Volume 59, Issue 1

This reading of Charles Burns’s graphic novel Black Hole, and of its four principle characters, Keith, Chris, Rob and Eliza, relies heavily upon ideas drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis: fantasy and symptom, desire and object a, Symbolic and Real as well as the notion of subjective destitution. Freud’s understanding of melancholy will aid the last of those discussions. Rumination on the book’s title and the mysterious infection, the “bug,” which drives the narrative, finds a suggestive analogy in relation to the theme of abjection so abundantly pictured in the text. Building upon the logic of abjection, this essay also seeks to examine the way in which the book’s implied social setting abjects those who suffer from the “bug” through a metaphor derived from a definition of “black holes” in a network to think through the social topology presented in the text. The “bug” is an issue in both the biological bodies of infected characters and in the social network from which they came, a network that violently excludes them. Black Hole is positioned as a fiction of abject “reality”

In discussing Chester Brown’s “comic-strip biography” Louis Riel, this paper highlights the narratologically perceivable strategies through which Brown complicates the depiction of the character of Louis Riel. Focusing on the execution of Thomas Scott, the paper discusses how Brown’s use of aural and visual focalization, narrated vs. narrative time and comics-specific engagements with his reader makes the reader sympathize with Scott, to the detriment of his opinion of Riel. Interpreting Louis Riel from a narratological perspective highlights Brown’s underlying insistence on the narratedness of his biography

This paper discusses how Jason Lutes’s Berlin calls attention to comics’ inherent dichotomy of words and images. By allegorizing two of its central characters, Kurt Severing and Marthe Müller, to represent the textual and pictorial narrative dimension in comics, Berlin critically reflects upon the limitations that arise from thinking in binaries when trying to determine how meaning is created on the comics page. This reading of Berlin as metafiction aims at dissolving this strict separation of written and pictorial codes and points to specific panel sequences that allow for such an interpretation of the comic

This essay traces the genealogy of the crime comic from its early date and origins in the 1940s and its demise at the hands of Fredric Wertham and the Comics Code of 1954, to the specific form they received at the hands of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips beginning in the early 1990s, concentrating especially on their work on Sleeper and Criminal. Combining discussions of culture, formalisms and genre, the article notes how Brubaker and Phillips’s return to the crime comic emphasizes the ways in which ostensibly ‘pulp’ fictions can be meaningful works of art

This article reflects on comics studies’ tendency for self-apology and a latent inferiority complex. It offers a survey of contemporary comics criticism and textbooks as well as a critique of a tendency towards an assimilation of comics studies by literary studies. It highlights the ways in which interdisciplinary approaches and a critical engagement with the foundational texts of comics studies, as well as recent scholarly endeavors to provide a theoretical grounding to comics studies apart from literary studies, can help the discipline. In particular, it advances the hope that comics can come to be recognized as an image-based medium with a need for its own critical vocabulary