Understanding Genres in Comics (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels) 3030435539, 9783030435530

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
1 Introduction: Genres as Formula, Genres Beyond Formula
Genres in Texts
Cluster, Resemblances, and Exemplars
Genres in Use, Genres as Uses
Method
2 Are Genres Media Specific?
The Case for Medium-Specificity
Cultural and Industrial Convergence
Conclusion
3 Where Are Genres in Comics?
Genre in the Paratext
Funny Animals, Genre in the Texts
Conclusion
4 How Genres Emerge: Horror Comics
Horrific Comics Without a Genre
The Institutionalization of Horror Through Intermedial Alignment
A Bifurcated Genre, Horror and Weird
Conclusion
5 How Genres Are Maintained: The Case of Genre Curation in Crossovers
Crossovers as Crossovers
Emerging Architexts
Negotiating Genre
Conclusion
6 The Uses of Genre: Productivity, Cultural Distinction and Shared Culture
The Appeal of the Known
Genres as Intertextual Building Blocks
Cultural Memories
Cultural Hierarchies
Conclusion
7 The Uses of Genre: Generic Discourses Among Producing Fans
Amateurs?
Method and Platforms
Hashtags and Genres
Conclusion
8 The Uses of Genres: Asserting Authority
Readers and Fans as Critics
Polite Disagreements
The Amazing Spider-Man After 9/11
Comicsgate, Genre and Interpretive Power
Conclusion
9 Invisible Genres and Other Architexts
Literary Adaptation as Genre
Graphic Novel, Manga, YA
Mignola Comics and “Personal Genres”
Conclusion
10 Conclusion: Beyond Genre?
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

UNDERSTANDING GENRES IN COMICS

Nicolas Labarre

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Series Editor Roger Sabin University of the Arts London London, UK

This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.” It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those capital letters have been earned. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of 60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding. Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for international media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC, Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643

Nicolas Labarre

Understanding Genres in Comics

Nicolas Labarre UFR Lettres, langues et civilisations Pessac Cedex, France

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ISBN 978-3-030-43553-0 ISBN 978-3-030-43554-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43554-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: CSA Images This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book was inspired in many ways by the discovery of Rick Altman’s Film/Genre, over ten years ago, a reading which has shaped my thinking about genre ever since. Many thanks to Roger Sabin for kindly suggesting that a talk about the Superman/Aliens crossover could be the unlikely seed for a book about genres in comics. During the writing period, I was also fortunate to receive advice and encouragements from my friends and colleagues Jean-François Baillon, Jean-Paul Gabilliet and Isabelle LicariGuillaume. I would also like to thank Kevin Huizinga and Deda Daniels for kindly allowing me to reprint their works in this book.

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Contents

1

Introduction: Genres as Formula, Genres Beyond Formula Genres in Texts Cluster, Resemblances, and Exemplars Genres in Use, Genres as Uses Method

1 2 5 7 10

2

Are Genres Media Specific? The Case for Medium-Specificity Cultural and Industrial Convergence Conclusion

17 19 23 25

3

Where Are Genres in Comics? Genre in the Paratext Funny Animals, Genre in the Texts Conclusion

29 30 36 41

4

How Genres Emerge: Horror Comics Horrific Comics Without a Genre The Institutionalization of Horror Through Intermedial Alignment A Bifurcated Genre, Horror and Weird Conclusion

45 47 48 52 58 vii

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CONTENTS

5

How Genres Are Maintained: The Case of Genre Curation in Crossovers Crossovers as Crossovers Emerging Architexts Negotiating Genre Conclusion

63 64 66 68 75

The Uses of Genre: Productivity, Cultural Distinction and Shared Culture The Appeal of the Known Genres as Intertextual Building Blocks Cultural Memories Cultural Hierarchies Conclusion

79 80 83 89 92 93

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The Uses of Genre: Generic Discourses Among Producing Fans Amateurs? Method and Platforms Hashtags and Genres Conclusion

99 100 102 104 108

8

The Uses of Genres: Asserting Authority Readers and Fans as Critics Polite Disagreements The Amazing Spider-Man After 9/11 Comicsgate, Genre and Interpretive Power Conclusion

111 112 114 115 120 124

9

Invisible Genres and Other Architexts Literary Adaptation as Genre Graphic Novel, Manga, YA Mignola Comics and “Personal Genres” Conclusion

129 130 135 138 142

10

Conclusion: Beyond Genre?

147

Index

153

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Kevin Huizenga, “Bona” (self-published, 2012). After Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle (Dell, 1962) Doug Moench, Alex Niño, adapted from Michael Moorcock, “Behold the Man,” Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #6 (Marvel Comics, November 1975) Foregrounding salient elements from the genre’s encyclopedia on the Reed Crandall cover of Buccaneers #27, a pirate comic book (Quality, May 1951) Internal ad for the Fiction House comics line, published in Planet Comics #33 (Fiction House, November 1944) Unidentified cover artist, Fawcett’s Funny Animals #12 (Fawcett, November 1943) Bill Brady, “Billy the Kid and Oscar,” Fawcett’s Funny Animals #13 (Fawcett, December 1943) Dick Briefer, “Frankenstein,” final page of its first appearance in Prize Comics #7 (December 1940) Alan Mandel, “Tales of Terror,” Yellowjacket Comics #9 (April 1946) A combination of potential generic labels on the covers of St John’s Weird Horrors #1 (June 1952) and Comic Media’s Weird Terror #1 (September 1952) Dick Briefer, “Utter Failure!”, Prize Comics #24 (Feature Publications, October 1942) Dan Jurgens, Kevin Nowlan, Superman/ Aliens #2 (DC/Dark Horse, August 1995), p. 46

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33 35 39 40 49 51

56 67 72

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 9.1

Dan Jurgens, Kevin Nowlan, Superman/ Aliens #3 (DC/Dark Horse, September 1995), p. 43, detail Danny Fingeroth, Frank Springer, Dazzler #13 (Marvel Comics, March 1982), pp. 9 and 16 Matt Fraction, Annie Wu, Hawkeye #8 (Marvel Comics, April 2013), p. 8 Deda Daniels, The Flower and the Nose, p. 188, posted on DeviantArt on June 12, 2019 Michael J. Straczynski, John Romita Jr., The Amazing SpiderMan v.2 #36 (Marvel Comics, December 2001), p. 9, detail The first “martial arts” comics story? Dave Berg, “Junior Judo,” Exciting Comics #57 (September 1947)

74 88 90 107 117 131

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Genres as Formula, Genres Beyond Formula

Abstract This chapter examines the theoretical blind spots in common uses of the notion of genre in comics studies. It argues that genres cannot be understood solely at the level of the texts themselves and that they do not constitute stable, finite categories, although a text-centric model of ahistorical categories often proves convenient as a shorthand. Offering a brief account of relevant genre theory in film and literature studies, the chapter argues for a socio-discursive approach to genres and their uses, based on a study of the specific context of production and reception of comics in the United States. Keywords Formula · Prototype · Prescriptive approach · Taxonomy · Architext

In Popular Fiction, the Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, Ken Gelder suggests that “one of the most productive ways to think about popular fiction is in terms of genre.”1 Examples abound of creators, publishers, readers and critics of comics who appear to share this assumption and use genres as an interpretive framework to make sense of the medium. Famously, fan-produced histories of the comic book tended for a long time to measure the vitality and relevance of the industry with reference only to the superhero genre.2 Genres also function as a frequent analytical

© The Author(s) 2020 N. Labarre, Understanding Genres in Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43554-7_1

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tool in contemporary comics scholarship with a variety of purposes, framing aesthetic and political inquiries, and offering boundaries to studies of industrial trends. In most of these cases, genres are conceptualized as unproblematic encapsulations, convenient ways to refer to a vast body of work in the context of a different discussion. Genre therefore functions as a useful model of complex phenomena, which is efficient enough to suit for a variety of purposes, as long as one does not lose sight that it is, in fact, a model. Philosophers of science have long pointed out that while models are “a trade-off between factual content and explanatory power,”3 usage can obscure the nature of this compromise, leading to a disregard for methodological precautions and domains of validity. When genres become central to any argument in comics studies, a pragmatic, simplified conception is no longer operative, and a more detailed model becomes necessary. The purpose of this book is to pave the way for such a modelization, through a study of North American comic books and graphic novels,4 although I may use examples from comic strips and from non-American publications occasionally. This corpus constitutes the aforementioned domain of validity for the arguments developed here, since I will argue that genres need to be understood within a specific cultural and industrial context. Covering manga, bande dessinée or comics produced in any other cultural sphere would therefore require significant adjustments.

Genres in Texts Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith and Paul Levitz devote several chapters of their textbook, The Power of Comics, to the various genres of comics, with a special focus on superheroes (ch. 7) and memoirs (ch. 8). Paying attention to character types, settings, narrative patterns, themes and visual conventions, they define genres as sets of “conventions” and historically stable “shared characteristics,” which serve as a basis for a taxonomy used by critics, creators and publishers.5 This appears to be a standard approach to genre, used by scholars and fans alike, whenever the subject is not the object of the study. To use but one recent example, Brannon Costello’s thoughtful examination of the comics of Howard Chaykin consistently treats “science-fiction” as an unproblematic category of works about future events, even as Costello pays close attention to the history and functions of superheroes and of noir 6 ; because science-fiction is not

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central to his project, it can be encapsulated by a standard and mostly non-historicized label. This approach takes the comics themselves as a starting point, in a logic that is often simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive: General rules are deduced from core texts and these rules in term serve to adjudicate whether new or marginal texts effectively belong to the genre. One of the most often quoted examples of this descriptive–prescriptive approach in comics studies is Peter Coogan’s “Definition of the superhero” from his 2006 book, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. Using judicial decisions, close readings and editorial history centered on Superman and Batman, Coogan identifies three core elements to the genre—a pro-social mission, a secret identity and a distinctive costume. Although Coogan notes that canonical examples, such as the Hulk or The Fantastic Four, do not exhibit all these characteristics at once,7 he subsequently examines whether certain characters belong in the genre or not, paying attention to the trifecta of characteristics but also to the way the publishers frame these characters. Thus, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, from the eponymous TV show, is “ruled out” of the genre because of a lack of self-identification as a superhero, and Nick Fury, in Marvel Comics, is similarly excluded by his lack of costume and of a secret identity, even though his stories take place in a superhero universe. Coogan concludes in both cases that they may be “super-heroes,” but are not “superheroes”8 : While they share some characteristics of core characters, such as Superman or Batman, they do not belong to the genre. In this conception, genre functions as a catalog, a series of boxes to be ticked off with central features (mission, identity, costume) and elements of context (self-identification, presence of competing genre affiliation), to which the genre’s established name provides only a crude index. In Coogan’s article, this catalog of conventions is conceived precisely as a tool allowing one to rule in or out, to resolve ambiguities and taxonomic difficulties, much like scientific classifications since Carl von Linné have sought to divide the living world into nonambiguous categories through ever-evolving tools, from external appearance to genetic markers. Though Coogan mentions the idea that generic characteristics function as clusters of characteristics, or resemblances, he concludes on a binary distinction, ruling in or ruling out. A refinement of the list model used by Coogan can be found in the writing of film theorist Rick Altman in his influential 1984 essay entitled “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” which offers a twodimensional approach to genre features.9 The issue of genre has been

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thoroughly explored in film studies, especially within the corpus of Hollywood cinema, and provides numerous theoretical leads which I shall use throughout this book. However, as I argued before, theories and models require a domain of validity. Genre theory in film has been written based on extensive familiarity with the history and industrial structure of the medium and can only apply to comics following a thorough historical and cultural relocation, checked upon available scholarship. In his article, Altman borrows the semantic/syntactic duality from Saussurian linguistics, to argue that genre conventions are best understood as a catalog of discrete elements (the semantic axis) along with certain organizational features (the syntactic axis). Thus, a horror narrative possesses only minimal semantic markers, maybe the presence of a monster, while a science-fiction narrative may follow a variety of narrative structures, but contains distinct settings and objects, from postapocalyptic worlds to robots. This approach is fruitful, in that it explicitly maps genres over two dimensions and thus makes it possible to think of hybrid narratives as intersections and not as marginal cases.10 It also emphasizes the fact that genre boundaries are not based on a homogeneous set of criteria, with some genres correlated to specific affects they may generate (and even to specific bodily reactions)11 while others are defined mostly through the features of the fictional world. Narratologist Jonathan Culler calls these the parameters of “vraisemblance”12 within the diegesis, while film scholar Steve Neale refers to them as “regimes of verisimilitude,”13 in other words, the boundaries of what is likely and expected: A fistfight is an unusual conclusion in a romance comic, but it is expected in a western comic. It is therefore not problematic to describe erotic comics as a genre, just as crime comics, even though the first label refers to an aesthetic and bodily emotion and the second to a plot structure. This non-homogeneity also implies that it is not necessary to create a hierarchy of genres, with humor as a super-category for instance14 : These super-categories can be understood merely as genres with little to no semantic content. Beyond its immediate usability and transposability to comics, Altman’s model demonstrates the usefulness of bidimensional conceptions of genre features, for instance to reflect on the way narrative and visual conventions may work at cross-generic purposes.15 Genre theorists commonly note that at the level of the individual text, genre functions as a balance between standardization and deviation,16 accepting editorial and cultural parameters or reworking them, even at the cost of altering

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the genre’s vraisemblance. Two-dimensional approaches—be they semantic/syntactic, narrative/visual or any other pairing—make it possible to account more precisely for the way a specific work negotiates this typicality. To take one example, Kevin Huizenga’s 2012 redrawing of Kona, Monarch of the Monster Isle (Dell, 1962), a King-Kong-inspired monster comic book, works by juxtaposing a formulaic story with a graphic style more typical of contemporary alternative comics.17 The resulting work can be read as both typical and singular in both genres. Incidentally, this also implies that it is possible not to read the story in either genre and by extension calls attention to the limits inherent in a model that describes genres as a textual category (Fig. 1.1).

Cluster, Resemblances, and Exemplars While adhering to a broadly textual approach and citing Peter Coogan, Duncan, Smith and Levitz put more emphasis on the “wide variety of conventions” and the flexibility of the superhero genre, beyond specific textual markers.18 This approach to a flexible taxonomy—literature scholar Guy Belzane expressively describes genres as “hesitant categories”19 —has been theorized using Wittgenstein’s conception of the family resemblance, developed in his Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein did not write specifically about genres, but about intellectual categories in general, arguing that no set list of features could account for the notions of “games” and “numbers,” and that understanding these categories required a more flexible approach, incorporating conventions, habits and “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing.”20 Wittgenstein’s approach does not establish a hierarchy between internal and external characteristics, between text and context, because he is not interested in collections of physical objects, but in the construction of linguistic concepts. Crucially, this approach discourages attempts at ruling liminal cases in or out of the category, since, as Wittgenstein writes about games: “We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn.”21 Wittgenstein’s approach is commonly invoked in genre theory, though with varying degrees of precision, but prototype theory, which builds on his work and was developed notably by Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff, provides a slightly more applicable model.22 It argues that the concept of family resemblance misrepresents the fact that to draw a distinction between core and liminal members in conceptual categories is feasible

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Fig. 1.1 Kevin Huizenga, “Bona” (self-published, 2012). After Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle (Dell, 1962)

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and often easy in practice: Prototypical examples empirically generate no problem of identification. Much like scientific models, conceptual categories only become problematic when they are the subject of the inquiry or when one tries to chart their margins. Prototype theory acknowledges the existence of central or most prominent members of a category, or exemplars, and makes it possible to conceive of various other examples as being close or distant to this core. The use of prototype theory to conceptualize genres23 implies treating them not as an objective index to a collection of physical objects, but as conceptual and discursive categories. This approach accounts for the perennial issue of genres’ fuzzy borders but also for the absence of any defining and indispensable characteristic. It also removes the need to distinguish between internal and contextual characteristics, for context— i.e., usage—is precisely what makes exemplars central and what makes the generic label useful in the first place. For the superhero genre in comics, exemplars undoubtedly include Superman, Batman and SpiderMan, though depending on the community of users, these names refer to specific historical versions of these narratives, or to a continuously redefined trans-historical and transmedial bricolage, as described by Ian Gordon in the case of Superman.24 Though unacknowledged as such, the prototypical approach to genres is fully compatible with the approach used in The Power of Comics, in which key texts receive more attention and more weight than examples perceived as marginal.

Genres in Use, Genres as Uses A prototypical approach and multi-dimensional models thus offer powerful tools to map genres and, in turn, make it possible to reflect on their functions. Broadly, genres play the same role as any intellectual category, by offering a convenient way to make complexity legible, and by enabling predictions based on regularity. Genre theorists across media have thus highlighted the usefulness of genres for the audience, as a guide to consumption and a “horizon of expectation”25 guiding consumption and generating specific pleasures; for creators, as reproducible narrative patterns, but also as ways guide and shape the readers’ experience, and an intellectual and affective level26 ; for publishers or distributors, as a way to create or identify expectations in order to market their products; and finally for critics, as ways to produce discourses encompassing more than discrete objects, but also to assert

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their own role in making the experience of a cultural object meaningful. In his seminal Film/Genre, Rick Altman sums up these functions by suggesting that genre functions as a blueprint, a structure (at the formal level), a label and a contract (for viewers).27 Literary theorist Jean-Marie Seillan, in his introduction to a collection on emerging literary genres, acknowledges these functions of genres and the multiplicity of their usages, which leads him to define them as an indispensable part of the reading experience: The degree of legibility and intelligibility of a new work depends to a large extent on its capacity to fit or not within a predefined and recognizable genre, as genre serves to establish in memory and in the cultural institution, albeit temporarily, filiations and classifications.28

In all these cases, they thus serve as a common language, enabling exchanges between various groups of users, or among a given group. As a result, genres are much less useful outside of mass cultural industries, in cultural fields in which the production is less abundant, authorship is more clearly defined,29 the community is smaller, and the need to establish a common language can be accomplished through other institutions. It should be clear at this point that genres and their uses are not separable notions. In a prototypical approach, genres do not exist beyond the discourses which produce them—they are a “loose assemblage of cultural forms shaped by social conflicts and historical vicissitudes”30 —and these discourses, in turn, perform distinct rhetorical and social functions. This functionalist and discursive approach is insufficient, however, to distinguish between genres and other text groupings—architexts—which may perform some of the same functions. Narratologist Gerard Genette coined the notion of the “architext” to describe “the relationship of inclusion that links each text to the various types of discourses it belongs to.”31 A cultural object such as a graphic novel can belong to any number of architexts: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and the comic book adaptations of Tomb Raider both feature female protagonists, a notable distinctive trait in many ways, yet one which is unlikely to be understood as the basis for a common genre. Similarly, the comics published under DC Comics’ Vertigo label, a group of text which I will examine in more detail in Chapter 6, display notable resemblances, but would not and are not in fact described as a genre. Some attested architexts mobilize intermedial knowledge (approaching Chris Ware’s Building Stories as a board game,

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reading an adaptation of a popular film in light of that film), while others function as genres, but with a very limited domain of validity, over time (western-romance comics) or across society (splatterpunk comics, poetry comics). Though the notion of genre could be extended and systematized to include all these occurrences, the resulting notion would differ significantly from the way the word is used by creators, publishers, librarians and readers, in short, with the way the idea of genre in comics already functions. What these counterexamples miss is a form of institutionalization, which would turn architexts groupings into genres. In the case of Vertigo, this institutionalization is absent because the “Vertigo label” is bounded, self-sufficient and non-generative: It can only be used as such for a limited number of works and can be applied to other comics only by analogy. Labels, trademarks and brands are architext whose boundaries are legal rather than social. In other cases, the architexts have simply not proved useful enough to be used by a sizable number of actors among the three main groups of comics users. Communities and institutions do not simply use genres or make them prominent. By bringing to the fore specific architexts, singling them out and making them meaningful, they constantly create the genres. Steve Neale, writing about film genres, suggests that genres “are always in play rather than simply being re-played” (emphasis in the original),32 implying that genres are not ahistorical ideals and that they are modified constantly by every new addition, because they have no transcending essence beyond the sum of texts which they encompass. In a socio-discursive approach to genre, they are also in play through a constant “collective bricolage,”33 encompassing each attempt to define and describe them, and in fact every use they are put to. For instance, Peter Coogan’s sharp delineation of the boundaries of the superhero genre and his choice of ruling out liminal examples, such as Buffy, attempt to shape the genre as much as they seek to describe it. In doing so, Coogan competes with other discourses which have sought to locate these very examples within the superhero genre.34 In the absence of an authoritative catalog of genres to refer to and of objective boundaries, as in the case of Vertigo, each use of a generic label is also a statement of intent, emphasizing or downplaying certain key characteristics; including or excluding intertextual references to core texts; and affirming or dismissing exemplars. Whatever their apparent scientificity, whether they

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work in lists, clusters or two-dimensional maps, the historically and culturally contingent degree of resemblance which define genres is adjudicated by a series of discursive communities. Because of these conflicting claims by various genre users, even fully institutionalized genres give rise to diverging interpretations, made manifest by the choice of a different set of exemplars and prototypes. The cautious and implicitly prototypical approach used in The Power of Comics rests on the existence of a core group of key texts, a canon for each genre to which any new addition is compared. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo have demonstrated that various communities in comics construct these canons in vastly different ways, as a result of employing barely compatible valuation criteria,35 which remains true at the scale of genres. For instance, comics historians may define Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates (1934–1946) as a key text and an exemplar for adventure comics, in view of its historical importance, cultural resonance and artistic achievement, while librarians may opt for Jeff Smith’s Bone (1991– 2004) as a key text in the structuration of contemporary children’s and YA comics publishing, whose aesthetic choices resonate strongly to this day; of course, other discursive communities may include both.36 For contemporary comics in North America, meaningful communities of genre users include authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, critics (from fans to scholars) and lay readers.37 The role of these various discursive communities is itself historically contingent: Librarians and book retailers could hardly have been called genre users before the emergence of the graphic novel. As a matter of course, this list would also be very different if the subject was genre in literature or in cinema: Mechanisms of genre formations would by and large be similar, but the end results and the specific stake of these formations would not.

Method When discussing Altman syntactic/semantic genre structure, I have argued that text-centric studies of genres required taking into consideration the specific affordances of comics in addition to the cultural and economic configuration in which they are produced and read. This is not equivalent to arguing that genres can only exist in one medium—a question I shall revisit in greater detail in Chapter 2—but it does suggest that even at this level, indigenous approaches to genres are required. This is even more crucial when broadening the approach to genre to include not

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only the works but also the “genrifiers,”38 understood as the individuals, communities and institutions that use, produce and maintain genres. As a result, the key texts dealing with genre in film studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s all undergird their theory with careful survey of the medium and its users. Though authors like Rick Altman and Steve Neale differ in the detail of their approach to film genres,39 they ground their approaches in a specific and well-delineated context, in which theory can be refined and adjusted. To write about genres in comics requires thinking not only about the texts themselves but also about what Bart Beaty, drawing on Arthur Danto, George Dickie and Howard Becker calls the “comics world”: the sum of “the collective activities that constitute [the] production and circulation [of comics],”40 for it is within this perimeter that comics genres can and do become institutionalized. Conducting an exhaustive study of genre occurrences and uses across comics history would be self-defeating and frankly impossible. Not only does the total output of the comics industry far exceeds the reading capabilities of any researcher (a cursory reading of the over 3000 comic books published in 1952 alone would require about three months of uninterrupted work), but the logic of genre is one of recurrence and patterns, and not of absolute consistency. Additionally, studying genre cannot be undertaken merely at the level of memorable works. By definition, these works function as exemplars, as exceptional attempts, they cannot stand for the average objects, the vast majority of comics production, for which the notion of genre becomes relevant. We cannot study erotic comics as a genre merely by looking at Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s Omaha the Cat Dancer (1981–1995), Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss (1988) and Melinda Gebbie and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (1991–2006), fascinating as these singular, distinctive and mostly celebrated works may be, for they only represent a narrow and cohesive subsection of the genre. To avoid this pitfall, I have tried to use a different genre as the focus for each of the following eight chapters, from funny animals to science-fiction and horror. As much as possible, I have relied on extensive readings of chronologically bounded genres and series, making use of original issues, of the extensive databases of public domain comics and of existing surveys. However, in many cases, close readings and detailed examinations of specific artifacts and their uses prove necessary, since genres are not free-floating discourses: They produce observable features in the comics as much as they are produced and abstracted from these features. In these cases, I have attempted to select comics that either reflect or illuminate

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broader tendencies. Furthermore, although I have attempted to deal here with comic books as well as graphic novels, the importance of seriality, at the textual and industrial level, means that genre plays a more visible role in the comics periodicals than in stand-alone comics sold in bookstores. Though these choices are to some extent arbitrary, informed by personal interest and preferences—genre assertions of their own, in effect—I hope to provide in each case a temporal or cultural domain of validity within which lessons can be drawn then cautiously generalized. Since my focus here is resolutely descriptive and analytical rather than prescriptive, I have also focused on well-established, fully institutionalized genres—akin to what linguist John Swales describes as “folk” categories41 —though Chapter 9 will return to the issue of textual and discursive formations which function as genres yet are not or rarely discussed as such. These choices will necessarily provide a fragmented map of genre in comics, but with the assumption that the missing regions and areas of interest can be safely extrapolated from the broad surveys and careful inspection of selected landmarks conducted in the following pages.

Notes 1. Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 40. 2. Benjamin Woo, “An Age-Old Problem: Problematics of Comic Book Historiography,” International Journal of Comic Art 10, no. 1 (2008): 268– 79; Marc Singer, Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies, 1st ed., World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 61–64. 3. Nancy Cartwright, “Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61, nos. 1–2 (January 1980): 83, https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.1468-0114.1980.tb00005.x. 4. I am using “graphic novel” to refer to comics in book format published since the 1980s and making no specific claim about their content at this stage. The question of whether the graphic novels constitute a genre of its own will be examined in Chapter 9. 5. Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 164–65. 6. Brannon Costello, Neon Visions: The Comics of Howard Chaykin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 22, 26. 7. Peter Coogan, “The Definition of the Superhero,” in A Comics Studies Reader, 2009, 82–83. 8. Coogan, 86–87.

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9. Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 6–18, https://doi.org/10.2307/1225093. 10. Spatial metaphors and mappings can also be deployed to create a “topology” of genres, in which: “in which each genre is characterised as being either nearer or more distant from other genres along a number of dimensions of comparison.” For a detailed analysis of these strategies and of the specific issues with applying them to multimodal cultural objects, see John A. Bateman, Multimodality and Genre: A Foundation for the Systematic Analysis of Multimodal Documents (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 223–29. 11. This approach to genre as “affect-producing narrative patterns” has been explored in particular by film scholar Torben Grodal. Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). 12. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 161, 172. For a more detailed discussion of genre as vraisemblance as applied to comics, see Catharine Abell, “Comics and Genre,” in The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, ed. Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook (Wiley, 2012), 71–72. 13. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 32. 14. “Humor” is often characterized as a register rather than a genre, to refer to its transversality and to its lack of content. I am following Benjamin Bouchard here in arguing that “parageneric categories” such as register can be folded into an inclusive and pragmatic approach to genres. Benjamin Bouchard, “Critique des notions paragénériques,” Poetique 159, no. 3 (2009): 359–81. 15. This disjunction has been examined in various comics, from Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye (Craig Fischer, “Hawkeye Supercut,” The Comics Journal , July 1, 2015, http://www.tcj.com/hawkeye-supercut/), with its diagrammatic approach to superhero fiction, to the unstable combination of pictorial influences in Kyle Baker’s historical account in Nat Turner (Singer, Breaking the Frames, 190–200). 16. Gelder, Popular Fiction, 45–46; Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 21; Scott Higgins, Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 5; Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à La Chaîne : Littératures Sérielles et Culture Médiatique, Poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2017), 30–31. 17. Kevin Huizenga, “F,” The Fielder Historical Society Cafe and Gallery, accessed July 14, 2019, https://fielder.tumblr.com/tagged/Bona1?og=1. 18. Duncan and Smith, The Power of Comics, 197–227.

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19. Guy Belzane, “Genres littéraires, notion d’” (Encyclopædia Universalis), accessed May 3, 2019, http://www.universalis-edu.com/encyclopedie/ genres-litteraires-notion-d/. Unless specified otherwise, all translations from French are mine. 20. Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. M. Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations, 3nd ed., repr. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), 32. 21. Wittgenstein and Anscombe, 33. 22. Eleanor Rosch, “Cognitive Representations of Semantic Categories,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104, no. 3 (1975): 192– 233, https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.104.3.192; George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); John M. Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings, 13. Printing, The Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 23. See, for instance, Barry Keith Grant, “Cycles and Cluster: The Shape of Film Genre History,” in Film Genre Reader IV (University of Texas Press, 2012), 42–59; Achim Hescher, Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration (Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 45–85. 24. Ian Gordon, Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon, Comics Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 173–75. 25. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Theory and History of Literature, v. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 26. Grodal, Moving Pictures. 27. Altman, Film/Genre, 14. 28. Jean-Marie Seillan, ed., Les Genres Littéraires Émergents (Paris, France: Harmattan, 2005), 8. 29. This argument is developed in particular in Paul Cobley, “Objectivity and Immanence in Genre Theory,” in Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism, ed. Garin Dowd, Jeremy Strong, and Lesley Stevenson (Bristol, UK and Portland, OR: Intellect, 2006), 44–45. 30. Nick Browne, Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (University of California Press, 1998), xiii. 31. Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction (University of California Press, 1992), 82. 32. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 219. 33. Letourneux, Fictions à La Chaîne, 238. 34. In fact, the Buffy TV show identifies her heroine as a superhero story, through the voice of Xander. Francis H. Early, “Staking Her Claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Transgressive Woman Warrior,” The Journal of Popular Culture 35, no. 3 (December 2001): 19, https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.0022-3840.2001.3503_11.x.

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35. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 36. Terry and the Pirates was the highest ranked adventure comic in The Comics Journal ’s list of the top 100 comics of the twentieth century (#210, February 1999); Bone was not on the list. By contrast, Jeff Smith’s series was included in a 2011 list of the “Best Graphic Novel for Children” compiled by the American Library Association. A 2011 readers’ survey on the Hooded Utilitarian, a culture blog whose audience overlapped with the Comics Journal ’s, included both Terry and the Pirates and Bone in the list of the 100 best/most significant comics; the two series were in fact nearly tied in that list. 37. One could add distributors to this list, both in their roles as commercial intermediaries and as decisive factors in shaping the content of comic books. See David K. Palmer, “The Tail That Wags the Dog: The Impact of Distribution on the Development and Direction of the American Comic Book Industry,” in Cultures of Comics Work, ed. Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 235–49. 38. Altman, Film/Genre, 1978. 39. Altman, Film/Genre; Neale, Genre and Hollywood. For a useful comparison of their positions and divergences, see Garin Dowd, “Introduction: Genre Matters in Theory and Criticism,” in Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism, ed. Jeremy Strong, Lesley Stevenson, and Garin Dowd (Bristol, UK and Portland, OR: Intellect, 2006), 16–18. 40. Bart Beaty, Comics versus Art (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 37. 41. Swales, Genre Analysis, 39.

CHAPTER 2

Are Genres Media Specific?

Abstract This chapter reflects on the interaction between genres and media, making the case that specific affordances and the fact that genres evolve in different ways across media makes it necessary to consider genre as medium-specific discourses. The chapter also examines the factors which reduce or obfuscate the distinction between these mediumspecific versions of various genres, including convenience and the intermedial circulations of successful works and trends. Keywords Media · Adaptation · Science-fiction

Stating that genre studies need to be historically located and mediumspecific does not imply that genres only exist within a specific medium. To take but one example, a high degree of commonality is understood between science-fiction comics, science-fiction movies, and science-fiction literature. It is unclear, however, whether the same degree of resemblance exists between poetry comics, such as those presented in Ink Brick or Over the Line,1 and traditional text-centric poetry. These two examples, one from a popular genre, identified across culture industries and one which occupies a fairly marginal space in comics as well as in most other media (video games, film, etc.)—though it is highly valued by dedicated communities—suggest that genres and media intersect in a variety of ways. The tendency toward intermedial genre alignment, which results from © The Author(s) 2020 N. Labarre, Understanding Genres in Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43554-7_2

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the social functions of genre and is further encouraged by strategies of adaptation and media convergence, does not entirely erase medium specificities, resulting from particular affordances or from the insular historical developments of a genre in a given medium. Understanding medium-specificity is complicated by the fact that there is no standard interdisciplinary definition of a medium. The Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication, for instance, offers a typical definition: “The means or agency through which communication takes place; often synonymous with channel,” which merely displaces the ambiguity as to what “channel” or “means” signify in this context.2 In Reading Graphic Novels, Genre and Narration, Achim Hescher suggests that in comics studies, the term has generally been understood as meaning: (a) comics as a plurimedial communication channel in which the pictorial and the verbal influence the reception of the other or intertwine with respect to meaning production; (b) comics as an artistic, multimodal discourse with its codes and rules; (c) comics as a genre combining different modes of writing, usually the comic (in the original sense of the predicate), dramatic, and the epic or narrative mode.3 Hescher thus offers a separation between the idea of a “communication channel” (a), again understood as a technological means of transmission, and a socially produced “discourse” (b). The use of the word “genre” in his third definition should be understood as referring not to a social process or a discourse, but to a collection of texts, shifting the focus from a technology to its products, but maintaining a distinction between texts and context. Narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan further suggests that technology and discourses are ontologically distinct: “genre conventions are genuine rules specified by humans, whereas the constraints and possibilities offered by media are dictated by their material substance and mode of encoding.”4 However, Jan Baetens, drawing on the notion of the “social construction of technology,”5 offers an approach to media that seeks to couple these two approaches, arguing that media cannot be understood without accounting for their content and their users, in addition to their technology.6 This explains, for instance, why Joseph Witek identified in

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1992 the shift from a perception of comics as a genre to their identification as a medium, based on readers’ and creators’ “conceptions,” and not on technological transformations.7 The efficiency of this socio-technological approach is perhaps best demonstrated in the case of comics by reflecting on the social construction of the distinction between children’s books and comics, which appears predicated on uses, institutions, and reading and selling practices rather than on a distinct technology.8 The use of discourses and institutions to patrol the borders of different media—recently exemplified by Steven Spielberg’s attempt to use his cultural capital to define Netflix movies out of cinema9 —suggests that, much like genres, they too may be “hesitant categories,” harboring a variety of relations to technology and materiality. In the rest of this chapter, I will treat media as historically validated combinations between a technological apparatus, a cluster of content and a cluster of usage, with a focus on broadly established categories such as comics, cinema, literature, and video games.

The Case for Medium-Specificity Within this definition, media possess specific specificities or affordances, which are correlated and sometimes subordinated to cultural and economic parameters,10 but are well established in practice. It is, for instance, possible to integrate animation or into comics through various means (flipbook, digital supplement, native digital publication, embedded chip, etc.) but the fairly stable conception of comics and cinema suggests that animations are a property of the latter, not the former. This has obvious effects on certain genres, whose existence is predicated on these affordances. In Movie Comics, comics and cinema scholar Blair Davis studies the case of the comic book adaptations of two Fred Astaire musicals, Let’s Dance (1950) and Singing in the Rain (1952) in Famous Funnies’ Movie Love, in 1951 and 1952. Though Davis notes that the unknown authors of these two adaptations managed to construct intelligible narratives, he also observes that: Aside from the opening image, [the] adaptation of Singin’ in the Rain contains no singing and no rain, shifting the reader’s generic expectations entirely. Those who purchased the book before seeing the film might be surprised to discover that it is actually a musical.11

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The existence of the musical in comics thus appears to be impossible, since the genre is predicated precisely on the presence of content which cannot be easily reproduced in comics: music and dance. Again, this does not imply that there are no musicals in comics or that comics that emphasize songs and dance cannot be produced.12 Across media, there are numerous examples of this type of genres, from first-person shooters in video games to epistolary novels. It is arguably difficult to find one still specific to comics; superheroes were perhaps an example during the few months, between Action Comics #1 and the beginning of the Superman radio show. In a more common case, media affordances do not prevent the existence of a genre, but lead to markedly distinct configurations and core mechanisms in its various incarnations. I have written elsewhere about the difficulty in replicating jump-scares and off-screen spaces when transposing cinematic horror to the comics page,13 but more broadly, one can surmise that Linda Williams’s cinematic “body genres” (the “woman film,” horror and pornography) function very differently in media which cannot resort to mimetic representation of the human body, including comics.14 In these cases and similar ones, media affordances bring about specific characteristics for medium-specific versions of a genre, even though they do not lead to a collapse of the “family resemblance” nor do they force genre users to renounce the usefulness of labels that can be applied across media. Distinct media also generate distinct professional fields, distinct practices, and modes of consumption, caught in a reciprocal relation with the type of content they offer. Thus, in spite of moments of intermedial convergence, which I shall detail later on, genres evolve at a different pace and in different directions across media. Science-fiction in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates this decoupling of medium-specific versions of a single genre, as a result of the interactions between affordances and the socio-cultural environment of each medium. At the risk of oversimplifying complex developments, in the 1960s, authors such as Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick and James Graham Ballard, publication projects such as Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine (after 1964) and Harlan Ellison’s collection Dangerous Visions (1967), gave shape to a vision of science-fiction which emphasized inner space and experimentation, while downplaying technology and futuristic visions.15 These authors and publishers not only produced new works, but they used their economic and symbolic capital within the field to articulate and

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publicize a renovated definition of the genre. Though Ellison and Moorcock wrote comics, as early as 1970 and 1971 respectively, this “New Wave” of science-fiction was barely represented in comics before 1975, when Ellison’s short story, “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” then Moorcock’s novella “Behold the Man,” were adapted, respectively, in Marvel’s Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #3 and #6, illustrated in both cases with a psychedelic flourish by Alex Niño (Fig. 2.1). Adaptations obviously constitute one of the ways in which genres can be synchronized across media, generating new cultural objects which may be subordinate to the source material or take a more eminent role, depending on the media pairing under consideration and on the adapted text. Comics adaptations, at least up to a recent date, generated clearly subservient or secondary objects, often depicted by the publishers themselves as echoes or byproducts of the source material, internalizing what some adaptation scholars describe as a long-standing prejudice against the practice.16 This may explain why these two adaptations, and a number of similar stories, failed to be construed as a meaningful revision of previous definitions of comics science-fiction. Another explanation lies in the small size of the corpus of science-fiction in comics in the 1960s and 1970s: The genre repeatedly proved commercially difficult, and the small number of stories and publications reduced the probability of internal definitional strife: The contrast could not be strong between New Worlds ’ combative tone and Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction’s oecumenical enthusiasm.17 The success of Star Wars and its adaptation in 1977 subsequently made the genre popular, but it did not exactly invite publishers to explore inner space. Additionally, Alex Niño’s visually striking rendition of both stories may have worked by challenging traditional layouts and figure works, but this was far from a perfect homology to the careful dislocation of the narrative and textual parameters of traditional science-fiction on which the trends represented by Ellison and Moorcock hinged. Though Niño’s style was distinctive and as such provided a tonal break of its own at the time, it subsequently proved applicable to conventional twist-ending short stories in the Warren magazines of the late 1970s. Thus, specific affordances combined by different historical and economic circumstances to produce a disjunction of the meaning of science-fiction in the two media, at least during that time frame.

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Fig. 2.1 Doug Moench, Alex Niño, adapted from Michael Moorcock, “Behold the Man,” Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #6 (Marvel Comics, November 1975)

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Cultural and Industrial Convergence Still, genres do function across media to a large extent. Science-fiction in comic books and in print may have diverged at the time, but this divergence did not amplify to the point of requiring distinct labeling. Over time, social and economic transfers work to counteract the historic and aesthetic specificities of each medium. The example of Star Wars provides a telling example of these transfers. Lucas’s movie owes a debt to comics, from Flash Gordon to Métal Hurlant, but its adaptation by Marvel Comics in 1977 downplayed these influences and was one of the most, if not the most successful comic book of the decade,18 spawning a host of imitations well into the 1980s (Marvel’s Alien Legion, DC’s Atari Force, etc.) in addition to a popular continuing series. Lucas’s film and the adaptation by Howard Chaykin and Roy Thomas were of course produced in utterly dissimilar industrial conditions,19 and they both play with and against medium-specific affordances and conventions. However, the success of the movie ensured the popularity of its tie-ins and thus partly realigned the two incarnations of the genre, as both versions became exemplars for the genre in their respective media. Beyond straight adaptations, successful trends and generic inflections in a popular medium tend to be consciously imitated in other popular media, even though these imitations short-circuit the historical trends which produced the influential work in the first place. The vogue of kung fu inspired action comics in the mid-1970s offer an example of these transfers. While characters such as Marvel’s Shang-Chi and Iron Fist appeared fully formed in comic books in 1974 (and in Shang-Chi’s case were located within the realm of pulp protagonists, through the figure of Fu Manchu), the sudden visibility of kung fu movies in the United States was the result of complex economic and cultural circulations, hinging on Bruce Lee’s stardom.20 The Marvel and DC comics did not concern themselves with this history—which goes a long way toward explaining the accusation of whitewashing when Iron Fist was later adapted for television—but they captured and transposed the final product. Creators repurposed and remediated their experience of a genre as consumers to become genre producers in a different medium, pivoting between two positions, two modes of engagement. More recently, the efforts toward cultural convergence and transmedia constructions in the era of industrial consolidation, as documented

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notably by Henry Jenkins and Dan Hassler-Forest, have produced a slightly different mechanism contributing to genre consistency across media.21 While strategies for transmedia dissemination were devised as early as Frank L. Baum’s Oz books,22 these strategies are now deployed in the context of intense consolidation in the culture industry, exemplified by Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Entertainment in 2009, or by Netflix’s acquisition of comics company Millarworld in 2017, both in the name of vertical integration. Although they are engaged in a constant negotiation with fan productions, ranging from integration to tolerance to hostile lawsuits, these corporations produce tightly controlled declination of branded products across media. This control is exerted at the level of the brand rather than the genre, but some franchises are so ubiquitous and popular that the difference between these two types of architexts is functionally small. Star Wars is not science-fiction, in print, in comics or in movie theaters, but by virtue of its popularity alone, it constitutes a key text in each of the medium-specific versions of the genre. By making sure that the experience of the franchise is maintained across media—including novels, video games and narrative toys—Disney and Lucasfilm thus promote a producer-driven consistency of genre across media. Borrowings and inspirations, as well as official adaptations and expansions, have long worked to maintain genre consistency across popular media. They have been especially significant for comic books, which have at many times in their history been used as promotional material for more lucrative cultural products. These processes generate products which approximate prototypes and exemplars to be found in other media, even if they do not align with the structure of the genre in the target medium, which reinforces the imprecision of textual determination of generic categories. Intermedial conceptions of genres erode medium-specific strategies and historical contexts, reducing genres to minimal definitions, often relying only on semantic and therefore transferable elements, which does not fully prevent them from being “riddled with contradictions.”23 In decontextualizing prototypes and core elements, they are also close to ahistorical categories: While they have a point of origin, the constant circulations across media and the lack of a meaningful milieu contribute to creating a minimal and static conception. We shall see in Chapter 7 how this conception can be and is in fact mobilized in comics.

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Conclusion Textual and historical approaches support the view that genres exist in medium-specific versions, even in the case genres whose prominent signifiers are a catalog of places, protagonists and props than on specific narrative and aesthetic strategies, such as the western or science-fiction. At the far end of the spectrum, certain genres rely so specifically on the affordances of specific media that they cannot be replicated within the established boundaries of different media. Conversely, the need to account for a variety of textual mechanisms and homologous but non-identical strategies mean that the use of genre-label is even more hesitant across media than when applied solely to films, comics, video games or literature. On the other hand, the very fact that genres do get used across media again indicates that their usefulness trumps their epistemological precision. Genre users and in particular genre producers have proved eager to realign diverging medium-specific versions of genres periodically through direct transplants from other media, either in the form of adaptations or through tightly controlled brand expansions. Thus, while there is such a thing as genre in comics, these genres are always in interaction with competing definitions, in particular with conceptions of the core texts inherited or influenced by other media, but also with the simplified and somewhat ahistorical conceptions of genres as they exist across media. Though comics may pioneer specific genre developments, as a result of individual contributions and specific trends, their genres often get shaped by versions inherited from more popular, more commercially successful or more culturally settled media.

Notes 1. Ink Brick is the name of both a micro-press and a comics poetry journal (2014–), run by Alexander Rothman, Paul K. Tunis, and Alexey Sokolin. Also see Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone, Over the Line: An Introduction to Poetry Comics, 2015. 2. Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday, A Dictionary of Media and Communication (Oxford University Press, 2016), electronic version, n.p. 3. Achim Hescher, Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration (Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 40. 4. Quoted in Gabriel Rippl and Lukas Etter, “Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative,” in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

and Jan-Noël Thon, Narratologia. Contributions to Narrative Theory 37 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 194. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas Parke Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Anniversary ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). Jan Baetens, “Le médium n’est pas soluble dans les médias de masse, ‘The Medium’ Is Not Soluble in ‘the Mass Media’,” Hermès, La Revue, no. 70 (December 15, 2014): para. 13. Joseph Witek, Ray B. Browne, and Marshall W. Fishwick, “From Genre to Medium: Comics and Contemporary American Culture,” in Rejuvenating the Humanities (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992), 73. Charles Hatfield and Craig Svonkin, “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books: Introduction,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2012): 429–35, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2012.0046; Joe Sutliff Sanders, “Chaperoning Words: Meaning-Making in Comics and Picture Books,” Children’s Literature 41, no. 1 (2013): 57–90, https:// doi.org/10.1353/chl.2013.0012; Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 39–40. Erin Nyren, “Steven Spielberg Doesn’t Think Netflix Movies Deserve Oscars,” Variety (blog), March 25, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/ film/news/steven-spielberg-netflix-movies-oscars-1202735959/. David Roche, “L’adaptation ‘plan par plan’ à l’épreuve de la ‘spécificité médiatique’: Sin City (Robert Rodriguez et Frank Miller) et Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009),” in Transmédialité, bande dessinée & adaptation, ed. Evelyne Deprêtre and German A. Duarte, Graphème (Clermont-Ferrand: PU Blaise Pascal, 2019), 214–15. Blair Davis, Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 223. Comics scholars Kieron Brown and Lian W. Peters have worked on the way comics such as Eric Drooker’s Flood and Bryan Lee O’Malley Scott Pilgrim remediates music as part of their narratives. In addition to these remediations, comics have resorted to technological supplements to integrate music, including the creation of Spotify playlists to accompany Kieron Gillen and Jamie McElvie’s Phonogram (Image Comics) and the insertion of a flexible record, the “first flexi-comic,” in Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s Nexus #3 (Capital Comics, 1982). Kieron Brown, “Musical Sequences in Comics,” The Comics Grid 3, no. 1 (November 25, 2013), https://doi.org/10.5334/cg.aj; Lian W. Peters, “Music in Eric Drooker’s Flood!” Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics 4, no. 2 (December 2013): 332–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2012.758164.

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13. Nicolas Labarre, “Alien as a Comic Book: Adaptation and Genre Shifting,” Extrapolation 55, no. 1 (January 2014): 86–87, https://doi.org/ 10.3828/extr.2014.6. 14. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13, https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758. In the case of pornography, the choice to identify drawn and filmed representations as one genre or two separate genres is of crucial judicial importance; the current legal framework appears to distinguish the two, in particular when it comes to the depiction of minors. 15. Brian Wilson Aldiss, David Wingrove, and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (Thirsk: House of Stratus, 2001), 340–49, 381–91; David Higgins, “New Wave Science Fiction,” in A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction, ed. Lars Schmeink (2013), 1–12, http://virtual-sf.com/?page_id=321; Rob Latham, “From Outer to Inner Space: New Wave Science Fiction and the Singularity,” Science Fiction Studies 39, no. 1 (2012): 28–39, https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud. 39.1.0028. 16. Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 2–6. 17. Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction actually ended with a final special issue, soon after #6. In the editorial to the issue, Roy Thomas reiterated the “conventional wisdom” that science-fiction did not sell, and stated that the magazine had broken even, but was discontinued because it could not show a profit. William Gaines and James Warren also commented on the comparatively poor sales of their science-fiction magazines compared to other genres, prior to Star Wars . 18. John Jackson Miller, “Comichron: Star Wars Sales Figures,” accessed July 19, 2019, https://www.comichron.com/titlespotlights/starwars.html. 19. Chris Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 160; Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, 2013, 193. 20. M. T. Kato, From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution, and Popular Culture (SUNY Press, 2012), 71–112. 21. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Dan Hassler-Forest and Pascal Nicklas, eds., The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Dan Hassler-Forest, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016).

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22. Henry Jenkins, “Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: The Remaining Four Principles of Transmedia Storytelling,” Confessions of an acafan, December 12, 2009, http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/revenge_ of_the_origami_unicorn.html. 23. Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à La Chaîne: Littératures Sérielles et Culture Médiatique, Poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2017), 192.

CHAPTER 3

Where Are Genres in Comics?

Abstract This chapter investigates the ways in which genres are made manifest, both in the peritext of the comics and in the comics themselves. It argues that the use of the paratext to advertise genres has undergone a significant transformation since the 1940s, with a shift from genres to proprietary architexts, enabled by the physical properties of comic books and graphic novels. The chapter also examines the funny animal genre, to argue that nearly all of the stylistic and narrative choices to be found in these comics constitute genre signifiers. Keywords Paratext · Style · Funny animals

Though genre definitions and uses owe a lot to intermedial circulations, comics offer specific textual features and reading practices through which genres can be marked or actualized. These features are connected to the affordances of the medium but also to the entire cultural and economic apparatus of the comics industry. Ken Gelder suggests that in popular literature, “generic identities are always visible,”1 and it is tempting to assume that this may also be the case in comics, through the efforts of creators and publishers working within the genres, who provide clues and pointers for cultural intermediaries and readers. This chapter will investigate the ways in which genres are made manifest, both in the peritext of the comics and in the comics themselves. © The Author(s) 2020 N. Labarre, Understanding Genres in Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43554-7_3

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Genre in the Paratext The use of genres in discourses about comics hardly needs to be demonstrated. Virtually all the contemporary writing, discourses and mediations about comics include genres: from Amazon categories, to individual entries in the Grand Comic Book Database, to articles on the Comics Journal Web site, from Coulton Waugh in The Comics (1947) and Fredric Wertham in the articles leading to Seduction of the Innocent (1954) to contemporary creators such as Emil Ferris (My Favourite Thing Is Monsters ).2 Genres as a way to organize comics marketing, readings, and analysis do not function as specialized knowledge but have been used widely for decades. To the question: “where are genres in comics?”, it is nevertheless tempting to answer that they often go unmentioned, and they are in particular largely absent from the books’ peritexts. The peritext is defined by Gerard Genette in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation as the numerous elements present in the book itself (or more generally in the cultural object)—such as its title, preface, cover—whose role is to introduce the book and prepare its reception. Genette distinguishes the peritext from the epitext, which fulfills the same function but is not included in the material object itself, while the paratext is composed of the peritext and the epitext taken together.3 Unlike the epitext, the peritext is part of the comic itself, in the physical object or in the digital file, and though readers may choose to ignore it—more or less easily depending on its nature and place—it is a component of the prescribed experience of the work. Furthermore, because the peritext functions as this “threshold” to the text, the handover point between the producer’s intentions and the reader’s expectations is a privileged and traditional site to mention genre. Broadly, this does not seem to have been the rule in comics in the past few decades, though there are of course numerous exceptions. The Marvel Graphic novel series offers a convincing example of this paucity, over its 75 volumes, published between 1982 and 1993. Though a majority of these were superhero stories featuring the publisher’s branded characters and others adapt existing novels or films, a number of these volumes offer original stories, set in a variety of recognizable other genres, including fantasy and science-fiction, such as Walt Simonson’s Star Slammers (1983), or Ron Wilson and John Byrne’s Super Boxers (1983). The collection was designed around a format rather than a specific type of story,4 and as such, did not convey precise expectations as

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to the content of a specific volume. One could therefore expect generic indications to be relevant and possibly important in guiding in prospective readers. Yet, a survey of the books reveals very few instances in which the generic labels are used by the publisher. The back cover to Super Boxers, for instance, uses a futuristic tagline, “In the future, winning is everything… and losing is certain death,” but does not use the words “science-fiction,” or an equivalent thereof. The entire collection seemingly includes only three exceptions to this practice: The long blurb on the back cover of Wolverine/Nick Fury: The Scorpio Connection (Chaykin and Goodwin, 1989) promises “twists and turns worthy of Ian Fleming himself […] for the espionage famished,” demonstrating how prototypical texts, here Ian Fleming’s James Bond, serve both as specific intertexts and as a basis for genre; the back cover of Bruce Jones’s Arena (1989) mentions “a whirling vortex of fear and horror”; finally, the back cover of The Raven Banner. A Tale of Asgard (Vess and Zelenetz, 1985) contains but two words, “Fantasy” and “Mythology.” The choice of including explicit genre markers for these three books makes it possible to remove ambiguities for potential buyers: For instance, the subtitle and the general atmosphere of The Raven Banner could otherwise be misread as a Thor superhero story. Genre appears to have been mentioned not because it was a convention to do so, but because it could solve a specific instance of possible miscommunication. There are of course many exceptions to this rule—Image Comics in particular mentions a single genre on the back cover to each of its collected edition, and on its Web site, though not on the comic books themselves—but the scarcity of explicit peritextual genre markers mirrors Altman’s observations regarding the major studio’s preference for brand names over genres to define their own products, thus “stressing the particular plus that the studio brings to the genre.”5 The aforementioned tagline to Super Boxers locates the story not only in science-fiction as a whole, but in a subcategory emphasizing action, violent confrontation, and grandiloquent rhetoric, all familiar narrative and stylistic options in Marvel comics. The Bill Sienkiewicz cover illustration to Super Boxers, a painted collage of epic scenes, reminiscent both of movie posters and of previous Sienkiewicz’s works for Marvel, offers a range of narrative and stylistic cues narrowing or complexifying generic expectations. Cover illustrations have multiple purposes, which may work at cross-purposes or mutually sustain each other. As demonstrated by Roy T. Cook, covers are always

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a marketing tool, but also an integral part of the interpretive scheme of comics, through a more or less direct connection with the rest of the content6 : They can offer restaged fragments from the book’s content, deliberately misleading teases, crucial parts of the narrative content (Watchmen, among others, made its covers the first panel of its issues), selfcontained narratives (for instance in Archie reprint volumes, whose covers rarely relate to a specific content), ostensible intertextual references (the numerous covers homaging or parodying Action Comics #1, for instance, but also Raina Telgemeier’s use of a smiley on the cover of her autobiographical graphic novels), promotion for other intellectual properties (Marvel Comics used a series of variant covers to promote Tron Legacy in 2010), to name but a few prominent uses. Covers commonly accomplish several of these goals at once through the juxtaposition of several images, with various degrees of centrality. While this diversity makes it impossible to encompass all the possible interactions between covers illustrations and genre, it can broadly be said that because the illustrations on comics covers often feature images which seek to encapsulate the appeal of the book, they tend to foreground recognizable elements of the majors architexts to which the comic is identified: The aforementioned Telgemeier covers constitute a series, Star Wars comics emphasize their visual faithfulness to the movies,7 and comics associated with an institutionalized genre present salient elements from that genre’s encyclopedia or from that genre’s intertextual memory (the covers to Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal, reference crime pulp covers, for instance, in addition to working as a series thanks to recurring design elements). In all of these cases, the cover images work in conjunction with the title and subtitle, and seek to provide guarantees of competency within these architexts (Fig. 3.1). The relationship between cover and genre is made more complex, however, by the fact that covers may be drawn by different artists than the interior of the books—especially in the case of comic books—and may employ different techniques and styles than the interior, regardless of the author. In certain cases, these specific cover conventions ossify in strong generic markers, as demonstrated most prominently by romance covers (and their subsequent homages and parodies), but in others, covers serve as deliberately ambiguous horizon of expectations, in addition to their commercial purpose. The material presentation of comics means that publishers arguably have even fewer incentives than film executives to frame precisely the

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Fig. 3.1 Foregrounding salient elements from the genre’s encyclopedia on the Reed Crandall cover of Buccaneers #27, a pirate comic book (Quality, May 1951)

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reading experience, as physical comics can be flipped through, offering the reader a precise overview of the story and its tone. For printed comics, Genette’s threshold is so easily crossed that it need not be loaded with superfluous explanations, except when a cursory reading could be misleading and potentially damaging for the publisher. The plot of the aforementioned Arena, for instance, includes occurrences of time-travel, which, in addition to its non-explicit cover, may have prompted Marvel to foreclose science-fictional readings and prepare readers for the historically charged experience of horror comics. Genette’s categories were not designed for periodicals—he does not mention ads for instance—and as such, they are more readily applicable to graphic novels than to comic books. The physical object of the comic book typically holds a broad range of content, including ads, subscription forms, letter columns, short stories, occasional inserted booklets, etc. As such, they raise difficult questions as to what should be considered as part of this peritext8 and requires expanding inquiries into genre beyond traditional liminal spaces. Comic books also require a more careful historicization than the fairly recent category of the graphic novel, since comic books until about the 1960s appear to have offered more open genre prescriptions in their peritexts. These early comic books could be sampled as easily as early 1980s Marvel graphic novels, but their title usually served a specific framing of expectation, either through the promise of a brand-name architext (Superman, Gene Autry Comics, etc.), self-aggrandizing descriptions (Super Comics, Best Comics, etc.) and in certain cases, a more or less precise generic framing (Action Comics , Boy Comics, etc.). This naming convention had taken hold in the pulps in the interwar period and had been carried over into comic books as a result of the thematic and industrial proximity between the two industries. For a publisher like Fiction House (1921–1955), comic books sometimes directly succeeded pulps of the same name. In 1944, the company published six comics, Fight Comics, Jungle Comics, Wings Comics, Rangers Comics, Planet Comics, and Jumbo Comics, a title which initially referred to the publication’s extra-large format, but which carried the tagline “Action, Adventure, Mystery” to clarify the content of the comic book. These titles promised a narrow and well-defined range of narrative content, especially when used on covers featuring Fiction House’s distinctive blend of violence and eroticism. In this ad (Fig. 3.2), generic identifications thus function in conjunctions with more local or proprietary groupings of text. Genres such as

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Fig. 3.2 Internal ad for the Fiction House comics line, published in Planet Comics #33 (Fiction House, November 1944)

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“jungle comics” are simultaneously positioned above the Fiction House outlet, as transcending archetypal narratives, and below, as mere subgenres of Fiction House’s brand of the disreputable popular, a brand materialized by the publisher’s ubiquitous bull’s-eye, which readers are invited to look for. Genre is apparent, but the tension with the brand is already perceptible. Some early generic titles published by DC/National survive to this day, but even these broad denominations have come to be read as brands, especially as the dominant model for comic books shifted from anthologies to character-centric publications in the 1960s. For instance, Action Comics has been strictly a Superman title since the early 1960s, and the title is no longer read as a title promising action. Similarly, in 1968, Marvel jettisoned its last two anthology titles, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish, to rebrand them as single-character comics: Captain America Comics and The Incredible Hulk, respectively. Later attempts to reuse these naming strategies—such as Image Comics’ Twisted Romance (2018) or Antarctic Press’s Horror Comics (2019)—work as nostalgic or ironic gestures, in which the intertextual gesture is arguably more significant than the generic affiliation, a point I shall return to in Chapter 6. Comics periodicals thus appear to have gradually shed overt peritextual genre clarifications in favor of branded denominations, which may also be a reflection of the gradual consolidation of the industry over a limited number of genres, and in particular superheroes.

Funny Animals, Genre in the Texts This gradual disappearance does not mean that genres are invisible or absent from comics, merely that publishers refrain from assigning explicit genre labels to their production (authors are generally less reluctant to make these identifications in interviews), and rely on the deployment of institutionalized conventions within the browsable texts themselves instead. The popular and highly codified “funny animals” comic books published in the 1940s make this inscription of genres in the comics page itself especially visible and offer further examples of the constant tension between brand and genre.

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The concept of the “funny animals”—non-human protagonists displaying anthropomorphic traits for humorous purposes—along with the phrase itself appears to have been established as early as the late nineteenth century,9 and they “ran rampant” in comic strips of the first half of the twentieth century.10 Though the first dedicated funny animal comic books were probably the Disney and Warner-based issues of Dell’s Four Color series (starting with Donald Duck in 1940), Fawcett preempted the genre as such when it started publishing Funny Animals , in December 1942. Several other publishers followed suit, with brand name or generic titles, such as Animal Comics, in which Walt Kelly’s Pogo debuted (Dell, 1942–1948), Real Funnies (Nedor, 1943) or Goofy Comics (Nedor, 1943–1948) and many more over the following decade.11 By the 1940s, potential readers were familiar with the genre and some of its exemplars, in illustration, in comics or in animated cartoons. The comic books could therefore play off an established familiarity with an unambiguously announced genre, and because they functioned as anthologies, with different characters and different authors, they served as self-contained demonstrations of the genre’s core characteristics and of its amplitude.12 Fawcett’s Funny animals was published for 83 issues, between 1942 and 1954, with two notable changes in its formula. The first was the gradual phasing out of references to Captain Marvel, Fawcett’s star character, as the popularity of superheroes waned after the war, and the second was a change in periodicity, as the comic book went from monthly to quarterly with #57 (Winter 1947). Funny Animals , through its five years of existence as a monthly title, and therefore as a regular presence on the newsstand, reveals some textual features which were invested to encode the genre. While these traits are specific to the funny animal genre during a specific time frame, they shed a light on the various ways in which genre conventions can manifest themselves in typical comic books. Superficially, the funny animals genre appears to be defined by simple semantic elements, animals behaving like humans, a definition which is certainly not medium-specific. This is the primary signifier of the genre, an element whose absence would curtail generic identification. Funny Animals adds a number of features to this definition, establishing recurring traits or secondary signifiers, but also defining the range of acceptable variations. In particular Funny Animals makes it very clear that the genre is compatible with a wide variety of narrative structures, both

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in length—from one to twelve page for a story—and in subject, as recurring characters included a superhero rabbit, a cowboy goat (Fig. 3.3), and a detective chimpanzee, all involved in the type of stories befitting their occupation. More broadly, the stories are shaped around antagonists (sometimes created by misunderstandings), accidents or a-personal triggering events. Though this suggests that the genre is light on what Altman designates as syntactic features, the “family resemblances” among the various stories do involve specific narrative features, such as the presence of an explicit conclusion: Between 1942 and 1947, nearly all the stories, including one-pagers, contain a final panel with a direct address to the reader or a recapitulation of some sort. The genre is also encoded through medium-specific secondary signifiers, such as the remarkable absence of captions throughout the corpus. Strikingly, a high number of stories include mute panels. On the other hand, no prescription exists regarding the amount of text when it is present, and by extension, the space it may occupy in the panel. While no regularity is observable in the choice of framing distance, significant recurrences include an abundant use of emanatas, but also the use of remarkably consistent line work to delineate the characters (backgrounds offer a greater variety of rendering): the many artists who worked on the title all employed a brush to produce graphically expressive fluid lines of irregular width, enclosing flat surfaces with no discontinuities and no attempt at line-based texture. This obviously creates a marked resemblance with the type of characters present in animated cartoons, in which flat colors and well-delineated characters were technical constraints, but none of the characters in Funny Animals existed in animated form at the time. This should therefore be read as an example of intermedial generic consistency maintained by the authors and the publisher at the stylistic level, and not as a mere adaptation (Fig. 3.4). I have excluded from this list structuring characteristics of comic books of the period, such as the presence of color or the use of a standard vertical disposition, but these features were of course part of the genre as well. Taken in isolation, none of the above characteristics is decisive and they could all be found in other genres, as confirmed by the fact most of these stories do not belong exclusively to the funny animals genre but are also and equally detective stories, superhero narratives, etc. However, taken together, they create a system of coordinated features which defined not an abstract idea of the genre, but the concrete conditions under which it was conceived, marketed and received during this historical period. The

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Fig. 3.3 Unidentified cover artist, Fawcett’s Funny Animals #12 (Fawcett, November 1943)

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Fig. 3.4 Bill Brady, “Billy the Kid and Oscar,” Fawcett’s Funny Animals #13 (Fawcett, December 1943)

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primary signifier of the genre remained the anthropomorphic animals, but the secondary signifiers delimited the pragmatic range in which the primary signifier was deployed. To put it differently, nearly all the formal and narrative characteristics of comics could be and can be invested with generic value as part of a historically located cluster of coherent options. As John Bateman points out in his work on multimodality and genres: “In some respects, there is […] an overlap between the concerns of genre and approaches that try to characterize visual style.”13 He goes on to suggest that visual style exists “between register and genre proper.” I would argue, however, that in the case of comics, a culturally and historically located approach results not only in an overlap between genre and style—“the manner of drawing and coloring, the page layout and the panel arrangements as well as the ways in which the narration unfolds,” as Benoît Crucifix and Maaheen Ahmed put it14 —but in a co-dependence, in which any genre implicitly includes a range of stylistic options, which are not merely surface effects but confirm and validate the genre identification enabled by the primary signifiers. Simon Grennan demonstrates this interdependence of genre and style in a Theory of Narrative Drawing, by conducting a rigorous analysis of the drawing practices of “formal exponents of genres,” focusing on romance comics in three successive periods.15 Grennan defines genre as a “socially agreed horizon of expectation,” with distinct generic constraints and generic styles.16 Working from a single story, Grennan produces three drawing experiments, in which nearly every element of the page’s style is adjusted to match these expectations. While Grennan does not claim to have identified a truly stable characteristic for any of the periods, he nevertheless identifies a range of secondary signifiers which effectively signpost a specific historical version of the romance genre. By keeping the story constant and unspecific, Grennan demonstrates the importance and the meaningfulness of these secondary signifiers, absent the primary one. Any page of Dell’s Funny Animals prompts identification as funny animals comics, whether it contains an anthropomorphic animal or not.

Conclusion The generic significance of nearly all aspects of comics can be clearly observed in the context of the increasing self-consciousness of popular comics. In Christian Ward and Matt Fraction’s Ody-C (Image Comics, 2014–2016), for instance, a gender-conscious retelling of The Odyssey

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which also works and an homage to 1970s European science-fiction comics, the generic allusions function through semantic elements (spaceships, futuristic weapons) but also through elaborate layouts, which connects Ward’s pages to the design strategies of Philippe Druillet (Lone Sloane) and more broadly through an imagined but largely invented historically and culturally contingent version of the science-fiction genre.17 In a somewhat different strategy, “The Coyote Gospel,” published in Animal Man #5 (Morrison, Truog and Hazelwood, DC Comics, 1988), makes use of the funny animals genre in an embedded narrative. The shift from the main narrative is marked by a transition to irregular caption borders, a rounder typeface, and an expressive brush-line, in addition to the introduction of a world peopled only by anthropomorphic animals. Like Christian Ward in Ody-C , Chas Truog adds imaginary or reconstructed genre signifiers to this list, with irregular panel corners, which are more characteristic of early twentieth comic strips. These stylistic gestures seek to establish the difference between the funny animals storyworld and the superhero fiction in Animal Man’s main narrative, even as the Coyote (modeled on Wile E. Coyote from the Warner Bros. animated cartoons) moves from one storyworld to the other. “The Coyote Gospel” again demonstrates that the identification of the funny animals genre hinges on many more signifiers than the mere presence of an anthropomorphic animal. While the primary signifiers of genre in comics are thus to be found in elements of the storyworld or in the shape of their narrative structures, these primary signifiers are made significant by a constellation of secondary signifiers, which prop up and signpost the main signifier. Many superhero stories include romantic plots, but this does not result in generic ambiguity unless a number of secondary signifiers of the romance genre (such as the centrality of women’s bodies and feelings) are deployed as well. As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 6, this makes it possible to use genre as fruitful and visually marked intertexts in the context of comics self-memorialization, and at a more pragmatic level, it makes it possible to a large extent to infer the genre of a comic by flipping through it, even though such a glance may overlook the primary signifiers of genre in the text. Genres are thus literally everywhere in comics, except perhaps for their peritexts, in the sense that comics display meaningful series of resemblances, both at the level of primary and secondary signifiers. However,

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these series cannot come to constitute genres without elucidating discourses and outside of a process of institutionalization: genre “objectifies the serial properties of the work, and stabilizes them by inscribing them into a structured discourse.”18 In the case of funny animals, the genre preexisted its deployment in comic books and that objectification had in a sense already happened. The following chapter will examine what happens when a genre takes shape.

Notes 1. Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 42. 2. In her proposal to publishers for My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Ferris described her work a “a type of monster in itself,” with the following genre-mixing formula: “20% memoir, 10% humor, 5% urban grit, 2% supernatural thriller, 38% mystery, 15% historical fiction, 5% romance, 5% biting social commentary.” Emil Ferris, The Emil Ferris Interview: Monsters, Art and Stories (Part 1) |, interview by Paul Tumey, February 16, 2017, http://www.tcj.com/the-emil-ferris-interview-monstersstories-and-art-part-1/. 3. Genette’s epitext is a rather fleeting category, in that it only includes elements of discourses which reflect auctorial of editorial interventions; interviews with the author belong to the category, but reviews do not, for instance. Amazon product pages, which incorporates factual information as well as the publisher’s own blurb does not fit neatly in this category for instance. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–15. 4. “‘Spectacular’ Sales Prompt New Project,” The Comics Journal, December 1979. 5. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 115. 6. Roy Cook, “Judging a Comic Book by Its Cover: Marvel Comics, PhotoCovers, and the Objectivity of Photography,” Image [&] Narrative 16, no. 2 (2015): 14–27. 7. Nicolas Labarre, “Les comics Star Wars et les paradoxes de la fidélité,” in Transmédialité, bande dessinée & adaptation, ed. Evelyne Deprêtre and German A. Duarte, Graphème (Clermont-Ferrand: PU Blaise Pascal, 2019), 258–69. 8. For a discussion of Genette’s categories and their application to periodicals, see Koenraad Claes, “Supplements and Paratext: The Rhetoric of Space,” Victorian Periodicals Review 43, no. 2 (2010): 196–210. 9. For instance, a 1877 issue of American Bookseller describes a children book called Pretty Pictures and Pretty Rhymes and its four chapters, “Little

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

Folks at Home,” “Our Horses,” “Funny Animals,” and “Happy Days,” stating that: “The illustrations are in bright colors, and their character may be inferred from the titles.” The funny animals in questions are of the anthropomorphic kind, and not merely realistic animals in amusing position. “New Books,” The American Bookseller, December 1877, Hathi Trust. David Herman and Daniel F. Yezbick, eds., “Lions and Tigers and Fears: A Natural History of the Sequential Animal,” in Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 37. For a succinct history of funny animals comic books, see Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 175–77. Though Fawcett chose to use a generic name for Funny Animals , the publisher was always careful to stress the “particular plus” it could ad, especially when competing with transmedia properties such as the Disney and Warner comics. That specific touch was the solid reputation of the superhero Captain Marvel, which already featured a number of memorable anthropomorphic animals. The cover to Funny Animals #1 is dominated by a portrait of Captain Marvel surrounded by animal characters, with a loose sheet of paper announces “Captain Marvel welcomes the new animal heroes to funnyland.” The lead story in this issue and in the following years featured Hoppy, the Marvel Bunny, a rabbit endowed with Captain Marvel’s powers, which famously outlasted its inspiration. John A. Bateman, Multimodality and Genre: A Foundation for the Systematic Analysis of Multimodal Documents (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 204. Benoît Crucifix and Maaheen Ahmed, “Introduction: Untaming Comics Memory,” in Comics Memory: Archives and Styles, ed. Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, Imprint Springer, 2018), 4. Simon Grennan, A Theory of Narrative Drawing, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 240. Grennan, 231. Nicolas Labarre, “Ody-C, Homère Re-Genré, Décalé, Excentré,” Leaves, 2018, https://doi.org/10.21412/leaves_0609. Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à La Chaîne: Littératures Sérielles et Culture Médiatique, Poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2017), 193.

CHAPTER 4

How Genres Emerge: Horror Comics

Abstract This chapter examines the emergence of the horror genre in comics in the 1940s and 1950s. It argues that the hearings of the US Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, in 1954, codified and enshrined generic discourses which had not fully coalesced until that point. In particular, publishers sought to distinguish between “horror” and “the weird,” which they described as more respectable and literary, in order to defend their own practices, while the two labels were perceived and used as differences of degrees up to that point. The chapter also argues that the potency of this moment of genre definition led to an unusual stability of the horror genre in the following three decades. Keywords Horror · Weird · US Senate

In small type, on the bottom of the first column on the front page of the New York Times for Thursday, April 22, 1954, the newspaper reported on William Gaines’s testimony in front of the Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency and his perceived failure to mount a convincing defense of horror in comics.1 In this damning report, the reporter first uses the phrase “horror comics” in quotes, as if to attribute the invention of the phrase to Gaines himself. However, the article later refers to crime and horror comic books without such typographical precautions. In the following year, the Times published a dozen more articles on horror comics © The Author(s) 2020 N. Labarre, Understanding Genres in Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43554-7_4

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and the outcry they generated across the world; in these pieces, the genre was mentioned with or without quotations marks, which were sometimes used to isolate only the word “horror.” After 1955, the Times stopped mentioning these comics for 15 years, and when they were mentioned again, the cautious typographical signs were gone. This chapter will focus on the disappearance of these quotation marks, arguing that the genre of horror in comics had been developing at least since the early 1940s, but had not cohered into a single genre with an agreed-upon label before 1954: “horror” competed with other designations, which stressed the supernatural, the occult and the weird. I shall trace the historical roots of the textual markers of horror but also the emergence of generic strategies and designation, leading to the 1954 hearings. There is little doubt that when Gaines himself testified, the horror genre and horror comics were clear and accepted concepts in his mind. He had after all helped launch the trend for which he was being pilloried by Senator Kefauver and the other members of the Senate subcommittee, and he had seen imitators treat his own comics as a replicable formula, up to the distinct layout of his covers. Similarly, the report produced by the subcommittee is predicated on the existence of the genre. While requests to define horror during the process were answered by striking examples rather than systematic formal or narrative inquiries (“They are quite typical of the stories and pictures which appear in this type of presentation”)2 —in essence a prototypical approach to the genre—crime comics and horror comics were given as unproblematic categories throughout. Readers shared this understanding of the genre, as evidenced by this letter to the Senate subcommittee from 14-year-old Harley Elliott: I read comics every day and also collect them. Many war comics have historical stories in them. Thus I learn more about the world. Sciencefiction stories boost my dreams for the future. Horror stories increase my imagination. Humorous comics make me forget my worries and troubles.3

Beyond pointing to the role of genres as affect producing technologies, the letter demonstrates that the horror genre was not an external reality or an artificial construct for this reader and presumably others, but a useful and meaningful mode of engagement.

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Horror comics thus functioned as an established genre for various discursive communities, within the comics world and on its border. Simultaneously, the typographical inconsistencies in the New York Times suggest this use was not yet firmly established among the broader reading public, or at least among the Times ’ editors. By contrast, the newspaper had been using horror as an adjective to describe films and novels since the mid-1930s, with no specific precautions.

Horrific Comics Without a Genre Horror as a genre appears to have been mostly incompatible with the reading practices of the comic strips. However, while the newspaper comics pages were read by the whole family, they were not homogeneous, and newspaper publishers curated them to include material likely to satisfy a variety of interests, not necessarily under the assumption that all the comics would please all the potential readers.4 This differentiated mode of address is evident not only on typical comics pages and supplements but also within individual series. The common practice of including realistically drawn attractive young ladies in the family and flapper strips of the 1920s offers a striking example of this strategy, interweaving layers of eroticism and fashion into all-age humor stories. Similarly, scenes aimed at provoking horror, disgust and other bodily reactions of anguish and rejection appeared sporadically in the adventure strips of the 1930s, from the numerous scenes of fiery death and torture in Flash Gordon (see June to September 1935, for instance) to Dick Tracy’s monstrous rogue gallery and bursts of graphic violence. Though these situations were typically directed against foes or secondary characters and tended to avoid the powerlessness which contributes to the effectiveness and affectiveness of horror fiction,5 they did stress “figures that are simultaneously ‘threatening and impure’, an experience merging the emotions of fear and disgust,” as defined by media scholar Jarkko Toikkanen.6 These unsanitized horrific scenes were undeniably part of the appeal of the comic strips, especially as Hollywood cinema could no longer resort to these visual excesses after 1934, the year the Production Code went fully into effect. Yet, horror in these strips functioned as a peripheral attraction, not as an aesthetic or narrative center of gravity. Furthermore, there is little evidence that creators or readers drew connections between the potentially horrific sequences in these various strips: Whatever expectations these scenes may have generated were firmly located within the indigenous seriality of a given text.

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Horror in comics became a genre only when it became available as a reader’s choice and as a dominant mode, in comic books. Even more than the comic strips of which they were contemporary, early comic books integrated horrific scenes, in their covers as well as their stories, replicating the sensationalist appeal of second-rate pulps. A noted by Terrence Wandtke in The Comics Scare Returns, there is considerable overlap between crime, horror and early superheroes.7 The figure of the mad scientist and his (more rarely her) associated paraphernalia, in particular, played a central role in superhero stories, either as mentors or as villains. Early examples of Bill Everett’s Sub-Mariner stories, for instance, commonly featured monstrous creatures and addition to featuring a “threatening and impure” anti-hero. Scenes, characters and props were transposed wholesale from the popular Universal horror movies and integrated into the specific syntax of the rapidly coalescing superhero genre.8 Dick Briefer’s initial run of Frankenstein in Prize Comics (1940– 1945) presented as an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel but more of an intermedial reinterpretation of the Universal series, both used and lampooned superhero motifs. The series was tied to the well-established cinematic horror genre and was at times earnest in its depiction of “fear and disgust,” but through its constant shift and its occasional metaleptic episodes, it initially functioned sui generis in comics, without resorting to a default genre or establishing one. Horror motifs and intertextual references were thus abundant in early comic books, but much as in contemporary comic strips, they did not function as a distinct and institutionalized genre (Fig. 4.1).

The Institutionalization of Horror Through Intermedial Alignment Deliberate moves toward intermedial generic convergence played a significant role in producing this institutionalization. Wandtke notes that “the very first horror comics were adaptations of literature–Classic Comics: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in No.13 (1943), Frankenstein in No.26 (1945), and Mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe in No.40 (1947).”9 These three standalone Classic Comics/Classics Illustrated issues arguably function as a loose series, but the clearest evidence of the articulation between intertextuality and intermedial generic convergence is to be found in the four adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s horrific short stories published in Yellowjacket Comics (Charlton, 1944–1946), a mixed-genre anthology title,

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Fig. 4.1 Dick Briefer, “Frankenstein,” final page of its first appearance in Prize Comics #7 (December 1940)

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starting in November 1944. The adapted tales are distinctly horrifying stories from the Poe corpus (“The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”), and they were published under a common title, “Famous Tales of Terror.” The series then became “Tales of Terror,” and it continued beyond the Poe adaptation, presenting original stories with a distinct taste for gruesome imagery, with a witch as a framing narrator (Fig. 4.2). Yellowjacket Comics only lasted for 10 issues, but the choice of using a shared title for these stories demonstrates an intentional attempt at constructing a genre or at least a cycle, starting with the Poe adaptation and expanding beyond them, a process which Matthieu Letourneux identified in other popular publications: “replacing the simple logic of intertextual imitation […] with a serial mode of reading, resting on architextual principles.”10 The use of the witch as a narrator indicates that the intent was not merely to transpose the structure of the literary horror genre, but to engage with a broader, intermedial mode of discourse. The witch replicated the formula of the host in the horror and fantastic radio show The Witch’s Tale (WOR, 1931–1938), which had itself used a mix of literary adaptations and original tales. That framing device had been used for 14 issues in Hit Comics (Quality) in 1940–1941, for a short-lived recurring series initially named “Weird Tales” and rapidly changed to “Old Witch,”11 then more briefly in 1942 in Blue Ribbon Comics then Zip Comics (MLJ/Archie). Of course, the same device was picked up in a more successful and influential way by the EC horror comics in 1950. What these early attempts illustrate is the fact that in an intermedial landscape, generic models in other media (literature, cinema, radio) were available to comics publishers, who sought to import salient elements or a whole generic structure. The “Tales of Terror” example epitomizes this intent to create a system of representation, as opposed to stand-alone stories or even or self-contained series. The consolidation of horror as a comics genre came through successive attempts at a dedicated magazine, with one issue of Spook Comics (Baily, 1946) and Eerie (Avon, 1947), then the more successful Adventures into the Unknown (B&I Publishing, 1948–1967). As we saw in the previous chapter with the example of Funny Animals , the principle of a thematically cohesive anthology title12 is predicated on the existence of an overarching structure, an architext and possibly a genre. The editorial page to Adventures into the Unknown acknowledges the publisher’s attempt to effect an intermedial generic convergence:

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Fig. 4.2 Alan Mandel, “Tales of Terror,” Yellowjacket Comics #9 (April 1946)

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To our readers. Superstition is ignorance. It’s a part of the dark ages from which man emerged centuries ago. But great classical authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Horace Walpole and many others have done much to keep alive the tradition of the “ghost” story… and to this day, tales of the mysterious unknown still grip our imaginations! This despite the fact that there are no such things as ghosts! There never were… there never will be! Yet, since stories of the supernatural will live forever, we invite you to enjoy the following “adventures into… the unknown!” (emphasis in the original)

This text is striking in its overt attempt at defining a transmedial genre, invoking prototypes from the literary tradition, but also in the many potential generic labels it bandies around, acknowledging the inadequacy of “ghost stories” through the selective quotations marks and offering “tales of the mysterious” and “stories of the supernatural” as yet nonhierarchized labels. While other attempts at comic books dedicated to supernatural horror failed, including the adaption of the popular mysteryscience-fiction-horror radio show The Mysterious Traveler (Trans-World publication, 1948), whose sole issue reprinted one of the Poe adaptations from Yellowjacket Comics, Adventures into the Unknown thrived. Comics writer Bruce Jones, in his preface to a 2012 volume of reprints, argues the comic book may have been: “the world’s first genuine horror comics,” before conceding that “it may depend on how you define ‘horror comic’.”13 Indeed, the durability of Adventures into the Unknown, published over nearly two decades, calls attention to the nuances of genre identification and labeling, nuances which came to the fore during the 1954 hearings and in the subsequent report.

A Bifurcated Genre, Horror and Weird While the horror genre had been simmering in comics since the early 1940s, it only became prominent at the end of the decade, after a wave of violent comics that highlighted another ingredient of the generic mix of early comic books: crime. The runaway success of Charles Biro’s Crime Does Not Pay (Fox, 1942–1955) after the Second World War led to a host of imitators after 1947 (in September of that year, Marvel put out two imitators of its own) and a peak in the number of new titles in 1948,14 which triggered a first wave of public outcry. Though the framing of these comics was not about horror, they nevertheless contained

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numerous scenes of spectacular bodily harm and an even higher level of implied violence. They were also mostly, though not exclusively, set in a contemporary urban setting, in which deviations from social norms could be felt acutely. Furthermore, as noted by Bradford Wright in Comic Book Nation, the social regulation and economic models of visual mass media meant that these comics “offered some of the bloodiest and most sadistic images in visual entertainment”15 (true crime tabloids could capture the aftermath of violence in sensational photos, but never the acts themselves). Meanwhile, Adventures into the Unknown initially included bursts of graphic violence, but over the course of 1949, it had steered toward adventure or science-fiction, themes which the covers emphasized, and generally downplayed violence in the stories. Horror as it was conceived in Adventures into the Unknown and crime comics thus shared very little, in terms of primary and secondary signifiers. By contrast, the celebrated and even mythologized “New Trend” comics published by EC Comics were either crime comics themselves, or a deployment the most salient semantic elements of these crime comics in the domain of the supernatural and the weird. In fact, EC’s most famous horror host, the Crypt Keeper debuted in one of EC’s crime comic books, Crime Patrol (#15, December 1949), which changed its title with #17, to become The Crypt of Terror (and later Tales from the Crypt ). Before and after this change, EC’s crime titles frequently featured stories of supernatural horror, with or without a host. Also of note is the fact that EC’s “New Trend” titles used an open articulation between a title and a broader framing, with a sidebar emphasizing a distinct mood on the cover: “Horror” for The Vault of Horror (first issue cover-dated April/May 1950), “Terror” for The Crypt of Terror (April/May 1950) and “Fear” for The Haunt of Fear (May/June 1950). These sidebars do not call attention to specific content—the gothic and supernatural elements are present in the lexical field of the title themselves—but the affective effect of these comics.16 These are not the “ghost” stories celebrated in the editorial first issue of Adventures Into the Unknown, but stories meant to replicate or approximate the effect of horror as it had already been identified and institutionalized in other media. Furthermore, this affective and generic framing is not limited to the covers. The letter page to the first issue of Tales from the Crypt (#20, October-No. 1950), “The Crypt-Keeper’s Corner,” contains an editorial of sorts, explaining the change in title, which sets a wholly different

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territory from the type of content to be found in Adventures into the Unknown: Drag over that battered COFFIN, kiddies, and stretch you palpitating CORPSES on the worm-eaten lid… […] As you no doubt are aware, my magazine has always been tops in TERROR… the first word in HORROR… and unsurpassed in SUSPENSE! […] Let me assure you, THE CRYPT of TERROR by any other name will still be… ah… TERRORBLE! (emphasis in the original)

The first letter published underneath that tongue-in-cheek editorial, by Ed Sezep, a Brooklyn reader, goes on to claim: “I hate to admit this, you old geezer, but your magazine is the very best HORROR-TERROR book I have ever read-barring none!” (emphasis in the original). Through these three tightly connected comic book series, EC went beyond the architextual gesture implicit in anthology titles: It foregrounded the existence of a series of texts, revolving around the twin concepts of horror and terror. The selection of that reader’s letter and the added emphasis demonstrate the will to delineate this precise generic territory. EC’s series of two, then three titles with a homogeneous presentation and mostly interchangeable content was a demonstration that these stories could not be contained by a single brand name.17 EC was not in any sense the first company to produce horror comics, but they did put together a cohesive cycle of titles and by late 1950, a demonstrable success which soon came to be seen as a replicable model for some other publishers attempting to work in the genre. The rapid production process of comics meant that competitors were able to produce blatant copycats and imitations as early as the second half of 1950. For instance, although Marvel had produced horror titles before EC, the first issue of Adventure into Terror (November 1950) made a point of imitating the distinctive typeface of the EC titles, while promising “Mysterious tales of Haunted Suspense.” Just as nearly all the comic book science-stories of the early 1940s were really inferior retellings of Flash Gordon, the horror comics of the 1950s were nearly all variations on the stories drawn by Jack Kamen or Graham Ingels following Ad Feldstein scripts for the EC Comics. Then again, to echo Bruce Jones’s point, it may depend on how you define horror, and it may also depend on how you call it. Indeed, as demonstrated by horror historian and writer Lawrence Watt-Evans, many titles of the

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period indeed followed the recipe and the framing of Adventures Into the Unknown and avoided association with the “horror” label.18 Throughout its entire existence, Adventures Into the Unknown, which went from bi-monthly to monthly in January 1951 (#14), used the word “horror” as the title to its stories only 5 times: Four of these were in 1951, and the last in 1953. For the remainder of its existence, before and after, the title instead self-identified in numerous editorials (accompanying readers’ letters) as being related to “the weird” and the fantastic in literature. To state that all horror comics were inspired by EC is only accurate if one is ready to distinguish them from the opposite pole of the weird. Thus, the EC horror titles and Adventures into the Unknown arguably existed at either end of a spectrum of oppositions: EC titles

Adventures into the unknown Horror/Terror Domestic Graphic

Moral tale

Weird Exotic

Allusive

Event driven narrative

In addition to the inevitable outliers, the sheer number of horror stories published monthly meant that most titles occupied a middle ground, shifting from one type of story to the other; titles such as St John’s Weird Horrors (1952–1953) or Comic Media’s gory Weird Terror (1952– 1954) demonstrate the slippery meaning of these undeniably hesitant categories. “Horror” and “the Weird” merely indicated two comparatively well-defined positions, on either end of this spectrum (Fig. 4.3).19 Famously, the so-called Comics Code, adopted after the 1954 outcry, banned “Fear,” “Horror” and “Terror,” but also “Weird” from comics titles, suggesting that these labels were equally condemnable. The transcription of the Senate hearings and the report which was produced in their wake tell a different story, however. While the problem with comic books was framed in terms of the “crime and horror” comics, the publishers and distributors who sought to escape rather than confront public opprobrium consistently used “weird,” not “horror” as a generic label. For instance, during the hearings, Monroe Froehlich, jr., business manager of Magazine Management Corp., Marvel’s distribution arm, sought

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Fig. 4.3 A combination of potential generic labels on the covers of St John’s Weird Horrors #1 (June 1952) and Comic Media’s Weird Terror #1 (September 1952)

to establish “the weird” as the transposition of a potentially respectable literary genre, echoing the strategy of the first editorial to Adventures Into the Unknown: Mr. Beaser: This is from Adventures into Weird Worlds, the May issue. It is the scene of a man being crushed to death by some sort of vise. Mr. Froehlich: That is quite reminiscent of a very well-known story called The Pit and the Pendulum, which has been a classic in American literature for many decades. When the demand was created for so-called weird or fantastic comics we felt that it was wise for our company to have a relatively few comics in the field provided they met the standards.

Even more tellingly, George B. Davis, president of Kable News, a major distributor of magazines and comics, sought to reframe the conversation by firmly establishing the category of “weird comics” which he contrasted

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with “horror comics,” the better to delineate the caution his company exercised: We have 1 adventure, 3 detective, 7 western, 8 juvenile, 6 love, 3 satire, 2 war, and 10 weird. Now, you say horror and something else. I refer to them as weird.20

This articulation of the literary “weird,” as opposed to the contemporary and graphic “horror,” was taken up in the same conversation by a member of the subcommittee: Senator Hennings: If the chairman will allow me again, here is Weird Terror. Of course, a lot of these things are in the realm of judgment and taste. Some may be suggested to be no worse than some of the more imaginative illustrators of the tales of Edgar Allen [sic] Poe, but some of them seem to go beyond ordinary imaginative artistic representation, even of horror.21

The hearings thus served as the opportunity to establish a strict delineation of the two poles of what clearly functioned as a continuous genre for publishers and readers. In the text of Interim Report published after the hearings, “weird” is used only once, while “horror” occurs 88 times (excluding references and lists of titles in both cases)22 ; by contrast, the ratio is about 1–5 in the transcript of hearings themselves. The New York Times never even referred to “weird” comic books, with or without quotation marks. The representatives for the comics industry were thus successful in reframing the discussion to shield some titles and some approaches to potentially horrifying content from the public outcry. This separation helps explain why some horror titles did survive the Hearings and the advent of the Comics Code. According to Watt-Evans, the editor of Adventures into the Unknown even relished the restrictions, which thinned up the competition and forced his writers to break new ground. During these hearings, in the Interim Report and in the associated press coverage, the amorphous or hesitant generic categories which had heretofore been used were solidified into absolute distinctions. “Horror” in particular became firmly associated with unsuitable, graphic content, while “weird” (and its alternatives, such as “supernatural” or “fantastic”) never became a comics genre and to the best of my knowledge, is not

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in use in any current database or catalog of the comic book industry.23 Though the reporters for The New York Times or the members of the Senate were most certainly not readers of these horrific comics, they became for a few months the most prominent users of the genre. Through the intense public attention they garnered but also through the institution of the Comics Code, guidelines which only had to be reversed to find a proper recipe for crime and horror, they established an official and longlasting formula for “horror comics.”

Conclusion The strength and potency of this moment of genre definition are also reflected in the fact that the whole “horror genre” mostly stopped being “in play,” appearing instead to be constantly “replayed.” Thus, the Warren horror magazines of the 1960s were defined to a large extent by reference to their EC forerunners. Later anthologies such as Bruce Jones’s Twisted Tales (Malibu and Eclipse, 1982–1984) and Tales of Terror (Eclipse, 1985–1988) similarly echoed the conception of horror that was settled during the 1954 hearings, to a point when readers’ complaints took the form of a comparison to the EC horror titles. Even in Taboo (Spiderbaby Graphix, 1988–1992), a thick, author-driven, black-and-white anthology, a story such as “Eyes Without a Face” (Jack Butterworth, Cam Kennedy, #1) was presented by the editor as an explicit embrace of the injury-tothe-eye motif described by Fredric Wertham in the course of the anticrime and horror comic book movement. That this ossified version of the genre was still in use more than thirty years after the events of 1954 demonstrates the strength of the generic assertion made in that year by publishers, distributors and senators, then relayed and validated by news outlets such as The New York Times. In that sense, horror comics are not unlike the original noir, in that their generic afterlife far exceeds their cogency at their semi-mythical time of conception.24 Of course, the horror genre in comics was not monolithic or entirely unalterable even during those years. Changes in modes of production, in the distribution system, and the mere effect of the passage of time, as well as a number of successive moments of intermedial convergence— starting with the transposition of the then-ongoing “monster craze” in the Warren magazines—gradually reopened the genre to alternative conceptions.25 However, the example demonstrates the interaction between textual production on the one end and public discourses on the other, in

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the formation of genre. Through public debates and through the involvement of potent institutions, “horror” in comics underwent a sudden codification, which excluded an entire range of publication which probably would have been labeled as “horror” in most other media, and created a strikingly narrow and time-bound definition of the genre, which only loosened significantly decades after the fact. Other comics genres have undeniably had different trajectories. However, the history of horror in the medium testifies to the complex mechanisms of genre formation, bringing together intermedial influences, the importance of trends in the comic publishing world, critical discourses and the paramount importance of the construction of the label itself, as a socially and intertextually charged denomination.

Notes 1. Peter Kihss, “No Harm in Horror, Comics Issuer Says; Comics Publisher Sees No Harm in Horror, Discounts ‘Good Taste’,” The New York Times, April 22, 1954. For more details about Gaines testimony, seen Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval, the History of the Comics Code (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 1998), 61–63; Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2010), 221–22; David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, 1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 251–55. 2. “Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books) Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary” (United States Senate, 1954), 4–6, https://archive.org/details/ juveniledelinque54unit. 3. Quoted in Carol L. Tilley, “Children and the Comics: Young Readers Take On the Critics,” in Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent Since 1865, ed. James L. Baughman et al., 1st ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 169. 4. Leo Bogart, “Comic Strips and Their Adult Readers,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957), 195–96. 5. Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 172–74. 6. Jarkko Toikkanen, The Intermedial Experience of Horror: Suspended Failures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 14. 7. Terrence R. Wandtke, The Comics Scare Returns: The Contemporary Resurgence of Horror Comics, Comics Studies Monograph Series (Rochester and New York: RIT Press, 2018), 13.

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8. Nicolas Labarre, “Frankenstein as Superhero: Frankenstein in the Generic System of Comic Books,” Leaves, 2019, http://climas.u-bordeauxmontaigne.fr/leaves. 9. Wandtke, The Comics Scare Returns, 14. 10. Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à La Chaîne: Littératures Sérielles et Culture Médiatique, Poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2017), 182. 11. Though based on the supernatural, these stories mostly resolved about traditional ghosts, with frequent unambiguous happy ends and few attempts at “fear and disgust.” They are in fact noticeably less gruesome and frightening than the superhero stories also contained in Hit Comics. 12. This cohesiveness is on display in Adventures into the Unknown, which also displays a high level of craftsmanship, while Eerie focused on supernatural events but did not seek to couple this theme with a specific style, borrowing heavily from adventure comics (“The Man-Eating Lizards!”) and even a humorous one-pager (“Goofy Ghost”). 13. Bruce Jones, “Under Forbidden Covers: Part 1,” in Adventures into the Unknown Archives Volume 1 (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2012), 7–10. 14. Wandtke, The Comics Scare Returns, 15. 15. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 81. 16. For brevity’s sake, I am limiting this discussion to EC’s overt horror comics, but the publisher’s other New Trend titles, with the exception of Mad, also functioned in close proximity with the genre. Amy Kiste Nyberg, in her study of the 1954 campaign, bluntly describes Shock Suspenstories as a horror comic, for instance. Nyberg, Seal of Approval, the History of the Comics Code, 30. 17. EC did attempt to use “Suspenstories” as a proprietary label to its horror stories in the finale issues of Crime Patrol and War against Crime, then in the three issues of Crypt of Terror, before applying to Crime Suspenstories then Shock Suspenstories but quickly dropped its use for the horror titles. 18. Lawrence Watt-Evans, “The Other Guys: Pre-code Horror Comics,” 1997, http://www.watt-evans.com/theotherguys.shtml. 19. Though they have grown apart in recent decades, the distinction between the “weird” and “horror” in literature was far from absolute at the time. H. P. Lovecraft’s celebrated essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927) contains frequent references to “horror,” “the weird” and even to “weirdly horrible tales,” without attempting to delineate these categories. 20. “Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books),” 236–37. 21. “Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books),” 242. 22. “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency: A Part of the Investigation of Juvenile Delinquency in the USA,” Interim Report (Committee on the judiciary (83d Cong. 1st Sess. and 83d Cong. 2d Sess.),

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March 14, 1955), https://web.archive.org/web/20091027160127/ http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8580/kefauver.html. 23. By contrast “the weird” still functions as a genre in literature and has recently seen a resurgence through the so-called new weird, exemplified by authors such as China Mieville. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “The New Weird,” in New Directions in Popular Fiction: Genre, Distribution, Reproduction, ed. Ken Gelder (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 177–98. 24. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 173–75. 25. The role of intermedial generic alignments in this case is further complicated by the fact that a number of prominent horror creators in other media—from George Romero to Stephen King—have repeatedly stated that they were influenced by the 1950s horror comics and in particular by the EC production. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (Simon & Schuster, 2011), 26; George A. Romero, George A. Romero: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 139.

CHAPTER 5

How Genres Are Maintained: The Case of Genre Curation in Crossovers

Abstract This chapter examines comics crossovers as privileged sites for the expression of publisher-centric discourses on genres. It argues that crossovers foreground conventions and narrative expectations in a compact and overt form. Through a close reading of the 1995 Superman/Aliens crossovers, the chapter examines the way inter-company crossovers call attention to the articulation between proprietary architexts, such as franchises and genres. In this case, the encounter between the two franchises reinscribes Superman and Alien explicitly in the science-fiction and body horror genres. Keywords Crossover · Franchise · Alien · Superman

In La Cité de la Peur (dir. Alain Berbérian), a 1990 French comedy about filmmaking and genre fiction, a fictional producer pitches Snow White vs. the Magnificent Seven: “First they meet. Then they meet and they fight. And then at the end, they fuck.” While this summary overstates the cordiality prevailing among heroes at the end of most crossovers, it highlights the conventionality of these fictional encounters, even in the context of serial popular fiction. Crossovers have been central to the economic model of comic book publishers since at least the mid-1980s and appear especially abundant in the medium. In addition to their economic rationale,

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they are one of the means through which publishers can attempt to shape genres and to locate their proprietary architexts with regard to those genres. Comics crossovers foreground conventions and narrative expectations in a compact and overt form, unearthing or underlining the conventions embedded in self-contained genre offerings. They are also typically the product of industrial strategies rather than author ambition as exemplified by Alan’s Moore mercifully forgotten Spawn/WildC.A.T.S. (Image Comics, 1996). Because the institutionalization of genre depends on a variety of actors, often with diverging interest, it is barely conceivable that a single publisher could or would create a genre—at best, they can create or distribute works which will become the basis of a genre, as in the case of Superman in Action Comics (National, 1938), Charles Biro’s Crime Does Not Pay (Lev Gleason, 1942) or Kirby and Simon’s Young Romance (Crestwood, 1947). However, once a genre has become institutionalized, publishers can push certain discourses and texts aimed at consolidating one version of the genre against others, in the context of the often conflicting “discursive claims” identified by Rick Altman.1 Because crossovers foreground genre conventions and ask readers to enjoy their familiarity, they offer a fertile ground for this type of publisher-driven genre curation. Superman/ Aliens , also known as Superman vs. Aliens (DC Comics/Dark Horse, 1995), will serve as the focal point to analyze genre discourse within crossovers, with the assumption that most of the observations pertaining to this three-issue miniseries can be applied to similar examples. Although all inter-company crossovers feature “exceptional” events in the life of these characters, and though Superman/ Aliens was published in DC Comics’ upscale “prestige” format2 is in many ways a typical product of this narrative practice in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Crossovers as Crossovers To borrow a concept from Linda Hutcheon’s approach to adaptation,3 it may be necessary to first identify crossovers as crossovers from a variety of other configurations, namely cameos, mere traces of a shared fictional universe and the ubiquitous intertextual nods of contemporary popular culture. Typical crossovers involve two acknowledged sources, coming together in a story which treats them both as being of importance.

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Superman/ Aliens is such a typical example. It was openly positioned as a crossover (the two publishers logo are visible on the cover, the names of the protagonists use a distinct typeface, they also feature prominently on each of the three covers; Dark Horse Insider #41 called it the “crossover of year”) and the narrative structure aims at striking a balance between the two original texts. As Comic Shop News puts it: “It doesn’t matter if you’re picking this one up because you are a Superman fan or because you’re an Aliens fan—no one’s going to leave this series disappointed!”4 Symptomatically, this endorsement conflates the characters and the franchise, by mentioning “Aliens” in the plural, a reference to James Cameron 1986 film and to the Dark Horse comics featuring the creatures. These Aliens are the xenomorphs first seen in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), based on a memorable design by Swiss artist Hans Rudi Giger. In 1995, when Superman/ Aliens was published, they had appeared with small variations in three big-budget feature films as well as in comics, since before the release of the first film, but mostly in the late 1980s (during the period when comics horror was finally getting past the definitional moment of the 1954 hearings). As early as 1989, the xenomorphs had also become crossover material thanks to the successful Aliens vs. Predator comics series (1989), as a result of a transmedia agreement between comics publisher Dark Horse and 20th Century Fox.5 The success of the film had made Alien an exemplar for the filmic horror genre of the late 1970s, next to Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975), and Halloween (dir. John Carpenter, 1978). Dark Horse’s adaptations and extensions, for their parts, had made the creatures available not only as comic book characters but also as a crossover-ready threat, at a time when pop-cultural mashups were far less prevalent in pop-culture than they are now. By 1995, Alien had generated proliferating transmedia and cross-media extensions and was on the verge of being turned into a nonproprietary filmic formula: Species (dir. Roger Donaldson) and Screamers (dir. Bertrand Duguay) two obvious high-profile imitation were released that year. Though there never was such a thing as an identified Alien genre, the series was used as a blueprint, as a structure, as a label (the poster for Species is a clear imitation of the Alien one) and very likely as a horizon of expectation, or narrative contract, for many readers. It served in other words as the anchor and the impetus for a specific transmedial architext (also including board games such as Games Workshop’s Space Hulk [1989] and video games such as Team 17’s Alien Breed [1991]),

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in addition to its role in the broader science-fiction and horror genres, in film and in comics. However, it should be noted that by 1995, when the series of crossovers with superheroes started, the xenomorphs on their own had seen a significant decline in sales from the beginning of the decade.6 Associating the franchise with superheroes roughly tripled these sales, which suggests that the majority of the buyers were interested in superheroes rather than space creatures; the commercial context thus created a hierarchy between architexts, which is replicated in the structure of the comics.

Emerging Architexts In a contemporary intra-company superhero crossover, an endogenous crossover, two superimposed and aligned architexts are foregrounded: the shared fictional universe in which these characters evolve, at the narrative level, and the publisher’s brand, at the editorial level.7 However, comics history suggests that this alignment is not the only option. In October 1942, for instance, Prize Comics #24 published a story in which all the heroes of this anthology title banded to stop the Frankenstein Monster, as imagined by Dick Briefer (and discussed in Chapter 4) (Fig. 5.1). Some of these characters were contemporary superheroes, but the crossover also included Doctor Frost, a Flash Gordon-inspired space adventurer, and the General and the Corporal, two “big-nose” comic characters usually seen in brief gags. That crossover did not hinge on a shared fictional universe, but it affirmed the role of the comic book itself as a meaningful architext, and not as a mere repository of unrelated serials. When inter-company crossovers, or exogenous crossovers, operate within a well-defined genre, they tend to foreground the genre itself, and its articulation with the specific exemplars or prototypes produced by its publishers. In sophisticated examples, this implies not only using shared narrative structures but also calling attention to their historicity beyond or along with brand affirmation. JLA/Avengers (Marvel/DC, 2003–2004), for instance, presents the history of superheroes as borrowings and copies, by playfully underlining the similarities between some of the publishers’ characters (The Flash and Quicksilver, Hawkeye and Green Arrow, etc.). Finally, some crossovers involve series which do not share a visible genre, nor a fictional universe (and generally not a publisher). These crossovers, such as Superman/ Aliens , cannot rely on an existing architext, beyond the general framework of serial comic book publishing. Yet, the

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Fig. 5.1 Dick Briefer, “Utter Failure!”, Prize Comics #24 (Feature Publications, October 1942)

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very act of crossing over affirms the compatibility of these texts, and therefore, their belonging to a loose “family,” in the Wittgensteinian sense. They thus sketch out a hitherto invisible and often problematic common ground, a virtual architext, whose sutures and construction are often made visible, and even become part of the narrative stakes. For instance, the first issue of the unlikely Red Sonja and Vampirella meet Betty and Veronica (Dynamite, 2019), which pairs two fantasy and horror heroines with two sides of the Archie love triangle, devotes a significant number of pages to dressing up the fantasy characters as American teenagers, while retaining some of their distinctive features. The text elucidates its own construction and the need to adjust the character’s costumes to a new regime of vraisemblance. Some of the expected pleasure lies precisely in the playful inventiveness of this process of reconciliation. As the borders of the branded architexts are redrawn and perimeters extended, they align with the larger architexts which these branded properties simultaneously belong to and help shape: in the case of Superman/ Aliens , superhero fiction and science-fiction-horror. As we shall see, the narrative constantly shifts between generic markers and specific elements of the two branded properties, treating the two series alternatively as architexts and as intertexts. Though Superman/ Aliens does not contain any editorial page or letter column—often an editorial proxy—this process is on display on the back cover. Each of these feature Superman endangered by the xenomorph, next to a large quote from the book, such as “More and more this place seems to reek—of DEATH” in #1. The characteristic anguish of the horror narrative is mediated through the superhero.

Negotiating Genre This pairing raises the issue of generic compatibility at the textual level, as the formula applied in the Aliens tales and in superhero narratives contradict each other on several levels, and especially regarding bodily descriptions. While the xenomorph exposes the fragile boundaries of the human body through a disturbing assault on gendered bodily functions,8 superhero narratives favor a more idealized and flawless vision of clearly gendered bodies. Theirs are not even the “hard-bodies” described by Susan Jeffords about Reaganite action cinema,9 but over-muscled, eroticized but ultimately undersexed representations.10 In fact, crossovers between heroes and Aliens only feature male superheroes, supporting the reading

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of the alien as the “monstrous, fetishized feminine,”11 in line with the role it plays in the first three films. While some crossovers effectively refuse to engage with the Alien architext beyond a few elements of design (notably Green Lantern vs. Aliens [Dark Horse/DC Comics, 2000]), Superman/ Aliens tackle this incompatibility head-on by opening up the superhero body. Brand management dictates that the superhero cannot die in this type of encounter, a fact known by any reader familiar with the genre’s publishing conventions. Nevertheless, the anticipation produced by this familiarity does not invalidate the experience of seeing the hero in danger: It merely encourages a reading in which close attention is paid to generic deviations.12 Paradoxically, though exogenous crossovers appear to open up the narrative world and possibilities, they actually reward connoisseurship and familiarity with the conventions, as an invisible construct against which the novelty can be measured. These crossovers also typically demand from their readers or viewers a temporary suspension of the knowledge that the protagonists will eventually be back in their own narrative spheres, with little chance of further interaction with the encountered universe.13 There is thus little at stake but the examination of genre and brand construction. Superman/ Aliens starts firmly in Superman’s world, where Clark Kent and Lois Lane are invited by Lex Luthor to witness the arrival on Earth of a space module bearing extra-terrestrial inscriptions, in Kryptonian (Krypton being Superman’s planet of birth). Superman then flies to a space station, belonging to Luthor, to take to a ship supposed to fly him to the planet of origin of the module. Writer Dan Jurgens chooses sciencefiction as a common ground where the Aliens and Superman can meet. The lost planet and messages from space, part of the Superman mythos, are foregrounded and slightly recast to suggest proximity with the Alien movies. In a slight semantic shift, an adjustment of secondary signifiers, the space station, space suit and weaponry are less futuristic than in other contemporary Superman adventures. Meanwhile, the beginning of the story reestablishes the bases of Superman narratives, summarizing his origin, emphasizing the Clark Kent/Superman duality, the triumphant body, using its most emblematic secondary characters (Lois Lane, Lex Luthor) and reaffirming Superman’s moral creed explicitly. The story reminds the readers of the rules of the game, the basic syntax of the Superman text, and by extension of the superhero genre, before tearing at them. Indeed, on the planet, Superman discovers a desolate-looking town and

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realizes that he is weaker than on Earth, shortly before being attacked by a xenomorph (#1 30). Thereafter, these reiterated codes of the superhero genre are progressively dismantled, an effect made all the more striking by the contrast with the genre-asserting opening. The status of the superhero diminishes with every page: The invincible body becomes vulnerable, and a splash page is devoted to the first vision of Superman’s blood (#1 37) when the Alien’s tongue hits his forehead. After each encounter with the creatures, Superman’s uniform gets torn, and it is eventually reduced to a pair of briefs and a blue legging. Simultaneously, he has to be rescued by a non-hero, a civilian with a flamethrower, who proves more capable than he is. As a visual metonymy and a reversal of the usual gender mechanics at work in the superhero genre, she remains fully clothed in an intact outfit while Superman is progressively exposed: The threatening gendered indeterminacy of the Alien cycle is thus reframed within the superhero genre. Meanwhile, Lois Lane is also shown proving that she does not need Superman, by dispatching creatures on her own in the space station where he left her, precisely in order to keep her safe. In a further interrogation of the rules of the fiction game, the story dwells heavily on Superman’s eventual renunciation to his vow not to kill, in the course of a nervous breakdown. As he douses a creature with the flamethrower, he is shown screaming: “I’m tired of it!/Tired of your ruthless ways! And most of all—tired of your ugly faces!” (#3 31). That outburst functions as an echo of the memorable scream in Alien, when the creature erupts from one of the astronaut’s stomach, a prominent generic inflection point toward horror in that film.14 Early in the story, when Superman is tempted by a firearm, the color scheme changes, replacing his usual primary colors with dark, cold hues (#2 21). When he throws the weapon away, resisting temptation, his usual colors are restored: The taboo regarding lethal violence is not treated as a mere plot point, it defines the character. Even more, the shift in graphic representation in these passages suggests that to have Superman use a weapon would be a genre-altering decision; the confrontation with a neighboring genre highlights the non-negotiable textual features of the Superman architext with the effect of consolidating this hesitant category. The series thus erodes the codes of the Superman narrative but never removes them entirely: What happens is not a disappearance but a dissociation. At the end of the second issue and the beginning of the third, Superman is alone, almost naked and captured by the xenomorphs. The

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scene is bathed in greenish hues, a color associated with danger in sciencefiction movies in general, and in Superman’s case with Kryptonite. At this point, dialogues have entirely disappeared, replaced by captions containing an inner monologue. What we are shown is Superman’s powerlessness, as he is about to be impregnated, but what we are given to read is his resolve: “Have to get loose!/ I know what happens next!/ It [an Alien egg]’s —opening!/ Not me./You won’t get me!” (#2 46). The temporary defeat of the hero, itself a narrative pattern of the genre,15 is framed as a temporary defeat of the genre, relegated for a while to a series of unappealing white boxes. Pierre Fresnault Deruelle describes the word balloon as “this white presence which neutralizes the décor.”16 In this case, they cannot hide entirely the shift to horror, with even the gutter colored sickly green on this page (Fig. 5.2). The crossover thus creates generic hybridity at the textual level, conflating body horror and superheroes (as we saw in Chapter 4, other forms of horror had been associated with superheroes before, in particular monster-based narratives inspired by the Universal and Hammer films), either through overt blending, as in the covers, or by segregating each genre to the different modalities of comics. Meanwhile, the task of repeating specific elements from the Alien films, which simultaneously reaffirms the specificities of the Alien texts in the context of science-fiction horror and enforces the intermedial generic convergence described in Chapter 2, befalls to the other storyline, featuring Lois Lane’s ordeal in the infested space station. This subplot, about a third of the story, is devoted to reenacting many of the key moments of the first two films. As a result, the reader gets to witness the birth of the chest-buster (#1 47; #2 14; #3 2) or the surprise impalement of a member of the crew, mimicking Bishop’s fate at the end of Aliens (#2 19); Lois also expels a xenomorph from the ship through an air-lock (#2 26–30) and faces the impassionate scientific curiosity of Luthor’s representatives, to mention but the most obvious resemblances. The key concept here is familiarity, as demonstrated by the way in which the chest-buster scene is recreated. In Alien, the Illustrated Story, the 1979 adaptation of the first film, the birth of the creature happened in a splash page whose effectiveness relied on the temporary suspension and suspense created by the turn of the page. In Superman/ Alien, the scene plays out in two facing pages: The splash page serves as a confirmation, not as a surprise. The validity of this knowledge is further confirmed on the following page as the characters start to puzzle together the rules

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Fig. 5.2 Dan Jurgens, Kevin Nowlan, Superman/ Aliens #2 (DC/Dark Horse, August 1995), p. 46

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of the games, which the reader had at his or her disposal all along. As in Red Sonja and Vampirella meet Betty and Veronica, the intended pleasures of such a passage rely on architextual knowledge rather than surprise. Besides, this faithfulness to the original movie, or more accurately this fetishization signaling faithfulness—a notion shunned by adaptation theory but often a crucial objective for the adaptation industry17 —is not without a narrative payoff. The replication of key scenes suggests that the comic book could also choose to eschew the superheroic resolution and instead replicate the grim ending of Alien and Alien 3 , or perhaps the bittersweet conclusion of Aliens. Having lived up to most of the promises of a faithful adaptation, a “repetition without replication,”18 and having depicted a deconstruction of the various signifiers of the superhero in favor of horror, Superman/ Aliens nevertheless ends up reasserting the vitality of the superheroic narrative. This restoration of genre hierarchy operates not only through narrative reversals—Superman is rescued, he is sent back to Earth to regain his powers—but also by reclaiming discarded symbols and signifiers. After the rescue, Superman first entails getting dressed again, to restore his devastated costume. At first, he seems disappointed, upon discovering that he is to renounce his superheroic appearance (“A space suit?”/“You want to breathe, right?”), but in the last panel of the page, Kara hands him a piece of his original costume, the red “S” on his chest, which had been portentously ripped off during his first confrontation with a xenomorph. The piece of fabric stands out in primary colors on a page dominated by cold greens and blues, and Kara’s comment emphasizes the symbolic restoration at work: “Seems like you and this symbol go together pretty well” (#3 16). The lieu of this panel mechanically creates tension and expectations, before the turn of the page.19 Earlier in the story, this articulation between the last panel and the following page had been used to recreate the shock entrance effect of horror movies. In this case, the same narrative device is reused and reversed. The next page is a splash page, showing Superman from a low-angle, in a classic heroic pose, with Kara renouncing her role as a heroine: Having restored a key semantic element of the genre, the narrative also reinstates its organizing principles, its syntax and in particular its gender dynamic. Kara is now in the background and inviting Superman to be the hero of the book again: “Lead the way, Kal” (#3 17). Pretty soon, an extra-effort allows Superman to

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use what is left of his powers, and he is sent back to Earth. Again striking a heroic pose, as he bursts from the tiny spacecraft in which he had been confined, he declares in a caption: “I’m back” (#3 40). On the next page, the last remnant of body horror is neutralized, as Superman vomits the Alien larva, effectively reversing the transgressive insemination process. The symbolic value of the passage is again emphasized by the text, the preserved domain of superheroics throughout Superman/ Aliens : “It’s gross, it’s weird./But I eventually regurgitate the creature” (#3 41). This digestive process becomes a metaphor for the genre mixing at work in the story as a whole. Horror is absorbed by the superheroic body, threatening to open it up, to make it abject, revealing its construction for all to see (laying it bare, literally), but eventually, it is expelled from the body and from the narrative. One page later, Superman breaks the teeth of suddenly inefficient Alien with his arm bearing the “S” symbol, and even the typography of the sound effects comes to support this restoration of normalcy. In the first two panels of the page, the xenomorph is threatening Lois, producing hissing sounds in round, organic-looking green letters. When the creature’s teeth break, it is with “Chinkt,” this time written in a straight white type (Fig. 5.3). Superman/ Aliens does not play with all the possible generic markers—panel borders remain unmarked generically, Kevin Nowlan’s line and inking remain consistent but it does employ the

Fig. 5.3 Dan Jurgens, Kevin Nowlan, Superman/ Aliens #3 (DC/Dark Horse, September 1995), p. 43, detail

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affordances of comics to frame genres through a wide range of aesthetic and narrative options. While the superheroic mode is thus restored, the story’s conclusion hints at possible other intersections between Superman and the Aliens. Kara is revealed to have survived her last encounter with one of the creatures and is shown drifting in space, alone in an “escape pod,” which works as an allusion both to the ending of Alien and to the origin of Supergirl, Superman’s cousin, also named Kara. In the 1984 Supergirl movie, she arrived on Earth in a spherical spaceship with round windows, almost identical to that depicted in Superman/ Aliens . This conclusion is meant to be read in light of the generic back-andforth which precedes it. It exemplifies the careful construction and insertion of genre markers in this adaptation. This confirms that by 1995, the Alien had stopped embodying genre-hybridity, but had instead taken upon the functions of a genre unto itself, an integrated sub-domain of both horror and science-fiction. They function more as an architext of their own than as an intertext.20

Conclusion Over these three issues, however, Superman/ Aliens exhibits salient traits and non-negotiable aspects of its two genitors, and in the process makes visible editorial claims regarding the structure and boundaries of two genres. These comics function as a monstrous progeny, an unstable architext born of contradictory generic assertions, which eventually collapse in order to restore the potency of the most commercially successful of the two genres, here conflated with normality. Merely reading these texts cannot inform us about the social construction of genres—though oblique measurements such as the fact that there was a slightly different sequel to Alien/Superman tells us a little about the readers’ reactions as perceived by the publishers—but it allows us to map the textual markers upon which these social constructs rest, at least from the producers’ perspective. Crossovers thus appear to be a favored mechanism in comics to negotiate not only genres, but the complex articulation between architexts bases on branded properties, proprietary cycles and larger architexts, such as genres. Because they rely on established familiarity—even more so in the case of transmedia properties such as Alien, in which the mechanisms of adaptation overlap with those of the crossover per se—they function as consolidation mechanisms, late stages in the shaping and maintaining of

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genres as described in chapter four. They patrol the borders, and in doing so, consolidate the hesitant contours of genres.

Notes 1. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 101. 2. The three issues are square bound, with a flexible cardboard cover and thick glossy paper affording for precise color reproduction. They are also priced at $4.95, when a 1995 Superman comic book cost between $1.50 and $1.95. 3. Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). 4. “CSN Hot Picks,” Comic Shop News, June 1995. 5. Kerry Gough, “Translation Creativity and Alien Econ(c)omics. From Hollywood Blockbuster to Dark Horse Comic Book,” in Film and Comic Books, ed. Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich, and Matthew P. McAllister (Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 2007), 37–63. 6. The Capital City number available in The Standard Catalog of Comic Books indicates that Alien series sold about 20,000 copies per issue at the time, against 40–50,000 five years earlier. The same goes for Alien vs. Predator, which started with nearly 100.000 copies in 1990 but was down to about 20,000 copies in 1995 (with the Aliens vs. Predator: Booty miniseries). These figures do not represent the total sales for these issues, but they are internally consistent—Dark Horse only signed an exclusive contract with Diamond in 1995—and make comparisons possible. 7. Andrew J. Friedenthal, in one of the rare academic texts devoted to a specific comic book crossover, charts the interplay between these two intertexts in his study of Crisis on the Infinite Earth, DC Comics’ pivotal 1986. Andrew J. Friedenthal, “Monitoring the Past: DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths and the Narrativization of Comic Book History,” ImageTexT 6, no. 2 (2011), http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v6_2/ friedenthal/index.shtml?print. 8. Ximena Gallardo and Jason C. Smith, Alien Woman. The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13–60; Phil Brohy, “Horrality—The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films,” in The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 280. 9. Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 10. Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture, 2. ed (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 222. It must be added that the superhero genre breeds a variety of historically located representations. Thus, the above description would not apply to a self-reflexive

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series such as Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Statix (Marvel Comics, 2002–2004), nor would it describe reframing of the genre such as SpiderMan Loves Mary Jane (2005–2007), which adopts the point-of-view of Spider-Man’s love interest. Superhero fiction does not lend itself easily to generalization, but the use of a superior and ultimately flawless masculine body is one of the few near-constants of the genre. Gallardo and Smith, Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley, 60. The same remark could be applied to many horror films in which the use of a formula does not prevent a viewer from being thrilled or shocked, as film-makers have proved adept at playing with these adaptations. As Philip Brophy puts it: “The contemporary horror film in general plays with the contradiction that it is only a movie, but nonetheless a movie that can work upon its audience with immediate results.” Brophy, “Horrality—The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films,” 282. WildC.A.T.S/Aliens is infamous in that writer Warren Ellis used it to kill not the WildC.A.T.S. but another superhero team, Stormwatch, slaughtered off-panel. While this could have easily been ignored as an alternative version of the team, the event was integrated into the continuity of the publisher’s shared universe. The commercial hierarchy between the three series is noteworthy, as WildC.A.T.S sold more than Aliens, which sold more than Stormwatch. The outcome of the storyline thus reflects to a large extent the expectations of the readership as expressed by their buying habits. Nicolas Labarre, “Alien as a Comic Book: Adaptation and Genre Shifting,” Extrapolation 55, no. 1 (January 2014): 77–78, https://doi.org/ 10.3828/extr.2014.6. Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Studies in Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 41. Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 70. Simone Murray suggests that this cultural divide does not stop with the issue of “fidelity.” She suggests that the lack of attention paid to the material conditions of adaptation by scholars “[has] given rise to a disjunction between, on one hand, cultural studies’ orthodoxies of textual relativism and, on the other, the media industries’ avid support of cultural hierarchy as evidenced in their marketing and publicity strategies.” Simone Elizabeth Murray, “Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry,” Literature-Film Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2008): 11. Hutcheon and O’Flynn, Adaptation, 173. Groensteen, The System of Comics, 147–48. Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à La Chaîne : Littératures Sérielles et Culture Médiatique, Poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2017), 178–83.

CHAPTER 6

The Uses of Genre: Productivity, Cultural Distinction and Shared Culture

Abstract This chapter examines the usefulness of genres for the producers of comics, including the creators, publishers and the other actors involved into the creation and distribution of these texts. It argues that genres and other architexts serve to mitigate risks in an industry of prototype, that they can serve as intertextual building blocks and that they can be used to trigger cultural memories, occasionally tied to cultural hierarchies. Keywords Formula · Prototype economy · Vertigo · Memory

Constructing a model of genre dynamics in comics requires moving away from the individual experience of genre—crucial as it may be pragmatically—to construct larger social groups, even at the risk of oversimplification. Over the course of this chapter, I shall consider the usefulness of genres for the “producers” of comics: the comics creators, but also the publishers and the other actors who supply the infrastructure whereby a popular work ceases to be an individual object and is turned into a mass commodity. While the distinction between author and publisher is operative to a certain extent in popular culture, as we have seen in Chapters 4 and 5, in other cases the two functions are tightly coordinated, through the figure of the editor for instance. When it comes to genre, the interests

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of all producers can be expected to align in great part, because of contractual agreements, shared economic interests and interpersonal exchanges. With rare exceptions, divergences and disagreement over genres among producers can be resolved before being made manifest in either the work or the public space. In the next chapters, I shall analyze the way readers and critics use genres, but I want to start by examining the incentives for producers to create objects with or within genres.

The Appeal of the Known The appeal of the genres for producers can be described in general terms as the appeal of familiarity and regularity, seen as economic guarantees. Because they always refer to previous works, genres offer a way to replicate previous successes or at least to invoke them. This description might sound reminiscent of the condemnation of the “culture industry,” by Adorno and Horkheimer in the mid-twentieth century, as an assemblyline process, which exaggerates the significance of incremental differences between functionally identical objects, but in the case of comics, these formulas are almost never all-encompassing. Some comics may be nearly “purely” generic, but the individual craft is never fully erased, the hand of the artist is always visible.1 Furthermore, a comic book is more delicate than a cake, and a stable formula cannot guarantee success if the level of craft is insufficient or if the economic environment shifts, even slightly. Still, the numerous rushes toward popular genres in comic book publishing in the twentieth century at least (in superheroes, crime, romance, jungle girls, teen comedy, etc.) demonstrate that these genres were or were seen as close to a guarantee for success, regardless of the objective quality of the product. The contemporary publishing environment has reduced the opportunity for such rushes, and the logic of incrementally different serial publishing is now more likely to be found within branded lines, structured in appropriate collections and labels. However, even within these proprietary architexts, the introduction of new characters and the inexorable renewal of these structures tend to incorporate, if not existing genres, at least existing stylistic and narrative patterns, which may already be in use in other well-established genres. The case of the various Marvel Zombies series, which spun off an episode of Ultimate Fantastic Four, itself a retelling/update of the original Fantastic Four (#21–23, 2005), offers a

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particularly salient example of this reliance on genre within a proprietary series. The more recent example, DC Comics’ DCeased series (2019), which uses the strikingly original premise of an encounter between superheroes and flesh-eating zombies, suggests that the rush to imitation has not entirely disappeared either. The incentive to keep producing material within an existing series is further reinforced by the way broad generic categories are adopted and to a certain extent ossified by the other actors in the comics world. The fact that comic shops have taken shape to sell mostly superhero comic books since the inception of the direct market—through their decoration, their furniture and layout, the choice of merchandising they sell, etc.—is a powerful incentive for producers to create products ready to fit that well-established distribution system. While a segment of graphic novel publishing obeys a different model, striving to make each book unique and emphatically not part a strategy of minimal differentiation (as exemplified in the work of authors such as Seth, Dan Clowes or Charles Burns), the children and Young Adult graphic novel industry which now dominates comic book publishing, and even book publishing as a whole,2 relies on genres as much as traditional comic book publishers, although it operates with a different catalog. Again, the ossification of retailing and consumption practices serves as a powerful incentive: Were Scholastic, the market leader in this segment, suddenly to offer a straight horror story, it would not fit easily in bookstores or book fairs and would probably generate significant pushback from the ultimate buyers. Genres along with brand names and collections thus serve as one of the stabilizing factors, which make it unnecessary for the industry to reinvent itself with each new product. Much like cinema, comics function as an economy of prototype3 —the word is not used here with the same meaning as in Rosch’s and Lakoff’s approaches—in which each book is a singular endeavor, employing a specific production team and requiring specific marketing efforts. Inscribing these books into larger series, be they collections, genres or proprietary universes creates regularities and mitigates the financial risks. Finally, genre allows producers to streamline the process of creation, through formulas and shared expectations. The metaphor of the culture industry, implicitly endorsed by Rick Altman, implies that once the blueprints have been drawn and the prototypes designed, the assembly itself requires only limited skills. This should not be read as a literal

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description of work in comics, in which even the most standardized production escapes complete rationalization. However, to take the example of the updated version of the superhero genre in the 1960s, once new parameters were established by the likes of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Marvel and its competitors were able to produce commercial successes employing lesser creators, with a considerably reduced artistic autonomy (new pencilers at Marvel were instructed to draw “like Kirby,” for instance).4 Because genres function as composites of semantic and syntactic signifiers of varying importance, standardization is never total: Minor twists and reversals of expectations are themselves included in the formula, and though they may be invisible to casual readers, they are part of the intended pleasures for devoted genre readers.5 In all the aforementioned uses, genres facilitate the production and the selling of comics, in interaction and sometimes in competition with other architexts. They establish commonalities and reusable patterns to mitigate the risks of an economy of prototype, though as noted by Rick Altman they also tend to reduce the distinctive appeal of a brand and a publisher if the logic of genre entirely displaces proprietary architextual constructs.6 An economy of prototype has to balance distinctiveness and reproducibility. Shifting from an industrial to a creative standpoint, from producers to creators, calls attention to other uses of genre, although these may also be commercially efficient strategies. To reiterate the point made in the introduction, dissociating creators from publishers makes sense only if one assigns a significant degree of autonomy to these creators within the comics world. DC Comics’ Vertigo label offers a fertile ground to investigate these creative uses of genre. As a publishing institution, it served a key locus for the articulation of author-driven approaches to comics and more traditional commercial approaches. It published titles owned by the publisher as well as creator-owned series, straddling both the world of monthly comic books and that of graphic novels, the popular and the literary. Again, this section is not about Vertigo per se, but about the uses of genres across comics publishing, which happen to be more salient at certain points and in certain institutions within the history of the medium.

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Genres as Intertextual Building Blocks One of the uses can be termed ostensible genre mixing, though a more proper description would be the use of genre as intertextually potent narrative building blocks. Neil Gaiman provided an evocative approach to this practice in 2005 when stating about his work: “I tend not to believe wholeheartedly in genre, and I get bored easily. I tend to use genre as a condiment rather than the main dish.”7 Though the quote was meant to apply to his novel, Anansi Boys, rather than to his work in comics, Gaiman’s ambivalent embrace of genres as useful tools rather than decisive formula, provides a fitting introduction to the practices made visible by Vertigo. In the context of the development of a “sophisticated segment”8 of comics publishing, the label produced works “grounded in but ennobling popular genres,”9 heightening and highlighting long-standing practices of genre mixing and deconstruction. Vertigo was created in 1993 as a label within DC Comics that encompassed an intended readership (“For mature readers”), contractual dispositions (new titles would be “creator-owned”) and narrative specificities, starting with the decision not to include typical superhero tales. A variety of changes brought an end to that incarnation of the label around 2013,10 and it disappeared in 2019. It should be pointed out that beyond the overt age categorizations, the “mature readers” label conveyed specific promises regarding language, but also eroticism and graphic violence in the context of comic book publishing.11 Such a label functions as a promise of these forbidden thrills, which in turn have been and are central signifiers in distinct comics genres. While Vertigo is by definition not a genre, the texts it encompassed possessed a distinct “family resemblance” based on a shared ethos12 and generated strong expectations. All of the main series published by the label—Saga of the Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Sandman, Preacher, 100 Bullets, Fables, Transmetropolitan— include recognizable components of a fully institutionalized genre, from horror to crime to science-fiction and fairy tales. Yet, all of them appear to foreground their generic hybridity. Preacher (Ennis and Dillon, 1995– 2000), for instance, articulates some of the most explicit markers of the western, including numerous textual references, to the subgenre of meat-obsessed southern horror.13 It also features occasional nods toward or extended engagement with other genres, such as police buddy movies (#5–7) and vampire fiction (#31–33). Transmetropolitan (Ellis and Robertson, 1997–2002) uses science-fiction as its main generic frame,

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but also includes recognizable tropes from 1970s political thrillers and from New Journalism. It should be stressed that this approach to genericity results from the singular place of the label in the comics world; it was in part inherited from previous British comics,14 but should also be understood in the context of a broader shift in popular culture, in which Hollywood genre films, for instance, prominently displayed a “sophisticated hyperconsciousness concerning not just narrative formulae, but the condition of their own circulation and reception in the present.”15 What I described above as the appeal of the known partly explains this prominence of genre. The series originally published within the label were previously part of DC’s shared fictional universe and partook in the publisher’s take on superheroes through crossovers and cameos. Most of them also functioned within the horror genre to a large extent, at a time when the stigma of the 1954 hearings was finally wearing off. Similarly, though it was later incorporated into Vertigo, Transmetropolitan was originally part of a dedicated science-fiction label, Helix. In all of these cases, generic affiliation worked to mitigate commercial risks. The creators of these series did not refuse genres, nor did they deny their usefulness. However, they were encouraged, by a logic of imitation of Alan Moore’s narrative strategies, and by a specific institutional context to play with genres in addition to operating within them. In Vertigo books, well-delineated genre references function as powerful intertextual nodes, which make it possible to conjure an entire vista of preconstructed situations, characters and narrative structures. These encapsulated cultural scripts make for efficient storytelling, in that concise references allow the creators not to reiterate expected elements in full and “character prototypes can be evoked by shorthand.”16 Some of these generic references are fleeting and, as per Gaiman, serve a mere “spice” within the typically rich intertextual brew of Vertigo series. Frequently, however, the generic shifts serve to generate a form of narrative trompe l’oeil, in which the backstory is entirely constructed by the reader on the basis of preexisting discourses. Genre theorists, from Rick Altman to Matthieu Letourneux, have argued that to read a work of fiction as a genre work is to compare it to a personal genre encyclopedia, a repertoire of previous knowledge about that genre, which defines the vraisemblance, generates expectations and makes it possible to anticipate certain outcomes, and to measure meaningful deviations. This encyclopedia is of course also available to the creators, to play with, enrich, confirm or renew. The creation of genre-based

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trompe l’oeil relies on the existence of this encyclopedia, which is convoked in its entirety through carefully underlined moments and made meaningful by a context of publication in which rampant intertextuality was the norm. By calling attention to these moments, the narrative makes use of the reader’s knowledge—as he was writing Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis fondly noted that comics creators “address a relatively small and relatively literate audience”17 —and ability to fill the gap, while the narrative itself provides minimal engagement with the genre or its encyclopedia. In the case of Preacher, the turn toward southern gothic horror, in the “All in the family” narrative arc (#8–12), offers an example of this mechanism and makes it possible to understand how the series differ from previous western hybrids.18 Up to that point, Preacher had been introduced as a contemporary western-horror hybrid, in the comics itself, but also in Garth Ennis’s long postface to the first issue. The abrupt introduction of the main protagonist’s degenerate family is accomplished through overtly clichéd representations of gothic southern fiction, often presented in arresting splash pages, which marks a disruption of the established readerly contracts.19 Though some antagonists do receive a backstory, the main villain of this arc, Grandma L’Angelle, is left with no hint of a past other than the generic encyclopedia associated with the many incarnations of the southern belle. The narrative’s embrace of the horror mode implicitly promises a grisly outcome for Jesse Custer, the main protagonist, who cannot possibly play the role of the “final girl,” the expected lone survivor in these narratives. However, in #12, as he is about to confront his childhood nemesis, Custer renounces the use of his own supernatural power and agrees to settle their dispute through a fistfight. The abrupt return to a semantic marker of western—the fair duel—forces readers to adjust their expectations regarding the outcome of arc from one panel to the next, as in this genre, Custer, the endearing outcast, is fully expected to survive. These abrupt reversals mean that southern gothic horror is used but never fully embraced: It is simultaneously employed and observed. In a text describing the place of genre in alternative comics, art scholar Doug Singsen defines this practice of leaving “undigested fragments” of genres as “genre-splicing,” which he contrasts with “genre-blending,” in which preexisting generic elements may be recognizable but function in a mostly integrated manner.20 The Vertigo ethos is commonly read as a form of postmodernism, slippery as the label may be, in which textuality and by extension genericity

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become the object of the comics, in a series of distanced relationships ranging from parody to literary history.21 Popular genres are arguably more central to this metatextual engagement than literature, since, as demonstrated by Isabelle Licari-Guillaume, not all Vertigo’s readers could be expected to be familiar with pointed literary references, which were often elucidated through exposition by the writers.22 As in Gaiman’s quote, the genres served as a backbone, as a commercially efficient structure for the work, and simultaneously as external objects, potential references to be worked in and connected with other intertextual and architextual citations. These works, which fit within a broader “revisionist” ethos,23 call attention to the history of the modes and references they employ. They also purport to uncover hidden connections and cultural references usually kept apart by the varying degrees of cultural legitimacy of the worked they originally appeared in. This is apparent in a number of Vertigo and proto-Vertigo works, from the conflation of horror comics hosts and of the Greek Parcae in Sandman, to the religious allegorical reading of the Wile E. Coyote cartoons in Animal Man (as discussed in the conclusion to Chapter 3). These idiosyncratic associations serve as alternative maps of popular and non-popular genres: While publisher-mandated crossovers are used to affirm and consolidate genre identity, these comics create or uncover unexpected architexts, which question existing generic mappings. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo have described this originality with and within genre fiction as “the apex of the canon as defined by participants in traditional comics fandom,”24 while also pointing out that the literary and metafictional ambitions on display in these comics is only elevated in relation to the relative unsophistication of most of what is produced in comic books: “even Gaiman, hailed as the most literary of comic book writers, is in prose merely a writer of popular genre fiction.”25 However, as Doug Singsen helpfully notes, genre-splicing is not limited to these comics, described by Beaty and Woo as “middlebrow.” From Charles Burns to Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman, some of the most celebrated alternative cartoonists resort to this practice “as a vehicle for self-reflexivity, thematic development, narrative pleasure [or] as a monkey wrench for the disruption of generic norms.”26 Singsen further suggests that the ubiquity of genre-splicing disproves teleological narratives of comics outgrowing popular genres and reveals the fragility of the social construction of “mainstream” and “alternative” comics as two different fields.27

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This is an important observation, for although Vertigo comics as well as the titles mentioned by Singsen (from Love and Rockets to Maus ) foreground the juxtaposition and confrontation of their generic strands, the use of explicit, affect-producing genre juxtapositions has long been a strategy in popular comic books. Vertigo titles may call attention to their generic playfulness, as a gesture toward their “mature” readers and in the context of a redefinition of authorship and cultural worth in comics publishing, but a more utilitarian approach to genre-splicing is to be found in many comics located outside this legitimate fringe. Rick Altman underlines in Film/Genre that in Hollywood cinema, multi-layered genre mixing is “virtually obligatory”28 —his definition includes both Singsen’s genre-splicing and genre-blending—and the popular sound film serials of the 1940s, with their many ties to comics, provide abundant examples of playful hybridity much earlier in the twentieth century.29 By virtue of their restricted and increasingly homogeneous readership, comic books after the 1950s have not shown the inclination to appeal to the widest possible audience to the same extent as popular cinema. Nevertheless, a wide range of distinctly “average” comics produced after the decline of the multi-genre anthology format include cases of genre-splicing. These typically have no metaleptic purpose but serve to accommodate a diverse audience (the Hollywood model), to adjust expectations in the middle of the story, or both. Unsurprisingly, this is especially apparent in comic books with an expected crossover audience, in terms of race, age or gender. The original Luke Cage, Hero for Hire (Marvel comics, 1972–1973) articulates superhero fiction and blaxploitation30 not only through a narrative blend but through distinct generic shifts within the narrative. Similarly, in superhero series headlined by heroines, the romance comics genre is frequently invoked and attributed a specific space—a few pages for instance—before the narrative shifts to the superhero mode. Dazzler (Marvel Comics, 1981–1986), featuring a female mutant with music-based superpowers, is such a series. In Dazzler #13 (Fingeroth and Springer, March 1982), the opening pages draw strictly from the semantic and syntactic elements of romantic comics: They foreground fashion, sentiment (with abundant thought bubbles), tears in close-up and the difficulty of relationships. Midway through the issue, in the final panel of a two-page spread, the generic shift is dramatized, with a caption warning the reader: “She is tense […], as if waiting for something terrible to happen” (Fig. 6.1).

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Fig. 6.1 Danny Fingeroth, Frank Springer, Dazzler #13 (Marvel Comics, March 1982), pp. 9 and 16

Just after the page-break, the heroine is taken from her bed by costumed villains, and the genre signifiers change abruptly: Dazzler’s costume becomes noticeably skimpier (her prison vest now barely covers her breasts), thought bubbles all but disappear, and the entire scene revolves around a physical confrontation in an abstracted prison room. In addition to genre-splicing, the episode offers an instance of genre-blending, by aligning the superhero fight scene with the sexualized physical confrontation of the infamous women-in-prison films, which may charitably be read as a nod to the “glimpses into realms of female empowerment” the genre is sometimes said to offer.31 In this example, no less than in Preacher, generic breaks are deliberate and visible. Romance and superhero fiction do not blend as much as they succeed each other, shifting expectations for each segment of the

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story and creating the “alternately harmonious and clashing combinations” described by Singsen. As a matter of fact, one of the readers writing about this episode registered his pleasurable shock at the reframing of his expectations, in terms of genre and gender: This was, so far, the best issue in Dazzler’s career. It had its share of action (beautifully handled, I might add), but it was the characterization that got me. Alison [Dazzler] was hurt and I hurt with her – and I’m a guy! (Reggie Smith, letter column to #18; emphasis in the original)

As in the more overtly metafictional series, genres serve as intertextual building blocks, building on shared cultural memories to heighten and expand upon the experience presented in the story.

Cultural Memories The efficiency of the narrative and structural strategies described above rest on the existence of a shared culture, of a shared generic encyclopedia. As a result, they are also willfully open to potential misreadings, especially when read out of context. For instance, a modern reader might easily see in Dazzler’s empathic tears a reference to Roy Lichtenstein’s reconstructions more than to the romance conventions which inspired them. Of course, it is entirely plausible these Lichtenstein images also served to elevate the importance of the tears-in-close-up motif in romance hybrids in the 1970s and 1980s. The role of these historically and culturally contingent interpretive communities is perhaps best exemplified by the place afforded to romance in Marvel’s more recent Hawkeye, as written by Matt Fraction (2012– 2015). Issue 8 of the series makes extensive use of romance comics in its graphic design, from the title to prominent red hearts, to the insertion of four fake romance comic book covers throughout the series (their cover prices—between 10 and 20 cents—locate them between 1947 and 1970, the heyday of the genre). The full-page fake covers, drawn by Annie Wu (Fig. 6.2), serve as ironical comments on situations in the main narrative, and as fairly convincing affectionate pastiches: for instance, all but one use thought balloons, a now quaint device which appears nowhere else in the issue. The sporadic signs of romance—most prominently the heart motif—here function as ornaments, as one mode of graphic presentation in a series often praised for its bold design choices. The generic

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Fig. 6.2 Matt Fraction, Annie Wu, Hawkeye #8 (Marvel Comics, April 2013), p. 8

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sequence which was operative in Dazzler in 1982 (and in many Marvel comics of the previous decade) is replaced by an engagement with some of the salient surface qualities of the romance, a genre now thoroughly construed as a historical artifact and reduced to a playful register.32 Hawkeye #8 calls attention to the sheen of romance, but not to the social function the genre may have had. However, because genres are the product of shared cultural memories, their signifiers can also be used within contemporary comics precisely to evoke these social functions, and the context in which the genre is or was traditionally used. Most of the writers for Vertigo were British, yet they used genres closely associated with the American experience, from horror comics (described and decried as American products in Great Britain33 ) to western and superheroes. As Isabelle Licari-Guillaume put it: “Vertigo’s America is a simulacrum: it is evoked via the representation of elements encoding Americanness (that is, whose referent is to be found in a shared cultural repertoire).”34 Contemporary graphic novelists have made extensive use of this possibility of using genre to trigger cultural memories, often combining generic evocations with an attention to the materiality of comics production. In Dan Clowes’s David Boring (2000, originally serialized 1998– 2000), for instance, isolated superhero panels from The Yellow Streak Annual, an intradiegetic comic book created by the eponymous protagonist’s father in 1968, serve as a puzzle throughout the narrative. These panels are reproduced in color, with Benday dots, as opposed to the gray tones of the framing story, most frequently feature archetypal superhero images, and are accompanied by David Boring’s commentaries, underlining their hermeneutic potential (“I strain to wring meaning from these disembodied frames,” 64 pn. 4). In the diegesis but also outside of it, these panels point to the disappearance of the users of this historically specific version of the superhero genre (Yellow Streak is supposed to be an anthology, but most of the reproduced panels come from the titular character’s story). Early in the narrative David Boring explains that he reads his Yellow Streak “very closely, with an eye for uncanny parallels and traces of [his] father” (45), guiding the reader through the process of reverse-engineering the lived discourses from their reified outcome. Though David Boring presents this quest as an aporia and a highly subjective endeavor, the graphic novel’s structure rests on the idea that genres can also serve as a metonymy for their users. In this case, these users are projections of Clowes himself, who based David’s Father on himself and intended his readers to experience comics the way he did when he was a

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child (he was born in 1961, seven years before the date he sets for the Yellow Streak Annual ): “As a child, I was so haunted by certain images in the comics that I had, that I would go into fits of depression/crying etc. for days based on a single panel… My dream is to…be able to inflict the same sort of thing on my reader.”35 Clowes here refers to a singular experience, but by using a recognizable genre, he inscribes it into a broader and looser pattern of reading experiences. Though genres are not the only device enabling creators to tap into broad cultural memories— Christopher Pizzino has shown that a single evocative panel can achieve similar results36 —it appears to be an efficient one, inasmuch as it evokes a range of texts rather than a single intertext.

Cultural Hierarchies In his reading of David Boring , Isaac Cates further suggests that: “David’s inability to interpret the fragments […] seems to comment on the problem of the graphic-novel genre as well as his own personal situation.”37 The problem, in this case, is the mortifying historical weight of the superhero genre, presented in the narrative, as in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, through the figure of the missing and potentially embarrassing father. Creators and publishers of genre works in comics have long been keenly aware of the intersection between genre and cultural distinction, in part because of the uncertain status of comics in general, up to a recent date. To a certain extent, genre has functioned since the advent of mass literacy as a stigma bearing on all of popular culture. From Sainte Beuve’s condemnation of “industrial literature” in the nineteenth century to the alarm over “standardized” kitsch in the writing of Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald a century later, the specter of the formula and mass-produced culture has served as the antithesis to elite culture.38 Genres have been commonly used by contemporary graphic novelists precisely as a way to comment on these cultural hierarchies, either to emphasize their own cultural capital, as Clowes appears to be doing, albeit ambiguously in David Boring , or to react against these very cultural hierarchies. In Arresting Development, Christopher Pizzino makes a strong case that a creator like Charles Burns—who was an early contributor to Mouly and Spiegelman’s highbrow magazine RAW, and is among the most celebrated North American comics creators—consistently uses popular genres and especially horror “to articulate not only the medium’s

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subordinate cultural position but also the tensions inherent in any system of cultural inequity.”39 The interviews quoted by Pizzino make it clear that Burns is not interested in the best examples of the genre, but in the average, the typical, the prototypes, precisely because his aim is not to bolster singular creators or singular works, but comics as popular art. This use of genre as a cultural statement is not limited to individual authors. Image Comics’s willingness to publish and sometimes resuscitate popular genres—from romance comics (Twisted Romance, 2018) to women-in-prison (Bitch Planet, 2014–2017)—reflects an investment in the continuing relevance of the popular, though the publisher also occasionally embrace the logic of cultural distinction when republishing these series in book format.40 Analyzing the output of alternative comics publisher Study Group Comic Book, Rob Clough similarly emphasizes the centrality of genre in its “publishing mission,”41 even though the publisher describes itself on its Web site as a “Publisher of Fine Comic Book Type Objects,” a motto congruent with the emphasis on materiality and cultural distinction at work among contemporary graphic novelists. In both cases, the open embrace of genres should be read in the context of the dominance of branded content in contemporary comic book publishing, not only at Marvel and DC but also among smaller publishers, such as Dark Horse, BOOM! or IDW. While the two main comic book publishers work on a few genre-defining mega-franchises, the smaller ones exploit a smattering of licenses and tie-ins, whose belonging to a genre is clearly less defining than their status as adaptations or transmedia extensions. Foregrounding genre, always with a “twist,” is thus a nostalgia-tinged strategy of differentiation in the market—cultural memories parlayed into cultural distinction—as well as a potential statement about the value of the popular.

Conclusion Genres thus serve as a formula or recipe for producers, along with many other devices of seriality, as a way to mitigate the risks of an economy of prototype by inscribing distinct cultural objects into larger architexts. These uses do not discourage generic innovation, nor do they prevent genre hybridity, but they rely on the internalization of these generic parameters both in the conception of the work and in its distribution. Additionally, genres function as discrete and combinable building blocks at the narrative level, in a practice which I have described as

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“genre-splicing,” following Daniel Singsen. These undigested narrative blocks, framed by the work’s ostensible genres, can be combined to produce metaleptic effects, as in the example of Vertigo, but they can also be used as efficient tools to shape the comics’ narrative and affective economy. Finally, these spliced genres can serve as metonymies for the social relations and situations with which they are associated—whether that association is historically accurate or merely a shared assumption among contemporary creators and readers. Genre markers can then create connections to specific cultural memories or specific cultural hierarchies, by embracing textual markers as the sedimented traces of existing discourses.

Notes 1. Pascal Lefèvre, “Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences,” SubStance 40, no. 124 (2011): 15–16. 2. Bryan Hibbs, “Tilting at Windmills #274: Looking at Bookscan for 2018,” The Beat, May 17, 2019, https://www.comicsbeat.com/tiltingat-windmills-274-looking-at-bookscan-for-2018/. 3. Laurent Creton, Économie du cinéma perspectives stratégiques (Paris: A. Colin, 2014). 4. Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book (Chicago Review Press, 2004), 215. 5. Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à La Chaîne : Littératures Sérielles et Culture Médiatique, Poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2017), 250. 6. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 59. 7. Quoted in Isabelle Licari-Guillaume, Vertigo’s British Invasion: La Revitalisation Par Les Scénaristes Britanniques Des Comic Books Grand Public Aux États-Unis (1983–2013) (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, 2017), 288. 8. Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2010), 104. 9. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 58. 10. Beaty and Woo, 56n2. 11. Licari-Guillaume, “Vertigo,” 188–90; Christophe Dony, “The Rewriting Ethos of the Vertigo Imprint: Critical Perspectives on Memory-Making and Canon Formation in the American Comics Field,” Comicalités. Études de culture graphique, April 18, 2014, n1, http://comicalites.revues.org/ 1918. 12. Licari-Guillaume, “Vertigo,” 191–93; Julia Round, Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (McFarland, 2014), 49.

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13. Niall Kitson, “Rebel Yells: Genre Hybridity and Irishness in Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon’s Preacher,” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, no. 2 (2007): 72–84; Nicolas Labarre, “Meat Fiction and Burning Western Light: The South in Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher,” in Comics and the U.S. South, ed. Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 242–65. 14. Jochen Ecke, The British Comic Book Invasion: Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and the Evolution of the American Style, Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 64 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2019), 111–15. 15. Jim Collins, “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity: Chapter,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Collins, vol. AFI film readers (New York: Routledge, 1993), 247, http://ezproxy.lib.le.ac.uk/login?url=http://lib.myilibrary. com?id=395546. 16. Ecke, The British Comic Book Invasion, 240. 17. Mark Salisbury, Writers on Comics Scriptwriting (New York: Titan Books, 1999), 69. 18. Such as DC’s own Weird Western Tales (1972–1980), numerous stories in the Warren horror magazines or, in a different combination, the various western-romance comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s (Cowgirl Romances, Cowboy Love, Frontier Romance, etc.). 19. Labarre, “Meat Fiction,” 250–52. 20. Doug Singsen, “An Alternative by Any Other Name: Genre-Splicing and Mainstream Genres in Alternative Comics,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5, no. 2 (April 3, 2014): 174, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 21504857.2013.871306. 21. For a study of these relationships with an emphasis on genre and genre reversals, see Christina Meyer, “Un/Taming the Beast, or Graphic Novels (Re)Considered,” in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and JanNoël Thon, Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory 37 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 271–99. On Vertigo as a postmodern endeavor, see Julia Round, “‘Is This a Book?’ DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s,” in The Rise of the American Comics Artist, ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 14–30; Chris Murray, “Signals from Airstrip One: The British Invasion of Mainstream American Comics,” in The Rise of the American Comics Artist, ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 31–45. 22. Licari-Guillaume, “Vertigo,” 220–26. 23. For an extended and critical discussions of this trend, see Marc Singer, Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies, 1st ed,

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24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 59–93. Beaty and Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time, 60. Beaty and Woo, 64. In Breaking the Frames, Marc Singer echoes this points and offers a more scathing discussion of the overvaluation of metafictional strategies in the comics world and especially in comics scholarship. Singer, Breaking the Frames, 72–73. Singsen, “An Alternative by Any Other Name,” 175. Singsen, 173. For a broader discussion of these alternatives, see Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005); Christophe Dony, Tanguy Habrand, and Gert Meesters, eds., La bande dessinée en dissidence: alternative, indépendance, auto-édition=Comics in dissent, ACME 1 (Liège: Presses universitaire de Liège, 2014). Altman, Film/Genre, 132. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 250. Jeffrey A. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 22, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy. u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/stable/j.ctt2tv7pv. S. D. Walters, “Caged Heat: The (R)Evolution of Women-in-Prison Films,” in Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies, ed. Martha McCaughey and Neal King, 1st ed (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 107. The use of cultural memory as historical register in discussed in more details in Simon Grennan, “Register in the Guise of Genre: Instrumental Adaptation in the Early Comics of Grennan & Sperandio,” Studies in Comics 4, no. 1 (2013): 75–88, https://doi.org/10.1386/stic.4.1.75_1. Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London: Pluto Press, 1984). Licari-Guillaume, “Vertigo,” 260 (my translation). Quoted in Ken Parille, “A Re-Reader’s Guide Do Daniel Clowes’s David Boring,” in The Best American Comics Criticism, ed. Ben Schwartz (Fantagraphics Books, 2010), 197. Christopher Pizzino, “Comics History and the Question of Delinquency: The Case of Criminal,” in Comics Memory: Archives and Styles, ed. Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, Imprint Springer, 2018), 168–85. Isaac Cates, “On the Literary Use of Superheroes; or, Batman and Superman Fistfight in Heaven,” American Literature 83, no. 4 (January 1, 2011): 850, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1437234.

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38. Sainte-Beuve, “De La Littérature Industrielle,” Revue Des Deux Mondes 19 (1839): 675–91; Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America., ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1957), 61. 39. Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, 1st ed, The World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 162. 40. Nicolas Labarre, “Ody-C, Homère Re-Genré, Décalé, Excentré,” Leaves, 2018, 37–38, https://doi.org/10.21412/leaves_0609. 41. Rob Clough, “Rediscovering Genre: Study Group Comics,” The Comics Journal, May 26, 2017, http://www.tcj.com/rediscovering-genre-studygroup-comics/.

CHAPTER 7

The Uses of Genre: Generic Discourses Among Producing Fans

Abstract This chapter examines the role of genres in online amateur comics. After a brief historical overview, it uses a survey of four major platforms on which amateur comics producers can post their work (DeviantArt, Tumblr, Reddit, ImgUR) to chart the form and nature of the generic discourses to be found on these sites; while genres are present in all four cases, they play a limited role, which can be partly explained by the absence of a fixed context of consumption for digital content. The chapter also examines the distinction between hashtags and genres, even in cases in which the hashtags include traditional generic labels. Keywords Amateur · Hashtag · Fandom

Producing fans, who bridge the gap between producers and readers of comics, occupy a privileged place in fan studies and indeed, in comics fandom. Though Matt Hills caution against the “moral dualism” of constituting them as “good” fans, as opposed to passive consumers,1 their public display of cultural agency and advocacy warrants specific attention when dealing with the discursive negotiation of genres. The next chapter will examine the way these active fans produce explicit critical discourses, and in the course of this “cultural activism,”2 challenge the producers’ hold on the definition of interpretive strategies for comics. In this chapter, I shall examine more specifically the way contemporary producing fans © The Author(s) 2020 N. Labarre, Understanding Genres in Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43554-7_7

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make use of genres to frame their own works, for themselves and for their readers. In both cases, I shall focus on contemporary developments more than historical examples, for reasons having to do with the availability of the objects but also with the sense that relationships to comics genres among fans and readers may be undergoing a significant shift in the age of the Internet, while such a historical rupture was less perceptible in the case of producers in the previous chapters.

Amateurs? The porosity between the comics fandom and industry professionals has often been noted by comics historians. In fact, starting with the 3rd generation of comic book creators, in the 1960s and 1970s, participation in fandom, and fanzines in particular, served as a privileged entry point in the comic book industry. In recent years, the increased availability of image-sharing tools online has turned what would once have been private portfolios in public showcases and made it possible to survey a larger proportion of this amateur comics-making. Whereas ama-strips, the 1960s name for “fanzines made up, in whole or in part, of comics produced by fans,”3 circulated only among other dedicated fans, who had entered a specific social network (through recommendation, letter columns, ads, etc.), online distribution has also allowed amateurs to bypass the commercial and material hurdle of physical distribution, by allowing instantaneous and cost-free distribution to a potentially unlimited audience, at least within the constraints of the contemporary attention economy. I am deliberately shifting from “fan” to “amateur” here to refer to a nonprofessional status, but also to suggest that while the creators of these comics are probably fans, they may not be fans of comics, as suggested by the large number of amateur comics produced around transmedia franchises (Pokémon, My Little Pony, Super Smash Bros, the Warrior book series, etc.). Although there have been a number of studies of online comics, in Europe and elsewhere,4 the role of genres in these comics has yet to be investigated, especially in the case of amateur productions. One reason to study these amateur productions is to consider them as “a minor league” for publishers,5 a public space in which future professionals are trained and socialized, integrating skills and norms which they will later bring to the industry. These social norms, including genres, do not appear ex nihilo but are constituted on the basis of existing practices and outlooks, among other fans and in the industry. They can

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be embraced or tweaked but are unlikely to be rejected outright by aspiring professionals. This leads to the hypothesis that fan creators may use genres as an altered reflection of institutionalized generic practices and as a token of a shared culture. However, as was already the case in the 1960s, not all amateur artists aspire to be professionals, either because they do not have the requisite level of craftsmanship or because they cannot or will not commit to a career in the industry. In this case, genres are likely to take up different functions. One may be a strategy of compensation, whereby an unaccomplished work is replaced in a familiar architext, in the hope that the reference will elucidate or strengthen the purpose of the work. Genres may also allow these creators to highlight the precise nature of their idiosyncratic stances within the field of comics, by providing a familiar context in which deviations become more readily apparent; in that case, the relation to genre is more adversarial and parallels the author’s own stance regarding the industry. Whereas the fan-as-future professional position is likely to reinforce existing genres through reiteration with minor alterations, the fan-as-amateur outlook would thus suggest a more challenging approach to existing discursive formations. In both cases, however, genres function among fans in ways analogous to their roles in the broader field of comics: They offer creators blueprints, to work with or against, they help label the works to facilitate their distribution and they provide horizons of expectations for potential readers, seeking one type of content rather than another. This opposition between amateurs and potential professionals should be understood not as an absolute distinction, but in terms of commitment and self-image.6 Aspiring to turn comics creation into a professional endeavor does imply committing to a regular schedule of production, but as I can attest, producing one page a week can be fully conceived as a hobby. Absent the symbolic validation of having a printed book published by a major house, audience-based ad revenues, and the sale of ancillary merchandise create a wide spectrum and no clear threshold between a modestly remunerative hobby and a professional occupation. Keeping in mind this indeterminacy, I have tried as far as possible to focus firmly on the amateur end of this spectrum. This meant in particular focusing on non-proprietary Web sites with free hosting, as opposed to personal Web sites and blogs, platforms that require a significant financial or temporal investment.

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Method and Platforms Any attempt to identify the most significant platforms for fan-made comics is fraught with uncertainties since the available measures of audience and of engagement provide little information regarding their respective roles in the comics field. Excluding content aggregators, some of the largest and more visible spaces in which amateur comics can be found are the image hosting services DeviantArt (established 2000), ImgUR (2009), microblogging social network Tumblr (2007) and discussion Web site Reddit (2005). A comprehensive survey of these platforms appears nearly impossible since hundreds of new works are published every day, in a variety of forms, presenting or discussing genres in a variety of ways. I have chosen to sample each of these sites and to conduct a systematic reading of 100 consecutive comics on each of these.7 In addition to observing institutionalized textual genre markers in the comics themselves (“visible” genres), I have paid specific attention to the generic framing provided by the authors or by their readers (“explicit” genres).8 In the final row of the table, “fanart & intertext” refers to works in which an intertextual reference is central, either because the work is set in an already-existing fictional universe or because the story hinges on the knowledge of a previous text. In nearly all cases, these references were explicit.9 The process is imperfect—individual encoding choices may be debated, and it is possible that some comics in the corpus were in fact reposted by someone other than the authors—but this sampling does provide an overview of the role played by genre (Table 7.1). Table 7.1 Use of genres in the paratext of amateur comics on DeviantArt, Reddit, ImgUR and Tumblr

Comics surveyed Explicit institutionalized genre Visible institutionalized genre Fanart & intertext

Total

%

DeviantArt Reddit

ImgUR

400

100

100

100

32

8

15

0–2

132

33

39

35

31

27

85

21

32

11

13

29

100 7–15 (incl. #animals or not)

Tumblr 100 6

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The first observation here is the relative rarity of explicit genre markers—in the title, in the tags or in commentaries—especially when taking into account the fact that over a third of the comics studied visibly belong to an institutionalized genre. “Visibly” in this case refers to the presence of distinct semantic or syntactic elements associated with such a genre; a robot, an alien, a cowboy, a talking animal or a romantic scene all led the work to be coded in this category. Among these, superheroes are somewhat surprisingly scarce (N = 13, or 3% of all comics, mostly as parody), while the dominant genre by far is that of anthropomorphic animals, though deployed in a wide variety of styles and intent (N = 64, or 16% of all comics). DeviantArt, in particular, features numerous works tied to the “furry fandom,” whose members display an interest in anthropomorphic animals as part of their social identity. These works are connected to the comics/animated cartoon genre of the funny animals at a remove since the animated cartoons inspired the fandom, which has since become its own discourse. Many comics centered on licensed characters, in particular Pokémon, are actually closer to traditional funny animal comics, but they do so by way of a licensed property (and are counted as such in the table). The table is also slightly misleading, however, in concealing the homogeneity of the corpus under consideration when it comes to tone and, to a lesser extent, to form. A recurring tag suggests that the works are “funny,” but actually, nearly all the non-erotic works surveyed are meant to be humorous and somewhat absurdist. This all-encompassing tone works to negate the value of the generic markers on display, be they aliens, monsters or talking animals. With the possible exception of talking animals, these vestigial generic markers imbued with irony are by far the most frequent in the corpus. They function as minimal synecdoches, or basic index to unused genre encyclopedias. This superficially resembles the instances of genre-splicing described in Chapter 6, and in particular the way some Vertigo series used similar minimal markers, inviting the readers to supply an intertextual backstory to certain characters and elements. However, the Vertigo series played on narrative contrasts, and frequently dramatized these splices visually, to call attention to their significance. By contrast, in the digital comics examined, these minimal genre markers are mostly understated and often entirely distinct from the narrative economy of the joke being told. Part of the explanation for this reduction lies in the generalization of irony and self-awareness within communities in which knowledgeability and detachment are important social markers. Another is to be found in

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the fact that these comics are conceived as autonomous modular elements: They are short, self-contained, ready to be reposted in various places (a limited number of works appeared simultaneously on the different platforms under consideration). While they can be read as a series on the sites where I accessed them, they are also likely to appear in isolation on a Twitter, Facebook or Instagram account, along with a variety of other content. In other words, they do not necessarily work as a series, do not belong to a fixed architext, and in the context of a convergent media environment,10 they may be consumed in a context in which they are identified more by their function and time of consumption—humor in a short burst—than by the specific aesthetic devices they employ. To put it differently, because they can be repurposed and delocalized, the context of their reception is fluid and they cannot rely on medium-specific versions of genres, but only on transmedial approximations thereof. Nevertheless, in a significant minority of cases—about 10%—genres do function in ways that align with what I have been describing so far in this book. Most of these examples, though not all of them, can be found within serialized narratives. This does not mean that these amateur comics merely reproduced existing genre dynamics, and they display significant differences in the mapping and respective importance of genres compared to the rest of comics publishing: On these platforms, “fantasy” comics exist mostly in relation to role-playing games and superheroes are less numerous than anthropomorphic animals for instance. The labels may also differ slightly: Erotic comics are more commonly designated as “sexy” (on the platforms which still allow them), autobiographic comics are “slice of life,” etc. These minor but entrenched differences confirm the existence of one or several discursive communities, for whom inherited institutionalized genres are useful but not unsurpassable. Another key difference derives from the plurality of labeling enabled and encouraged by hashtags, even in cases in which these legacy genres are used.

Hashtags and Genres With only a handful of exceptions, all the cases of “explicit institutionalized genre” in Table 7.1 are labeled through the use of hashtags. Of the four platforms under study, only Reddit does not use them systematically, and the near absence of genres there is not coincidental. This connection has been explored by Alice Daer, Rebecca Hoffman and Seth

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Goodman, who point to the similitudes between hashtags and rhetorical genres, as complex meaning-making or meaning-inflecting devices.11 Rhetorical genres are distinct from popular genres but the two theoretical fields have been in dialogue at least since Carolyn Miller’s seminal “Genre as Social Action” and there are significant commonalities between the two approaches12 : Similarly, hashtags may espouse the roles of popular genre labels, albeit with key pragmatic differences. Hashtags are a bottom-up device, originally invented by users as a way to organize content and to make it possible to search and curate the continuous flow of social networks. They may serve a variety of functions, in relation to the content they label, from redundancy to ironic counterpoint, but they are fundamentally category-making tools and architext enablers. As such, they can point to institutionalized genres, either through traditional denominations, such as #horror, or through a palette of closely related terms, such as #anthro (short for anthropomorphic animals), #furries and #furry (all found among the 47 tags for “The Bloats” p. 4, by Lorstormcaller, on DeviantArt). From a functional standpoint, #horror is very close to an explicit declaration of genre by the author of the work, framing the way the work was created and is meant to be consumed, and in this case warning off readers who may object to such material. In the logic of self-publication, it is not surprising that the author should take up some of the uses of genre typical of publishers or retailers for commercial comics. Hashtags thus resemble genres and sometimes overlap with them. Nevertheless, as machine-mediated indexes of content in a convergent media environment, they are ontologically and functionally different from genre labels. Firstly, since they function across media, they are removed from any medium-specific genre formation. A search for #romance or #horror on any of the platforms studied here returns a wide variety of cultural artifacts, including single images, sketches, animated GIFs and text reviews. Hashtags are always assigned in a specific context, but the very nature of the digital documents they index makes this context contingent. Second, hashtags are unidirectional and stable. I have argued that genres are negotiated and hesitant, but categories defined by hashtags are absolute and rigid; even “mistakes,” such as typos, or the creation of new categories overlapping with existing ones,13 form their own machinevalidated subgroup. A search for #romance and #comics on DeviantArt returns exactly 9116 documents as of this writing, with no porosity whatsoever with posts using similar labels (#romantic and #comics, for

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instance). The platform may suggest a related hashtag to search for, but again, this will result in one absolute user-defined category. The machinebased mediation means that user-defined categories will not be rethought or adapted by gatekeepers, such as librarians, critics or retailers unless they violate some boundaries regarding permissible content of the platforms. These categories are thus more robust than traditional peritexts because they constitute a shared procedure between the creators, the platforms and the users, in which the bricolage that is central to popular genres has no place. Third, and as a consequence of this rigidity, hashtags invite proliferation, whereas genres work best through limitation. Traditional genres allow for overlaps, ambiguities and multiple affiliations, but their function is to exclude as much as they include. In a physical environment, a single copy of a book can only occupy one place on a shelf, and thus has to belong to one category rather than another—Image Comics include their books in several genres at once on their Web site, but only mention one on the back cover of the trade paperbacks they publish. Taxonomical categories are not strictly exclusive, but they favor clear affiliations. More broadly, genres serve to define the salient elements of a given work, with the assumption that there will be countercurrents, panels or sentences which could easily evoke other genres. When a work is sold or traded, genres serve as promises or guarantees regarding a yet to be consumed content. By contrast, on these platforms and in this format, the moment of discovery coincides with the moment of consumption, and tags serve as pathways to this discovery rather than as promises. The discovered work then serves as a gateway to other modes of consumptions, inviting the reader to discover other works by the same author for instance: All four platforms under study offer this two-step logic. The system and the platforms themselves, which rely on generating traffic, thus incentivize extensive labeling–to the point where sites edict guidelines restricting the number of tags–and offer no tangible benefits to a sparse and more carefully curated use of tags. To take one example, The Flower and the Nose is a 189-page narrative published serially on DeviantArt with a Creative Commons license, by a Deda Daniels, a film and animation professional. It is an accomplished work, presenting an ambitious narrative and one which users of the site are likely to discover out of order, perhaps in uncharacteristic passages (Fig. 7.1). Accordingly, Daniels provides a list of 11 tags to guide this discovery, which she uses for all the pages of the work: #copics, #fantasy,

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Fig. 7.1 Deda Daniels, The Flower and the Nose, p. 188, posted on DeviantArt on June 12, 2019

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#love, #markers, #romance, #romanticcomedy, #sliceoflife, #traditional, #webcomic, #comiccomics and #sliceoflifecomic. This list displays a high level of familiarity with the discursive norms of the platform—“copics” are markers and a popular tag on DeviantArt, but almost inexistent on ImgUR, for instance—but also a wish to cover multiple points of entry through overlapping labels such as love, romance and romanticcomedy. In this context, even a straightforward genre label used as a hashtag takes a different meaning than it would have, were it applied by a publisher or even a self-publisher on a traditional printed comic. Moreover, the fact that most works use numerous tags further underlines the rarity of these genre labels in amateur works. Comics genres are in use, especially in serialized works, which more closely resemble the types of narratives to be found in comic books and graphic novels, but they are not central to these online amateur communities.

Conclusion Amateur producers of comics have not discarded institutionalized genres. For many of these creators, whose form replicate or approximate contemporary publishing projects in comic books or graphic novels, genres serve as shared sets of references against which evaluation of craftsmanship and knowledgeability (subcultural capital, social capital) can be adjudicated. In numerous other cases, however, these genres are reduced to vestigial markers, which refer not so much to medium-specific versions of the genres in question but to a minimal transmedial shared culture, often used with a high degree of irony. Furthermore, this study highlights the reliance of popular online platforms on bottom-up tagging procedures and machine aggregation, which overlap with preexisting genrification mechanisms but transform them in significant ways. In particular, these tags disintermediate genres, allowing producers and readers to use non-hesitant categories. Tags, which are not hierarchized, invite producers to apply all the relevant labels to their work. They embrace the complex mix of signifiers to be found in comics (and in the making of comics) and render them all possibly significant for readers. Though this would seem to encourage and reward genre mixing, this is counterbalanced by the fact that the dominant form on these platforms is that of a sparse single-page, akin to humor comic strips or to humorous cartoons. The affordances and practices of online platforms thus appear

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to be transforming the uses and the roles of genre, a point I shall revisit in the conclusion to this book. As we shall see in the next chapter, online platforms are also transforming genres in the case of commercial comics (which may of course use tags to a certain extent) by redefining the allocation of discursive authority, or at least by creating spaces in which challenges to this allocation can be mounted.

Notes 1. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), 27–30. 2. Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2010), 257. 3. Gabilliet, 262. 4. Among the many relevant studies, see in particular: Sean Fenty, Trena Houp, and Laurie Taylor, “Webcomics: The Influence and Continuation of the Comix Revolution,” ImageTexT 1, no. 2 (2005), http://www. english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_2/group/; T. Campbell, A History of Webcomics: The Golden Age: 1993–2005 (San Antonio: Antarctic Press, 2006); Jeff Thoss, Werner Wolf, and Katharina Bantleon, “‘This Strip Doesn’t Have a Fourth Wall’: Webcomics and the Metareferential Turn,” in The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation, Studies in Intermediality (Amsterdam [etc.]: Rodopi, 2011), 551–68; Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, “Digital Comics—New Tools and Tropes,” Studies in Comics 4, no. 1 (April 1, 2013): 185–97, https://doi.org/10.1386/stic.4.1.185_1; Julien Baudry, Cases-pixels: une histoire de la BD numérique en France, Iconotextes (Tours: Presses universitaires François Rabelais, 2018). 5. Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 264. 6. On the interaction between labor, amateur work and professional occupation in comics, see Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, “Fandom and/as Labor,” Transformative Works and Cultures 15 (February 28, 2014), https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0593; Benjamin Woo, “Erasing the Lines Between Leisure and Labor: Creative Work in the Comics World,” Spectator 35, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 57–64. 7. This survey was conducted in June 2019. In each case, I have browsed works in chronological order rather than using rankings based on popularity, so as to focus on “average” objects, and I have selected only original comics (as opposed to reposts), excluding illustrations but including single-panel comics on the, admittedly subjective, basis of the presence of a narrative. I have also turned off adult filters, avoided duplicate posts and

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

limited the number of pages by a single author when these were presented in different posts. One of the unexpected results of this research has to do with the differences in use between “comic” and “comics” among amateur producers. The fact that both are used to label comics pages is in itself unsurprising, since the abstract collective “comics,” as used by Scott McCloud and in this very book, is far from ubiquitous. From a quantitative standpoint, on DeviantArt, “comics” and “comic” produce a similar number of results, whereas on ImgUR, “comics” outnumber “comic” by about a third: the two labels are thus used on the same scale, with significant overlap. However, this apparently accidental variation happens to generate meaning, as the singular and the plural each trigger its own network of associations. For instance, on Tumblr, users who tag their works with #comic usually associate it with: #art, #funny, #cute, #pokemon and #illustration. Meanwhile, the plural or abstract collective form, #comics is associated with keywords which correspond more narrowly to the traditional comics field: #marvel, #webcomic, #dc, #batman and #illustration. Similarly, on ImgUR, “#comic” is accompanied by the brief and general summary “Heroes on paper,” whereas the description for #comics, “POW! BAM! ZAP!,” refers more specifically to a clichéd version of superheroes. A possible explanation may lie in the association of the plural form with collecting and serialized narratives, therefore to the larger comics culture. The proportion of fanart varies considerably from one site to another. Complementary surveys confirm that in a number of cases, amateur comics based on licensed properties were simply not identified as comics by their authors. For instance, on Reddit, Pokémon fan comics appear in their own section, and are not commonly posted in the general “comics” forum. Graham Meikle and Sherman Young, Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life (Macmillan International Higher Education, 2011). Alice R. Daer, Rebecca Hoffman, and Seth Goodman, “Rhetorical Functions of Hashtag Forms Across Social Media Applications,” in Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on The Design of Communication CD-ROM —SIGDOC ’14 (the 32nd ACM International Conference, Colorado Springs, CO: ACM Press, 2014), 1–3, https://doi.org/ 10.1145/2666216.2666231. Amy J. Devitt, “Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre,” College English 62, no. 6 (July 2000): 696, https://doi.org/10.2307/ 379009. Bernd Leiendecker, “Of Duck Faces and Cat Beards: Why Do Selfies Need Genres?” in Exploring the Selfie: Historical, Theoretical, and Analytical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography, ed. Julia Eckel, Jens Ruchatz, and Sabine Wirth (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 199, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57949-8_9.

CHAPTER 8

The Uses of Genres: Asserting Authority

Abstract This chapter examines the role played by critics and fans in the definition of genres in comics. It argues that among the competing generic claims in the comics world, established criticism plays a weaker role than in other mass media, and that online platforms further blur the hierarchy between fans and critics. Subsequently, the chapter examines two cases in which fans have used online tools to challenge the generic claims made by comics producers, in the controversy surrounding the 9/11 issue of the Amazing Spider-Man, in 2001, and more recently, as part of the Comicsgate movement. Keywords Amateur · Hashtag · Fandom · Comicsgate

The example of the 1954 hearings described in Chapter 4 demonstrates that generic definitions can be produced and solidified outside of traditional categories of genre users, turning them into social and political controversies, not dissimilar to the perennial and eminently political questions of what counts as art or literature. More importantly, the definition of and delineation of horror were done in contradiction with the practices of publishers—which published a wider spectrum of “horrific comics” than what the subcommittee eventually identified and condemned—and presumably those of readers, who had been eagerly buying these comics.

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The dramatic example demonstrates that in comics as in other media, producers do not control genres. They are certainly the most important actors in that regards, since they get to inscribe their generic positions in the comics themselves, either in the text or in paratext, and since they control some of the devices by which series and groupings of texts can be made apparent, through labels, collections, graphic echoes, etc. However, in spite of these structural advantages, producers’ approaches to genre are not hegemonic and integrate feedback from readers, critics, and potentially other users, whose discursive claims may take a variety of forms. At the most basic level, this feedback is materialized by the economic success or lack thereof of a generically located text. Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly’s The New York Four (2007), for instance, is a coming-of-age story originally published in DC Comics’ short-lived graphic novel imprint, Minx. In line with the generic alignment of the imprint, the back cover to the volume emphasized romance and the experience of young adulthood. After the failure of Minx, the sequel to the book, The New York Five, was published in 2011 under the Vertigo imprint. This time, the blurb on the publisher’s Web site conjured a mood of urban dread, focusing on secrets, “dark places” and murky past, even though the two volumes tell a continuous story. The generic realignment followed a relocation of the title within the publisher’s line, which itself derived from commercial lack of success. Beyond this indirect influence, readers do offer explicit discursive claims, which may challenge the position of the publishers, especially when genres are new, marginal, or when the examples under discussion are removed from the prototypical works in the genre. These disputes, big and small, shed a light not only on the uses of genre but also on the power structures underlying generic claims.

Readers and Fans as Critics Writing about Hollywood cinema, Rick Altman suggests that critics are crucial users of genres, because they can highlight similarities across a broad range of cultural products, while discourses of studios have incentives to identify meaningful series only at the level of their own proprietary content.1 The situation is not replicated in the comics world since comics criticism—here understood as institutionally and rhetorically distinct from academic work—has not accrued the same institutional weight, nor the

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same visibility as in other media. For instance, the “graphic novel” section of criticism aggregator Book Marks, roughly the equivalent of Metacritic for literature, contains less than 50 entries between 2016 and 2019, while the “fantasy” section includes more than 100 entries a year. Comics criticism, even including academic efforts, remains fragmented and to a large extent incomplete, in part because the comics world is itself proliferating and deeply fragmented. Serial narratives and continuing series do not lend themselves easily to a critical evaluation, and the institutions which do focus on popular comics tend to ignore or cover only in a piecemeal fashion the rest of comics publishing. The Comics Journal , which has served as the pivotal critical publication about comics in the United States, since the late 1970s may have partially succeeded its pushing its aesthetic agenda in favor of ambitious, long-form comics, but that goal has been achieved in great part through the intervention in the field of its publishing arm, Fantagraphics. As with other media, the shift from central publications with a significant accumulated cultural capital, at least within the field, to more transient and diffuse forms of publications online appears to have further eroded the idea that comics criticism may exist as an occupation and produce discourses distinct from those of academics,2 fans and publicists— all of whom have been published in the page of The Comics Journal . Perhaps the best illustration of the shapelessness of the category of the comics critic is to be found in the tongue-in-cheek decision to “hand over” the reviews of Joe Matt’s Spent to Amazon customers, in Fantagraphics’s Best American Comics Criticism volume (2010).3 The reviews do provide short but cohesive appreciations of Joe Matt’s autobiographical work, and the joke functions because it exposes the paucity of authoritative or even audible voices in the field. As Schwartz himself acknowledges in his introduction to the volume, “in comics, the line between fan and professional (cartoonist, critic, publisher, archivist) is etched in sand.”4 While the line may be harder to cross for some of these functions, criticism is one domain in which fans and opinionated readers successfully compete for attention with loosely defined professionals. In a discussion of meaning-making in contemporary graphic novels, Christina Meyer fittingly describes fans and professionals as occupying the same position when it comes to generic claims: “fan bloggers and professional online reviewers participate in the proliferation - and consolidation - of (popular) culture knowledge and thereby also impact the development of genre awareness.”5 The emphasis on technology—for both fans and

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professionals—is striking in this assertion and acts as a reminder of the changes brought by online communication to the classification and to the hierarchy of discursive claims.

Polite Disagreements When paratexts move from the physical object of the book or of trade journals to shared online spaces, auctorial and editorial genre discourses are hardly privileged compared to other discourses; social media and other online intermediaries invite readers’ voices to intermingle with professional discourses. On an Amazon page, for instance, reader’s reviews and generic claims coexist with the publisher’s epitext, with excerpts from published reviews and with the retailer’s own taxonomical indications. The page dedicated to the first volume of Amulet (Scholastic, 2008),6 Kazu Kibuishi’s wildly successful children graphic novel series, includes a brief blurb, which contains an abundance of potentially significant keywords (“tragic,” “strange house,” “demons, robots and talking animals,” “terrifying monster”) but no explicit generic affiliation.7 Further down the page, one of the selected editorial reviews, from the Web site Kirkus Reviews, provides a more compact description, calling the book a “graphic-fantasy series.” Further down still, Amazon’s own genre-inflected taxonomy indicates that the book is included in “Children’s Spine-Chilling Horror,” “Children’s Comics & Graphic Novels (Books)” and “Children’s Fantasy & Magic Books.” Finally, the 605 customer reviews provide abundant and conflicting generic descriptions such as “fantastical family adventures” and “typical fantasy hero quest with a few shakes of steampunk,” both of which features among the commentaries ranked as most helpful by other visitors to the site. While this example points to the cacophony of genre discourses on this page, it does not reveal a conflict between the various users and appears to confirm Henry Jenkins’s statement in his seminal Textual Poachers, suggesting that disagreements among fans or between fans and producers of TV shows “occur within […] a common sense of the series’ generic placement.”8 Jenkins echoes the idea that the function of genre is to serve as a shared language, and bolsters his assessment by noting that fans are concerned with originality and distinctiveness rather than with serial approaches: “Fans speak of ‘artists’ where others can see only commercial hacks, of transcendent meanings where others find only banalities,

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of ‘quality and innovation’ where others can see only formula and convention.”9 Evidence of this tendency to celebrate authors or stories against genres can be found in the comics fandom long before the period Jenkins was writing about. In the original run of influential fanzine Alter Ego (1961– 1969), for instance, the focus was on creators and on specific characters, not on ensembles; strikingly, one of the first instances of a generic label in that publication was meant as a derogatory category, when reader Irving Glassman indicates that “stf”—short for “scientifiction”—bores him and verges on the ridiculous (#2, “Conversations”). Simultaneously, although fanzines such as Alter Ego offered “a space in which a profound interest in genre could be expressed,”10 the newly reactivated superhero genre, Alter Ego’s focus, was spared criticism and functioned as an unexamined frame of reference, further confirming Jenkins’s thesis. Stable and fully institutionalized comics genres, such as superheroes, appear unlikely to generate discord and issues of identification. By contrast, they are far more frequent about emerging genres and works produced within new or atypical publishing institutions, especially if these works also display an ostensible contemporary hyperliteracy, which encourages mashups and intertextual collage. The issue in these cases does not lie in the identification of signifiers, but in the choice of emphasizing one over the others: The Amazon page for Amulet vol. 1 does not display a conflict so much as a series of valid hypotheses, likely to be sorted out only at an ulterior date, as the graphic novel’s place in broader series (Young Adult graphic novels, Scholastic’s and Kibuishi’s outputs) becomes clearer. However, as we shall see in the following examples of The Amazing Spider-Man #36 and of Comicsgate, issues of genre definitions can become especially conflictual when they concern a genre that had the appearance of being agreed upon.

The Amazing Spider-Man After 9/11 In the wake of the September 2001 attacks, Marvel Comics, like many other publishers, put out a number of commemorative issues and miniseries explicitly designed to address the event and to celebrate the rescue teams. However, Marvel also published an issue of The Amazing SpiderMan dealing with the event, which maintained the series numbering, price point and general design. The Amazing Spider-Man vol. 2 #36 (hereafter ASM 36) came out with a black cover and describes the stunned reaction

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of Marvel’s superheroes in the ruins of the World Trade Center, while partaking in a broader discourse toward the “canonization of policemen and firemen as the ‘real heroes’.”11 While none of the other special issues generated significant controversy at the time, ASM 36 created a notable backlash, centered around the meaning of branded characters but also on the superhero genre in general. Narratively and formally (in terms of pacing, word count, etc.), this was an atypical story,12 which was nevertheless positioned as a “regular” superhero comic book: It featured a popular character, in its own continuing series, drawn and written by the title’s regular creative team, John Romita Jr. and Michael J. Straczynski, it kept the series numbering and included ads. The black cover aligned it with Art Spiegelman’s famous black on black 9/11 cover for the New Yorker but also with the crass commercialism of the black bag in which Superman v.2 #75 (1993), the climax of “the death of Superman” had been packaged. This was in other words an ambiguous object positioned, both within and without the serial logic of superhero publishing. The superhero genre proved to be an important frame to account for 9/11 in comics. Many of the short stories collected in the various anthologies at the time displayed a willingness to use the cultural heritage of the superpowered characters to cope with the shock and grief generated by the event. In the words of cartoonist Danny Donovan, in an autobiographical story published in 2002: “I feel bad transferring my anger on my childhood heroes, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”13 The reassuring patterns of the genre, its strong connection with the American century and with the metropolis all explain this temptation. In the following years, many comics creators offered alternative modes of engagement with 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror through superheroes, from counterfactual history (Ex Machina, The Ultimates vol. 2) to revenge fantasies (Frank Miller’s Holy Terror, originally conceived as a Batman story and very close to a mirror image of ASM 36). Dan Hassler-Forest famously argues in Capitalist Superheroes that echoes of 9/11 also drive the extremely successful contemporary cycle of superhero films.14 In other words, serialized superhero fiction quickly proved flexible enough to accommodate an event that famously resembled so many stories previously published in the genre. However, ASM 36 was published a mere two months after the attack, at a time when superhero stories had not yet taken to integrating afterimages of the event routinely, and in a period in which Time Magazine scornfully rejected the very idea

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that superheroes could engage with the event.15 As such, it constitutes a site of negotiation, and potential genre redefinition, prompted by an external event. A key moment in the issue has many of the Marvel villains gathered at Ground Zero, despairing at the devastation, and a close-up panel on Fantastic Four opponent Doctor Doom even shows him crying (Fig. 8.1). This sparked widely reported angry reactions from fans, who argued that this depiction ran against the usual portrayal of these characters as mass murderers, discussions framed not only in terms of Marvel’s characters but of the broader superhero genre. This disagreement was profound enough to warrant a heated response by Michael J. Straczynski when asked about the controversy in the course of a Newsarama interview:

Fig. 8.1 Michael J. Straczynski, John Romita Jr., The Amazing Spider-Man v.2 #36 (Marvel Comics, December 2001), p. 9, detail

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To which I say: move out of your mom’s basement. One’s a fictional situation; the other is a real one. If you cannot perceive the distinction, stop reading. And for god’s sake stop breeding.16

Derek Johnson, in a book chapter devoted to “fan-tagonism,” underlines the privileged position afforded to creators even in online fan forums, where they can “discipline” unruly fans by reasserting their “productive dominance.”17 Straczynski’s answer certainly illustrates this disciplining intent, and the injunction to “stop breeding” can be read as a literalized version of the “productive dominance” argument. In the rest of his answer, Straczynski nevertheless articulates a different reasoning and identifies elements in the character’s fictional history (Doom’s nobility, Magneto’s childhood in the camps) to justify their compassionate attitude. However, artist John Romita Jr., answering a similar question in a later interview, quickly discarded the diegetic rationale and embraced the tone of the issue as necessary “heavy-handed” symbolism.18 Meanwhile, fan reactions after and before Straczynski’s interview insisted that the issue lacked consistency with the series’ established narrative norms, stating in several cases that the use of superheroes for political commentary was not only disruptive but also inappropriate. For instance, the author of the now-defunct The Daily Raider, an opinionated personal Web site dedicated to pop culture, posted a 2000-word review expounding the necessity to keep politics and superheroes apart: “Save your ‘thoughts’ and ‘opinions’ for, um, some other piece of writing, JMS. I certainly don’t want to read someone’s opinion if it doesn’t involve who could beat the Hulk: Thor or Superman.”19 The irony, of course, is that most critical assessments of superheroes have taken note of their muddled, often inconsistent or playful, but persistent engagement with current political issues, from Superman’s New Deal activism to Captain America uncovering a conspiracy at the heart of the American government in the Watergate era.20 Furthermore, fans rarely object to the presence of real-life events in superhero comics—the Vietnam war featured distinctly in the background of the early SpiderMan comics, for instance—except in this case, when the event supersedes the rules of genre. The tension arose because of the creators’ wish to bend genre and its regime of vraisemblance to accommodate the perceived importance of the 9/11 attacks. In ASM 36, Straczynski and Romita Jr. deliberately stretched this vraisemblance by having the narrative function as an explicit allegory, and

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fans responded by pointing out that, within the parameters of a serial publication, institutionally framed as a regular Spider-Man comic book, they were not ready to accept such deviation. The notion that the story would have been acceptable had it been published in a special issue is prominent against the book’s detractors.21 In effect, they pointed out at the discrepancy in the generic framing between the publisher and the authors, to side with the former. A major redefinition of the genre’s vraisemblance would have required it being signposted as such, while ASM 36 provided contradictory markers on every level, as the issue simultaneously attempted to articulate a pacifist message and to promote the superhero video game X-Men 2: Mutant Academy, with the tagline “Take Fighting to a new height”. ASM 36 was in fact very popular and ended up at the fifth best-selling comic book of 2001 (Heroes, Marvel’s other early commemorative book, came second).22 Heated as the controversy may have been, it was confined to a vocal minority and has largely died down since. Without ads, removed from their serial context and from the contemporary state of the superhero genre, reprints did not generate the same level of hostility and only residual quibbles persisted about the presentation of the supervillains in the story.23 However, the 2001 skirmishes, predicated on the inconsistent framing of the issue, made it clear that fans have a stake in the definition of genres even in the absence of commercial consequences for the producers. The violence of Straczynski’s reaction reflected his emotional involvement in the issue—he later republished the entire text, minus the superhero references on his mailing list, as a personal reflection on 9/1124 —but also genuine anger at being denied the authority to use the genre in a way which he deemed important. After the initial outbreak, his Newsarama interview also yielded some ground to his critics, by trying to demonstrate the vraisemblance of his narrative choices, thus conceding to a certain extent the validity of his critic’s approach, seeking to demonstrate that he had not only put the genre “in play” but that he had “replayed” it as well. This debate revealed the existence of a new context for discursive claims about genres: a transformation both of the alignment between author and publisher and of the audibility of readers’ opinions. Straczynski was hired in 2001 as an author with a distinct voice, in the context of Marvel’s commercial and aesthetic collapse of the late 1990s. ASM 36’s display of an idiosyncratic take on the characters and the genre was in fact in line with the company’s strategy,25 but it also positioned the author

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and the publisher as distinct voices. This was of course not an isolated case, as the comic book industry continued its shift toward the model of the star creator, who became bigger than the characters he worked with, inscribing within the industry Jenkin’s description of fan perceptions, from Textual Poachers. However, by separating the writer from the brand and from the genres, the move reduced the weight of his generic claims and introduced a bifurcated position, a gap that critical fans could exploit. Simultaneously, the emergence of the world wide web made the fan’s voice more audible than they would have been in fanzines or in the mediated fora of the comics’ letter pages.26 However, all these discussions still took place in self-selecting and highly hierarchized locations: While fans posted their anger on message boards appended to popular Web sites or on their homepages, Straczynski’s version was afforded an exponentially more visible space on a very popular site. Though he felt the need to address the criticism his work had received, the controversy about genre was in fact highly asymmetrical. Since 2001, however, increased access to broadband Internet and the concomitant development of social media have changed the way readers and fans can make themselves heard, as demonstrated by the “Comicsgate” controversy.

Comicsgate, Genre and Interpretive Power The Comicsgate movement appears to have started in 2017, in reaction to a photograph posted on social media by a group of female contributors to Marvel Comics. That post triggered angry reactions to the increased emphasis on diversity on the part of the publisher, both in its publication and in its hiring policy, which coalesced under a common hashtag.27 Comicsgate is also an example of a broader movement sweeping through North American popular culture, which moved from literary science-fiction (2014) to video games (2015) before reaching comics. These movements form a matrix composed of “overlapping discourses, utterances, and ‘counter-publics,’”28 they display a form of loose coordination as well as somewhat similar strategies, but they are not uniform and employ specific targets and specific spokespersons. However, they share a hostility toward what they perceived as a forced movement toward diverse representations and voices in their cultural practices. Each of these movements also takes a sharp interest in the definition and delineation of genres. The “sad puppies” organized a coordinated intervention in the nominating

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process for the Hugo award, one of the most prestigious distinctions in the field of science-fiction, in order to celebrate an “exciting and fun” version of the genre, defined in opposition to a “literary” approach rife with “ideological preaching.”29 Similarly, the Gamergate movement in video games sought to ridicule a number of introspective games by lumping them under the derisive generic label of “walking simulators,” a label which has since been reclaimed.30 Comicsgate is no exception, and Martin Lund notes that even though the name of the movement appears to encompass comics in general, “the ongoing struggle for interpretive power is taking place mostly, but not exclusively, in the orbit of [the superhero] genre.”31 This conflation of comics with a single genre, which downplays the broad transformation of the comics market in the United States and the movement of its center of gravity from comic book stores to general libraries, is a significant rhetorical move. As Aaron Kashtan points out, it makes it possible to ground value judgments in an apparently unassailable economic logic—the canonical feedback process available to fans— by tying the increased diversity in comics to an erroneous narrative of decline.32 While comics criticism actually represents a small portion of the activity related to the hashtag—most of it is made of group-defining social positioning—this criticism consistently focuses on the efficiency and legitimacy of choices made by creators among secondary signifiers, such as graphic style, pacing, the range and modes of bodily representations and the level of political explicitness. Art critic Alexander Adams, who has embraced Comicsgate against what he describes as “cultural entryism,” makes explicit this connection between style and genre, when he claims that: “to have superheroes who are unappealing in terms of both appearance and behavior undermines the superhero formula.”33 Subsequently, examples that break with the group’s self-ascribed standards, modeled in part on mainstream 1990s superheroes, are defined as failed attempts at comics, failed attempts at the genre. Feminist activist Anita Sarkeesian describes the actions of the Gamergate crowd as an attempt to “police the border” of video games,34 and similarly, the claims made as part of Comicsgate constitute an attempt to police the border of the genre, competing against similar claims made by publishers, scholars or by the authors themselves. Genre is an apt battleground to wage this “struggle for interpretive power,” in a decentralized repetition of the culture wars of the 1980s.

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These constantly renegotiated “hesitant categories,” these “loose assemblages” cannot be subjected to any truth test beyond the consensus they engender among users. By invoking history, by assembling what appears to be a significant number of voices—though by no means a majority of comic book readers, let alone a majority of comics readers—and by creating or attempting to create “proper” comics which reflect their standards, Comicsgaters wage a war for generic authority on multiple fronts. Their choice of prototypical texts, the highly sexualized, violent and critically panned but also commercially successful superhero comic books of the early 1990s incorporates an objective, if debatable, metric for importance.35 Moreover, because genres do not function by enumeration but by the abstraction of ensembles, generic definitions cannot be refuted by counterexamples. The numerous examples of progressive positioning or unconventional art in successful comics of the past, which have been used to answer Comicsgate, can simply be explained away as marginal cases or deliberate deviations. There are numerous similarities between this positioning and that of the readers who objected to ASM 36. Just as these readers expressed their dislike for the changes brought to Spider-Man in the context of its regular series, Comicsgaters appear particularly concerned with the transformations brought to recognizable core characters (Thor as a woman, Captain America as a black man), as opposed to the creation of new characters (such as a Muslim Ms. Marvel). Seriality and continuity are read as promises of stability, and the anger is more acute when these promises are not kept. The disparagement leveled at these changes is also channeled through criticism of individual authors—Comicsgate even published a “blacklist”36 —as a way to exploit the gap between publishers and creators. Detaching authors from the publishing institutions serves to diminish their importance in the genre economy, especially since one of the main figures of Comicsgate, Ethan van Sciver, is a comic book artist himself. Companies such as Marvel and DC are keen on leveraging the apparent intimacy of self-branding and expect creators to promote their own works on social media as purportedly independent artists, even when they are working on corporate-owned properties. Meanwhile, the strong group dynamic among Comicsgaters means that the key figures in the movement, notably Van Sciver, have more followers than their importance in the comics world would suggest.37 Social media have also eroded the primacy of the main news outlets in the comics field—and in any

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other field—and reduced the importance of sites in which the producers’ “productive dominance” can be asserted.38 Finally, the contemporary online environment offers numerous tools to further erode the distinction between readers and producers, including crowdfunding, “a new strategy of visibility for actors who cannot break through traditional imposed field barriers to entry.”39 As of this writing (July 2019), most of the activity surrounding #comicsgate is focused on promoting these crowdfunding efforts. Derek Johnson noted in 2007 that in the case of TV shows, the greatest power in the “war for hegemony” over the construction of interpretative consensus was located in the corporate institutions40 : The rise of social media coupled the more fragile status of comics producers and publishers suggest that the power imbalance may not be so acute for contemporary comics. My intent is not to reduce the activity around Comicsgate to an epistemological debate about genres, while members of the movement themselves routinely present their actions as part of a broader right-wing political agenda. However, I would like to avoid treating the movement as merely a homogeneous ad hoc tool to wage a global culture war, or even as the “latest irate gasp of fading white hegemony in geek culture,” to quote from a progressive critic.41 As fans and media scholars, William Proctor and Bridget Kies caution: “not every campaign of this sort can be simplistically attributed to orchestrated ‘alt-right’ strategies, even as news reports hype and exaggerate such claims.”42 Comicsgate is about identity politics, and some people posting under that hashtag display a truly abhorrent form of sexism, but it is also literally about superhero comics. The movement is based on myopic and refutable historical and economic considerations, but it articulates audible generic claims and demonstrates to what extent contemporary readers can challenge the authority of producers and critics and assert the right to “police the borders” themselves. In 2001, Rick Altman, drawing from Benedict Anderson, stressed the fact that genres served a somewhat similar function to nations in generating virtual communities: Isolated from each other, reduced to imaging the larger group on the basis of a few faint sightings, generic communities constitute what I call constellated communities, for like a group of stars their members cohere only through repeated acts of imagination.43

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The ubiquity of social media has actualized these communities, turning them into loose but visible networks of affinities, which can occasionally solidify around a specific positioning.

Conclusion Understanding the interplay between genre users and their respective powers in shaping generic discourses requires strict historicization. The weakness of comics criticism, when compared to other popular media, invites us to focus primarily on the interplay between producers and readers. As we saw with ASM 36, and further with Comicsgate, online exchanges have greatly increased the capacity of readers and fans to articulate genre definitions, while the increased emphasis on authorship in comics has fragmented and weakened the cultural authority of the producerly pole. It should be noted, however, that these forceful and confrontational approaches to genres have so far failed to yield significant changes in their definitions. These movements call attention to the borders and the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, but the constant drive for novelty in popular culture turns the attempts at stabilizing genres through a nostalgic lens into rear-guard actions. Though increasingly challenged, producers retain the ability to set the ground for the discussion, if not to end the argument. The increasing emphasis on producing comics within the Comicsgate umbrella may reflect a similar conclusion, although the mechanics of crowdfunding mean they are unlikely to reach beyond the audience of the already converted.

Notes 1. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 69–82. 2. The development of comics studies, in particular through open-access journals, has contributed to the creation of a critical consensus around certain recent works, and to the creation of a critical canon. However, as demonstrated by Beaty and Woo, academic publications are disproportionately focused on a small number of contemporary creators and project a limited image of the comics world, useful as it may be. 3. Ben Schwartz, “Introduction,” in The Best American Comics Criticism, ed. Ben Schwartz (Fantagraphics Books, 2010), 18. 4. Schwartz, 15.

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5. Christina Meyer, “Un/Taming the Beast, or Graphic Novels (Re)Considered,” in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory 37 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 281. 6. “The Stonekeeper (Amulet #1): Kazu Kibuishi,” Amazon.com, accessed May 10, 2019, https://www.amazon.com/Stonekeeper-Amulet-1Kazu-Kibuishi/dp/0439846811/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=amulet&qid= 1557477608&s=gateway&sr=8-3. 7. The book itself features an evocative back cover, with text and illustration pointing toward a horror story of the haunted house kind. A bright yellow tagline indicates: “There’s something strange behind the basement door….” 8. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Updated 20th anniversary ed (New York: Routledge, 2013), 137. 9. Jenkins, 17. 10. Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2010), 264. 11. Dan Hassler-Forest, Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age (Winchester, UK and Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2012). 12. Nicolas Labarre, “‘We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program…’: The Amazing Spider-Man: le genre sous le choc,” Leaves, no. 1 (2015): 108–27. 13. Danny Donovan and Eric Wolfe Hanson, “Fiction Is Better than Reality,” in 9/11 Emergency Relief, ed. Jeff Mason (Gainesville, FL: Alternative Comics, 2002), 2001. 14. Hassler-Forest, Capitalist Superheroes. A more cautious modulation of this view can be found in Liam Burke, The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 24–45. 15. Andrew D. Arnold, “The Most Serious Comix Pt.2,” Time, February 5, 2002, http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,198966,00. html. 16. “Talking to JMS About Spidey, Joe’s Comics, and More…,” Newsarama, January 4, 2002, Archive.org, http://web.archive.org/web/ 20020206215702/http:/www.comicon.com/newsarama/. 17. Jonathan Gray et al., eds., “Fan-Tagonism: Factions, Institutions and Conservative Hegemonies of Fandom,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 294. Derek Johnson has more recently revisited the concept of “fantagonism,” which he no longer hyphenates, to suggest that it may not “adequately capture all the struggles in play.” This is an important precaution,

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but the concept nevertheless appears applicable to the two specific examples provided in this chapter. Derek Johnson, “Fantagonism, Franchising, and Industry Management of Fan Privilege,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, 1st ed (Routledge, 2017), 395–405. Quoted in Brian Cronin, “Comic Book Legends Revealed #190,” Comic Book Resources, January 15, 2009, http://goodcomics. comicbookresources.com/2009/01/15/comic-book-legends-revealed190/. The Fanboy, “Amazing Spider-Man #36 Review,” The Daily Raider (blog), 2001, http://www.dailyraider.com/TheDailyRaider% 20AmazingSpider-Man%2336Review.htm. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001); Martin Lund, “Redefining the Superhero Through Selective Reading,” Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art (SJoCA) 3, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 86–100. See for instance “Topic: Talking to JMS About Spidey, Joe’s Comics, and More…,” COMICON.com, September 23, 2002, https://web. archive.org/web/20020923155610/http://www.comicon.com/cgibin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=12&t=000103. John Jackson Miller, “Comichron: 2001 Comic Book Sales to Comics Shops,” Comichron, accessed June 3, 2019, https://www.comichron. com/monthlycomicssales/2001.html. See for instance the nearly 1200 comments on Imgur, “Amazing Spiderman 36 (477)- This Always Makes Me Cry,” Imgur, September 11, 2015, https://imgur.com/gallery/83xZp. J. Michael Straczynski, “9/11 Notes from JMS,” JMSNews, November 9, 2002, http://JMSNews.com/messages/message?id=4725. Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, 2013, 406; Matt Yockey, ed., Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, 1st ed, World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 174–75. Daniel Stein demonstrates that letter columns in the superhero comics of the 1960s displayed “strong claims of authority” on the part of fans, but the fact that such letters were selected and printed by the publishers forces us to consider these challenges as a domesticated and tightly controlled contestation. Daniel Stein, “Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Functions of the Comic Book Paratext,” in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory 37 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 177. Martin Lund, who is notoriously skeptical of oversimplified political and religious readings of superhero comics, points out that Marvel and the

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creators it employs have in fact been trying to broaden the range of representation in the comics they publish. The factual observation that some comic books have become more overtly political is thus not without merit, though Lund emphatically rejects the conclusions Comicsgaters draw from it. Martin Lund, “Closing the Comics-Gate: On Recognizing the Politics of Comics,” The Middle Space (blog), February 5, 2019, https:// themiddlespaces.com/2019/02/05/closing-the-comics-gate/. William Proctor and Bridget Kies, “Editors’ Introduction: On Toxic Fan Practices and the New Culture Wars,” Participations 15, no. 1 (May 2018): 131. Brad R. Torgersen, “Why SAD PUPPIES 3 Is Going to Destroy Science Fiction!” Brad R. Torgersen (blog), January 16, 2015, https:// bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/why-sad-puppies-3-isgoing-to-destroy-science-fiction/. Nicole Clark, “A Brief History of the ‘Walking Simulator,’ Gaming’s Most Detested Genre,” Salon, November 11, 2017, https://www.salon. com/2017/11/11/a-brief-history-of-the-walking-simulator-gamingsmost-detested-genre/. Lund, “Closing the Comics-Gate.” Aaron Kashtan, “‘Those Aren’t Really Comics’: Raina Telgemeier and the Limitations of Direct-Market Centrism,” November 3, 2017. Alexander Adams, Culture War: Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism (Andrews UK Limited, 2019), chap. Comicsgate: a case history (electronic edition). Quoted in Proctor and Kies, “Editors’ Introduction,” 135. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo make the case for the importance of these comics in the Greatest Comic Book of All Times; though they described this section as a tongue-in-cheek exercise, they delineate a convincing rationale. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 73–84. Eric Francisco, “Comicsgate Is Gamergate’s Next Horrible Evolution,” Inverse, February 9, 2018, https://www.inverse.com/article/41132comicsgate-explained-bigots-milkshake-marvel-dc-gamergate. This being said, comics writer Mark Waid, one of the most vocal opponents of Comicsgate, has about three times as many followers on Twitter as Van Sciver, further eroding the claim that the movement represents the majority of comic book readers. Similar campaigners in other media were able to use critics aggregators to attempt to sabotage products they disliked, from the movie version of Captain Marvel to “walking simulators”. The absence of a review aggregator for comics means that this strategy was unavailable to Comicsgaters.

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39. André Perreira de Carvalho, “Reconfiguring the Power Structure of the Comic Book Field: Crowdfunding and the Use of Social Networks,” in Cultures of Comics Work, ed. Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels (New York, NY: This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature, 2016), 261. 40. Gray et al., “Fan-Tagonism: Factions, Institutions and Conservative Hegemonies of Fandom,” 298. 41. Francisco, “Comicsgate Is Gamergate’s Next Horrible Evolution.” 42. Proctor and Kies, “Editors’ Introduction,” 131. 43. Altman, Film/Genre, 161.

CHAPTER 9

Invisible Genres and Other Architexts

Abstract This chapter examines the case of comics architext whose status as a genre is contested. Examining in turn literary adaptations, graphic novels, manga and YA, it details the discourses claiming that each of these categories is or is not a genre, and tracks the arguments used by the proponent of each thesis. Using the comics of Mike Mignola as an example, the chapter also points to the existence of idiosyncratic text groupings which bear most of all of the functions of established genres. It offers a range of hypothesis regarding the threshold of genericity in the comics world, based on the existing of conflicting architextual claims and on the criteria used to adjudicate the resemblance between the various members of the grouping. Keywords Architext · Manga · Adaptation · YA · Mike Mignola

Defining genres in terms of their uses and effects, as I have done so far, is to call attention to the existence of numerous other discursive formations which produce similar effects (blueprint, structure, label, contract) but are not consistently discussed or identified as genres. The number of fully institutionalized genre in comics is to a large extent arbitrary, but probably equal to a few dozens: The Grand Comics Database (GCD) references 37 genres all based on narrative patterns, including comparatively rare categories such as “car” or “medical”; Comixology has 48 while © The Author(s) 2020 N. Labarre, Understanding Genres in Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43554-7_9

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The Power of Comics lists about 16. Any list of institutionalized genres is provisional, debatable and historically contingent. For instance, the GCD includes “martial arts” stories as old as 1947 (“Junior Judo,” by future MAD contributor Dave Berg, in Standard’s Exciting Comics [Fig. 9.1]), but the phrase itself only became common in the mid-1960s and it is also around that date that a substantial number of publications featuring this motif appeared. Because the generic label is applied retroactively to stories such as “Junior Judo,” it loses its apparent historicity and constructedness. Unsurprisingly, the guidelines for contributors to the GCD indicate that “Genre and the Official Genre List are two of the most hotly debated topics when it comes to indexing at the GCD;”1 even the much shorter list mentioned in The Power of Comics only overlap partially with the GCD’s. In the previous chapters, I have attempted to focus on these fully institutionalized genres, or “folk” genres in John Swales’s terminology, as a way to examine core examples rather than idiosyncratic or problematic groupings. However, these problematic groupings raise interesting questions of their own, and in particular, they ask us to consider why a number of attested groupings of texts do not fully pass the threshold of genericity. Genre and philosophy scholar Catharine Abell suggests that any useful conception of genre “should provide a plausible way of distinguishing between comics categories that are genres and those that are not, and should provide principled reasons for this distinction.”2 Most approaches to genre, lay or scholarly, perform this sorting between genres and non-genres. However, because of incompatible definitions or because of diverging representations of the categories they seek to account for, these various approaches produce non-congruent results for a number of liminal cases. Rather than attempting to solve that dilemma by stating which are really genres and which are not, I shall attempt to understand these contradicting categorizations, in the hope of elucidating what distinguish genres from other architexts which appear to share the same discursive and functional properties.

Literary Adaptation as Genre Literary adaptations have a long history in comics, in the satirical retelling of popular novels and plays by cartoonists such as Cham in nineteenthcentury-European humor publications, in North-American newspaper

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Fig. 9.1 The first “martial arts” comics story? Dave Berg, “Junior Judo,” Exciting Comics #57 (September 1947)

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comic strips of the 1920s, then in comic books, as exemplified by the creation of Classics Illustrated (initially Classic Comics ) in 1941. The enduring success of Classics Illustrated, which published 169 different adaptations over thirty years—not counting its author-driven revival by First Comics in 1990–1991—encouraged numerous imitators, including Dell’s Famous Stories (1942), Seaboard’s Stories Famous Authors Illustrated (1950–1951) and Marvel’s later Classics Comics (1976–1978). Beyond comic books, literary adaptations constitute a well-established segment of the comics market in bookstores,3 ranging from transpositions of the classics in various formats and styles to adaptations of contemporary popular novels, such as The Baby-Sitters Club (Scholastic, 2006–). The category of literary adaptations possesses most of the functions that have been associated with genres in the preceding chapters. For instance, several factors indicate that literary adaptations are and have been seen as a distinct marketing strategy, or label, by publishers. This was first of all the project undergirding Classics Illustrated: creating comic books that would be markedly different from their competitors, because of their drawing style, of their price, of their continuous availability through a strategy of regular reprints, so that parents could and would buy them confidently. More broadly, the fact that these adaptations have often been organized either in series or in distinct collections—Manga Shakespeare (Self Made Hero) and No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels (SparkNotes) are two recent examples—demonstrates that publishers see these texts as forming a coherent ensemble. The persistence of this practice over the past eighty years strongly suggests that this strategy has been vindicated by the readers’ responses. The Amazon and Goodreads comments for a book such as Gareth Hinds’s Macbeth (Candlewick Press, 2015) also provides ample evidence that the work is read as an adaptation and not merely as a period story of betrayal and madness. More generally, the temptation to compare an adaptation to its source and the critical appreciation derived from this comparison offers a readerly contract that is unique to adaptations, confirming that the practice generates its own horizon of expectation. In other words, there is a strong institutional support to the idea of adaptation as a genre from the producer’s pole of the comics world, and anecdotal as well as indirect evidence suggest that readers embrace the category as a distinct mode of reading, correlated to specific expectations. The case for literary adaptation as an adaptable recipe, a blueprint for creators, is somewhat more tenuous, especially when trying to account for

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a corpus spanning eighty years. However, the fact that authors specialize in adaptations—Roy Thomas, P. Craig Russell and Gareth Hinds come to mind—as well as the strong stylistic influence of the self-effacing graphic style practiced in Comics Illustrated all suggest that the canon of existing adaptations has served as a model for further works at several points in the medium’s history. Finally, literary adaptations have long been identified as a distinct practice by critics and scholars. In 1952, the poet and critic Delmore Schwartz called attention to this corpus of comics in a famous piece for Partisan Review,4 and articles on adaptations have appeared with a degree of regularity in The Comics Journal , in academic publications (including numerous special issues since 2013),5 but also in Publisher’s Weekly and in trade publications such as The Library Journal. Literary adaptations have thus been consistently acknowledged as a group of text possessing a shared identity, a family resemblance, by critics inside and outside the comics world. However, in comics as in cinema, literary adaptations remain what film scholar Thomas Leitch describes as an “invisible genre,”6 one that is not conceived as existing in paradigmatic relation with institutionalized categories such as horror, romance or superheroes. To give but one instance, Gareth Hinds’s Macbeth is present in the public libraries of the four largest cities in the United States7 and is classified under a variety of “subjects,” typically under a dozen, which help readers navigate from a book to similar ones. The catalogs of two of these libraries suggest that readers may be interested in other adaptations of Shakespeare, or in other books on regicide, but none included the possibility that these readers may want to read more literary adaptations, let alone literary adaptation in comics or graphic novels. The institution may partly recognize the genre—in trade journals—but does not inscribe this recognition in its own cataloguing practices. In his article on adaptation as a genre in cinema, Thomas Leitch, building on Linda Hutcheon, argues that adaptation functions as a genre notably because these films display specific recurring textual markers, notably a “fetishization of the past,” which prompt viewers to view the film as an adaptation. He also notes that because adaptation “presumes by definition audiences who are experiencing each new text in the context of earlier texts,”8 it necessarily activates the mechanisms of genre. While this is undoubtedly correct, it fails to explain why Leitch had to stake

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part of his cultural capital on the “perverse”9 move of trying to establish adaptation as a visible genre. Literary adaptations rarely pose problems of identification in comics, because up to a recent date, the status of the work was systematically advertised on the covers, in the peritexts or in other available liminal space in the stories themselves. These comics and stories were thus positioned as “subservient” adaptations,10 respecting a cultural and commercial hierarchy between respectable originals and their popular transpositions; while the changing status of comics creators have led to more flexible relations to the source material,11 these “subservient” adaptations have been and remain the most common mode of literary adaptation. To paraphrase Leitch, this framing ensures that readers experience each new text in the context of earlier texts, and yet, these adaptations are not fully institutionalized as a genre. Several hypotheses come to mind to explain why these adaptations have not crossed the threshold of genericity. One explanation may have to do with the fact that most adaptations also belong to other, more visible text groupings, derived from the content of the original work. For instance, the catalogs of the major public libraries quoted above dutifully register that Gareth Hinds’s Macbeth is a graphic novel about monarchy and about Scotland, and Amazon classifies comics versions of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days as adventure stories. Both of these texts are also listed as “classics,” itself a quasi-genre. A connected explanation hinges on the fact that “adaptation” indicates a process and a specific intertextual relationship, whereas institutionalized genres in comics center on narrative features. This may create a resistance to using the label, which would disrupt the apparent homogeneity of the generic taxonomy. Thinking about genre in use offers a different account for this persistent invisibility. Comics adaptations have long been marketed to parents, then to children and teachers, as an introduction to classroom reading material; when Acclaim republished the original Classics Illustrated in the 1990s, they marketed them as pocket-sized “study guides,” for instance. These adaptations therefore did not have the same uses and users as other comics, which may explain they were not included in generic discourses produced or sanctioned by active fans, who often became the first theorists and historians. On the creators’ side, the fact that adaptations were “subservient,” that they are still described by creators as “drudgery work and uncreative work”12 and that they seemingly afford little prestige to

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creators working in the shadow of celebrated works, may have similarly discouraged the formation of generic discourses. Literary adaptation thus appears to have all the functions of a genre, while failing to be discussed as such or included in a paradigmatic series with other institutionalized genres.13 They demonstrate that genericity competes with other architextual identifications. In this case, all the users of genre appear to construe literary adaptation as a useful discursive construction, but each of them has reasons to define it as something other than a genre.

Graphic Novel, Manga, YA A variety of other broad text categories exist on or under the threshold of genericity: kids’ comics, photocomics and even graphic novels are such examples. These are partly institutionalized, in that they occupy a space in which various approaches to genre do not overlap: They are commonly described as genres, but may be denied this identification by other writers or other interpretive communities. For instance, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey argue in The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (2015) that the graphic novel should be considered as a medium, not a genre. However, several essays in The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (2018), which the same two authors edited along with Stephen E. Tabachnik, instead treat the graphic novel as a genre. The arguments used by partisans of either approach reflect different definitions of terms, of course, but also different evaluations of the salient characteristics of the corpus, based on different survey techniques. In particular, authors hold different views on the balance between technology and content in that corpus. Catharine Abell illustrates the conviction that the shared characteristics of graphic novels should be seen as historically contingent epiphenomena when she writes: “the interpretative and/or evaluative expectations that a comic’s being a graphic novel generates are an accident of the way in which graphic novels have evolved, and are not essential to the category.” This judgment leads her to define the graphic novel as a medium.14 However, the value judgment at work in determining whether the graphic novel’s conventions are “essential” or “accidental” does not rely on a systematic survey or the corpus, which would admittingly be a daunting task. This explains why Achim Hescher, using a different but broadly compatible theoretical framework, reaches the opposite conclusion.15

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This disagreement is not merely a reflection of position-staking academics. In an introduction to graphic novels aimed at librarians, Janet Pinkley and Kaela Casey write for instance: “Graphic novels are also often referred to as a genre, but everyone in the comic industry and graphic novel fans will quickly correct this.”16 Their argument rests on the problematic idea that the graphic novel encompasses a diversity of institutionalized genres and therefore cannot be a genre itself, but the vigor of the assertion is remarkable. Meanwhile, Comixology, which is very much a part of the comics industry, quietly includes graphic novels among the genres it offers. From the pragmatic and discursive position which I have used throughout this book, it is not necessary to reach a conclusion to this debate, or even to argue that either of these conceptualizations is correct, merely to observe that both positions have been substantiated by internally coherent theoretical approaches and that both have been defended vigorously by various genre users.17 In all these cases, the arguments on which genericity hinges are the following: the respective importance of material affordances and textual content; the refusal or acceptance of the notion of meta-genres, encompassing other genres; and implicitly the acceptance or refusal of an apparently inconsistent taxonomy, since comic books are usually not construed as a genre. It is fair to suggest that these arguments, explicit in scholarly engagements with the issue, also inform the decision by other users to treat graphic novels as a genre or not. The case of the graphic novel illustrates the fact that the adjudication of genericity can only be done a posteriori, when a coherent image of the corpus is shared among genre users. The notion of the graphic novel actually reflects changing realities, and point to a variety of possible corpora, with books aimed at different readers, sold in different locations and no factual description of the field. Systematic surveys like the one undertaken by Brian Hibbs based on Bookscan data since 2003, which have incorporated a complete data set since 2017, are a precondition for this debate to be resolved, especially if they could be complemented by a historical overview, making sense of the existing back-catalog. Manga is another prominent category existing on the threshold of genericity, and it presents some of the same issues as the graphic novel. It may seem absurd to refer to manga as a genre, as the word simply serves as an equivalent to “comics” in Japan. “Manga” is in fact not a generic label when used as a factual descriptor for comics produced and sold in Japan. It can become one, however, when designating the way these comics are

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sold and received in North America, because the idea of a foreign culture and foreign products is always caught in cultural constructions, a system of difference with the characteristics of the national imagined community. As Casey Brienza writes in her introduction to Global Manga: “Japanese” Comics Without Japan?: When used by English language speakers, the word “manga” typically refers to “story manga,” a format telling a continuous story over a large number of pages and often serialized. It also connotes certain stereotypes about specific types of narrative and artistic content such as character designs with big eyes, graphic, sexualized violence, and/or science-fiction and fantasy themes.18

In spite of her apparent wariness regarding this cultural construction, she also notes that these stereotypes often prove accurate when considering the books which get distributed in the United States. Her description, which is centered on the idea of a format, again falls on the border between genre and medium. It indicates that “manga” is not merely a factual description, but a label referring to a host of primary and secondary signifiers, tied to certain marketing strategies and generating certain expectations. As indicated by the quotation marks in the title of the collection edited by Brienza (and further developed in her other writings), “Japanese” in this context refers to a culturally constructed image, based on selected and “domesticated” content,19 rather than to a geopolitical fact. This construction has proved strikingly flexible. For one thing, “manga” often serves as a label encompassing other Asian comics, notably the thriving Korean production (manhwa). For another, the core signifiers, associated with manga in the West, have been appropriated and domesticated by local creators to produce original work. Brienza describes this “global manga” as “the published sequential art products of a sometimes globalized, sometimes transnational, sometimes hyperlocal world in which something its producers and consumers might call ‘manga’ can be produced without any direct creative input at all from Japan.”20 Among the prominent examples of this global manga was the publication between 2009 and 2013 of “Manga Twilight,” a highly successful series of adaptations of Stephanie Meyer’s vampire novels drawn by Korean artist Young Kim and published by Yen Press, a publisher of manga and manhwa in the United States.21

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Scholars and some fans accurately call these books “global manga,” or “manhwa,” but these distinctions are only operative within fairly small communities: A Google search for “manga Twilight Meyer” generates twelve times as many results as “manhwa Twilight Meyer,” for instance. “Global manga” differs from manga at the point of production, but it is lumped with Japanese manga for distribution and presumably for consumption. It is clear, then, that “manga” has migrated from designating a history of production to being a useful category for readers and publishers, but also for creators willing to tap into these expectations, regardless of their nationality. This should not be read as suggesting that Japanese manga are more “authentic” when using established tropes and graphic styles: Contemporary Japanese creators no less than the creators of “global manga” absorb and rework successful existing conventions, which often derive from previous transnational circulations. The practice of selling and consuming these global manga along with Japanese ones cannot be reduced to a mere obfuscation of their origins. Manga then fulfills most of the functions of genre for most of its users, but it also retains distinct characteristics, from its association with a range of distinctive publishing formats (small black-and-white books modeled after the Japanese Tank¯ obon, thick black-and-white magazines) to its overt interactions with a national identity. Emphasizing the materiality of the formats Brienza refers to manga in the United States as a medium, while Catharine Abell concludes that it should be considered as a genre. Once again, this split can be found across a vast array of discursive spaces, often replaying similar lines arguments to those found about the graphic novel (including the lacunar taxonomy, since “North-American comics” is not a genre). This hesitancy is further complexified in many discussions by consideration of the use of “manga” as a purely cultural marker: The ontological uncertainty of the object is redoubled by the polysemy of the word.

Mignola Comics and “Personal Genres” The comics of Mike Mignola and those of his imitators demonstrate the existence of an additional category of quasi-genres, in addition to the invisible and the indeterminate genres I have described so far: personal or local genres, used by very small interpretive communities.

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Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series provides an example of the way these personal genres can emerge. The series offers many examples of producerdriven generic hybridization, with idiosyncratic gothic middle ground between superheroes and horror, built around the pivotal figure of the hero as a monster. Having gradually charted this ground, in the comics and in their paratexts (adding a preface by horror writer Robert Bloch to the first collection, for instance), Mignola produced a sprawling proprietary cycle, published by Dark Horse. The long-running Hellboy serial, fragmented into stand-alone stories and longer narrative arc was expanded by spin-offs and prequels, which in turn generated their own ancillary series. This extended fictional universe of interconnected fiction presents a high degree of narrative and aesthetic consistency, with particular attention paid to the paratext: In addition to recurring colors, typefaces and mentions such as “From the Pages of Hellboy,” Mignola himself often draws covers for books which he does not illustrate. Though Mignola has proved open to distinct projects within this fictional universe,22 he retains control and commercial ownership over the creation. Hellboy and its ancillary series are by definition not a genre, but a cycle, a series of branded proprietary products. However, they perform some functions of genre. It is quite possible to produce Hellboy pastiches (as demonstrated by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen in Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. #10 [Marvel, 2006], and on a strictly graphic level by Simon Grennan in A Theory of Narrative Drawing ) and books of the sprawling “Mignolaverse” generate specific expectations but are open to deviations within the formula. More importantly for our purpose, Hellboy’s influence is also perceptible beyond Mignola’s own series. Ted Naifeh’s early work (such as Gloomcookie, co-created with Serena Valentino, Slave Labor Graphics, 2001), and celebrated European series The Chimera Brigade (L’Atalante, 2009– 2012), by Serge Lehman, Fabrice Colin and Gess offer examples of this circulation, in which elements of a graphic style, notably the use of architecture, of vast flat surfaces and of a geometrical approach to anatomy are combined with specific narrative strategies, including a recourse to the gothic. These works tap into the way Mignola’s style and approach to anatomy “establish generic expectations for the knowing reader,” as noted by Scott Bukatman in his study of Hellboy.23 This is to be sure a limited corpus, whose frontiers are constituted by the numerous works which borrow only some traits of Mignola’s style and narrative strategies. Nevertheless, a few years ago, while working on Hellboy, I concluded a

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talk at a conference with the idea that these were perhaps the embryo of a “Mignola genre,” reproducing Altman’s description of the transition from cycle to genre. Though welcomed with curiosity, that suggestion received no echo beyond the conference. From a functional point of view, this potential “Mignola genre” did serve as a potential blueprint and did create expectations, at least among some readers and critics. While there was little evidence that the books were marketed using similarities to Hellboy, it seemed fair to assume that publishers were aware of the resemblance, although they chose not to open themselves to claims of intellectual property impingement. The functions of the genre were mostly there, but the scope was not, and my attempt at leveraging my social capital to identify and establish such a category failed. As a result, this “private” genre was really only operational during the time of the conference. The idea of a fully private genre is logically absurd, from a discursive perspective. As pointed out by Steve Neale, building on Todorov, genres “public and institutional—not personal or critical—in nature.”24 However, this anecdote suggests that even problematic groupings, based on a fairly small sample, can function as genres as they straddle the border between the personal and the public, within an incomplete process of institutionalization. This well-known phenomenon of specialization of taste and knowledge results in a proliferation of subgenres, which are no less rigorously constructed than fully institutionalized genres,25 but which operate for smaller groupings of users. “Urban fantasy” comics—which happen to be mostly adaptations—are an example of such a grouping.26 Throughout this book, I have refrained from treating comics producers or users as homogeneous groups, yet I have tried to identify consensual labels (“folk” or “fully institutionalized” genres) as if there was such a thing as “comics readership,” and as if disputes about genericity or about the borders of genres could be adjudicated by referring to this majority opinion. My semi-private Mignola genre is of course far below the threshold of genericity. However, Young Adult, or YA comics, demonstrates that even important genres can be established in large subsets of comics readers, yet barely used by others. The age category to which the label refers (defined as readers between 12 and 18 by the American Library Association) is a fairly recent conceptualization, which was first deployed in literature, before coming into use in other media, in cinema, but also in comics when specialized publishers such as Scholastic entered the market in the early 2000s.27 Unlike manga, YA cannot be used as a factual description, for YA is always a discursive

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transaction, a promise to potential readers rather than an objective characteristic of the work. The label is thus used to foster and guide expectations and, in comics, has gradually become associated with specific content: Memoirs, coming-of-age stories, teenagers and non-white-male protagonists, though fantasy and straight humor are also well-represented.28 YA has thus come to function as a comics genre, created in part through an intermedial alignment with literature, and age categories such as “children,” “teenagers” and “young adult” are in fact the only comics architexts mentioned on the Scholastic Website. However, the market for comics is famously and increasingly bifurcated, between specialized stores and general booksellers, the environment in which YA graphic novels have thrived. Up to a recent date, comic book publishers did not identify or address a specific YA audience, or quickly abandoned their efforts in that direction, as exemplified by DC’s Minx label. For instance, when comic book publishers introduced age-based rating systems after 2001, following their abandonment of the Comics Code, none adopted the YA terminology, instead opting to break up the age-group into categories such as “Teen,” “Teen +” and “Parental Advisory.” The increasing visibility of YA texts across media, in particular, through movie adaptations (notably Twilight and The Hunger Games, adapted, respectively, in 2008 and 2012) certainly contributed to a realignment of these two sides of the market, especially since both DC and Marvel belong to massive multimedia entertainment conglomerates. Both companies started publishing comic books designed according to the Young Adult template in 2014, with series such as Ms. Marvel , The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Shade: the Changing Woman (written by YA novelist, Cecil Castellucci), and both have come to embrace the label, while their parent companies market YA superhero novels, promoted as such. Although a number of previously published comic books fit into the YA genre, the category was thus simply not in use for roughly half of the comics market29 until the mid-2010s, even as it had become central in the other. This example suggests the existence of a continuum of private and semi-private genres, whose domain of validity extend only to specific interpretive communities, and acts as a reminder that the notion of comics genre is fragile, inasmuch as publishing events such as the creation of the Graphix line by Scholastic redefined the shape of the comics-reading audience. The bifurcation of the market is also a bifurcation of interpretive communities, and potentially a bifurcation of all genre categories. It

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may well be the case that categories institutionalized across that boundary function more like the minimal units of intermedial genres—defined by transposable traits and narrative patterns, as seen in Chapter 2—than as medium-specific categories.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that genres constitute only a specific mode of textual groupings, caught in a continuum of similar yet not identical architexts. In comics, the threshold of genericity appears higher for textual groupings which are not based on narrative features, or which exist in proximity with a preferred format of publication. As a result, fully institutionalized genres in comics tend to have intermedial equivalents while a number of discursive formations function as invisible genres (adaptation), liminal genres (manga, the graphic novel) or semi-private genres (YA, up to a recent date). To speak of genres in comics is to impose a very high degree of institutionalization, based on the model of a mostly homogeneous set of users. While the connections between comic books and graphic novels are numerous, in the rank of professionals, in the comics themselves and among readers, some genres may require considering these sectors in isolation in order to understand the uses they are put to.

Notes 1. “Genre—GCD,” accessed July 11, 2019, https://docs.comics.org/wiki/ Genre. 2. Catharine Abell, “Comics and Genre,” in The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, ed. Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook (Wiley, 2012), 68–84. 3. In 2016, I conducted a survey of all adaptations in bookstores from 2010 to 2015. Literary adaptations represented more than a third of all adaptations, including transmedia expansions, sequels, etc., and about 7% of the total number of books sold over that period, 6% in value. 60% of these literary adaptations were traditional transpositions, transposing a single novel or a play under the same title. 4. Delmore Schwartz, “Masterpieces as Cartoons,” Partisan Review, August 1952, 461–71. 5. Studies in Comics, vol. 4, no. 2, “Comics and Multimodal Adaptation” (April 2013), European Comic Art, vol. 6, no. 1, “Comics Adaptation of Literary Works” (Spring 2013), ImageText, vol. 6, no. 3, “Special Issue:

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8. 9. 10. 11.

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14. 15. 16.

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Shakespeare and Visual Rhetoric” (hiver 2013), European Comic Art, vol. 10, no. 1, “Comics and Adaptation” (Spring 2017). T. Leitch, “Adaptation, the Genre,” Adaptation 1, no. 2 (September 1, 2008): 106–20, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apn018. This survey was conducted in June 2019 using the catalogs of the public libraries in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. The book was absent from the public library in Phoenix. Hinds’s Macbeth was chosen because it is ostensibly an adaptation, from a key canonical work, by an author who has specialized in such works. It therefore seemed to offer the best chances of being read as an adaptation. Leitch, “Adaptation, the Genre,” 177. Leitch, 106. Rocco Versaci, This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature (New York and London: Continuum, 2007), 200. Versaci, 182–212; Jacques Dürrenmatt, Bande Dessinée et Littérature, Études de littérature des XXe et XXIe siècles 39 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013); Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, Cambridge Introductions to Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 191–216. “SDCC: Mark Waid and Terry Dodson on Marvel’s Star Wars: Princess Leia Miniseries,” accessed December 12, 2016, http://comicbook.com/ blog/2014/07/27/exclusive-mark-waid-and-terry-dodson-on-marvelsstar-wars-prince/. A notable exception is to be found in an article by Stephen Weiner in the Library Journal, registering the development of the graphic novel and including adaptation as one of the six genres or “kinds” present in the format, along with superheroes, human interest stories, manga, nonfiction and satire. Stephen Weiner, “Beyond Superheroes: Comics Get Serious,” Library Journal 127, no. 2 (January 2, 2002): 55. Abell, “Comics and Genre,” 80. Achim Hescher, Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration (Walter de Gruyter, 2016). Janet Pinkley and Kaela Casey, “Graphic Novels: A Brief History and Overview for Library Managers,” Library Leadership & Management 27, no. 3 (May 13, 2013): 2, https://journals.tdl.org/llm/index.php/llm/ article/view/7018. A footnote may nevertheless be the right place to argue that while the “graphic novel” is certainly a format, arguably a medium—as a loose convergence of material affordances, content and institutional discourses—it only functions as a genre if one is willing to construct a restricted corpus. This corpus typically excludes numerous examples of objects which were historically commercialized and discussed under this label, like the “Marvel Graphic Novel” line described in Chapter 3. Scholars such as

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Hescher and Karin Kukkonen (Karin Kukkonen, Contemporary Comics Storytelling [Lincoln: University Press of Nebraska, 2013], 11) make this specific move, which is perfectly legitimate as a staking of generic authority, but is far from being a consensual position. As a reminder that genres are culturally specific, I would argue that in a French context, however, the contemporary uses of “roman graphique” (the translation for graphic novel) do constitute a visible genre. The phrase has a much narrower meaning and these romans graphiques are consistently seen as a subset of the French bande dessinée, sold in the same places, in many cases by the same publishers as traditional albums; crucially the format used, a book of comics rather than a magazine, is not a discriminant in the French market. The issue is further complexified by the fact that some writers argue that the graphic novel is a genre not of comics but of literature, a position which I shall not discuss in details here except to note that it downplays historical considerations—the genealogy of the graphic novel is very much not that of literary genre—but constitutes a valid description of the way some readers, publishers and retailers use these books. It is unclear whether that genre is used by the creators themselves. See Christopher M. Kuipers, “The New Normal of Literariness: Graphic Literature as the next Paradigm Genre,” Studies in Comics 2, no. 2 (2012): 281–94, https:// doi.org/10.1386/stic.2.2.281_1. Casey Brienza, “Introduction: Manga Without Japan?” in Global Manga: “Japanese” Comics Without Japan? ed. Casey Brienza (Farnham, Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 7. Casey Brienza, Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics (London, Oxford, and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Brienza, “Introduction: Manga Without Japan?” 4. In France, the books were announced as “comics,” presumably because they were first published in the United States; these are global comics in many ways, but they are consistently pigeonholed into imagined national identities. See S. G. Hammond, ed., The Mignolaverse: Hellboy and the Comics Art of Mike Mignola (Edwardsville, IL: Sequart, 2019). Quoted in Terrence R. Wandtke, The Comics Scare Returns: The Contemporary Resurgence of Horror Comics, Comics Studies Monograph Series (Rochester and New York: RIT Press, 2018), 188. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 42. I am borrowing this notion of the “institutionalized” genre from Steve Neale. For Neale, these institutions encompass cultural gatekeepers and intermediaries (such as journals, libraries and bookstores) but also Hollywood itself. Neale, 39–40.

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26. “Urban Fantasy Graphic Novels (159 Books),” accessed July 12, 2019, https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/5474.Urban_Fantasy_Graphic_ Novels. 27. Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox, Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays (University Press of Mississippi, 2017). 28. Chris Mautner, “What Do We Do with YA?” The Comics Journal, Winter– Spring 2019, 139–40. 29. John Jackson Miller, “Industry-Wide Comics and Graphic Novel Sales for 2018,” Comichron, 2019, https://www.comichron.com/ yearlycomicssales/industrywide/2018-industrywide.html.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion: Beyond Genre?

Abstract This conclusion reflects on the relevance of traditional genres in view of some of the changes highlighted in the previous chapters. It argues that genres now have to contend with a variety of other technological and discursive tools to map personal affinities and families of text. It suggests that in spite of their diminished relevance in the comics world, genres retain their functions, as well as a nostalgic and referential appeal. Keywords Mapping · Hashtags

It would be disheartening to conclude a forty-thousand-word study of comics genres with an admission of their irrelevance. Yet, the studies conducted in Chapters 7–9 invite us to reconsider Ken Gelder’s description of genres as “one of the most productive ways to think about popular fiction,” which I quoted at the beginning of this book, at least in the case of contemporary comics. As we have seen, genres are seldom publicized by contemporary comics publishers—Image Comics being a striking outlier—and they play only a minor role in the proliferating production of amateur and self-published comics, while even superheroes, arguably the most established genre in American comics, have become a battleground for contradictory discursive claims. Even if we disregard the period of overt and ubiquitous generic affirmations in the 1940s as a historical anomaly, this suggests at the very least that the importance of genres for © The Author(s) 2020 N. Labarre, Understanding Genres in Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43554-7_10

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the industry has been eroding significantly. This does not mean that conventional narrative structures and aesthetic recurrences have been abandoned, merely that genres may no longer be the dominant discourses by which these features are identified and classified to form families of texts. This reduced visibility of genre can be explained in several ways. In the case of comic books, as opposed to graphic novels, this is partly the result of a specialization in superheroes, which has to some extent turned that genre in an undiscussed default option, at least for Marvel and DC Comics, which represent about two-thirds of the comic book market (as of 2019). While we have seen that the boundaries and specific signifiers of the superhero genre have been challenged by some fans in recent years, the genre need not be publicized as such, all the more so since its signifiers (the costumes, the names) are both easily identifiable and culturally ubiquitous. Since genres serve to establish a system of differences, the rarefaction of these differences in turn diminishes the usefulness of these discourses, as least in their use as commercial labels. More broadly, the reduced visibility of genre can be explained by the elevated status afforded to other types of architexts. Proprietary, branded architexts are among the most visible of these alternative text groupings. The Star Wars comics published by Marvel are placed in explicit dialogue with the rest of the franchise, including the movies, but also the novels, videogames and toys, through a variety of intertextual circulations meant to display the cohesiveness of the narrative and aesthetic system,1 through careful branding (from the names of the series to the typeface used in the title) and through centralized promotional discourses (the comics are advertised, discussed and explained on Starwars.com). Unlike genres, franchises do not invite potential readers to look to other publishers for variations on an identified formula: These familiar differences can be all be provided within the franchise, through the constitution of a library of tonally different narratives, designed for nonlinear consumption. Comics are particularly suites for such a proliferation of variations since they remain inexpensive to produce, compared to the other media involved in a typical franchise ecosystem. While genres constitute open discursive spaces, these franchises, which often hinge on adaptations or other intermedial circulations, function as walled gardens, cordoning off certain texts or fictional universes to the point where they become sui generis. As genres become irrelevant to discuss these objects, their general usefulness also decreases, in a self-reinforcing mechanism. Even outside of

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franchises, the blurring of boundaries between legacy media through their electronic remediations, as well as the frequent circulation of any popular content across media invite users to consider genres as intermedial discourses. As I have argued in Chapter 2, these intermedial versions of genres are less specific and thus less efficient as fashioning expectations and expressing tastes than medium-specific generic claims, which take into account affordances and medium-specific historical evolutions. Again, this evolution reduces the effectiveness of generic labels as horizons of expectations, diminishing their relevance for consumers and by extension, for producers. Authors offer the basis for another set of architexts vying for usefulness with genres. The gradual rise to prominence of comics authors in the wake of underground comics has led to taxonomies and modes of identification which, again, prove more precise and stable than genres. Any library or bookstore opting to sort their comics alphabetically, by author’s name, is encouraging its users to consider Charles Burns’s El Borbah, Black Hole and X-Out, as a meaningful text grouping, while downplaying their potential belonging to the genres of occult detective stories, teenage horror and surrealist fiction, respectively. Furthermore, the elevation of the author has historically operated as a repudiation of the logic of genre and by extension of the logic of mass culture; auteurist approaches do not invalidate genres, but following Andrew Sarris, “genre [is] just one more creative condition which is overridden by the auteur template.”2 In the case of comics, this may take the form of a strict hierarchy, which puts authorship above generic affiliation, and strongly privileges one architext over another. Dan Clowes’s cynical take on the superhero origin story, The Death Ray, may feature most of the signifiers of the genre (costume, power, etc.) but to the best of my knowledge, it is not commonly shelved, bought or reviewed as a superhero story or even as a parody thereof. It is, rather, Dan Clowes’s take on a superhero story, and to be read primarily within his oeuvre, a reading which is also strongly encouraged by the presentation and format of the book. Author-based architexts can even turn into more open categories by a process of analogy, of the kind already produced by the automated recommendations in online bookstores. It should also be noted that certain discursive communities may further refine these author-centric architexts by distinguishing between core and peripheral texts within the oeuvre, or even by excluding certain works altogether; Doom 2099 is rarely considered in the discussion of Warren Ellis’s oeuvre, for instance. As indicated in the case of Mike Mignola in Chapter 9,

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these architexts come to resemble genres very closely, though they always appear to belong to a different epistemological category, a different type of label. This hesitation offers another explanation for the relative decline of genres within the comics world. We have seen in Chapter 9 that categories such as the graphic novel, YA comics and manga occupy such an ambiguous position, which means that cultural intermediaries are unlikely to agree how to best use them for practical purposes, such as classification and display strategies. All of this suggest that genres are being displaced by a variety of other architexts, which are more readily definable by producers and more easily sortable by cultural intermediaries, while fulfilling many of the same functions: organizing production, distribution and consumption. As indicated in Chapters 7 and 8, the declining usefulness of genres may be tied to the technical apparatus of digital distribution, even when that distribution involves printed comics as the end product. Hashtags and other forms of categorization available online, whether usergenerated or not, put the emphasis on discoverability rather than on a precise taxonomy. Because these online objects proliferate—and again, comics can be produced more quickly and cheaply than many other cultural objects—the major barrier is not so much in making the right selection from available options, but in discovering precisely what these options are. As we saw, this imperative of discoverability incentivizes extensive labeling, in which genres coexist with indications of techniques and with more nuanced mentions of tone or style. These practices negate any special status of genres, by juxtaposing them with a variety of other indicators, with varying degrees of granularity. Furthermore, because digital remediations blur the boundaries between media, the generic labels used in these contexts are to be understood as broad categories, devoid of a medium-specific history. These digital practices do not discard legacy genres, but they treat them as merely one taxonomical option, which may or may not be used by prospective readers (here again, authors are traditionally privileged over genre, since their names are not mere tags, but receive a distinct presentation and are a favored discovery method). Finally, the erosion of genre is to be understood in the broader context and the rampant intertextuality and self-referentiality in popular culture, which heightens the playfulness inherent in many uses of genre,3 to the point of being about genres rather than in them. While comics in the

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United States have consistently shown signs of self-awareness and metaleptic impulses—from Bill Woggon’s Katy Keene to the entire output of Marvel comics in the 1960s—such practices have arguably become ubiquitous, leading to uses of genre which often seem to verge on parody, or blend so many possible signifiers as to discourage generic identifications—Amulet, mentioned in Chapter 8, offers such an example. Yet, genres still matter in comics. As a counterpoint to some of the above observations regarding the effect of generalized intermedial exchanges, it should first be observed that genres still matter in comics in part because of the important role they play in other media. Intermedial genre labels may be imprecise and largely ahistorical, but as long as comics function in a broader media ecology, these labels are likely to be used and apply to graphic narratives. Furthermore, many of the effects described in Chapter 6 are still relevant today, in particular because the narrative and cultural history of genres can still be tapped in the construction of new works. This is obviously true of contemporary creators reworking the influence of historical genres from the overt pastiches produced by Michael Kuperman to the referential crime comics associated with Sean Phillips and Ed Brubaker. Furthermore, while publishers have every interest in relying on closed-off architexts, such as franchises, their competitors are incentivized to identify the potentially generic elements in these architexts, in order to produce similar works or metacommentaries. These cycles and imitations may not always cohere into visible or consensually identified genres, but they counteract the closing off of fictional universe generated by franchises and industrial consolidation. These potential genres for specific communities call attention to the fact that in contemporary comics, as in popular literature, specific and limited genres proliferate, even as the importance of major legacy genres diminishes. To return to the image of genres as a language, these niche architexts serve as proliferating idiolects: Instead of broad categories, with fairly weak predictive and descriptive values, these niche genres provide a narrower horizon of expectation, which may be a result of the overdetermination of content prevalent in the tagging of cultural objects and is certainly tied to the shift from mass to personal media. I have already mentioned Image Comics as a publishing institution in which genres play a significant role, including mentions on each trade paperback and a dedicated page, prominently featured on their website. The complete list of genres includes expected staples, such as fantasy,

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horror or humor,4 but also idiosyncratic selections, such as “food,” “psychological,” “politics,” “mythology” and “feminist”—which is apparently not political—“sports” and even “British.” The basis for all these generic categories is immediately apparent, and some of these genres have wellestablished precedents in other media or in other cultural areas—foodbased manga come to mind—but in other cases, these genres seem to function as ad hoc construction, meant to clarify the publisher’s brand and highlight recurrences in its catalog. The fact that Image distinguishes between “crime and mystery” and plain “mystery” further suggests a very precise granularity, akin to the drive toward specialization which one would more readily expect from highly specialized fan communities. These ad hoc genres thus function as a form of catalog curation, moving away from a shared catalog of legacy genres and toward an openended repertoire, in which generic labels are caught between an overly large domain of validity—intermedial genres—and an extremely limited one—private or ad hoc genres—whose span of life may not exceed a few years. In the latter case, they function as part of a broad range of textual mappings, and alternate topologies, from which they differ in part through a sense of nostalgia and perhaps a hint of self-conscious chic.

Notes 1. Nicolas Labarre, “Les comics Star Wars et les paradoxes de la fidélité,” in Transmédialité, bande dessinée & adaptation, ed. Evelyne Deprêtre and German A. Duarte, Graphème (Clermont-Ferrand: PU Blaise Pascal, 2019), 258–69. 2. Barrett Hodsdon, The Elusive Auteur: The Question of Film Authorship Throughout the Age of Cinema (McFarland, 2017), 48. 3. Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à La Chaîne: Littératures Sérielles et Culture Médiatique, Poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2017), 267–68. 4. The “funny animals” genre is designated using its more common online designation, “anthro”, short for “anthropomorphic animals,” suggesting that Image’s somewhat nostalgic embrace of genres is also in conversation with recent usages of these genres in contemporary discursive communities. Also see Chapter 7.

Index

A Action Comics (comic book), 20, 23, 32, 34, 36, 64 adaptation, 8, 9, 18, 19, 21–25, 27, 38, 48, 50, 52, 64, 65, 71, 73, 75, 77, 93, 106, 130, 132–135, 137, 140–143, 148 Adventures into the Unknown (comic book), 50, 52–57, 60 affordance, 10, 18–21, 23, 25, 29, 75, 108, 136, 143, 149 Alter Ego (fanzine), 115 Altman, Rick, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 13–15, 31, 38, 43, 64, 76, 81, 82, 84, 87, 94, 112, 123, 124, 128, 140 amateur, 100–102, 104, 108–110, 147 Amazon, 30, 43, 113–115, 132, 134 Amulet (GN), 114, 115 Animal Man (comic book), 42, 86 animation, 19, 37, 38, 42, 102, 103, 106 anthology, 36, 37, 58, 116

Archie (comic book), 32, 50, 68 architext, 8, 9, 24, 32, 34, 50, 54, 64–66, 68–70, 73, 75, 80, 82, 86, 93, 101, 104, 105, 130, 135, 141, 142, 148–151 auteur, 149

B Baetens, Jan, 18, 26, 135 bande dessinée, 2, 144 Batman, 3, 7, 110, 116 Beaty, Bart, 10, 11, 15, 86, 94, 96, 124, 127 Bechdel, Alison, 8 Black Kiss (comic book), 11 blaxploitation (genre), 87 body genres, 20 Bone (comic book), 10, 15 bookstore, 12, 81, 132, 142, 144, 149 brand, 9, 24, 25, 31, 36, 54, 66, 69, 81, 82, 120, 152

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 N. Labarre, Understanding Genres in Comics, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43554-7

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INDEX

Brubaker, Ed, 32, 151 Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (TV show), 3, 9, 14 Burns, Charles, 81, 86, 92, 149 C Chaykin, Howard, 2, 11, 23, 31 children’s books, 19 Classics Illustrated (comic book), 48, 132, 134 Clowes, Dan, 81, 91, 92, 149 Comics Code, 55, 57, 58, 141 comics criticism, 1, 2, 7, 10, 43, 80, 105, 106, 112–114, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 127, 133, 140 Comicsgate, 115, 120–124, 127 Comics Journal, The (magazine), 13, 15, 30, 113, 133 Comics poetry (genre), 25 comic strips, 2, 37, 42, 47, 48, 108, 125, 132 Comixology, 129, 136 community, 7–11, 17, 47, 89, 103, 104, 108, 123, 124, 135, 137, 138, 141, 149, 151, 152 convergence, 18, 20, 23, 48, 50, 58, 71, 143 cover, 30–32, 34, 39, 44, 46, 48, 53, 56, 65, 68, 71, 76, 88, 89, 106, 108, 113, 115, 116, 134, 139 Crime Does Not Pay (comic book), 52, 64 crime (genre), 4, 32, 45, 46, 48, 52, 53, 58, 80, 83, 151 crowdfunding, 123, 124, 128 D Dark Horse, 60, 64, 65, 69, 72, 74, 76, 93, 139 David Boring (GN), 91, 92 Dazzler (comic book), 87–89, 91

DC Comics, 8, 23, 36, 42, 64, 69, 76, 81–84, 93, 95, 112, 122, 141, 148 Death Ray, The (GN), 149 Dell Publishing, 5, 6, 37, 41, 132 DeviantArt, 102, 103, 105–108, 110 Dick Tracy (comic strip), 47 digital comics, 100, 103 Ditko, Steve, 82 domain of validity, 2, 4, 9, 12, 141, 152 E EC Comics, 50, 53–55, 58, 60, 61 Eclipse Comics, 58 Ellison, Harlan, 20, 21 Ellis, Warren, 77, 83, 85, 139, 149 erotic (genre), 4, 11, 20, 27, 104 F family resemblance, 5, 20, 38, 83, 133 fans, 2, 10, 24, 65, 86, 99–101, 103, 110, 112–115, 117–121, 123, 124, 126, 134, 136, 138, 148, 152 fan-tagonism, 118, 125 Fantagraphics, 96, 113, 124 Fantastic Four, The (comic book), 3, 80, 117 fantasy (genre), 30, 31, 68, 95, 104, 106, 113, 137, 141, 151 Fawcett, 37, 39, 40, 44 Ferris, Emil, 30, 43 Fiction House, 34–36 Flash Gordon (comic strip), 23, 47, 54, 66 formula, 37, 43, 46, 50, 58, 65, 68, 77, 80–83, 92, 93, 115, 139, 148 Fraction, Matt, 13, 41, 89, 90 Frankenstein, 48, 49, 66

INDEX

Funny Animals (comic book), 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 50 funny animals (genre), 11, 36–38, 41–44, 102, 103, 105, 114, 152 G Gaiman, Neil, 83, 84, 86 Gaines, William, 27, 45, 46, 59 Gamergate, 121, 127, 128 Gelder, Ken, 1, 12, 13, 29, 43, 61, 76, 147 gender, 70, 73, 77, 87, 89 Genette, Gerard, 8, 14, 30, 34, 43 genre splicing, 103 genrifiers, 11 Grand Comics Database (GCD), 129, 130 graphic novel, 2, 8, 10, 12, 15, 30, 32, 34, 44, 81, 82, 91, 95, 96, 108, 112–115, 128, 132–136, 138, 141–144, 148, 150 Graphix (imprint), 141 H hashtags, 103–106, 108, 109, 120, 121, 123, 150 Hassler-Forest, Dan, 24, 116 Hawkeye (comic book), 13, 66, 89, 91 Helix (imprint), 84 Hellboy (comic book), 139, 140 Hinds, Gareth, 132–134, 143 horizon of expectation, 7, 32, 41, 65, 132, 151 horror (genre), 4, 11, 20, 34, 45–48, 50, 52–55, 57–61, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77, 81, 83–86, 91, 92, 105, 111, 125, 133, 139, 149, 152 Huizenga, Kevin, 5, 6, 14 humour (genre), 63, 80, 103, 113

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Hutcheon, Linda, 27, 64, 76, 133

I Image Comics, 26, 31, 32, 36, 41, 53, 89, 92, 93, 102, 105, 106, 116, 136, 137, 147, 151, 152 ImgUR, 102, 108, 110 intermedial genres, 17, 142, 151, 152 Iron Fist (comic book), 23 irony, 36, 103, 105, 108, 118

J Jenkin, Henry, 24, 27, 28, 114, 115, 125 Jurgens, Dan, 69, 72, 74

K Katy Keene (comic book), 151 Kirby, Jack, 64, 82

L letter columns, 34, 53, 68, 100, 120, 126 library, 9, 10, 106, 136, 143, 148, 149 linguistics, 4, 5, 14 Linné, Carl von, 3 literature, 5, 10, 17, 19, 25, 29, 50, 55, 60, 61, 86, 111, 113, 140, 141, 144, 151 Lost Girls (GN), 11

M Macbeth, 132–134, 143 manga, 2, 132, 136–138, 140, 142, 143, 150, 152 manhwa, 137, 138 martial arts (genre), 23, 27, 130, 131

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INDEX

Marvel Comics, 3, 21–23, 30–32, 34, 36, 44, 52, 54, 55, 77, 82, 87–91, 93, 115, 117, 119, 120, 122, 126, 127, 132, 139, 141, 148, 151 mass culture, 24, 80, 81, 92, 149 Mignola, Mike, 138–140, 149 Minx (imprint), 112, 141 Moorcock, Michael, 20–22 Moore, Alan, 11, 64, 84 Ms. Marvel (comic book), 122, 141 musical (genre), 19, 20

N narratology, 4, 8, 18 Neale, Steve, 4, 9, 11, 13, 61, 96, 140, 144 Netflix, 19, 24 New Worlds (magazine), 20, 21 New York Times, The, 45, 47, 57, 58 Niño, Alex, 21 Noir, 2, 58 nostalgia, 36, 124, 152 Nowlan, Kevin, 72, 74

O Ody-C (comic book), 41, 42 Omaha the Cat Dancer (comic book), 11

P parody, 32, 86, 103, 149, 151 pastiche, 89, 139, 151 periodicals, 12, 34, 36, 43 peritext, 29, 30, 34, 42, 102, 106, 112, 114, 134, 139 Phillips, Sean, 32, 151 pleasure, 7, 68, 73, 82, 86 Poe, Edgar Allan, 48, 50, 52, 57 Pokémon, 100, 103, 110

Preacher (comic book), 83, 85, 88 Prototype theory, 5, 7, 8, 10, 31, 46, 112, 122 Publisher’s Weekly (magazine), 133 pulps, 23, 32, 34, 48 R Red Sonja and Vampirella meet Betty and Veronica (comic book), 68, 73 romance (genre), 4, 32, 41–43, 80, 87–89, 91, 93, 105, 108, 112, 133 Romita Jr., John, 116–118 S Sandman (comic book), 83, 86 Scholastic Corporation, 81, 114, 115, 132, 140, 141 science-fiction (genre), 2, 4, 11, 17, 20, 21, 23–25, 27, 30, 31, 42, 46, 53, 69, 71, 75, 83, 84, 120 seriality, 12, 47, 91, 93, 104, 108, 110, 116, 122, 137 Shakespeare, William, 132, 133 Spider-Man, 7, 77, 115, 118, 119, 122 Spiegelman, Art, 86, 92, 116 Spielberg, Stevens, 19, 65 Star Wars , 21, 23, 24, 27, 32 Star Wars, 148 Straczynski, Michael, 116–120, 126 style, 5, 21, 31, 32, 38, 41, 42, 60, 80, 103, 121, 132, 133, 138, 139, 150 superhero (genre), 1–3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 14, 20, 30, 31, 36–38, 42, 44, 48, 60, 66, 68–71, 73, 76, 77, 80–84, 87, 88, 91, 92, 103, 104, 110, 115–119, 121–123, 126, 133, 139, 141, 143, 147–149

INDEX

Superman, 3, 7, 20, 36, 64, 65, 68–71, 73–76, 116, 118 Superman/Aliens , 64–66, 68, 69, 71–75 T television, 3, 23, 114, 123, 125 Telgemeier, Raina, 32 Terry and the Pirates (comic strip), 10, 15 Thomas, Roy, 23, 27, 133 toys, 24, 148 transmedia, 23, 24, 44, 65, 75, 93, 100, 142 Transmetropolitan (comic book), 83–85 Tumblr, 102, 110 Twilight , 141 U Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction (magazine), 21, 22, 27 V Vertigo (imprint), 8, 9, 82–87, 91, 94–96, 103, 112

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video games, 17, 19, 20, 25, 65, 119–121 vraisemblance, 4, 5, 13, 68, 84, 118, 119

W Waid, Mark, 127, 143 walking simulators (genre), 121, 127 Walt Disney Company, The, 24, 37, 44 Ware, Chris, 8, 86, 92 Watchmen, 26, 32 weird (genre), 46, 53, 55–57, 60, 61, 74 Wertham, Fredric, 30, 58 western (genre), 25, 38, 83, 85, 91, 95, 102 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 14, 68 women-in-prison (genre), 88, 93

Y Yen Press, 137 Young Adult (YA), 10, 81, 115, 135, 140–142, 150