Contemporary Comics Storytelling

Conclusion

177 Conclusion In Contemporary Comics Storytelling, each of the constituents of the title is salient. In the introduction I focused more on the “contemporary” aspect of this book, mapping its place in a time of rising cultural prestige for comics and an era that begins to renegotiate postmodernism. Comics like Fables, Tom Strong, and 100 Bullets are literature, not so much because cultural gatekeepers are finally paying attention to them, but because their complex narrative strategies allow to them to participate in and reflect on the contemporary cultural debate. This book has endeavored to analyze the narrative strategies of the three series, unpack their complexities, and trace their connection to postmodernism. My exploration of the literary aspect of comics via contemporary storytelling practices has operated at the level of what David Bordwell (1996a) calls “middle-range research” in film studies: inquiries that are driven by a particular problem or set of interpretative challenges, as evidenced in my case studies. Such middle-range inquiries then can go on to provide the foundations for a broader narratology of comics. In this conclusion I will chart a number of ways in which Contemporary Comics Storytelling, as a middle-range inquiry, contributes to the study of storytelling —narratology—at large. Middle-Range Inquiries into Comics Each of my three case studies identifies a localized issue of inquiry: subversion and tradition for Fables, fictionality and self-reflexivity for Tom Strong, and fictional minds for 100 Bullets. Each case study is driven by a particular problem. For Fables, I ask how we can understand a text’s engagement with textual traditions, how it creates subversions, and how it inscribes itself into these traditions. Cultural memory, genre frames, and multimodal storytelling were the concepts I used to explain how Fables recuperates tradition for the postmodern, subversive fairy tale. 178 Conclusion For Tom Strong, I ask how we can understand the interplay between immersion in a text and readers’ awareness that this is a text, made by an author under particular production conditions and inscribed in particular textual traditions. Storyworlds, imaginative projections, and narrative patterns were the concepts I put to work on Tom Strong and its positive reevaluation of the imagination and escapism in the superhero genre. For 100 Bullets, I ask how we can understand fictional minds in comics, how they develop an identity for characters, and how moral judgments contribute to this process. Fictional minds, centers of narrative gravity, and practical judgments were the concepts I used to shed light on the affirmation of moral commitment in the world of relativist contingencies depicted in 100 Bullets. Each of these problem-driven inquiries, and the concepts I use to approach them, contributes to a cognitive approach to comics. I understand subversion, self-reflexivity, and fictional minds as textual effects that emerge from a combination of clues and gaps in the text triggering particular processes in the readers’ minds. Even though I have not tested my hypotheses about these textual effects empirically, they are based on the models and insights of cognitive and evolutionary psychology and should be, by and large, testable. Because of my focus on textual effects , none of my inquiries depends on what Bordwell, perhaps too pejoratively , calls a “Grand Theory” (1996a). Even though I look into the ways postmodernism is renegotiated in each of my texts, and even though I address concepts like the master narrative or the différance of value, the basic assumptions of my analysis are not derived from postmodern theory . Rather, I understand them as a particular postmodern conceptualization and ask which cognitive processes they relate to. My analyses are certainly theoretical, in that they take my case studies to relate to larger issues, but they do not apply the framework of any single, encompassing theory. What makes all these middle-range inquiries hang together is the cognitive approach I take toward comics. This cognitive approach is not a “Grand Theory” but rather a perspective that accommodates different theories. As Bordwell and Carroll put it: “A cognitivist analysis or explanation seeks to understand human thought, emotion, and action by appeal to processes of mental representation, naturalistic processes, and (some sense of) rational agency” (1996, xvi). In order to provide a cog- Conclusion 179 nitivist explanation of readers’ response to fictional comics texts, I have drawn on a number of theories to do with cognition, such as schemata , scripts and frames, theories based on inferences and mental models...