbell’s structurally filtered mythology. C. W. Marshall opens Part Two with a “test case” in the elaborate intertextuality of commercial superhero comics (90). He details the incorporation of the Furies into the “DC [Comics] Universe” in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and its spinoffs, and subsequent transformations of these now comic-booked Furies in Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman story The Hiketeia. R. Clinton Simms on the changing character of Ares through comics, and Benjamin Stevens on the conflation of biblical and comics intertexts in Kingdom Come provide similarly impressive “test cases” in the creative appropriation of both classical and comics mythology. These essays show that comic storytelling can gain from classics, but it does so when incorporating the classical into its own sophisticated discourse.

Papers throughout the volume generally focus on the writer’s side of comics, more than the artist’s. Perhaps there is good reason for this. Among Part Three’s discussions of ancient history in comics, Anise K. Strong examines the treatment of Augustus’s imperial policy in the Sandman issue “August”. She amply demonstrates the creative manipulation of sources like Suetonius in this comic. But she also shows that visual details of the comic have been drawn from the BBC production of I, Claudius even in contradiction of ancient artistic depictions of, for example, the empress Livia (176). Similarly, Emily Fairey’s study of Persians in Frank Miller’s 300 makes a convincing case that Miller’s vision of the Persians comes not from Achaemenid monuments, or Athenian vase painting, but by translating the hostility to Persians expressed in Athenian literature into the idiom Miller has developed for depicting villainy and social deviance in his other comics. Some comic book artists do take inspiration from ancient art, though. Part Four approaches the Trojan War in comics, especially in Eric Shanower’s...