The British Comic Book Invasion: Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and the Evolution of the American Style 2018053970, 9781476674155, 9781476635002

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The British Comic Book Invasion

CRITICAL EXPLORATIONS IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY (a series edited by Donald E. Palumbo and C.W. Sullivan III) Earlier Works: www.mcfarlandpub.com Recent Works: 37 Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays (ed. Janet Brennan Croft, 2013) 38 Girls Transforming: Invisibility and Age-Shifting in Children’s Fantasy Fiction Since the 1970s (Sanna Lehtonen, 2013) 39 Doctor Who in Time and Space: Essays (ed. Gillian I. Leitch, 2013) 40 The Worlds of Farscape: Essays (ed. Sherry Ginn, 2013) 41 Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars (ed. Gloria McMillan, 2013) 42 The Heritage of Heinlein (Thomas D. Clareson and Joe Sanders, 2014) 43 The Past That Might Have Been, the Future That May Come (Lauren J. Lacey, 2014) 44 Environments in Science Fiction: Essays (ed. Susan M. Bernardo, 2014) 45 Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works (ed. Anne Hiebert Alton, William C. Spruiell, 2014) 46 Nature and the Numinous in Mythopoeic Fantasy Literature (Christopher Straw Brawley, 2014) 47 J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and the Birth of Modern Fantasy (Deke Parsons, 2014) 48 The Monomyth in American Science Fiction Films (Donald E. Palumbo, 2014) 49 The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film (ed. Judith B. Kerman, John Edgar Browning, 2014) 50 Star Wars in the Public Square (Derek R. Sweet, 2016) 51 An Asimov Companion (Donald E. Palumbo, 2016) 52 Michael Moorcock (Mark Scroggins, 2016) 53 e Last Midnight: Essays (ed. Leisa A. Clark, Amanda Firestone, Mary F. Pharr, 2016) 54 e Science Fiction Mythmakers: Religion, Science and Philosophy in Wells, Clarke, Dick and Herbert (Jennifer Simkins, 2016) 55 Gender and the Quest in British Science Fiction Television (Tom Powers, 2016) 56 Saving the World rough Science Fiction: James Gunn (Michael R. Page, 2017) 57 Wells Meets Deleuze (Michael Starr, 2017) 58 Science Fiction and Futurism: eir Terms and Ideas (Ace G. Pilkington, 2017) 59 Science Fiction in Classic Rock: Musical Explorations of Space, Technology and the Imagination, 1967–1982 (Robert McParland, 2017) 60 Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building (Audrey Isabel Taylor, 2017) 61 e Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio: Exploring eir Parallel Worlds (Laura Tosi with Peter Hunt, 2018) 62 A Dune Companion: Characters, Places and Terms in Frank Herbert’s Original Six Novels (Donald E. Palumbo, 2018) 63 Fantasy Literature and Christianity: A Study of the Mistborn, Coldfire, Fionavar Tapestry and Chronicles of omas Covenant Series (Weronika Łaszkiewicz, 2018) 64 e British Comic Invasion: Alan Moore, Warren Ellis and the Evolution of the American Style (Jochen Ecke, 2018) 65 e Archive Incarnate: e Embodiment and Transmission of Knowledge in Science Fiction (Joseph Hurtgen, 2018)

The British Comic Book Invasion Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and the Evolution of the American Style

Jochen Ecke CRITICAL EXPLORATIONS IN S CIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, 64 Series Editors Donald E. Palumbo and C.W. Sullivan III

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS C ATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Ecke, Jochen, 1979– author. Title: The British comic book invasion : Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and the evolution of the American style / Jochen Ecke. Description: Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2019. | Series: Critical explorations in science fiction and fantasy ; 64 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018053970 | ISBN 9781476674155 (softcover : acid free paper) Subjects: LCSH: Comic books, strips, etc.—United States— History and criticism. | Graphic novels—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN6725 .E27 2019 | DDC 741.5/973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053970

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BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-7415-5 ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-3500-2 © 2019 Jochen Ecke. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover illustration © 2019 iStock Printed in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

Table of Contents Acknowledgments

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A Note on References

viii

Introduction: How to Read This Book

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1. U.S. Mainstream Comics of the 1970s and 1980s: Defining the Mode of Practice

11

2. The British New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s

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3. Alan Moore and the American Mode of Practice

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4. “What is there for me to do?” Case Studies in the Second Wave of the British Invasion

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Conclusions: Imagined Readers and the Strange Afterlives of the British Invasion

239

Appendix: Interpretation of the Questionnaire

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Chapter Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments I am greatly indebted to Anja Müller-Wood for her commitment to and support of this project. This study has benefited considerably from her advice and insightful comments. Mark Berninger and Gideon Haberkorn made my first steps in the academic world possible by putting me on the organizational team of the Comics as a Nexus of Cultures conference. Thank you for your trust and friendship. I would also like to thank Patrick Gill and Willi Barth for their support. Many colleagues gave me the opportunity to develop my ideas on conference panels, on journal pages and in essay collections. I would like to express my gratitude to Nathan Wiseman-Trowse, Mike Starr, Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, Shane Denson, Alfred Hornung and Matthew J.A. Green for providing a forum for young scholars to test the waters. Ruben Schmitt, Thomas Nickel, and Christian Giegerich got me into comics and, most important of all, made sure that I kept reading. Lucas Kraus gave me the best education in the weird and the strange in the arts imaginable and continues to be a great friend. Thank you all. Knut Brockmann has always been my favorite academic sparring partner. He also lent me his copy of David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film some years ago. One of these days, I am actually going to return it. This book was originally submitted as a doctoral thesis entitled “The British Invasion of American Comics: A Poetics” at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Helmut, Annemarie, Michael, and Johanna: none of this would exist without you. I am incredibly grateful for your boundless patience, understanding and help. This one is for you, with love. All mistakes and omissions are, of course, my own.

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A Note on References Until the 1990s, most U.S. mainstream comics serials were not created with the intent to eventually reprint the books in collected editions. For this reason, they often lack pagination, even when they are eventually collected in book form. As a consequence, this study contains many references which, to the frustration of the reader, only state “n.pag.” instead of a page number. To make references more precise, panel number(s) have been added in most cases. The Arabic number given after the page number or “n.pag.” therefore always refers to the panel number in intuitive reading order. Some of the comic books cited are paginated, but start the pagination over at the beginning of each chapter. In these cases, the Roman numeral after the author’s/s’ name(s) refers to the chapter number; the subsequent Arabic number designates the page; and the final Arabic number points to the panel. To give an example: the parenthetic reference (XI, 9, 3) refers to chapter 11 of the respective comic book, page nine, panel three.

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Introduction: How to Read This Book There is no such thing as the British Invasion of American comics. This may seem like an unfortunate first sentence for a study devoted to the same, but it is only a slight exaggeration. In fact, this suspicion may dawn on any researcher working on this phenomenon at some point. Upon embarking on this project, it quickly became apparent that the commonplace account of the British Invasion of American comics is at the very least problematic. However, this did not prove disastrous. In the end, it merely led to a different account of the British Invasion, albeit one that often contradicts the standard version of this part of comics history. Here is a summary1 of what comics readers and scholars typically mean by “British Invasion”: at the beginning of the 1980s, representatives of the U.S. mainstream comics industry started to approach British comics writers and artists with the intent to recruit them for work on U.S. serials. Typically, comics historiography invokes Alan Moore as one of the first British comics creators to cross the pond. He is also considered the most important figure of the first wave of these artistic emigrants, and perhaps of the whole of the British Invasion. One of the two large U.S. comics publishers, DC Comics, courted Moore at the beginning of the 1980s because of his highly innovative work on British comics serials like Marvelman (1982–1989) and V for Vendetta (1982–1989). He quickly made a name for himself in the United States, taking over the struggling monster serial Saga of the Swamp Thing in 1984 with penciler Steve Bissette and turning it into a hit with readers and comics professionals alike. Moore’s definitive breakthrough in the United States came with the 12-part series Watchmen (drawn by Dave Gibbons, 1986/1987), a self-reflexive, formally sophisticated superhero serial which opened new perspectives on the genre and on the comics medium. It garnered immense attention and critical accolades, even outside the typically insular comics community. In the follow1

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Introduction

ing, editors from all major U.S. comics publishers sought out new British talent that they hoped would be able to replicate Moore’s accomplishments. In quick succession, writers and artists like Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan, Warren Ellis, Brian Bolland, and Steve Dillon entered the U.S. comics mainstream. Their work on a large variety of U.S. comics serials exhibits many common traits—the British Invasion comic books share certain themes, stylistic choices, and a pronounced British perspective on U.S. popular culture. One of the defining features of the migrant comics creators’ Britishness is a critical, often highly politicized attitude towards the superhero genre. Many of these British comics writers and artists came to achieve star status in the U.S. mainstream, affecting substantial changes to the American mainstream comics practice by the subversive and innovative precedent they set. This account is problematic in several ways. For one, it relies on a notion of singular artistic genius. In this version of the story, the sole explanation for the migration of British comics creators to the U.S. market is the quality, innovation, and forcefulness of Moore’s work. By opting for a monocausal explanation for the British Invasion, this standard account thus excludes many historical and material contingencies (not to speak of the large number of other, equally talented British writers and artists): the state of the U.S. and British comics industries at the end of the 1970s; the artistic, narrational, and economic practices of the U.S. and British comics mainstream; and conflicts surrounding comics authorship that were virulent at the time, to name only three major factors. It also disregards the fact that Moore and his peers did not start their careers in the United States—their complex style had its origin in the comics industry of Great Britain. In other words, there was a British Invasion style before there was a British Invasion. For those works produced in the UK, the term “new wave” or “British new wave” is therefore preferable to underline this historical differentiation between a phase prior to and several phases after the migration to the U.S. mainstream comics industry. This dominant version of an important chapter in Anglophone comics history also indulges in a certain amount of essentialism, pitting a vaguely defined notion of Britishness against the innately American practices of the U.S. comics industry. But in how far can a work like Watchmen be considered “British”? Do the inhabitants of Great Britain have a monopoly on ideological and moral criticism of popular fictions, for example? And are the British and U.S. comics practices of the 1980s and 1990s truly so different as to merit the differentiation between two entirely dif-

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ferent systems? In an alternative account of this portion of comics history, for example, one might disregard the birthplace of Moore, Morrison, Ellis, and all the other members of the British Invasion, and instead posit a transnational comics culture, sharing, evolving, and circulating practices, conventions, and norms. In this version of comics history, Moore et al. would feature as innovative maverick creators alongside their groundbreaking U.S. peers like Frank Miller, but their nationality would be of little consequence.2 A thoroughly text- or style-centered comics studies might even dispense with authors entirely. The standard account of the British Invasion also lacks the critical methodology to come to grips with innovation in the U.S. and British comics industries. If the comics of the British Invasion were truly groundbreaking, the research question “What made them groundbreaking?” must be considered imprecise. Instead, we need to ask what made them groundbreaking in comparison to the narrational standards of the U.S. comics mainstream at the time, since this is the point of departure for practically all evaluations of the British Invasion. In turn, this forces us to ask: what are the narrational standards of the U.S. comics mainstream at the time? Which norms and restraints upon creativity can we discern? In other words, what was it like to read a “normal,” run-of-the-mill mainstream U.S. comic book in the 1970s and 1980s, the initial timeframe of the British Invasion? And will this comparison result in the fundamental otherness of the British Invasion that the standard account presupposes? These are only the most pressing concerns that this historiographic template evokes. They inevitably cast a certain amount of doubt on the very existence of the British Invasion outside discursive and performative practices. For this study, the central research question of this study thus became “In how far can the British Invasion be considered a verifiable phenomenon?” Contemporary theory offers any number of potential solutions to this problem. It would be possible to discuss the movement’s identity politics, for example. In many ways, the comic books analyzed in this study certainly lend themselves to interpretations in terms of identity formation. 3 It would equally be possible to perform close readings of the British Invasion serials to identify the thematic links and divergences between the works of their creators. Ideological criticism would have been a viable option, too. Roughly, this study could have outlined how the comics of the British Invasion perform ideological criticism(s), and can, in turn, be criticized themselves. Yet another alternative to the standard account would have been to conceptualize and describe the transnational comics culture that has already been sketched above, which would, however, have

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Introduction

made it necessary to dispense with the notion of the British Invasion entirely, and widened the focus dangerously. None of these approaches have been adopted for this book. This is largely because the research questions to be posed here differ from those asked by critical projects such as the ones outlined above. Instead, this study seeks to answer the following basic questions: for one, how did the persistent emphasis on innovation and subversion in our view of the British Invasion come about? Most readers share the view that the writers and artists of the British Invasion shook up the status quo in the U.S. comics mainstream during the l980s and 1990s, and that there is indeed a stylistic continuity that unites much of the British Invasion work, no matter the author(s). This analysis of the British Invasion will seek to clarify whether this shared experience of innovation holds true, and what this notion in the context of the U.S. comics mainstream entails. How can we reliably identify originality and novelty within this mode of comics practice? Again, an answer to this question requires a historically contingent notion of the narrational norm in the U.S. comics mainstream—an historical and analytical comics poetics (more on the notion of a comics poetics in Chapter 1). In turn, this means that this research project will engage with the modalities and material circumstances of mainstream comics publication and narration as much as possible. It will consider, to give two examples, the principle of (mostly unlimited) seriality that is so prevalent in the U.S. mainstream comics practice to this day. Mainstream comic books in the United States are largely released in short monthly chapters in what has been called a “floppy” or “pamphlet” format (the terms refer to the lack of a more expensive square binding). Until the 1990s, U.S. mainstream comics were only rarely collected in paperback or hardcover format. This serialized mode of publication has considerable consequences for narration (seriality will be treated in-depth in Chapter 1, and throughout this study). It is equally essential to consider the industrial circumstances of production in the U.S. mainstream, which to this day produces comic books based on an assembly line model. Creative duties are typically split between an editor who organizes the entire creative endeavor, a writer who produces the script, a penciler who draws each page, an inker who finishes up the penciler’s line work in ink, and a colorist. But the U.S. mainstream comics industry cannot be solely characterized on these material terms. It is also a complex cultural practice made up of—among many other things—an immense mass of critical as well as historiographical paratexts written by comics creators and readers alike and an astonishing amount of reader

How to Read This Book

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participation in fanzines, on Internet message boards, Twitter, comics news sites, and during fan conventions. In U.S. mainstream comics, in other words, the line between creatives and the audience is exceptionally blurry. This participatory culture, as Jenkins calls it (“Convergence”: 3), is both reflected in and partly created by the comic books themselves. Certain central concepts of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s poetics of the cinema—also called neoformalism by certain critics—will serve as the foundation of this study, albeit with considerable modifications to suit the comics medium. Bordwell and Thompson’s definition of the classical Hollywood cinema as developed in their monograph of the same title (1985, with Staiger) has proved helpful in honing this volume’s approach to what we will call canonical narration in the U.S. mainstream of the 1970s and 1980s. Their concept of a poetics rests upon two pillars. For one, the methodology is empirical: their analysis of classical Hollywood narration, for example, is based on a corpus of 100 randomly chosen, decidedly unremarkable films, all of which have been analyzed according to the same list of research questions that center on basic questions of narrative comprehension. In other words, Bordwell and Thompson are interested in what could be called the “normal” or “ordinary” case of narration, just like the initial chapters of this study will be about the “normal” mainstream comic book of the 1970s and 1980s. Bordwell and Thompson also approach narrative from the point of view of cognitivism, a perspective that this study, too, will adopt for the comics medium. Roughly, this means that the analyzes in the following chapters will focus on the audience’s cognitive activities and aesthetic experiences in reading comic books—“normal” mainstream books of the 1970s and 1980s, and comics of the British new wave and British Invasion (more on cognitivism in Chapter 1). On this empirical and cognitivist basis, it can indeed be posited that the British Invasion is a verifiable phenomenon at what film scholar David Bordwell calls “the middle level of narration” (“Poetics”: 3). His concept of a stratified process of reception requires some explanation, especially since it will be of equal importance for this study. In Bordwell’s account, narration takes hold on three separate levels. In a first step, the basic perception of the cues proffered by the narration takes place. In the case of the comics medium, readers quickly differentiate between human figures and material space; they take in colors and contrast cues, perceive agents and objects in spatial relation to each other, and so on. To Bordwell, this mostly involuntary intake is already an active, goal-oriented process, even if the reader is not necessarily aware of it. Awareness only becomes a necessity at the middle level of narration,

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Introduction

that of comprehension. Here, the perceived cues are analyzed and meaningfully incorporated into the larger spatio-temporal as well as causal model of the narrative that the reader is constructing. The decidedly more abstract third level of appropriation or interpretation, on the other hand, is much less driven by concrete narrational cues. Instead, in appropriating a narrative, readers mostly bring to bear the mental schemata and prototypes they have previously acquired, and use them to map interpretations on the (more or less) compatible prompts that the narration has provided (paraphrased after Bordwell “Poetics”: 47/50/54; see Chapter 1 for a more thorough account). Reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, to cite a prominent example from this study, in terms of ideological criticism or of a “deconstruction” of the superhero genre would constitute an act of appropriation, for example. Such an interpretive mapping requires prior knowledge of the genre, its history and its conventions, as well as a certain ideological, social, and historical background on the part of the reader. This study of the British Invasion will only concern itself with appropriation(s) if they are an integral part of the narration—for example, if the need for active interpretation that goes well beyond the construction of a linear, causally coherent narrative is foregrounded by a particularly suppressive and fragmentary narration. There will also be a focus on the British Invasion’s penchant for interpretations when it comes to foregrounding authorship and ensuring cultural distinction. In other words, a considerable amount of space will be devoted to the many ways in which British Invasion serials prompt readers to come up with abstract interpretations, and in how far these interpretations are an important part of the movement’s poetics. But actual interpretations of the works will not be at the center of this study. Instead, this book is about the middle level of narration, in an attempt to approximate the experience of reading these comic books, largely prior to any interpretive concerns. To do so, it is necessary to differentiate between two practices: that of the U.S. comics mainstream of the 1970s and 1980s, and that of the British new wave, or British Invasion. The first chapter will map some of the most important processes involved in comprehending a “normal,” unremarkable comic book from the U.S. mainstream of the 1970s and 1980s. To define “normal” or canonical storytelling in the comics medium, a randomized selection of 50 mainstream comics dating from these two decades have been compiled. They will serve as a corpus on which a catalogue of research questions will be brought to bear. The full list of questions as well as the interpretation of the data can be

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found in the appendix. In other words, this study of is based on verifiable data as much as possible. Every attempt has been made to concentrate on the most basic narrational work of the British Invasion serials and the American comics mainstream. In other words, this book is about what these comic books actually do, not which interpretations they afford. This methodology might incur the reproach of naïve positivism from critics who consider a conceptual differentiation between comprehension and appropriation impossible. Others may harbor general doubts as to the applicability and validity of empirical study in the humanities. Since the emergence of the distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities in the 19th century, humanists have continuously rejected the use of scientific methodology in their disciplines. Dating back to 19thcentury German thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey, universities have differentiated “between the natural sciences, Naturwissenschaften, and the sciences of the mind, Geisteswissenschaften” (Plotkin “Imagined World”: 11). Both are thought to ply entirely different trades. While the sciences are “based on experimentation, quantification and precisely stated laws and theories” and are therefore tasked with explaining nature, the humanities are meant to foster our understanding of human beings (cf. Plotkin “Imagined World”: 11, Slingerland “Science”: 3). Understanding—as opposed to explaining—“involves interpretation, hermeneutics and empathy, not experimentation and quantification” (Plotkin “Imagined World”: 12). Slingerland sums up this traditional distinction between the humanities and the natural sciences in the following way: “The humanities study the products of the free and unconstrained spirit or mind—literature, religion, art, history—while the natural sciences concern themselves with the deterministic laws governing the inert kingdom of dumb objects” (n.pag.). To Slingerland, this antagonism of the humanities and the sciences is in close analogy to the Western world’s persistent “metaphysical belief … that there are two utterly different types of substances in the world, mind and matter, which operate according to distinct principles” (n.pag.). Yet as humanist researchers are increasingly discovering, the differentiation between the sciences and the humanities is only tenable if we cling to this dualism. If we posit, alongside the natural sciences, that the mind is of the body, it follows that “these body-minds are, have always been, and will always continue to be part of the world of things” (Slingerland “Science”: 8). And if the mind is matter, its workings can be usefully illuminated with the means of the natural sciences. This is not to say that an embodied approach to the humanities vies for those “eternal, objective truths” so suspect to contemporary cultural critics (ibid.). Instead, the premise of a common human

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Introduction

embodied experience “can result in a stable body of shared knowledge, verified (at least provisionally) by proofs based on common perceptual access” (ibid.). Slingerland advocates that humanists take note of scientific findings, incorporating them into their theoretical frameworks in an attempt at “vertical integration”: the natural sciences are to provide new foundations for humanist enquiry, just like the natural sciences will profit from the findings of the humanities (Slingerland “Science”: 16). This study is an attempt at such vertical integration. 4 At the same time, it must be noted that while the foundations of this study are cognitivist and constructivist, its methodology is not rigorously scientific at all. The research questions it asks of the comic books in its corpus are largely concerned with narrative strategies that most readers would readily be able to identify as important to their most basic comprehension of the story. To give a few examples of research questions: “Does the narration leave easily discernible gaps, and are these gaps subsequently filled or left permanently open? Do these gaps invoke clearly defined, causally relevant questions on the part of the reader? Does the narration deliver all pieces of information necessary to understand and predict the outcome of the narrative on the first few pages, or does it suppress and distribute essential causal cues? Does the narration regularly provide insights into the protagonist’s/s’ emotional and intellectual inner life, or does it choose not to divulge its characters’ thoughts and feelings instead?” Most of these queries indeed concern the conceptual middle level of narration, in that the answers to these extremely basic questions will very likely produce, as Bordwell puts it, “many convergences” among recipients (“Poetics”: 47). However, this study does not set out to prove these convergences, for example by way of empirical studies with test readers. Such empirical validation (or perhaps proof of the contrary) would certainly be desirable in the future, but its lack does not invalidate or fundamentally compromise the study’s findings. While its methods are not as rigorous as those of the natural sciences, its research questions mostly take their point of departure from cognitive theory, that is, the natural sciences. The value of the findings is perhaps best illustrated by how counter-intuitive many of them are. In many cases, the statistics suggested conclusions that were unanticipated, painting a picture of a complex and demanding mainstream comics practice even in books that most would consider unremarkable. Admittedly, the borderline between comprehension and appropriation is not clear-cut, and to a certain extent, comprehension is “evidently a matter of degree; some viewers get more, some get less” (Bordwell “Poetics”: 50). What this study considers a question of comprehension may be

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a case of appropriation for others. The definition of canonical narration in the American mode of practice of the 1970s and 1980s offered up in the conclusion to Chapter 1 must therefore be seen only as an approximation of the reading experience of a “normal” comic book, with all the other caveats that this volume’s methodology entails. The following chapters are devoted to answering the question how the poetics of the British Invasion differ from the poetics of the U.S. comics mainstream at the time. In addition to the results of the corpus analysis, new theoretical frameworks such as Mittell’s concept of narrational complexity are introduced in this second half of the study. The works of the British new wave and British Invasion are considered roughly in chronological order. Chapter 2 covers early new wave serials like Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s Charley’s War (1979–1985) and Alan Moore’s Marvelman/Miracleman (1982–1989), while Chapter 3 is dedicated to Moore’s arrival in the American comics mainstream, and firmly puts serials such as Saga of the Swamp Thing (1984–1987) and Watchmen (1986/1987) in the new wave context. Chapter 4 focuses on the second wave of the British Invasion, providing exemplary analyzes of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher (1995–2000), Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary (1998–2009) as well as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Flex Mentallo (1996). In this manner, stylistic continuities, divergences, and evolutions become more apparent, concrete historical and material circumstances of production can be considered, and the teleological discourse of genius authorship may largely be avoided. At the same time, this book does not shirk away from an analysis of the “greatest hits” of the British Invasion such as Swamp Thing and Watchmen. Who might profit from such a poetics of both the U.S. comics mainstream and the works of the British Invasion? Primarily, this book was written for cultural and literary critics as well as comics scholars: those who are interested in the phenomenon of the British Invasion itself; but this study will hopefully also be of interest to researchers who are doing work on the U.S. comics mainstream as a larger practice. For both kinds of scholars, this research may show new ways of engaging with the mainstream as well as the British Invasion from a more reader-centered perspective. The results of this study might also arouse the curiosity of narratologists and cognitivist scholars who are not chiefly invested in the comics medium. Many of the phenomena discussed in these pages are transmedial in nature and have already been adopted by the rapidly convergent media landscape. The fact that this study’s model of canonical narration in the U.S. comics mainstream shows many similarities to the classical Hollywood style also points to the possibility of discovering what

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Introduction

could be called a standard storytelling practice: a universal set of basic narrational traits that would outline what an audience expects of a “normal” story, regardless of its mediation. Some of the more basic narrational norms that are outlined in the following chapters may well be “specieswide conceptual, affective, and aesthetic norms” (Slingerland “Science”: 72), and the vertical integration of scientific discoveries may enable us to talk about them on these terms. Finally—and this may well be this volume’s most ambitious aim—this book was also written with comics professionals in mind. While reading it may be challenging for non-academics, great pains have been taken to keep academic jargon at bay. In the following chapters, comics writers and artists may find many concrete examples of how both “normal” mainstream comics and the more adventurous British Invasion serials challenge, transport, and commit their readership—not just to the stories, characters, and serials themselves, but also to individual authorial personas. What is on offer on the following pages is (part of ) the British Invasion’s formula for success, presented as concretely as possible with copious illustrations and ready-made for appropriation and variation by writers and artists. This is how to read this book, then: you are invited to cast aside your preconceptions as to what the British Invasion or the U.S. mainstream comics practice entails, and to reconsider both from the point of view of poetics. This change of perspective may take some getting used to, especially for those already familiar with the British Invasion, since many of this study’s contentions go against received opinion. In this analysis, the works of the British Invasion will emerge not as the revolutionary, deconstructionist practice of the standard historical account. The findings of the following chapters offer compelling arguments against the view that large portions of the British Invasion comics disavow the comics mainstream. Instead, this book hopes to convincingly reframe the British new wave style as a dynamic, constantly evolving set of narrational strategies that exists in a state of co-dependence, even symbiosis with the mainstream, employing, appropriating, modifying, and subverting industry norms and conventions, but always relying on the readers’ knowledge of their existence and workings. This productive tension between the comics mainstream and the British new wave’s practices, which practically always takes its point of departure at the middle level of narration, offers the most compelling arguments for the verifiable existence of the British Invasion—as a set of narrational strategies, a specific reading experience, and, as will be argued in the conclusion, a cultural practice based on a clearly definable implicit theory of the reader.

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U.S. Mainstream Comics of the 1970s and 1980s: Defining the Mode of Practice If the aim of this study is to describe a poetics of the U.S. comics mainstream of the 1970s and 1980s as well as of the British Invasion, it is worthwhile to ask if some of the work has not already been done. Whether they know it or not, comics scholars, cultural critics, and comics creators themselves have already made many significant contributions. Most importantly, they have appropriated and made current the term itself, previously used only for the exploits of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the United States two decades prior. It is now widely accepted both in scholarly and non-scholarly publications. 1 Critics and artists have also identified a fluctuating number of creators associated with the British Invasion. For example, Pellitteri invokes “Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Pete Milligan [sic], Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis” (“Ideology”: 83); these are all writers. Quite a few more could be added to these lists, the most obvious omissions being Pat Mills, John Wagner, Alan Grant, Brian Bolland, Bryan Talbot, Mike Carey and Jamie Delano, but also more recent transatlantic migrants such as Simon Spurrier and Paul Cornell. As for defining the artistic impetus behind the British Invasion, the overwhelming consensus is, again, that these writers and artists transformed mainstream American comics, bringing about changes both in the way comic books are produced and read, “challenging audience expectations and creating waves of media interest” (Murray “Signals”: 31). 2 For Little, there is no doubt that they created “the defining works of the period” (“2000AD”: 140). Pellitteri proposes that the artists of the British Invasion distinguished themselves most of all “by their subversive charge” and their “willingness to clearly and controversially indicate the limits of a genre, action comics and its superhero variant” (“Ideology”: 83). The view that 11

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the British Invasion effectively put the final nail in the superhero genre’s coffin is widespread, but there are dissenting voices as well. Gabilliet, for example, in an almost complete reversal of Pellitteri’s position, posits that these British writers and artists did not destroy the superhero genre at all. Rather, they “restored an interest in narrative formulas that had clearly exhausted themselves by the 1970s” (“Of Comics and Men”: 169). Murray concurs with Pellitteri that the British creators were out “to deconstruct the superhero as a projection of American mythology,” but he comes to see their approach less as a death knell than as the establishment of a new style, one of “critical distance and ironic detachment” (“Signals”: 35). Little brings into play the notion of a transatlantic hybridization, writing that “in some respects the 1980s saw not simply a progression to a new stage in the history of American comics, but a merger of two national traditions” (“Signals”: 140). The actual protagonists of the British Invasion equally display wildly divergent attitudes towards their own success. Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison, for example, has a unique take on the familiar narrative. Writing about his own experience as part of the second wave of British writers starting to work in the American mainstream, he notes: “Now here were the proud Americans handing us their dream children, like Romans in Britain delivering their gods into the hands of the Celts for a revamp. The gray skies over Britain split. The superheroes arrived to save the day, and when the cape was dangled, we grabbed hold and were lifted into the golden clouds above the lengthening dole queues. We became known as the British Invasion” (187/188). Morrison reverses the standard account and implies that it was not the British creators who saved the American superhero genre from certain demise, but the other way around. Many British artists, threatened by unemployment under a string of consecutive Thatcher governments, were instead saved by the American superheroes. In Morrison’s view, genre fiction has a life of its own, a textual reality and performative agency that exceeds any individual artist’s or movement’s powers. Several basic questions about narrative follow from these divergent attempts to portray the British Invasion. How does (genre) fiction operate, particularly superhero stories? What was the state of superhero comics when the creators of the British Invasion entered the American mainstream in the early 1980s? How can we characterize the way in which the American comics mainstream operated at the time? How does fiction elicit certain effects in readers? In how far, by what means and to what ends can genre conventions be subverted? Can a genre truly be exhausted? In how far, if at all, had the superhero genre exhausted itself in the 1970s?

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Do genres have certain objectively identifiable ideological constraints that cannot be overcome? What is the cultural status of a mainstream comics creator? And finally, who is in control, the author or the fiction that he or she creates? Pellitteri, Little, Gabilliet, Murray, and Morrison give many thought-provoking answers to (some of ) these questions. They offer excellent pointers as to the British Invasion’s innovations. What they lack is a reliable means of talking about innovations. In effect, these critics posit a narrational norm in mainstream comic books during the late 1970s and 1980s against which they gauge the changes that the British Invasion brought. Before the questions above can be answered, it is therefore crucial to find out just what characterized the narrational norm for American comic books at the time of the arrival of the British comics creators.

A Comic Book Poetics In other words, we need to have a systematic look at a certain number of unexceptional comic books to define the standard, that is, the normal mainstream comic book of the 1970s and 1980s. Duncan and Smith sum up what is currently the most widely accepted definition of the American comics mainstream, stating that in the American comics scene, production is characterized as an oligopoly, a climate in which a few competitors control the field. In comics the few is actually a two, with the majority of sales concentrated in a pair of publishers, Marvel Comics and DC Comics…. Because the Big Two command so much of the comics readers’ attentions, they are often referred to as forming the mainstream, which is both a concession to their preeminence in the field and a critique of their conservative publishing practices…. For example, the majority of comic books made be the Big Two are from one genre, superheroes, and the two compete head-to-head using the conventions of that genre [90/91].

Duncan and Smith are mostly concerned with defining the mainstream as a producer and a product of restrictions here: “conservative publishing practices,” economic strictures, and the predominance of certain genres severely curtail artistic options. It is productive to think of these restrictions in terms of what Bordwell calls “extrinsic norms” (“Narration”: 150). According to Bordwell, a norm is defined as “a coherent standard established by fiat or by previous practice” (ibid.). It need not necessarily be written down or explicitly agreed upon to exert its authority. The sum of these practices is “usefully considered as what semiologists call a paradigm—a bounded set of alternatives which at some level serve equivalent functions” (“Narration”: 151). In other words, comic book writ-

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ers and artists working in the U.S. comics mainstream have a certain predefined range of options to tell their stories, as long as these options are used to serve certain aims—the establishment of clear, unified causality, for example. In this sense, the paradigm “offers bounded alternatives” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 5), since all narrational alternatives in the comics mainstream must be “functional equivalents” (ibid.) serving the same normative goals. To clarify the concept of extrinsic norms, Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson give some examples of what filmmakers working in the classical Hollywood mode of practice were not allowed to do (ibid.). The analysis of the corpus of mainstream comics has yielded similar norms. For example, a U.S. comics artist must not make use of panels that contain more than 10 salient points of narrative information; he or she must not obscure their character’s/s’ face(s) for multiple panels or pages; and he or she is forbidden to tell a story using only close-up views of their characters. These are but a few examples of how the American comics mainstream’s mode of practice restricts artistic choices. These constraints will be considered in much greater detail in the course of this chapter. An extrinsic norm thus is a standard of paradigmatic narrational options dictated from without—in our case, by the U.S. mainstream comic book industry, its readership, and decades of normalizing artistic practice. An intrinsic norm, conversely, is a standard “attained within the text itself ” (Bordwell “Narration”: 150). However, it is important to note that an intrinsic norm does not necessarily equal the complete disavowal of an extrinsic norm. “Intrinsic norms may coincide with or deviate from the conventions of the extrinsic set” (Bordwell “Narration”: 153). In other words, while the narration may use an innovative means to tell its story, the means may still be employed to comply with extrinsic norms such as the unwritten law positing a clear-cut causal chain. If the narrational device functions as a paradigmatic option, achieving the same aims as the other options in the paradigmatic set, the mode of practice usually will not constrain or ban its use. Reframed from the point of view of poetics, then, Duncan and Smith’s definition of the comics mainstream presents us with a set of extrinsic norms defined by the two major publishing houses in the field. For the most part, these are the extrinsic norms of the superhero genre, albeit a conservative interpretation of said genre. Duncan and Jones also imply that Marvel Comics and DC Comics largely do not deviate from the extrinsic norms historically established in superhero comics, instead choosing to compete by making use of the pre-existing conventions. This implies

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rigorous constraints on the establishment of intrinsic norms that deviate from extrinsic norms. The American comic book mainstream might therefore usefully be defined as a mode of comic book practice that imposes a “historically distinct set of norms of narrational construction and comprehension” (Bordwell “Narration”: 150). While the mainstream encourages experimentation with said extrinsic norms and with non-deviant intrinsic norms, it is reluctant to allow the establishment and use of intrinsic norms that stray too far from the standards. This is not to say that innovations are impossible. In fact, the mainstream is not static at all—a historical study of the norms governing American mainstream comics would certainly demonstrate that new intrinsic norms are invented constantly and are in turn adopted as extrinsic norms by practitioners. To some extent, this is what the following chapters on the American mode of practice of the 1970s and 1980s show, too. It is merely to state that the invention and the use of intrinsic norms are highly restricted. Seen in this light, the task of this chapter is two-fold: for one, it means to establish the most important extrinsic norms that govern the American mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s. But it is also designed to give insight into the range of options a comic book creator in the mainstream had to deviate from these extrinsic norms. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985), Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson devise a method to formulate the characteristics of such a set of extrinsic norms, which they choose to call a “mode of film practice” (xiv). In analogy, for comics studies, we will speak of a mode of comic book practice. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson define a mode of practice as consisting of “a set of widely held stylistic norms sustained by and sustaining an integral mode of … production” (ibid.). To isolate and describe these norms for the classical Hollywood film, they make use of quantitative and deductive methods. They analyze a corpus of randomly chosen Hollywood films produced between 1915 and 1960, “recording stylistic details of each shot and summarizing the film’s action scene by scene” (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 10). This study, too, will rely on such an “unbiased sample (abbreviated UnS)” (ibid.). In our case, this sample is comprised of 50 American comic book stories published between 1970 and 1985 and equally chosen at random (for a full list of titles, see the works cited).3 As in the analysis of the classical Hollywood film by Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, this method of selecting the corpus aims to give “privileged place not to the aberrant” comic book “that breaks or tests the rules but to the quietly conformist” comic “that tries simply to follow them” (“Classical Hollywood”: 10).

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Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s method has often been called Neoformalism, since their theories are based on the work of the Russian formalist school, most notably Victor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynianov. Thompson even uses the term Neoformalism in the subtitle of two of her monographs (“Ivan” 1981/“Glass Armor” 1988). However, it must be noted that Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson modify the Formalists’ premises substantially: for example, they take great pains to avoid ahistoricity and essentialism. They also introduce theoretical tools from contemporary narratology as well as cognitivism and constructivism to the study of film. For this reason, both Bordwell and Thompson have given preference to the term “poetics” over “Neoformalism” in their later works. Their theoretical edifice serves as the foundation for this study for many reasons, the most important of which is the fact that many of Bordwell and Thompson’s concepts are, at least at the most basic level, transmedial, and can be easily adapted to suit the comics medium. Their general applicability is largely based on a deductive methodology: Bordwell and Thompson encourage critics to ask specific questions concerning narration, style, and reception and to seek answers by way of close study of a broad corpus. Whenever necessary, their theories have been modified to accommodate the specificities of the comics medium. Importantly, Bordwell characterizes poetics as “offering explanations rather than explications.” In other words, “meaning in the narrower sense that is the product of film interpretation (a ‘reading’) isn’t necessarily the goal of the poetician” (“Poetics”: 16/17). Instead, the poetician is interested in those effects of artworks that “interpretation never seeks to elucidate” (ibid.). These range “from perceptual ones (why certain color schemes dominate films of a particular period) to conceptual ones (how we know that X is the protagonist)” (ibid.). Bordwell suggests to analyze such “middle level problems” (“Poetics”: 3) in a movement from particulars—e.g., a concrete usage of the angle-reverse angle technique—to the patterns in which such a convention is used in a single or several works of art. Once such a pattern has been described, the poetician will want to discover the purposes and underlying principles of the patterning: why do artists make use of the angle-reverse angle technique in a specific way? How does this practice fit within the demands of the larger mode of production? And finally, how are these normalized uses of the device processed by the audience? In sum, this methodology amounts to a research framework composed of “six P-words: particulars, patterns, purposes, principles, practices, and processing” (“Poetics”: 24). Interpretation never enters the equation. This is not to say that poetics cannot be fruitfully employed in the service

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of more orthodox critical activities. Bordwell himself points out that its findings might be helpful in providing a more reliable basis for thematic and/or ideological readings, although he does not practice them himself (“Poetics”: 17). Thus, this analysis of the unbiased sample of 1970s and 1980s American comics will be concerned with poetological principles and historical norms rather than interpretation in any traditional sense of the word. However, the study of the UnS will provide the foundation for some basic interpretive work in later chapters. In conceiving of the comics of the UnS as part of a mode of comic book practice, this chapter aims to answer the following questions, in analogy to Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson’s inquiry into the classical Hollywood cinema (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: xiv): what is the “set of assumptions” that readers bring to bear on a comic book that determines how the normal comic should operate? How can the stories that a typical American mainstream comic of the 1970s and 1980s tells be characterized? Which techniques and conventions do artists and writers have at their disposal while practicing their craft within this mode of production? How much leeway do they have for innovations and experimentation? And what is the role typically assigned to the reader? In short, in the following, this study will sketch out what canonical narration in the American comics mainstream of the 1970s and 1980s entails.

Analysis of the Unbiased Sample To define the mode of comic book production for the 1970s and 1980s, a catalogue of research questions has been compiled. All 50 stories in the unbiased sample have been interrogated based on this questionnaire, and each question has been answered for every single comic book in the UnS. The basic research questions and the interpretation of the data can be found in the appendix. For the most part, Bordwell’s theory of narration serves as the basis for the analysis of the UnS. Its foundations are two-fold: Bordwell makes extensive use of Formalist ideas, but not without modifying them greatly according to constructivist principles. To Bordwell, a constructivist account of narration “must rest upon a general theory of perception and cognition” (“Narration”: 30) and place a special emphasis on the activity of the spectator. Constructivism assumes that perception and thinking “are active, goal-oriented processes” (ibid.). In perceiving a narrative, the audience is not just passively bombarded with stimuli that form a complete

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story in and of themselves. Instead, readers must actively supplement and process the cues provided by the artwork, since the stimuli themselves are “incomplete and ambiguous” (ibid.). During the perceptual process, readers thus make inferences about the data they have been given. Based on these inferences, they “construct a perceptual judgment” and thus, piece by piece, a narrative (ibid.). These inferences are based on two general principles. For one, there are so-called “bottom-up” inferences. Here, perceptions are constructed solely “on the basis of the perceptual input,” since the stimuli or cues are sufficient to formulate a robust hypothesis about the data (ibid.). Bordwell cites color perception as an example of a bottom up process (“Narration”: 31). “Top-down” processes are driven by more complex interactions: here, the audience’s previous knowledge and expectations as well as the human propensity towards problem-solving come into play (ibid.). From a constructivist perspective, reception thus becomes “a process of active hypothesis testing” (ibid.). Both bottom-up and top-down inferences operate much the same. The perceptual apparatus receives cues from the environment and formulates a perceptual hypothesis. As further input arrives, the hypothesis is “either confirmed or disconfirmed; in the latter case, a fresh hypothesis tends to appear” (ibid.). The main difference between the two perceptual processes is one of the relative degree of consciousness: while bottom-up perceptual processes “operate in a fast, involuntary way,” top-down processes “are more overtly based on assumptions, expectations, and hypotheses” (ibid.). Both cognitive activities are based on mental schemata. The perception of the color red requires a schema that helps identify it; likewise, to recognize a bird, one needs what Bordwell calls a “schema for visual recognition,” a prototype mental image of a bird (ibid.). Bordwell differentiates between prototype schemata and template schemata. The use of prototype schemata involves “identifying individual members of a class according to some posited norm” (“Narration”: 34). The audience needs them to identify the narrative’s “individual agents, actions, goals, and locales” (ibid.). Reading a conventional Superman story, for example, the reader would have to invoke the superhero prototype as well as the supervillain prototype—that is, if Superman takes on a supervillain such as Lex Luthor or Brainiac in the story, as is usually the case. Depending on the Superman story, the reader may also have to draw upon prototype schemata such as “journalist” and “small American town”—both integral elements of many Superman stories. Even more importantly, readers will have to activate their knowledge

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of template schemata, which Bordwell likens to filing systems (ibid.). These comprise larger narrative structures that have become conventions. In superhero comics, a good example of such a template schema would be the misrecognition trope that is frequently invoked when superheroes first meet: here, convention dictates that a misunderstanding must lead to a battle between the heroes until the warring parties realize that they are pursuing the same noble goal and reconcile. Readers of superhero comics are well-versed in this convention, and comic book writers and artists will make use of their knowledge: ellipses, the reshuffling of temporal sequence, as well as parody become possible because the reader will almost certainly be able to compare the actuation of the schema to the template, filling in the gaps, restoring temporal order, and chuckling at the knowing foregrounding of an often rather ridiculous trope. Taking in a film, a novel or a comic book, the audience relies on such schemata constantly. It would, in fact, be impossible to perceive the totality of a narrative. As Bordwell puts it, “the perceiver does not patiently isolate each datum (in a film, each movement or shot or sound) and slowly assemble a narrative event” (“Narration”: 35). Instead, the viewer depends on the anticipatory inferential process: he or she “selects salient cues, then draws on prototype schemata … and template schemata specific to narrative structure (e.g., what is likely to be causally prominent)” (ibid.). Based on this data, the audience formulates causal story hypotheses, which will then be either confirmed or disconfirmed in the further course of the narrative. It is at this point that Bordwell merges the constructivist account of perception with the Formalist theory of narration. In Bordwell’s view, the spectator or reader of a story is busy “picking up narrative cues, applying schemata, framing and testing hypotheses” (“Narration”: 49). In the process, he or she assembles “progressively and retroactively” the “imaginary construct … termed by Formalists the fabula” (ibid.). It “embodies the action as a chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events occurring within a given duration and a spatial field” and is built “on the basis of prototype schemata …, template schemata …, and procedural schemata (a search for appropriate motivations and relations of causality, time, and space)” (ibid.). The most important questions for the poetician’s analysis of narrative thus become: which cues does the narration present for the viewer or reader to pick up and use as the basis for his or her fabula hypotheses? And how are these cues presented? To come to terms with this process, Bordwell introduces two narrational systems: the syuzhet and style. In Bordwell’s definition, the syuzhet

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is “the dramaturgy of the fiction film, the organized set of cues prompting us to infer and assemble story information” (“Narration”: 52). It is possible for the syuzhet to be largely congruent with the fabula, but this is rarely the case. The syuzhet will arrange and present the fabula in different order, make use of ellipses or gaps, suppress vital story information, and cast doubt on the veracity of its presentation. In short, it leaves to the reader or viewer the task of constructing the “correct,” complete fabula. Style, on the other hand, designates “the film’s systematic use of cinematic devices” (“Narration”: 50). Typically, style is subordinated to the syuzhet’s needs and used almost entirely to “perform syuzhet tasks” (“Narration”: 52). But it is equally important to point out that in some instances, style “can also take shapes not justified by the syuzhet’s manipulation of story information” (ibid.)—in other words, style may become independent of the narrational process, if only rarely so. In Bordwell’s definition, narration is thus defined as “the process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula” (“Narration”: 53). The addition of the stylistic system to the basic Formalist distinction between fabula and syuzhet is a crucial one. It provides us with a means of gauging how the specific medium’s “texture affects the spectator’s activity” (“Narration”: 53) and it opens the door for studies of historical comic book style. Additionally, the distinction between syuzhet and style offers us the possibility to “analyze stylistic departures from the syuzhet’s project” (ibid.)—in other words, a precise method of coming to terms with metafictional or non-fictional experiments with style.

Fabula/Syuzhet Relations in the Unbiased Sample Such stylistic deviations from the narrational norm will be covered in due course. For now, this study is most concerned with comic books that only rarely allow such experiments to take place. It is therefore more fruitful to first look at the basic fabula/syuzhet relations in the Unbiased Sample to formulate the normal syuzhet’s “tactics for representing fabula information” (“Narration”: 54). However, this is not to say at all that the UnS will be considered in abstraction, without any concern for style. In fact, almost all the strategies of visual narration in the UnS work in tandem with the syuzhet’s narrational impetus. The analysis of style is therefore integral to any account of the UnS’s syuzhet strategies. Most of the sections in the analysis of the UnS will follow the methodology suggested by Bordwell in Poetics of Cinema: in a first move, research questions to detect

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specific narrative phenomena are framed. This will be followed by an exploration of how these phenomena form patterns within the UnS and a clarification as to their purposes within the process of reception (“Poetics”: 24). In the final result, this will amount to a sketch of the poetics of American mainstream comics in the 1970s and 1980s, outlining the major extrinsic norms as well as the range for deviation typically granted to comics creators in the mode of practice.

The Master Extrinsic Norm: Causality Before taking a closer look at fabula/syuzhet relations, there is one final prerequisite. We must first clarify the most important goal the narrations in the mode of practice are pursuing in their syuzhet patterning. Without fail, this goal—which Bordwell calls the “prime unifying principle” in classical narration—is clear-cut, unbroken causality (“Narration”: 157). Ideally, every single syuzhet cue will be subordinated to this principle. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson distinguish between three systems that any narrative will possess. In the classical narrative, they will invariably be subordinated to causality or narrative logic, itself one of the three systems. Apart from the system of narrative logic, “which depends upon story events and causal relations and parallelisms among them,” there is a system of time, and a system of space (“Classical Hollywood”: 7). “A given device may work within any or all of these systems, depending on the functions that the system assigns to the device” (ibid.). A long shot typically helps establish diegetic space, for example, and the causal actions represented within it also cue chronological time. In other words, the three systems interact and overlap. It is therefore necessary to analyze the relation of the three systems to each other (ibid.). The most important research questions to ask are “Does one of … [the systems] subordinate the others? Do all three operate independently? How are the principles of one justified or challenged by another?” (ibid.). For now, it is sufficient to state that the system of narrative logic or causality is almost always dominant in the mode of practice, governing the operations of the systems of time and space. Some fluctuations in this pattern will be discussed in a section dedicated entirely to the relationship of the narrational systems in the mode of practice (see “The Basic Narrational Systems”). If the system of narrative logic is dominant, every single datum in the storyworld will be subordinated to causality. This dominance of causal cues in the syuzhet presentation applies wholesale to the mode of comic book practice. Take the story “Wolves of the Steppes” from The Warlord #19 (1979), for example. On the first story page, the protagonist Travis

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Morgan and his wife Tara are shown travelling the fantasy world of Skartaris using futuristic flying machines (Grell “Wolves”: 349). The syuzhet immediately tells us why the protagonists are abroad: “We were lucky to have acquired these flying machines, Morgan! With them we’ve been able to cover the far corners of the world, but still no sign of our son,” Tara says (Grell “Wolves”: 349, 3). The spatial and temporal cues on the page are thus integrated into a causal scheme. The prime causal movers of the story are “psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clearcut problem or to attain specific goals” (Bordwell “Narration”: 156). As the dialogue implies, Tara and Travis are on a quest for their kidnapped son. The immense space of the storyworld 4 itself becomes one of the prime impediments in this search—it is the reason why the protagonists’ search is not over yet (the actual reason is that every narrative requires a certain amount of delay before the protagonists’ aim is reached, of course). Our heroes’ vehicles feature as means to an end in that they facilitate the search. Most of the dialogue provides causal motivation for their actions, too. “The witch, Saaba, said that we would find Joshua in a land of half light, half shadow! There’s only one place we haven’t looked that could fit that description,” Travis Morgan says (Grell “Wolves”: 349, 4). This statement amounts to a short flashback, which in turn provides the motivation for the protagonists’ next actions: they will seek out “the polar opening where Skartaris meets the Outer World” (ibid.). In other words, past events are only of interest to this narration if they propel the narrative further along, providing causal cues for future actions. The rest of the story will not deviate from this pattern of subordinating space and time to causality.

Characters: Star Prototypes, Intermedial Pressure and the Limits of Change Most of the stories in the corpus belong to the superhero genre, which requires at least some introduction. Many of the most famous superhero characters such as Batman or Superman were created in the United States during the late 1930 and 1940s. This initial formulation of the superhero genre is commonly dubbed “the Golden Age” in fan circles. After a period of decline, the genre saw its second heyday at the close of the 1950s and during the 1960s. This stage is usually called “the Silver Age.” The titles in the corpus are thus part of a phase of transition: the 1970s still comprise the tail end of the Silver Age, while the 1980s are commonly attributed to a “Dark Age” or “Bronze Age.”5 While the superhero genre’s popularity has waned since its immense successes in the 1940s, U.S. mainstream

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comics are still dominated by it. An explanation of this continuing success, while not the immediate research focus here, would have to include many reasons. For one, it is certainly true that superheroes were tied with American national identity quickly after the genre’s inception. At the beginning of the Second World War, the superheroes came to be conflated with the war effort in the United States. Yet in their earliest incarnations, they are also proof of what Jenkins’ has called a fundamental “generic instability” (“Multiplicity”: 41). According to Jenkins, genres do not have a “predetermined life cycle” from original formulation to final exhaustion. Rather, they are subject to a “perpetual push and pull” from outside forces that reposition a genre’s schemata and extrinsic norms “in relation to social, cultural, and economic contexts of production and reception” (“Multiplicity”: 19). Some genres may be unable to respond to these forces and lose their cultural cachet; yet others manage to adapt to the “perpetual push and pull” by displaying an immense flexibility. This is easily demonstrated in the case of the superhero genre. The superhero “emerged from a range of different genre traditions” (Jenkins “Multiplicity”: 41). Batman is the most commonly cited example, since this superhero without superpowers represents an obvious “link between comics and the heroes of pulp magazines such as The Shadow and Doc Savage” (Chapman “British Comics”: 173). He borrows numerous traits from various popular pulp characters such as the Shadow’s strategy of selfmystification and aura of the uncanny and Doc Savage’s quest for physical and mental perfection. Wright cites other genre influences and the political Zeitgeist as expressed in many Golden Age stories that place the superhero even more squarely within a specifically American experience of modernity. To give but one example, he sees the superhero as the reincarnation of the Western frontier hero. However, this new protagonist is no longer tasked with ending the conflict between what was perceived as wilderness and civilization. The Super-Westerner in slightly more colorful attire is instead meant to “resolve the tensions of individuals in an increasingly urban, consumer-driven and anonymous mass society” (Wright “Comic Book Nation”: 10). While such a mono-causal explanation of the genre’s creation can only partly account for the genre’s invention and popularity, there is little to contradict that this fixture of American heroism would not have contributed to the superhero genre in some manner. The Second World War was to further reify the equation of the superhero with American identity and history. Even before the United States had entered the war, the creators of superhero comics sought to intensify the link between patriotism and the men and women in tights:

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The British Comic Book Invasion [A] warlike mind-set had already set in the country for several months, as witnessed by the era’s mass culture in general and comic books in particular. Superman was probably the first character to respond overtly to the international tensions of his time. By the late 1930s, all the popular literature narratives set in the present wove yarns about spies and saboteurs from aggressive nations, or dictators imposing their yoke on terrified, helpless populations…. The aggravation of the international context was the backdrop to the rise of the superhero genre, which unambiguously echoed ambient patriotism [Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 22].

The key word here is “unambiguously”: comics creators certainly did their best to thoroughly tie the medium to performances of national identity, which necessitated simplistic plots and an equally unsophisticated concept of good and evil. In the decades since the Second World War, the superhero genre has not merely managed to survive, but assert its dominance over the American comics mainstream, too. There is much debate among scholars how changes within the genre since the late 1930s should be conceptualized. Jenkins’ previously cited theory of the superhero genre characterizes it as immensely flexible, able to maintain “its dominance over the comics medium by constantly absorbing and appropriating new generic materials” (Jenkins “Multiplicity”: 41). Instead of a stable core of schemata and conventions, Jenkins posits a fundamental instability and constant shifts in the genre’s “core meanings and interpretations to allow for new symbolic clusters” (ibid.). In Jenkins’s model, the superhero genre does not develop in any teleological sense; rather, it adapts to historical, societal, and cultural circumstances to survive. Other scholars employ teleological models. Klock, for example, sketches a development of the superhero from the Golden Age to the Silver Age to a “third movement,” which saw “the birth of self-consciousness in the superhero narrative” and which he consequently dubs the age of “the revisionary superhero narrative” (“Multiplicity”: 2/3). Other scholars aim to define a stable generic core that remains fundamentally unchanged. Coogan’s definition of the superhero is most commonly cited in this regard.6 According to him, a superhero is a heroic character with a selfless, pro-social mission; with superpowers—extraordinary abilities, advanced technology, or highly developed physical, mental, or mystical skills; who has a superhero identity embodied in a codename and iconic costume, which typically express his biography, character, powers, or origin (transformation from ordinary person to superhero); and who is generically distinct, i.e. can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of generic conventions. Often superheroes have dual identities, the ordinary one of which is usually a closely guarded secret [Coogan “Definition”: 77].

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Coogan’s account answers as many questions as it raises. How do we characterize the superhero’s “pro-social mission,” for example? Especially the latter term should prove difficult to define. Additionally, how can the superhero genre be unequivocally distinguished from other genres if (some of ) its origins lie exactly in the genres Coogan cites here (fantasy, science fiction, the detective story)? And if Jenkins is right in his contention that genres continually appropriate conventions and schemata from other genres, does that not additionally complicate Coogan’s concept? On top of that, this definition tells us very little about the narrational work of the genre, and it is not at all concerned with the process of reception through the readers and fans. Coogan himself admits that superheroes “can exist who do not fully demonstrate these three elements, and heroes from other genres may exist who display all of the elements to some degree but should not be regarded as superheroes” (Coogan “Definition”: 82). The findings from the unbiased sample should help find some middle ground between the polar opposites represented by Jenkins and Coogan: on the one hand, the contention of a constant, non- teleological evolution based on societal, historical, and cultural pressure; on the other hand, the attempt to demonstrate that the genre has a static, somewhat reliable centered. Much of the analysis of the UnS will be devoted to characterizing the dynamics of the superhero genre in the 1970s and 1980s, and many of the extrinsic norms that will be analyzed can be considered the extrinsic norms of the superhero genre during this specific historical period. For now, let us consider the question of character more closely. In this regard, the study of the UnS proves both Jenkins and Coogan right to some extent, even though some qualifying statements are necessary. The protagonists in the UnS have clearly defined goals that the syuzhet will cue time and again. At first glance, this seems to tally with Coogan’s concept of the superhero’s “mission.” But upon closer inspection, the UnS narrations do not rely on an a priori motivation for the protagonist. In fact, the superheroes in the corpus are hardly ever proactive. The causal sequence of a story in the mode of practice typically will not be set in motion by the protagonist. Instead, the exposition invests considerable energies to portray the villain and their almost uniformly evil designs. Once the antagonist’s plans are set in motion, the protagonist is left to react to the consequences. From this point onwards, the hero will indeed be “the prime causal agent” as in the classical Hollywood cinema (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 14). Mostly, he or she will strive to “restore an original state of affairs” (Bordwell, Staiger, and

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Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 16), that is, the condition of order that existed before the disruption through the villain. Consider, for example, the story “Beware the Steel Wind!” from Ghost Rider #75 (1982). The narration begins with a splash page showing the villain called Steel Wind on a motorbike as she makes a dramatic entrance at the circus where the superhero protagonist Johnny Blaze works and lives (DeMatteis and Budiansky “Wind”: n.pag.). Shortly afterwards, Blaze is told by the troupe’s manager to leave the circus, since his services as a stunt driver are no longer required—he is to be replaced by Steel Wind (n.pag., 5–6). In the following, Steel Wind reveals herself as a villain, manipulating the manager, tormenting the circus folk, and plotting against the protagonist. The hero’s countermeasures will be justified by the villain’s reprehensible behavior, not by a previously defined pro-social mission. Instead of preventing the villain from taking over the circus in the first place, Johnny Blaze will strive to restore it to its former ordered state. Despite declarations to the contrary, the superhero’s moral righteousness is thus almost always established by contingency, and hardly ever in absolute, a priori terms. It will effectively be renegotiated with each new story. In this manner, the mode of practice carefully evades the thorny issue of a shared definition of selflessness and morally correct behavior. This absence of proactive attitudes in the mode of practice’s protagonists makes it problematic to ascribe definite ideological meanings to the superhero genre as a whole. If this study speaks of a superhero or a supervillain schema in the following, then, it does not refer to a set of static traits such as the one Coogan describes. Rather, the term refers to a concept that is derived from the audience’s actual, historically specific experience of reading superhero comic books. Whether consciously or not, a seasoned superhero reader in the 1970s and 1980s would have been able to rely on observations like the ones outlined above: a superhero is a character who may have formulated a vague mission statement at some point (“I will fight crime”), but who usually reacts to criminal activities rather than preventing them proactively. They will most likely operate in a morally exemplary fashion, but just what that entails will be defined contingently. Finally, an important factor in the definition of morally correct actions will be whether they help re-establish the order that existed before the villain’s disruptive activities. The numbers confirm that the genre’s reliance on contingency hardly ever results in ambivalent character actions. Sixty-four percent of all characters in the UnS are portrayed as completely accessible in their decisionmaking. This percentage tallies with the share of superhero stories in the corpus. Characters in the mode of practice thus form a reliable basis for

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the process of hypothesis formation. To achieve this effect of certainty and reliability, they will be “endowed with a consistent batch of evident traits, qualities, and behaviours” as in the classical Hollywood cinema (Bordwell “Narration”: 156). The mode of comics practice even knows an equivalent of the Hollywood star system. In the classical Hollywood, the studios would take great pains to create “a rough character prototype for each star”—John Wayne characters are rugged, virile, taciturn, sometimes conflicted—a prototype which “is then adjusted to the particular needs of the role” (ibid.). Superheroes, too, come pre-equipped with such a rough character prototype that can be summed up in a few sentences. In certain Marvel comics from the corpus, this prototyping is even made explicit in a caption on the first story page, which provides essential information about the protagonist. Consider this example from an Amazing SpiderMan issue: “While attending a demonstration in radiology, student PETER PARKER was bitten by a spider which had accidentally been exposed to RADIOACTIVE RAYS. Through a miracle of science, Peter soon found that he had GAINED the arachnid’s powers … and had, in effect, become a human spider…. Stan Lee presents: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN” (O’Neil and Romita Jr. “Marathon”: n.pag.). The caption reveals what is non-negotiable about the star persona at this point in the serial’s history: the protagonist’s origin, his age, the fact that he is a student, the extent of his powers, and his heroism. Most everything else that has been previously established, if handled carefully, can be adapted to suit the story at hand. What does this mean for character development in the mode of practice? If character consistency is an important extrinsic norm in the mode of practice, it follows that drastic changes in a protagonist will be rare. Instead, character arcs will often resemble those of the classical Hollywood film. A protagonist is either introduced or already well-established, at least in terms of a star prototype. If the hero or heroine changes, it will typically not be in radical terms; instead, the protagonist will be shown as somehow deviating from the prototype. In the end, the narration will present him or her as returning “to the path from which one has strayed” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 38). Even on this minuscule scale, though, character change hardly features in the UnS. Sometimes superheroes diverge from their prototype through mind control. A villain will hypnotize a hero or heroine, for example. Inevitably, the hero wreaks havoc in the following. This is the case in the New Teen Titans story “Kidnapped!” in which the superheroine Starfire is under the control of her evil sister (Wolfman and Pérez “Kidnapped!”: 78). The visual narration makes sure that the deviation from Starfire’s prototype schema is not too radical: her powers may be out

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of control, but by sheer chance, she only damages buildings; no human injuries are cued. On top of that, the heroine repeatedly voices that she is not to be taken responsible for her actions. The return to her prototype schema is a foregone conclusion. Few characters in the UnS are allowed more substantial change than such minor deviations from the status quo. The mode of practice’s attitude towards character ambiguity is characterized by a similar reluctance. Nevertheless, more than a third of all protagonists and antagonists in the UnS sometimes exhibit ambivalent traits. However, such ambiguity is only possible if it is heavily conventionalized. Importantly, the conventions for ambivalence will frequently be appropriated from other genres. Western comics will be influenced by their cinematic counterparts, for example. This is probably why ambiguous protagonists are rare in the superhero genre: quite simply, only a very few superhero films or television series were produced during the period that the UnS covers. In other words, there was no immediate intermedial pressure on superhero comics that would have incurred important changes. However, there are a few instances where ambiguity is cued. In the story “If an Eye Offend Thee…!” from All-Star Squadron #10 (1982), the superhero Starman declares that “it’s winning this lousy war that’s important” (that is, the Second World War). To achieve this aim, he is willing to “mangle every rule in the book” (Thomas and Gonzalez “Eye”: 273, 1). Such drastic advocacy to put ends over means is unheard of in the other superhero books from the UnS. Still, the editors at DC Comics probably allowed such a radical characterization for two reasons. For one, the stories in All-Star Squadron take place during the Second World War. This is likely why writer Roy Thomas can adopt conventions from previous representations of war. In a Hollywood depiction of World War II from the early 1980s, a statement such as the one above would certainly not be inconceivable. Additionally, the setting at the end of the 1930s brings the superheroes in the story into proximity with the pulp heroes who had a great influence on the initial creation of the superhero genre. A pulp character such as The Shadow would not have shirked from extreme attitudes and questionable means. In other words, extrinsic norms begin to change as soon as comics creators experiment with genre hybrids and begin to historicize their works. Generic appropriation must therefore be considered one of the prime engines of change in the mode of comics practice. If a genre is also to be found in media other than comics, changes to the extrinsic norm tend to be more radical. As pointed out earlier, the Western titles in the UnS especially are greatly influenced by the historical conventions of the genre as formulated in the cinema. In the 1960s and 1970s,

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many Westerns produced in the United States fell into the self-referential category. Films such Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1973), or Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976) had replaced the morally upright protagonist of the classical Western with broken, ambiguous characters. Italian directors such as Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci had produced Westerns starring deeply amoral antiheroes. They had been successful, too: titles such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) or Django (1966) proved popular with audiences throughout the world. The new generic norms formulated in these films are probably the reason why mainstream Western comics of the 1970s and 1980s can deviate from the prevalent norm for characters in the mode of practice. The disfigured bounty hunter Jonah Hex, star of his own series, is the clear result of such cultural and economic pressure. In the story “FaceOff with the Gallagher Boys!” (1975), Hex is mistaken for a train robber and imprisoned. His jail sentence is not entirely an accident, though: it underlines the character’s proximity to villain status. Hex’s ambiguity is equally emphasized when he manages to escape from prison. He immediately takes revenge on his jailer, forcing him to eat a bowl of old soup sullied with cigarette butts. The guard must comply, lest Hex “splatter yor brains all ovuh the wall!” (Fleisher and Wildey “Face-Off ”: 288, 1). Such cruelty would be unthinkable in a UnS superhero title. In a Western comic that needs to compete with Clint Eastwood’s cynical “Man with No Name” character from the Sergio Leone Westerns, it is permissible.

Communicativeness: What UnS Narrations Want Us to Know In the Neoformalist account, a narration’s degree of communicativeness is of the utmost importance. A narration will strategically provide as well as withhold information. In the mode of practice, the amount of information divulged by the narration will be regulated by the extrinsic norm for causality. But this does not mean that the syuzhet divulges all causal links immediately. It goes without saying that any syuzhet presentation will refrain from providing all the important fabula information at once. Without delaying strategies, any narrative would be over far too soon. Bordwell therefore proposes that every narrative has an “internal norm of communicativeness” (1985: 60), a specific rhythm of providing fabula information, be it steady and plentiful, or sparse. The narration may strive to conceal certain important points and delay their reveal. Whenever such efforts of concealment become overt, we will speak of a suppressive narration. In Bordwell’s definition, “any deviation from … [a narrative’s] internal norm of commu-

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nicativeness becomes a mark of suppressiveness” (“Narration”: 60). The research questions for this section will therefore be “How communicative is the average narration in the UnS? Which patterns of suppression and distribution of information can be detected? And which conclusions for the overall mode of comic book practice can be drawn from these findings?” Deviations from the communicative norm are very frequent in the UnS. Eighty-two percent of the stories in the UnS make at least occasional use of overt suppression. The story “Murder by Spider” from The Amazing Spider-Man #228 (1982) is a typical example of the type of suppression that is common in the UnS. During the expository phase, we are introduced to an old man inhabiting a Gothic mansion. He is being watched by SpiderMan through a window, and we are given Spider-Man’s thoughts: “This is the third time I’ve felt myself drawn to this same old house … but why?” (Strnad and Leonardi “Murder by Spider”: n.pag.). Spider-Man’s ignorance of the forces drawing him to the house represents the first instance of suppression: the verbal narration provides the reader with all the necessary cues to arouse curiosity as to the origins of the hero’s state and actions, but is adamant about not answering them. Still, by convention, the reader knows that this amounts to a promise. At the end of the issue, the question as to what supernatural agency is at work will have been answered. The next few panels uncouple the visual narration from Spider-Man’s point of view and engage in a typically redundant suppressive strategy (figure 1). Throughout the rest of the sequence, the mise-en-page flaunts the narration’s ability to be omnipresent, that is, to take up any perspective necessary to convey the most important causal information. This is a feature that the mode of practice has in common with classical Hollywood cinema, where “narrational omniscience” is translated “into spatial omnipresence. The narration freely acknowledges, we might say, its ability to take us wherever it wants” (Bordwell “Narration”: 125). In our SpiderMan example, it gives us close-ups of spiders slowly crawling up the old man’s clothes. At the same time, the victim is entirely unaware of their presence, as is indicated by some unconventional framing techniques: artist Rick Leonardi cuts off the old man’s face just below the eyes in one instance and deprives the reader of his line of sight in most of the other panels. After a few panels presenting further gruesome details, the scene ends on a close-up of the window outside the old man’s room. The verbal narration indicates that he screams, but the visual narration foregrounds its suppressive attitude—we will not be shown what is happening to the victim, nor will we be told why he is so cruelly attacked (for now). This amounts to the second instance of suppression in the exposition, in a

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Figure 1. A typical example of suppressive narration in the mode of practice. Page taken from John Strnad and Rick Leonardi, “Murder by Spider,” in Essential The Amazing Spider-Man Volume 10 (New York: Marvel Comics, 2010 [1982]) n.pag. Image © Marvel Characters.

move that could be called both redundant and additive: it is redundant in that we are led to surmise that this is yet another demonstration of the same unknown supernatural forces at work. It is additive in the sense that we are given a second mystery: why does the mystical agency cruelly attack and (perhaps) murder the old man? The fact that the narration ends the scene on an image that most of all points to occlusion is highly conventionalized, too. The reader’s vision is restrained, but this is again a promise, this time of visibility: the narration will make perceptible for the reader everything that has been momentarily excluded from view.

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The UnS does not contain a single example of a story that is suppressive throughout the whole of the syuzhet. In other words, all but 18 percent of the stories in the UnS fluctuate between a steady, reliable distribution of information and occasional bursts of suppression. Most of the UnS narratives may hold back information, but they do not suppress it permanently. This pattern of suppression taps into any number of prototype and template schemata. In fact, it becomes itself partly constitutive of the genre(s) that the mode of practice favors. As Bordwell puts it, “all films exploit disparities between fabula and syuzhet, but different genres do so in different ways” (“Narration”: 73). In other words, different genres make for different “patterns and purposes” in syuzhet/fabula strategies (ibid.), which in turn make up template schemata that comic book writers and artists can easily draw upon. Very often, for example, the UnS stories will make use of the detective story template, although with considerable modifications. This is, to some extent, true of our Spider-Man story, which employs a suppressive exposition to lead into an investigation of the old man’s demise. We find the same suppressive patterning in “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle…” from Batman and the Outsiders #8 (1984) (figure 2). Here, the exposition shows us a short flashback depicting the kidnapping of a young child. The analepsis7 is quickly curtailed by the fact that the verbal narrator, a Mrs. Whit-

Figure 2. Suppressive framing strategies typical of the mode of practice. Page taken from Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” in Showcase Presents Batman and the Outsiders (New York: DC Comics 2007 [1984]) n.pag. Originally published in Batman and the Outsiders #8, March 1984. Image © DC Comics.

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field, is knocked out by a kidnapper before she can perceive the criminal; when she wakes up, her baby son is gone. An investigation into the crime is launched (Barr and Aparo “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”: 217). The framing strategies are similarly occlusive as in the Spider-Man example. For example, the visual narration shows us only a medium shot of Mrs. Whitfield being brutally knocked out; the kidnapper is excluded from the panel. In a visual narration for the most part concerned with providing the best possible visibility, this amounts to a highly flaunted instance of suppression. And yet these occasions where the narrational device is blatantly laid bare are pervasive throughout the UnS. Why are they permissible? The answer lies in how these instances of suppression are motivated. Any reader of mainstream comic books will immediately recognize a suppressive exposition as a hallmark of the detective story and embrace the convention. Bordwell differentiates between four different types of motivation: compositional, realistic, transtextual, and artistic (“Narration”: 36). He underlines that motivation is not an intrinsic feature of the text, but is generated in the interaction between the work of art and the spectator or reader. The artwork will provide certain cues implying specific types of motivation which the viewer may seize upon or not (ibid.). Compositional motivation justifies syuzhet operations such as suppression in terms of dramaturgical necessity (ibid.). Both instances of suppression cited above are motivated compositionally: the detective story template would not be able to rely on its typical patterning of hermeneutic pressure, suspense and surprise (cf. Bordwell “Narration”: 64) if not for certain systematic instances of withheld information. If we knew who killed the old man and who kidnapped the baby from the start, the stories as told would quite simply deflate for lack of tension and curiosity on the part of the reader. In this sense, these instances of suppression are generically motivated as well—they form an integral part of the conventional detective story. The example from Batman and the Outsiders cues realistic motivation, too: the framing excludes the kidnapper, the argument might go, because he surprised Mrs. Whitfield, knocking her unconscious before he entered her field of vision. In this sense, the flashback could be seen as an accurate representation of Mrs. Whitfield’s experience. The SpiderMan example uses no such pretense. The visual narration’s omnipresence could even be called mildly metafictional, since at first glance, it is not linked to any specific character’s perceptions, thus drawing attention to itself. However, it is possible to motivate this feature of the narration generically: from this point of view, the Gothic narration is showing us

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the ephemeral perspective of the supernatural forces about to kill the old man. In other words, such reluctant dallying with metafiction or, as Bordwell calls it, artistic motivation, is almost always softened and never uncoupled from dramaturgical needs in the UnS. The numbers reflect this assumption. In most cases, suppression is compositionally and generically motivated (82 percent). Artistic motivation can only be found in 6 percent of all cases, and it is never disconnected from compositional and/or generic concerns. Suppression can often be found in a mainstream comic book story’s expository phase, as the two previous examples have shown. In very much the same vein, it is an important device in the serializing strategies found in the UnS. Ninety-four percent of the stories in the UnS are open-ended serial narratives, and on average, they sustain three different plots at the same time. They typically bring one of these plots to partial or complete closure at the end of an issue, which means that a new plot line must be launched every month to avoid total closure. Sometimes, these plots are only introduced fleetingly, to be picked up in the next issue of the serial, or maybe even later. As an effect of serialization, the expository phase of such a new plot can sometimes be severely delayed, occurring not at the beginning of the issue but, as in the case of “Face-off with the Gallagher Boys” from Weird Western Tales Presents Jonah Hex #26 (1975), after 11 story pages of a total of 21 have already elapsed. Here, a new villain is introduced and his plan to kill Jonah Hex is announced (Fleisher and Wildey “Face-Off ”: 283/284). The rest of the issue’s story is entirely disconnected from this expository material. Most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, the visual narration in this example is highly suppressive. We see the heavy’s coach arrive at a cemetery, and he emerges from the carriage, aided by a servant. In the following, the two have a conversation hinting at the villain’s thirst for revenge because of past misgivings. But even though the scene takes up almost two pages, the villain’s face is never shown. In the first panel of the scene, it is concealed by an umbrella, as if by accident. But many of the following panels only show close-ups of objects and clothing meant to characterize the villain pars pro toto; others depict him with his back to the reader. In any case, the occlusive strategy is sustained and heavily foregrounded by its repetition, and the dialogue proves equally suppressive. The introduction of a new serial plot is thus ritualized: suppression is flaunted to such an extent as to become impossible to ignore. In the 1970s/1980s mainstream comic book, then, seriality is often bound up in the promise of visibility. In exchange for buying the next issue, readers

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are guaranteed both frustration and discovery in equal measure. But the pleasure to be derived from serialization goes beyond the joys of the visible and the curiosity evoked by the suppression of information. By foregrounding the device, the narration also engages the reader in a knowing ritual, acknowledging the reader’s awareness of the conventions of serial mainstream comics.

Gapping: The Mode of Practice’s Attitude Towards the Past Gapping is a syuzhet/fabula strategy of equal importance to that of suppression. Seventy-two percent of the syuzhets in the UnS make use of gaps; that is, they employ considerable ellipses. Modifying some of the central assumptions of Meir Sternberg’s theory of gapping, Bordwell distinguishes between temporary and permanent as well as diffuse and focused gaps (Bordwell “Narration”: 55; Sternberg “Expositional Modes”: 50/51). A gap is temporary if “the informational hole in the fabula can be plugged”; if it is never filled, it must be considered permanent (ibid.). The second pair of categories is based on the gap’s contents, or rather, the questions the gap evokes. If a gap is employed to suppress a specific point of information—e.g., the identity of the kidnapper in the Batman and the Outsiders story—we speak of a focused gap. Diffuse gaps are most often encountered in narratives spanning large amounts of time: for example, an ellipsis covering a decade in the life of a character will most likely amount to a diffuse gap, since such a long period is unlikely to yield merely one or two missing pieces of important information. It is also important to ask whether the syuzhet operations draw attention to the process of gapping or not. If they do, Bordwell speaks of a flaunted gap; if the syuzhet does not draw any attention to an ellipsis, we will speak of a suppressed gap (ibid.). Based on this terminology, the research questions for this section are evident. “Does the average narration in the UnS make use of gapping? If so, which types of gaps are typically employed, and to what ends? Which patterns of gapping can be identified, and what is their significance for the mode of comic book practice as a whole?” Often, the gaps used by the narrations in the UnS are temporary (94 percent), focused (100 percent), and flaunted (94 percent). The story “The Gunfighter” from Weird Western Tales Presents Jonah Hex #21 provides an example. Here, Western protagonist Jonah Hex has found refuge on an old woman’s farm after having been severely injured. Now that he has recovered, he is about to leave the farm and the old woman. Unfortunately, a bandit, who is also a convalescent on the farm, is apparently not quite

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as sick as he has let on. In the final panel of page 177 (Albano and DeZuniga “Gunfighter”), the old woman is seen watching Hex depart, while unbeknownst to her and Hex the criminal has emerged from the house bearing a knife. The final panel amounts to a miniature cliffhanger, a strategy frequently employed on the last panel of a page. Flipping over to the next page brings along a change in location and a jump forward in time: “And two days later…,” the caption tells us (Albano and DeZuniga “Gunfighter”: 178). The gapping is redundantly flaunted both by the visual narration (change in scene) and by the verbal narration (change in time) as well as delineated precisely. Finally, the visual narration on the last panel unequivocally evokes a focused question, i.e., “what will happen to the old woman?” The gap is temporary, of course, and the question will be answered in the course of the story. What would change if Albano and DeZuniga had opted for a gap that was not so clearly flaunted? It would have been possible, for example, to show the old woman saying good-bye to Hex without the criminal emerging from the house with clearly malicious intent. The result would have been a suppressed gap; Hex’s return to the farmhouse now under the control of the bandit would have amounted to a mere surprise for the reader instead of a suspenseful string of sequences that delay the filling of the gap. It is therefore understandable that the UnS’s narrations will favor suspense over surprise in almost all cases. Hypothetically, Albano and DeZuniga could have opted not to fill the gap at all, leaving the question of the old woman’s survival permanently open. But for the most part, the UnS does not tolerate such loose ends: only two titles (4 percent) in the corpus make use of permanent gaps. Closure may be delayed, sometimes for a very long time, but it must inevitably come. This is not to say that gaps cannot be used to complex effect. In the story “Endings … and Beginnings!” from The New Teen Titans #34 (1983), writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez present the reader with two flaunted gaps. The first is triggered during the exposition and typical of the superhero genre. Here, the supervillain Deathstroke is introduced by a highly suppressive narration (Wolfman and Pérez “Endings”: 377/ 378). Much as in the example of the Jonah Hex villain described in the section on communicativeness (“What UnS Narrations Want Us to Know”), Deathstroke’s part in the dialogue is given, but he can hardly be seen on the first page, casting doubt on the speaker’s identity. The reader is given certain cues to help frame hypotheses: the visual narration shows us an upscale New York apartment, a personal valet, the trophies of a big game hunter, and a large collection of books. The teasing character of the visual narration is mirrored in the dialogue, in which a “plan ‘T’” is mentioned,

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but never elaborated upon. The narration changes scene then, which creates a flaunted and focused gap in our fabula construction—namely, what Deathstroke does next. In one of the following scenes, he behaves according to the basic supervillain schema. His plan turns out to involve kidnapping a Wall Street banker. He is duly stopped by the superheroine Terra, who has recently joined the Teen Titans superhero team. Up until this point, the narration has yet to surprise, filling the focused gap in the most prosaic terms. However, there is another focused and flaunted gap in the story that is highly relevant: the story of Terra’s origin as a superhero. This gap has been left open since Terra’s introduction to the series some issues prior to these events; now it is filled. In the story’s penultimate sequence, Terra returns to her apartment, only to find Deathstroke there. In a suppressive sequence that closely parallels his introduction, Deathstroke is revealed to be Terra’s father. In other words, by revealing Terra’s back story, we are not given a superhero’s origin story, but a supervillain’s. Deathstroke has used his daughter Terra as a spy; she has infiltrated the Teen Titans on the pretense that she is a superheroine. The story’s two most important gaps—Deathstroke’s intentions and Terra’s origin—are thus shown to be one and the same. A skillful writer, in other words, may be able to use the extrinsic norm to his advantage: while there is no doubt that the mode of comic book practice dictates that gaps be focused, flaunted, and quickly filled, it is entirely possible to fill a gap only partially but pretend that it has been plugged entirely—if the remainder of the information is not withheld permanently. It is also possible to lead the reader astray by implying that a gap is focused very narrowly when in reality it is both narrow and wide. After all, Deathstroke’s plan, at first glance short-term, turns out to have been long-term. And finally, it is possible to use the conventional cues for certain template schemata—in this case, the superhero origin story—as a diversion. For the most part, this example demonstrates the artistic leeway that the mode of comic book practice typically grants. The comic book creator may use generic template schemata as misdirection, but only so long as a generic template schema is brought to bear in the end. They may only be partially truthful as to the focus of a gap, but only so long as the focus still applies in part (after all, Deathstroke did kidnap the banker). The comic book creator may even collapse two gaps into one as long as the questions raised by the gapping are answered. There is no doubt that Wolfman and Pérez’s story fulfills all the criteria imposed by the extrinsic norm for gapping in the end, but their clever use of ellipses and template schemata has created an intrinsic norm that neatly fore-

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grounds the reader’s activity in reading a superhero comic. The extrinsic norm, in other words, may afford the leeway necessary for certain metafictional techniques if the norm is not seriously called into question in the process.

Delay: Generic, Narrational and Serial Functions The narrations in the UnS may prize visibility and the discovery of all relevant causal actions and plot points above all else, but as in every other mode of narrative practice, they must rely on any number of means to delay their revelation. Through strategies of retardation, the syuzhet may “arouse anticipation, curiosity, suspense, and surprise” (Bordwell “Narration”: 161). But delay is also crucial to meet the extrinsic norms dictating the length of each story—the average syuzhet in the UnS has 21.8 story pages. The nature of the delaying materials mostly depends on the specific genre. If generically appropriate, retardation may be achieved through “inserted lines of action, such as causally relevant subplots, interpolated comedy bits, and musical numbers” (ibid.). The latter are, of course, somewhat unlikely in the mute comics medium. In framing research questions about retardatory materials, we are interested in the following issues. “How often do the syuzhets of the UnS make use of delaying materials? How much of the syuzhet and the fabula duration do they take up, on average? How are these retardatory episodes motivated? And what does the normative pattern of delay tell us about the extrinsic norms governing the mode of comic book practice?” As already pointed out, the stories in the UnS are generically somewhat disparate, although the superhero genre certainly dominates. The corpus features Westerns (Jonah Hex), fantasy/adventure stories (Warlord), psychedelic science fiction tales (Warlock), and all manners of hybrid forms. The previously mentioned Spider-Man story “Death by Spider,” for example, heavily relies on conventions from the Gothic. While these genres often have somewhat different rules for delaying materials, their actuations in the UnS share the same justificatory cues. In 98 percent of all cases, delay is compositionally motivated, and all stories in the UnS contain delaying material that is typical of their genre. Realistic and artistic motivation hardly ever come into play: only in 8 and 4 percent of all cases, respectively, does the syuzhet justify delay principally on these grounds. These numbers allow for two conclusions as to the extrinsic norms gov-

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erning delay in the UnS. First, the retardatory material must always tie into the larger story. Additionally, the syuzhets in the UnS value the fulfillment of genre conventions highly; the rules of genre will therefore almost always override psychological realism or metafictional concerns. A typical example from The Uncanny X-Men #127 (1979) should illuminate what this means in terms of the actual syuzhet presentation of a delaying sequence. In this case, writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne make use of the fight sequence, a staple of superhero comics. In fact, we are presented with a variation on this retardatory convention that we have considered before: a battle between superheroes based on a misunderstanding. After a devastating clash with the villain Proteus, the mutant superheroes are shown relaxing with a cup of coffee in a high angle long shot (Claremont and Byrne “Quality”: n.pag.). Soon, the panels focus on the relationship of mutants Cyclops and Wolverine, switching from long shot compositions depicting large groups of people to two-shots. In panel three of the page, the visual narration gives us an over the shoulder perspective on Wolverine roughly from the point of view of Cyclops. Wolverine averts his eyes with his hands and is depicted as physically slack and gloomy. The verbal narration presents us with Cyclops’s thoughts, and they reiterate the cues given by the visual narration while reinterpreting them as a causal motivation: “Whatever happened here to Wolverine has shaken him—badly. He’s close to breaking. If he doesn’t snap out of this funk—now—he’ll be permanently gun-shy” (ibid.). Following this logic, Cyclops has no choice but to provoke Wolverine to a sparring match to rouse his spirits. This characterization of Wolverine is wildly improbable: usually, he is depicted as a tough loner of almost unshakable fortitude. In other words, the verbal narration is nothing but a flimsy bit of psychological motivation for the ensuing battle. Instead of psychological motivation, generic motivation takes center stage. One of the chief pleasures of the superhero genre is the spectacle of beautiful bodies doing (mostly non-lethal and non-crippling) injury to each other. This is what Claremont and Byrne present us with on the following three pages (“Quality”: n.pag.), in a long series of dynamically drawn long shots. Apart from the gratification of the fight scene, the sequence has compositional functions, too: by showing how the other superheroes react to two of their friends fighting each other and by redundantly mentioning Wolverine and Cyclops’s rivalry, it introduces the characters and their relationships to new readers of the series and shows off their superpowers. Delaying materials may therefore serve a larger dramaturgical function in serialized comics, in that they deliver exposition

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that, if presented less elegantly, would be much more apparent as redundant for steady readers of the series. The sequence’s second compositional function is literally tied to the notion of delay: while the two friends fight each other, the supervillain Proteus has ample time to go on his murderous ways. In conclusion, even a sequence as—at first glance—frivolous as this has, upon closer inspection, any number of ties to the larger dramaturgical structure of the story and plays a crucial role in the process of serialization. One might say that the extrinsic norm for delay demands that retardatory materials serve causal functions; a delaying scene must not be cut off from the larger action. Ideally, it will also be in the service of redundancy, helping new readers find their way in the complex serialized storyworld. On top of that, it must in some way be pleasurable, providing the reader with a satisfying variation on a familiar convention. For the greater part of the UnS, this does not require innovative uses of delay. Well-executed and expertly drawn action sequences are sufficient to satisfy the demands of the extrinsic norm. Skillful use of retardation is especially important for any artist working in the mode of comic book practice if one considers the numbers. On average, 84 percent of the syuzhet duration is taken up by delay in the UnS, making substantial plot developments the exception rather than the rule. Small wonder that some comic book writers and artists make delay the implicit theme of their stories. An example of such a strategy can be found in the story “Marathon” from The Amazing Spider-Man #216 (1981), written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by John Romita, Jr. Early in the story, Peter Parker alias Spider-Man overhears a conversation between hired murderers in a hospital (O’Neil and Romita Jr. “Marathon”: n.pag.). As is typical of expository sequences in the UnS, the narration is suppressive, showing us the assassins exclusively as shadows through a hospital curtain and providing only ambiguous information about the intended crime. We are assured that “the gun is ready” and that the “sucker will be outta the race—permanent” (O’Neil and Romita Jr. “Marathon”: n.pag.). Peter Parker draws the conclusion from the scant data that the criminals are planning to shoot a participant in the New York Marathon (O’Neil and Romita Jr. “Marathon”: n.pag.). Consequently, Parker will spend the rest of the issue participating in the marathon, on the lookout for the assassins. Of course, he will be dressing up as his alter-ego, the superhero SpiderMan. Very quickly, though, certain syuzhet cues initiate a suspense strategy that puts doubt on the hero’s interpretation of the expository information.

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Periodically throughout the long New York marathon sequence, public telephones are shown to be ringing in Spider-Man’s vicinity. In all cases, the visual narration emphasizes the phone in its compositions so that the reader cannot help but notice it, whereas Spider-Man does not, and the verbal narration makes this observation redundant: in the first panel of the series, Spider-Man is shown in long shot with his back to the phone, a considerable distance away (O’Neil and Romita Jr. “Marathon”: n.pag.). The second panel, in a necessary variation on the theme, does not feature the protagonist at all; the verbal narration tells us that the “emergency phone again rings—but, although Spidey hears it, he pays no attention” (O’Neil and Romita Jr. “Marathon”: n.pag.). After yet another variation on the theme of negligence, Spider-Man finally picks up the receiver as the fourth public phone starts ringing close to him. He is told, of course, that he is on the wrong trail. The killers are not targeting an athlete at all, but a candidate for the office of mayor (O’Neil and Romita Jr. “Marathon”: n.pag.). The events of the by far greater part of the story are thus revealed as delaying materials. The comic book creators could conceivably have cut to the chase and let Spider-Man in on the correct interpretation of the expository cues. This is a typical example of the kind of metafictional play that is permissible within the mode of comic book practice. O’Neil and Romita Jr., foreground and lightly ridicule the extrinsic norm of delay in superhero comics, but they also dutifully fulfill it at the same time.

Exposition: An Intensely Self-Referential Practice The example from “Marathon” is indicative of the attitude towards self-reflexivity in the mode of comic book practice as a whole: it is only permissible under specific circumstances and has been rigorously conventionalized. This is not to say that it must not be used; in fact, metafiction regularly features in the UnS. It usually has its preordained place in the overall composition, though. For example, a self-aware attitude is entirely permissible, even desirable, during the exposition. This is how the verbal narration opens the story “…to Live in Peace—Nevermore!” from DC Comics Presents Superman Team-Up #13 (1979): “Take note: for though no sound echoes through airless space, the blow that has just been struck will become history! At this precise instant, an entire world’s population has been doomed—to live in peace—nevermore” (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: n.pag.). The visual narration shows Superman battling a spaceship, presumably with the aim of defending a NASA capsule. Planet Earth can be seen in the background, in a dynamic splash page8 (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 259; figure 3). Many features

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Figure 3. Highly self-reflexive opening pages are the norm in the mode of practice. Page taken from Paul Levitz and Dick Dillin, “…to Live in Peace— Nevermore!” in Showcase Presents Superman Team-Ups Volume 1 (New York: DC Comics 2009 [1979]) 259. Originally published in DC Comics Presents: Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes #13, September 1979. Image © DC Comics.

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of the page are self-reflexive, starting with the direct address of the reader in the verbal narration and the flashforward that it provides. The prolepsis gives us an indication as to how the story will proceed, but leaves out important causal links that the syuzhet will provide piecemeal. In the caption above the splash-page, the narration provides all the necessary prototype exposition to understand the character of Superman, and there are visual as well as verbal references to the company publishing the comic book—DC Comics—and the creators of the Superman character, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (ibid.). It also tells us that we can expect the story to not just feature Superman, but also the superhero team called “The Legion of Super-Heroes.” Another caption at the bottom of the splash page gives us the names and occupations of all the artists and administrators involved in the production of the story (ibid.). Many of these selfreferential pieces of information are excluded from the more overtly narrative splash panel, but the prolepsis and apostrophe in the verbal narration and the superimposed title of the story intrude into the diegetic space. The fact that the syuzhet cues are presented in a splash page is itself indicative of a self-reflexive moment. After all, this stylistic choice is somewhat rare in the UnS. On average, a UnS syuzhet only chooses to employ a splash page 1.5 times per issue. Such mise-en-page will thus automatically draw attention to itself. Often, the narration will employ a splash to open the story. In conclusion, somewhat like the classical Hollywood film, the mode of comic book practice “uses the credits sequence to initiate the narration.” This initial sequence is often “self-conscious to a high degree” (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 25). During the 1970s and 1980s, the metafictional exposition was not begun on the first interior page. In fact, the cover page has an even greater propensity towards prolepsis than the first interior page. Ninety-six percent of all narrations in the UnS make use of a flashforward, and practically all of them feature the only prolepsis in the entire issue on the cover. Outside the exposition, the flashforward is an outlawed device, since it tends to flaunt the narration’s omniscience and is difficult to motivate on any terms other than the artistic (cf. Bordwell “Narration”: 79). After the expository phase, such metafictional elements are quickly discarded. In classical American films, the exposition is typically delivered in a fashion that Bordwell, modifying Meir Sternberg’s theory of exposition, calls “concentrated and preliminary” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 28; cf. also Sternberg “Expositional Modes”: 98/ 99). In other words, most of the important expository information about

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the protagonist(s) and the central conflict(s) of the narrative are cued in a condensed fashion at the beginning of the narrative. There are other options. Instead of conveying the expository materials in a concentrated manner, it could also be distributed throughout the syuzhet. In other words, the narration “might scatter the information…, interweaving it with ongoing present action” (Bordwell 1985: 56). The syuzhet may also deny the readers expository cues in the beginning and delay them indefinitely (ibid.). The effects of such a strategy of distribution and delay can be profound. A concentrated and preliminary exposition provides “solid grounds for confident hypothesis formation” (ibid.). It thus often tallies with the promise of reliability and visibility that also characterizes the mode of comic book practice. Delayed and distributed exposition leaves the reader or viewer on much shakier ground. It may lead to “a suspension of strong or absolute hypotheses” on the part of the audience (ibid.). In other words, concentrated and delayed exposition potentially presents the reader with a much more ambiguous storyworld and with equally ambivalent characters. In extreme cases, the lack of information will draw attention to the fact that the narration is withholding important causal links and facts, and therefore to the process of narration itself (ibid.). One would be wrong to assume that the mode of comic book practice favors concentrated and preliminary exposition as clearly as the classical Hollywood cinema. About two-thirds of the stories in the UnS fall within this pattern; 78 percent of all narrations make use of concentrated exposition, and 74 percent of all syuzhet presentations give the most important expository cues in a preliminary fashion. But a sizable portion employs delayed (26 percent) and/or distributed exposition (22 percent) instead. This is not to say that this portion of the UnS opts against a self-aware opening of the story. Most often, we find hybrid models that present the reader with some concentrated and preliminary cues, but then choose to overtly suppress important information. The Superman Team-Up story cited at the beginning of the section is a good example. Having saved a space capsule from Earth from the attack of the alien probe, Superman follows the damaged attack ship to its home planet (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 259–264). There, he finds two civilizations that have been “at war for centuries” (262). Since their campaign has recently only yielded diminishing returns, one of the warring factions has taken to “stealing people away from other worlds to become warriors” (ibid.). Superman intends to quickly put an end to this nefarious business, but he is stopped by the Legion of Super-Heroes, who beseech him not to interfere since “the Millennium War is as historical and unchangeable as the

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destruction of Krypton,” Superman’s home planet (264). For this argument to make sense, it is important to know that the stories about the Legion of Super-Heroes typically feature time travel; the members of the group originate from centuries in the future. All the syuzhet cues recounted thus far are delivered in concentrated and preliminary fashion. But then the narration chooses to overtly suppress a key piece of information: Superman elects not to end the war and leaves the battleground. The members of the Legion of Super-Heroes are certain that “he will not interfere” (ibid.). But they are equally afraid what will happen “if he [Superman] finds out the whole story…. What then?” (ibid.). The narration thus cues some specific questions. Is the Legion of Super-Heroes trustworthy? What are their real plans? If the protagonists of the story were not serialized characters, this flaunted suppression of expository information would have considerable consequences for the process of hypothesis testing. The Legion of Super-Heroes would have to be considered as a band of ambiguous characters, with potentially nefarious motivations. It would not be inconceivable for them to turn out the villains of the story. In short, the delayed piece of exposition would have an immensely destabilizing effect, making the formulation of hypotheses on the part of the reader a much more worrying ordeal. This is not the case, though, because the blow of the delayed exposition is softened considerably by the mode of practice’s extrinsic norms. For one, the historical superhero template schema intervenes. At the time of publication (1979), readers could still rely on the fact that a publication by DC Comics would not feature a team of superheroes that have unequivocally turned into villains. As has been pointed out in the section on character in the mode of practice (“Characters: Star Prototypes, Intermedial Pressure and the Limits of Change”), the hero-turned-villain plot is wholly conventional, but it is only admissible if a plot twist is provided at some point in the syuzhet development that makes the return to the status quo possible. The demands of serialization and a variation of the so-called primacy effect that is particular to the mode of practice equally cushion the impact of the delayed exposition. Sternberg’s term describes the fact that typically, our impressions of a person or a fictional character are “decisively determined by the order of presentation employed” (Sternberg “Expositional Modes”: 94). In other words, an audience will typically assume that its initial impressions of a character are accurate and reliable unless the narration cues ambiguity. Thus, “in any narrative, the information provided first about a character or situation creates a fixed baseline against which later information is judged” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson

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“Classical Hollywood”: 37). In classical narration, “once the exposition has outlined a character’s traits, the character should remain consistent” (ibid.) to allow for stable hypothesis formation. However, in “…to Live in Peace— Nevermore!” the protagonists are hardly introduced at all. The selfconscious first page of the story merely tells us that Superman is “the world’s greatest super-hero” and that the Legion “will become a galaxyspanning heroic legend” (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 259). Superman is first presented in medias res on the first page. The Legion of Super-Heroes equally turns up in the storyworld without any major introductory cues except for the bare minimum needed to propel the plot. If anything, the narration thus only triggers a minimal primacy effect for the protagonists, guaranteeing the novice reader that he or she can rest secure in the knowledge that the heroes of the story will only have the most righteous of intentions. On the other hand, faithful readers of superhero comics will take these minimal introductions as intertextual cues that are meant to activate their previous knowledge of the characters: the combined result of what has previously been called a star character’s prototype and continuity. These experiences will most likely confirm the heroism and moral rectitude asserted on the story’s first page. The bulk of the expository cues aiming for the primacy effect is instead expended on the story’s central conflict and the villains. This strategy is very typical of the mode of comic book practice. After all, the relatively small number of story pages puts an immense restraint on the amount of plot points and character introductions that could possibly be represented in the syuzhet. Comic book writers and artists will therefore often opt to concentrate on non-recurrent characters and the story’s central conflict instead of the introduction of the protagonist(s). The qualities of the latter are instead habitually presented as a foregone conclusion. Serialization plays an important role here, too. If the protagonists’ characteristic traits and back stories were highly complex, having to reintroduce them on a monthly or bimonthly basis would take up far too much precious syuzhet space. The fact that protagonists in the mode of comic book practice are often relatively flat characters is therefore also a result of extrinsic norms that restrain syuzhet duration and compel artists to concentrate on causal action instead of depth of character. However, it is important to note that there are exceptions to this rule. Some of these are based on house styles. While DC Comics largely published traditional action/adventure comic during the 1970s, for example, the competition at Marvel Comics had introduced long-running soap opera style plotting to its books, which in turn brought a much greater focus on character

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depth.9 Most of the Marvel books in the UnS may be called upon to demonstrate that the Marvel creators still relied on the then-current conventional schemata of the superhero genre, though. All of this is not to say that delayed and distributed exposition is ineffective in the mode of comic book practice. In the example from “…to Live in Peace—Nevermore!” the Legion’s suppressed motivation creates suspense and ensures that the reader will be left guessing as to what has compelled the Legion of Super-Heroes not to interfere in the conflict. The delayed expository materials also amount to a guarantee of a future clash between Superman and the Legion. Levitz and Dillin even manage to wrest some residual ambiguity out of the technique, since the Legion’s hesitancy to disclose their true motivations to Superman also implies that there might be limits to moral agency. What if all the possible choices open to the heroes lead to the undeserved discontent of at least one of the parties involved? In the end, the story thus makes a problem exactly of the minimal primacy effect reserved for its protagonists, making us ask: if superheroes always have the best of intentions, how do we define those intentions? The story thus leaves the genre as conceived by the mode of comic book practice mildly called into question, but it never entirely foregrounds its metafictional operations. True to its own logic, the syuzhet closes on a note of discontent, but it will cushion the blow considerably by applying the villain schema. Superman must face Pete Ross, whose son has been kidnapped by an alien probe. Our protagonist feels compelled to tell Ross that he will not rescue his son. By the standards of the superhero genre, this is an immense avowal of failure on Superman’s part. But immediately, generic and compositional motivation is brought to bear to allay the story’s melancholy outcome. Pete Ross is not allowed to merely be a grieving father. Instead, he is turned into a future villain and used to provide causal motivation for serialization: “No, Superman! I can’t forgive you,” he says. “You’ve taken my son, Superman—and you’ll pay for that!” (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 275). The visual narration shows him turning his back on the protagonist, and his facial expression bespeaks anger and malice instead of heartache (figure 4). The issue’s final panel, a close-up of Ross’s face, his gaze almost turned directly to the reader, recalls the convention of the villain’s soliloquy in which he expounds his plans. In other words, the verbal and the visual narration redundantly cue the villain schema, making it somewhat difficult for the reader to wholly sympathize with Ross as a victim. A potentially troubling scene thus ends almost entirely on a conventional note.

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Figure 4. This Superman story toys with the idea of a permanently altered status quo—Superman is unable to free Pete Ross’s kidnapped son. The syuzhet cushions the blow by painting Ross in a villainous light. Page taken from Paul Levitz and Dick Dillin, “…to Live in Peace—Nevermore!” in Showcase Presents Superman Team-Ups Volume 1 (New York: DC Comics 2009 [1979]) n.pag. Originally published in DC Comics Presents: Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes #13, September 1979. Image © DC Comics.

Range and Depth of Knowledge: Opportunistic Omniscience The Superman Team-Up story discussed above already tells us something about the range and depth of narrational knowledge that is typical of almost all expositions in the UnS. In Bordwell’s definition, a narration “can be called more or less knowledgeable about the fabula it represents” (“Narration”: 57). The verbal narration in “…to Live in Peace—Nevermore!” shows all the signs of omniscience, even flaunting the immense

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range of its knowledge to some extent through flashforwards (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 259; figure 3). From the point of view of poetics, the narration’s knowledge is not at all restricted during the exposition (Bordwell “Narration”: 57). On the following pages, it also demonstrates considerable depth by giving us a string of insights into Superman’s thoughts (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 260–262). To do so, writer and artist choose the stylistic device called the thought bubble. This is only one option an artist has at their disposal to convey depth. A narration may “present the whole of a character’s mental life, either conscious or unconscious; it may confine itself to the character’s optical or auditory experience; it may eschew any but behavioral indications of psychological states; it may even minimize those” (Bordwell “Narration”: 58). The syuzhet will not necessarily sustain cues indicating a particular range and depth of knowledge throughout the whole of its duration, though. In fact, as in the classical Hollywood cinema, the fluctuations of narrational range and depth are “codified” generically and dramaturgically (Bordwell “Narration”: 160). In the mode of comic book practice, too, “the temporal progression of the syuzhet makes narrational properties fluctuate” between restricted and omniscient strategies, between an immense depth of knowledge and the almost complete absence of insight into the characters’ inner lives (ibid.). Based on these criteria, this section is therefore interested in the following questions. “Which range and depth of narration are typical of the narrations in the UnS? What patterns of fluctuation between different strategies of conveying narrational depth and range can be discovered? And which conclusions as to the extrinsic norms governing the mode of comic book practice can we draw from these findings?” The numbers speak the most unambiguous language of all the UnS statistics. In 100 percent of all cases, the narration is intermittently omniscient or restricted—to the point of view of one or several characters and/or to a specific location and/or time. Equally, the depth of narration shows signs of a middle ground between two extremes. In 100 percent of all UnS stories, the narration sometimes chooses to give the reader glimpses of the characters’ inner lives and sometimes to stay on the outside entirely. Not a single story in the corpus elects to constantly convey thoughts and emotions; neither does any narration in the UnS entirely refuse the reader cues that would give insights into the characters’ psyche. As for the pattern of fluctuation, it is much the same as in the classical Hollywood cinema (compare Bordwell “Narration”: 160). It has already been pointed out that the expositional phase of most stories in the UnS is self-referential and highly knowledgeable about fabula events. However, it is not quite as com-

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municative as in classical Hollywood films, choosing sometimes to delay crucial pieces of expository information. Very often, it provides many depth cues, too. Once the exposition is over, the narration quickly sheds most of the self-referential cues and omniscience, instead letting “the characters and their interaction take over the transmission of information” (Bordwell “Narration”: 160). This pattern is evident in the Superman Team-Up story, too. After the first seven story pages, covering most of the exposition, the narration relinquishes all self-referential devices, prolepses and thought bubbles (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 258–264). Instead, the story’s causal chain is indeed conveyed by character dynamics, dialogue, and physical actions, with the occasional verbal narration in captions thrown in for redundancy. Again and again, shifts in narrational range occur: during the exposition, the narration stayed within the range of Superman’s perception, but as he leaves the Legion of Super-Heroes, it briefly chooses to remain with the Legion. It proceeds to show their heroic exploits in saving some of the starship pilots fighting in the planetary war from certain death (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 264–265). This short scene, largely without any major consequence for the larger story, is probably included to offset the damage done to the characters’ reliability due to the delayed exposition. In other words, the narration chooses its range and depth of knowledge based on their effectiveness in complying with the mode of practice’s extrinsic norms. It will focus its efforts on the Legion of SuperHeroes for a few panels to restore their status as unequivocal heroes; then it will switch its focus to Superman’s experiences, since he is the story’s main driving force (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 266ff.). Whenever necessary to cue causality, it will display features of omniscience and great depth again. On page 267, the narration opts to visualize a flashback concerning one of Superman and Pete Ross’s past encounters, thus granting us an insight into both characters’ memories. It will only return to the extreme depth, knowledge, and self-referentiality of the exposition on the final page (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 275, figure 4). There, it flaunts its own dramaturgical segmentation with a banner saying “EPILOGUE” (ibid.) and foregrounds Pete Ross’s transformation into a villain with his almost direct address of the reader (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 275, 6). The narration also makes overt its own serial status and obsession with causality with the proleptic announcement that “next issue,” there will be a “payoff ” to the current issue’s events in the form of, presumably, a battle “Superman vs. Superboy!” (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 275).

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In its oscillation between restricted and omniscient as well as exterior and interior narration, the mode of comic book practice mostly adheres to the extrinsic norms of what can broadly be called conventional realism. Captions and thought bubbles are employed to convey thoughts and emotions, while the visual narration largely provides physical action cues.10 If the visual narration is called upon to provide depth, that is, to express emotions and thoughts, it will do so by way of body language, facial expressions, and staging. The previously mentioned panels in which Pete Ross is shown to be turning away from Superman to almost directly address the reader is a good example of these conventional methods to visualize emotions and thoughts (Levitz and Dillin “To Live in Peace”: 275; figure 4). To turn away from Superman is to overtly and angrily deny him allegiance and respect; Ross’s facial expression only strengthens this obvious cue the staging provides. More daring visual strategies to represent the characters’ inner lives are much rarer. In the story “In the Chill of the Night” (1984), for example, artist Dan Day uses distortions that are reminiscent of a fish eye lens in photography to convey the protagonist’s drugged state (Barr and Day “Chill”: 347, 1–2). The first two panels of the page present the reader with an extremely wide, low angle long shot of Gotham City. The buildings are grossly twisted and warped. In a particularly surreal detail, two giant snakes seem to have coiled themselves around two skyscrapers. The skyscrapers mimic human bodies: their window patterns gel into grotesquely deformed facial expressions. The moon, too, has been anthropomorphized to horrific effect. In the widest possible sense, Day is making use of a conventionalized version of Expressionism, then: it is no longer merely the body and the face that convey inner states; the entire physical world has become a mirror of the human mind. Usually, such a nightmare technique would not be permissible in the mode of comic book practice. Day is only able to use it as a permissible paradigmatic option because it is properly motivated. Batman, our protagonist, has been drugged. The distorted cityscape, so the convention suggests, accurately conveys his troubling experience. For this reason, the visual narration is allowed a small avantgarde flourish.

Redundancy: A Highly Repetitive Extrinsic Norm Day’s use of Expressionist techniques has an important purpose, in that it is one among several cues that point to the highly subjective nature of the ongoing sequence. Repeatedly, the syuzhet will ask us to differentiate between the Batman’s twisted perceptions and an objective reality,

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and the use of Expressionist cues will be amongst the telltale signs that the visual narration is in parts unreliable (Barr and Day “Chill”: 340–357). It is important to underline that the technique is not used on its own to convey the sequence’s subjective trappings. In isolation, Day’s recourse to modernist practices would be much more ambivalent, evoking questions such as: are these panels meant to convey subjectivity or does the storyworld actually look like this? What is the cause of this deviation from the typically stable conventional realism of the visual narration? In short, this stylistic choice only really becomes a viable option within the mode of practice if it is part of an accretion of depth cues that more or less convey the same information: the Batman has been drugged, he is hallucinating, and objective reality is similar to but different from the superhero’s perceptions. Day’s use of Expressionism is a redundant cue, in other words, and it is only permissible within the mode of practice because of its redundancy. The classical syuzhet will invariably repeat itself (cf. Bordwell “Narration”: 57), be it in the Hollywood film or in the mode of comic book practice. Ninety-eight percent of all syuzhets in the UnS make constant use of redundancy; only one syuzhet in the whole of the corpus does not reiterate a small number of important plot points. A narration that makes no use of redundancy at all or chooses only to repeat a few essential story developments is strictly banned by the extrinsic norm. Repetitions are therefore an essential and pervasive tool in the narrational process. They are used frequently because they almost guarantee the formation of a clear-cut fabula. They greatly influence the process of reception in that they “reinforce assumptions, inferences, and hypotheses about story information” (ibid.). In short, they too help create the illusion of stability and of a seamless, unbroken causality that the mode of practice prizes so highly. Our research questions for this section will therefore be as follows. “Which characteristic uses of redundancy can we isolate in the mode of comic book practice? In how far does the use of repetition in the UnS form distinctive patterns? And which conclusions can we draw from these patterns as to the extrinsic norms governing redundancy in the mode of practice?” Some panels from the story “The World on Fire!” (1981) from AllStar Squadron will demonstrate how redundancy typically operates in the UnS (Thomas and Buckler “World on Fire”: 31; figure 5). Every single narrational cue in these panels is redundant to some extent, beginning with the first. Here, the visual narration shows the superhero known as the Shining Knight striking a rock face with his sword (Thomas and Buckler

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Figure 5. Qualifying redundancies in the visuo-verbal narration. Page taken from Roy Thomas and Rich Buckler, “The World on Fire!” in Showcase Presents All Star Squadron Volume 1 (New York: DC Comics, 2012 [1981]) 31. Originally published in All-Star Squadron #1, September 1981. Image © DC Comics.

“World on Fire”: 31, 1). In the panel’s dialogue, he states: “I may be of greatest assistance to you, Danette Reilly, by smiting the side of the volcano—thus!” (ibid.). The verbal narration is doubtless a repetition, but it also turns the physical action into a causal link: Shining Knight’s efforts are meant to help Danette Reilly in finding out what lies hidden within the rock. Panel two of the same page shows the cave entrance that the Knight’s exertions have created, and the dialogue is once more repetitive:

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“Y-you carved out a whole cavern—with a single blow!” Danette says. Again, this tells us that the Shining Knight is responsible for the new opening in the rock, but it also provides new information. The gaping hole shown in the visual narration is indeed the entrance to a cave. We can conclude from these and countless other examples in the UnS that even at its most redundant, the interplay of verbal and visual narration will at least attempt to qualify its counterpart’s cues while repeating them. In the page’s final panel (Thomas and Buckler “World on Fire”: 31, 5), the villain Solomon Grundy is shown attacking the Shining Knight. The latter comments on the scene at a length that is somewhat unlikely given the frantic action of the visuals: “Zounds! One of the pair is nearly eight feet tall—a veritable monster—and now, he charges at me, like unto an angered bull!” (ibid.). While certainly inelegant and almost comical in its blatant efforts at overdetermination, such mildly qualifying redundancy is still permissible within the mode of practice. Its crassness is also due to the circumstances of production in the mode of practice. Most mainstream comic books are produced by a division of labor. There is a writer who produces a script, a penciler who draws the individual pages in accordance with the script (at least that is what the writer hopes for), an inker who finishes the penciler’s work, a colorist, a letterer, and finally an editor, who may interfere at all stages of production.11 Usually, the individual creative parties do not meet in person during the production process. It is entirely possible for the writer not to know which artist will receive his or her script; tight monthly schedules may prevent the regular penciler of a series from completing the story, and a fill-in artist may have to replace them at the last minute. Redundancy is therefore also a safety mechanism for the writer. Even if one or multiple agents in the chain of production prove incompetent, the narration’s overdetermination will ensure the construction of a stable, causally sound fabula. There are signs in the UnS that such strategies were slowly being discarded by comics artists during the early 1980s. Unsurprisingly, this change is especially evident in those works within the UnS that could be considered (very) minor classics. The story “Spider-Man: Threat or Menace?” by writer Dennis O’Neil and penciler Frank Miller (1981) provides a glimpse of these stylistic developments. In one scene, the villain Doctor Octopus and the antihero called the Punisher are fighting in a dark morgue (n.pag.). Repetitions are reduced to the bare minimum, and very often pared down to the additional causal cue that the extrinsic norm demands. In panel one of the page, the villain knocks the Punisher out with his robot tentacles, reaching for the anti-hero’s hand. The dialogue only tells us that

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the villain “need[s] that ring” (O’Neil and Miller “Threat”: ibid., 1). The reader is thus asked to make the connection that Doctor Octopus strikes the Punisher because he needs the ring. Conceivably, the earlier approach to redundancy would have given us a repetition of the physical action in the dialogue, too. The visual narration is also bold in that it never gives the reader a clear view of the villain: we only get to see his robot arms. This is not a repressive strategy in the strictest sense; the average SpiderMan reader would immediately recognize the arms as Doctor Octopus’s appendages. Rather, it is evidence of the beginnings of a confident new style that solicits the reader’s involvement more directly by finding more challenging ways of fulfilling the extrinsic norms. Another story in the UnS drawn by Frank Miller, “To Dare the Devil” (1979), even features an entire action sequence that altogether dispenses with captions or dialogue that repeat the visual narration (McKenzie and Miller “Dare”: 104–105). This is not to say that a purely visual sequence was out of the question in the comics mainstream prior to the 1980s. However, the extrinsic norm for redundancy worked so strongly against this narrational option as to heavily marginalize it. In the UnS, it is a paradigmatic option, but still rare.

The Basic Narrational Systems In all the narrations in the UnS, the system of narrative logic or causality is dominant, subordinating the stylistic options to its needs, that is, the establishment of an unbroken causal chain in the fabula. This section will explore how mainstream comics of the 1970s and 1980s are governed by narrative logic in their representation of time and space. It will answer the following research questions. “How is the chronological order of the fabula typically represented in the syuzhet? To what extent and in which ways is the mode of practice invested in the system of time, especially the representation of the past? Which patterns can be found in its use of flashbacks and flashforwards? Under which circumstances is the pattern of dominance among the narrational systems allowed to fluctuate? And what role does the comics medium’s materiality play in the fluctuation between dominant narrational systems?”

The Representation of Time in the UnS: The Inevitable Self-Reflexiveness of Serial Temporality “Time in the classical film is a vehicle for causality, not a process to be investigated on its own”: this is the conclusion that Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson reach in their exploration of the classical Hollywood cin-

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ema (“Classical Hollywood”: 47). To some extent, this is true of the mode of comics practice, too. There is not a single instance in the UnS of a syuzhet representing fabula events in a non-chronological order outside the conventionalized prolepses on the cover page and/or first story page, for example. In other words, the narrations in the mode of practice will do their utmost to cue linearity and causality One would therefore be tempted to assert the mode of comic book practice’s similarity to the classical Hollywood cinema and declare the case closed (cf. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 42). A first glance at the UnS’s strategies to delimit fabula time seems to confirm this assumption. For example, 60 percent of the narrations in the UnS announce an explicit duration for their main plot, just like the classical Hollywood film often will. There, “the story action sets a limit to how long it must last. Sometimes this means simply a strictly confined duration…. More commonly, the story action sets stipulated deadlines for the characters” (44). In “Blues for Lonesome Pinky!” from The Amazing Spider- Man #221 (1981), we find a prototypical example of what will be termed a specific deadline. The story’s villain has poisoned the customers of a New York bar, and Spider-Man’s search for an antidote has led him to a scientist called Kissick, who supplied the villain with the toxic chemical (O’Neil and Kupperberg “Blues”: n.pag.). Kissick immediately confesses and tells the hero that he has “prepared an antidote at the university lab, but I’ve been afraid to use it—and afraid not to. I just don’t know what to do. Anyway, it’s too late now. I could never get it to Brooklyn in time” (O’Neil and Kupperberg “Blues”: n.pag., 4). On the next page, a bubble giving the reader access to Spider-Man’s thoughts tells us that the hero has “fewer than fifteen minutes to deliver it [the antidote]” (O’Neil and Kupperberg “Blues”: n.pag., 9). Based on this data and the fact that 15 of 22 story pages have already elapsed, the reader can formulate the reliable hypothesis that the story will likely climax shortly before those 15 minutes (and four to five pages) have elapsed. A specific deadline, in other words, will very often result in the main plot being closed off within a series’ current issue. In these cases, the mode of practice operates in much the same vein as the classical Hollywood cinema by achieving the unity of time. But there are non-specific deadlines, too; and these are more frequently employed in the UnS. They complicate the notion of a unity of time and of closure considerably. To give an example of such a non-specific deadline: in the previously discussed story “The Quality of Hatred!” from The Uncanny X-Men #127 (1979), the villain Proteus is at large. He has

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defeated the X-Men in battle and escaped. Unless he is stopped, many more people will suffer and likely die. The narration makes this point repeatedly: the superhero Cyclops, for example, states that “the only way we can trail him [Proteus] is by following the bodies of his victims” (Claremont and Byrne “Quality”: n.pag., 1). Proteus himself assures the reader in a monologue that the X-Men will be unable to “keep me from finding and destroying the ‘one-I-hate,’” meaning his father, “and when he is no more, it will be the X-Men’s turn” (Claremont and Byrne “Quality”: n.pag., 9). The advantages of setting such a non-specific deadline are obvious. While a specific deadline usually calls for closure within the issue at hand, the non-specific deadline is tailor-made for serialization. It promises a dramatic conclusion, but it makes no guarantees as to when closure will be achieved. Potentially, the suspense created by the non-specific deadline can thus be serialized. This example affords us a glimpse of the importance of serialization for the representation of time in the mode of practice. In general, comics creators are faced with two problems: they need to ensure the literal endlessness of the serial while at the same time taking care that the reader’s craving for closure is satisfied periodically. To both defer closure and bring it about at the same time, the typical narration in the mode of practice, as previously stated, will have three different plots, of which one or two are dominant (this is the case in 98 percent of all narrations in the UnS). At the end of an issue, approximately two plots will be left unfinished and consequently serialized; only one plot will be concluded satisfactorily. Total closure is never achieved in most of the serials from the corpus. This should not come as a surprise if one considers the basic method of serialization in the mode of comics practice. If a series or character is commercially successful, Marvel or DC Comics will be unlikely to stop publishing stories about them. And even if a series is cancelled, its protagonist(s) will typically be denied full closure—who knows if the intellectual property might not thrive at some point in the future? In short, for a hero such as Spider-Man or a superhero team such as the X-Men, there can be no such thing as a clearly delimited fabula. It would therefore be wrong to state that time in the mode of comic book practice is merely a “vehicle for causality, not a process to be investigated on its own.” In the tightly unified classical Hollywood narration, it is possible to conceal the operations of the system of time in favor of a smooth causal chain. In mainstream comics, the tension between an individual plot’s clearly defined duration and the immense accumulation and open-endedness of fabula time—years and years of monthly stories, with more being added

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continuously—becomes impossible to overlook. By the 1970s, it has even become an important focal point of the mode of practice. In other words, the system of time is under constant and intense scrutiny in the mode of comics practice. The daunting mass of accumulated information or continuity, as it is frequently called, becomes a theme in its own right and will be continuously referenced by most of the narrations in the mode of practice. Almost without fail, they will allude to the limitless duration of their fabula or continuity at some point, thus pointing to the process of serialization. Sometimes, the reference to past events will be specific, recounting proceedings that took place one year, 20 years, or 600 years ago. More often, the indication of fabula duration will be non-specific, merely implying a span of some weeks or years. Such ambiguity makes sense for serials that have been published for decades without seeing their protagonists age in any considerable way. As long as the correct chronological and causal sequence of thousands upon thousands of fabula events cannot be conclusively established, logical errors and the sheer impossibility of realistically fitting an immense number of often contradictory events into a relatively small amount of fabula duration do not become quite so apparent. Less than presenting a serial’s backlog of stories as a unified fabula, narrations in the mode of practice will thus reference past events in terms of a body of knowledge that does not merely contain information about fabula events, but also about the mode of production, the publishing house, the creators involved, and the stylistic choices made by them. Kelleter and Stein, too, observe that this emphasis on accumulated knowledge allows not just “for the canonization of certain authors, styles and eras,” but also for a “serial self-reflexivity of a new type” (“Autorisierungspraktiken”: 76, my translation). This is because comics authors and artists can rely on the fact that a sizable portion of the audience is aware of diegetic and generic history. In Jenkins’s terms, these comics fans form a “new knowledge culture” no longer tied to “older forms of social community” (“Convergence”: 27). These fan communities “are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations” and “reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments” (ibid.) such as the writing of fan fiction and “the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge” about the objects of their fandom. Many of the comics in the UnS are explicitly geared towards such communities.12 In the Spider-Man story “Blues for Lonesome Pinky!” for example, the villain Ramrod exclaims upon meeting the series’ hero: “Spider-Man! We ain’t mixed it since Frisco that time!” The dialogue is marked with an

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asterisk (*), and the corresponding caption tells us that Ramrod is referring to events that took place “way back in Daredevil #103.—Tom” (O’Neil and Kupperberg “Blues”: n.pag., 4). If the reader wants to find out who “Tom” is, they need only go back to the first story page, where a caption names a certain “Tom DeFalco” as the story’s editor (O’Neil and Kupperberg “Blues”: n.pag.). The cue thus encourages the reader to engage with the comic book’s specific mode of production as well as the artists and editors contributing their share in the division of labor. The caption also suggests that readers pick up a copy of a different Marvel comic book altogether, that is, the series called Daredevil, and a specific issue, namely #103. This installment of the serial was published in 1973, whereas the Spider-Man yarn has a 1981 cover date. In short, in real-world terms, Spider-Man and Ramrod indeed last met “way back in Daredevil #103.” But while eight years have elapsed in the real world, the same can hardly be said for the diegesis. Still, the narration gives us no clue as to how much time has passed there—the caption thus also draws attention to the ambiguous nature of time in serialized comic books. On top of that, the editorial intrusion presents the two titles, Daredevil and The Amazing Spider-Man, as sharing one and the same storyworld. Finally, if our hypothetical reader were to go into a comic shop and seek out the old Daredevil back issue, he or she would also be confronted with the materiality of the history of the Marvel universe that the two heroes share. Typically, specialized shops stock rows upon rows of bagged and boarded back catalogue. To fully understand editorial intrusions such as this one, they would have to invest an immense amount of time to read up on not only the back story of the characters, but also on the history of mainstream comics, their creators and the major publishing houses. He or she may also wish to engage with other comics fans to discuss and expand the body of knowledge about the mode of practice. Mainstream comics of the 1970s and 1980s are therefore intrinsically bound up in their own past and their historical circumstances of production, and to a certain extent they demand that their readers be, too. The system of time subtly comes to the fore in the mode of practice’s use of flashbacks, too. On average, a UnS narration employs between three and four analepses. The device is cued in almost all UnS syuzhets as well— in 98 percent of all cases, a UnS story will contain at least one flashback. Flashbacks take up a considerable amount of the average UnS syuzhet: 13 percent of all syuzhet pages are devoted to analepses. In this sense, too, the mode of practice is heavily invested in the past. Bordwell differentiates between three different types of analepsis: a flashback can be recounted,

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that is, characters will communicate “information about prior events by any means (writing, speech, pantomime, tape recording, film clips, etc.)” (“Narration”: 78). It can be enacted: in this case, “the syuzhet presents prior events as if they were occurring at the moment, in direct representation” (ibid.). Finally, a flashback can be both recounted and enacted, or mixed: here, “a character tells about past events, and the syuzhet then presents the events in a flashback” (ibid.). More than half the flashbacks in the UnS are of the recounted type, although we also find a considerable amount of analepses that are both recounted and enacted (42 percent). The purely enacted type is rare (4 percent), probably because it disregards the extrinsic norm for redundancy by refusing to make use of verbal narration. For the most part, flashbacks of the recounted type serve two functions in the mode of practice. For one, they repeat fabula cues, providing the reader with information about events that took place either in the current issue or a previous issue of the serial. Very often, though, they pare the information down to the bare minimum, sometimes leaving considerable causal gaps. This is not due to the writers’ lack of talent. Rather, the narration’s suppressive cues make the recounted flashbacks participatory. They incite readers to extend their body of knowledge about the comic book in question, to buy back issues, and read up on the storyworld’s past. If readers should decide to enter the ranks of fandom, they will likely appropriate the content offered by the mode of practice even more extensively, engaging in fan fiction, commentary, and the like. The strategies of serialization to be found in comic books from the mode of practice could thus be termed examples of what Jenkins has called “participatory culture,” that is, a cultural field that no longer clearly separates the roles of artists and consumers (“Convergence”: 3). For Jenkins, this culture is the result of the increasing media convergence of the past decades, “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (“Convergence”: 2). American mainstream comic books have always been at the forefront of such convergences, their storytelling practices spilling over to other media such as radio plays, cinema serials, and television shows long before the rise of fan culture to the cultural mainstream that began in the 1970s. What is perhaps more important for the comparatively early formation of knowledge cultures for mainstream comics is that the large publishers Marvel and DC began to market their superhero lines as incorporating each individual title’s storyworld, char-

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acters and accumulated back stories into a larger universe (“the DC universe,” “the Marvel universe”).13 These immense feats of narrative construction quickly required an immense amount of expertise to be fully enjoyed. Small wonder that comics did away with “older notions of passive media spectatorship” earlier than other media, casting “media producers and consumers” not as “occupying separate roles,” but as “participants who interact with each other” (Jenkins “Convergence”: 3). Analepses of the enacted and recounted type tend to be less geared towards participation in the UnS. This is because they typically provide fabula information that has not been previously disclosed. They are rarely suppressive for the same reason. Their use is just as heavily conventionalized as that of the recounted flashbacks, though. Most frequently, they are employed to fill gaps the narration has previously flaunted. In the Batman and the Outsiders story “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle…” (1984), we find a typical instance of such a mixed flashback filling a gap. Previously, the narration has presented the reader with an old man “found on the street, … not drunk, but nearly catatonic” whose fingerprints nevertheless match those of a kidnapper the Batman is trying to apprehend (Barr and Aparo “Hand”: 222, 1). The syuzhet motivates its suppression of past events by presenting the old man as unable to talk (Barr and Aparo “Hand”: 222, 2). A series of mixed flashbacks will subsequently fill the gap piece by piece, starting with the sequence seen in figure 6. The analeptic panels are clearly indicated, the flashback even cued in an overdetermined fashion as is usually the case in the mode of practice (Barr and Aparo “Hand”: 225, 3–5). Their irregular outlines point to their status as parts of a flashback; an immense incongruence in the diegetic spaces as well as the absence of Batman and the police inspector in the flashback panels also cue the analepsis. On top of that, the verbal narration announces the device by its use of the past simple. The redundancies continue throughout the flashback, which largely functions based on an interplay of restricted narrational range (we only get to see and hear what the nurse sees and hears) and suppression. The first analeptic panel shows the nurse tucking in the children for their afternoon nap (225, 3), and the verbal narration repeats these cues. The visual narration in the third panel shows the nurse’s back in a medium shot; she is apparently in the process of turning around (225, 4). Like her, we do not see what is happening to the children. The third panel presents us with a view of the dorm room, but only because the nurse has turned (225, 5). We are now presented with the result of the suppressed narrational cues: apparently, the children have turned into old men and women in just a few seconds. Based on these

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Figure 6. A series of flashbacks fills in focused gaps. Page taken from Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle…,” in Showcase Presents Batman and the Outsiders Volume 1 (New York: DC Comics, 2007 [1984]) n.pag. Originally published in Batman and the Outsiders #8, March 1984. Image © DC Comics.

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findings, the reader should be able to formulate a new hypothesis as to the identity of the catatonic old man. It is likely that he is not the kidnapper at all, but the child who has supposedly been taken. A second flashback will confirm this hypothesis and reveal the identity of the actual kidnapper. Mixed flashbacks are therefore an important tool in channeling hypothesis formation in the mode of practice. Unlike recounted flashbacks, they invariably point towards the narrative’s future. Mixed flashbacks are also employed in the service of the so-called origin story. This is an important convention of the superhero genre, presenting the reader with a hero’s or villain’s past. In superhero serials, these origin stories are periodically repeated for a variety of reasons. For one, their repetition is meant to introduce new readers to a protagonist’s or villain’s back story and motivations. But the repeat performance also opens the possibility of subtle or not-so-subtle changes in the narrative, which will usually have some impact on future stories and, perhaps even more importantly, activate the reader’s body of knowledge about a specific character and his or her back story. The superhero genre often thrives on such minor or major “revamps” or “retcons,” as they are called among fans, which explicitly invite comparison to previous incarnations of a character. The origin story also gives comics creators some license to employ devices that are usually prohibited in the mode of practice and to subordinate the present to the past, if only for one monthly issue of a series. The story “Elektra” from Daredevil #168 (1981) is a case in point. Here, a flashback introduces the readers to a new character called Elektra by recounting and enacting (parts of ) her origin story in a flashback (Miller “Elektra”: 221–228). The sequence is remarkable for its length: the analepsis takes up 33 percent of the syuzhet. This is a serious deviation from the extrinsic norm for flashback duration. Typically, only 13 percent of the syuzhet are cued as flashbacks. Such a lengthy exploration of the past already indicates that the flashback is not just concerned with presenting the bare minimum of past events to propel the plot into the future. Elektra’s origin story as told in the analepsis also allows writer and artist Frank Miller to momentarily suspend the extrinsic norm of individual agency as the prime mover of the plot. Instead, the narration leaves a crucial element of Elektra’s story to chance: when she and her father are held hostage by terrorists, Daredevil, the series’ protagonist, tries to save them. But Elektra’s father is accidentally shot by the police, who mistake him for one of the terrorists (Miller “Elektra”: 226, 6–9). Such a tragic turn of events is not unheard of in the mode of practice, but the numbers show that it is nevertheless unusual. We only find important causal links originating

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on a non-individual basis in 22 percent of all the narrations in the UnS. This is not to say that the use of chance is outlawed in the mode of practice. Chance encounters between heroes and villains are frequently used to initiate the story action, for example. However, the consequences are hardly ever this final and harrowing. By convention, the mode of practice will often confine such tragic events to mixed flashbacks, and often to a hero’s or villain’s origin story. Prolepses are even more rigorously conventionalized than analepses; their use is almost consistently restrained to a narrative’s self-reflexive exposition. If they appear elsewhere, they will be motivated by fantastical phenomena such as visions or fortune telling. The story “Inferno!” from The New Teen Titans #31 (1983) offers a rare example of such a flashforward outside the exposition or cover page. Superheroine Raven has been captured by a band of supervillains. She is now being manipulated by the villain Phobia, who shows her a glimpse of the future where Raven’s father—himself a villain—has “killed her only friends” (Wolfman and Pérez “Inferno”: 313). But even this supposedly radical use of the flashforward is braced by convention. Several parts of the villain schema play a crucial part here. Most importantly, a supervillain in the mode of practice will almost always announce a grand plan that will subsequently be foiled by the superhero(es). The flashforward shares certain traits of the supervillain’s soliloquy proclaiming their malicious designs, since it is brought about by the manipulation of Raven’s mind. The reader therefore has every reason to hypothesize that this version of events will not come to pass (as indeed it does not). Prolepses in the UnS often provide such cues about future events that are eventually disproved. Consequently, it is possible to state that the flashforward is one of the few narrational devices in the mode of practice that is allowed to bear overt traces of unreliability. However, it would be rash to speak of actual ambiguity as a result, since the unreliability is heavily conventionalized: any practiced reader of superhero comics will be able to discredit a flashforward’s truth claims at a glance. Why make use of flashforwards at all if they do not announce any danger for the protagonist(s)? Prolepses typically present the reader with an unusual, often spectacular situation and amount to a guarantee that the syuzhet will show how this situation came about. This is their first function, then: to arouse curiosity in the chain of events that will lead to the scenario shown in the flashforward. The New Teen Titans story, too, will climax in a scene that bears many similarities to Raven’s vision. After this string of causal links has been revealed, the seasoned superhero aficionado still will not be interested in whether the protagonists will die (convention tells us

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that likely they will not). Instead, the reader wants to find out how astute the narration will be at presenting a clever solution to the problem presented by the prolepsis. In the mode of practice, the prolepsis can therefore be considered a self-referential device that arouses interest in the successful variation of superhero tropes rather than in singular fabula events.

The Representation of Space in the UnS: Spatial Continuity and the Concept of Foregrounded Spatiality Like the representation of time, the representation of space in the mode of practice is predicated on clarity and redundant overdetermination, all in the service of causality. A typical page from the UnS should demonstrate some of the more important extrinsic norms governing the representation of space. Consider the following example from the story “Home Is a Four-Letter Word!” (1977) by Mike Grell (130). The scene takes place at an archaeological digging site. Our protagonists’ destination is a chamber that has recently been excavated. The first panel of the page re-establishes the location by means of metonymy: in the foreground, we see a crate, probably containing archaeological equipment. In the background, a stone structure indicates that the characters are still moving through a field of ruins. In the middle ground, a hole in the ground and a ladder further indicate that excavations have been taking place. Taken on its own, this panel would not cue an archaeological dig as the setting; however, in solidarity with the preceding panels, the scant few details suffice to redundantly imply the location. The next panel takes us into the chamber itself. The fact that the protagonist can be seen descending the ladder shown in the previous panel makes for a logical, linear progression. The hole in the chamber’s ceiling where the ladder leads further cues a continuous diegetic space. Grell chooses a long shot to clearly establish all the important cues in the new location; the composition also unequivocally indicates the relation of the protagonists’ bodies to each other. Four archeologists have already arrived at the bottom of the chamber; our protagonist is still descending. We can also see a bas-relief of a human-tiger hybrid prominently in the middle ground. For this reason, Grell is free to use a much narrower medium shot in the next panel, which nevertheless achieves spatial redundancy. It does so by reiterating the spatial relationship between Travis Morgan and one of the archaeologists in the background on the one hand and by showing us part of the bas-relief that had featured so prominently in the previous panel on the other. The fact that Travis Morgan is now no longer on the ladder but touching the bas-relief

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cues further causal, linear action, and the progressive dialogue strengthens this hypothesis. In other words, the verbal and the visual narration work hand in hand to redundantly establish and re-establish spatial and temporal continuity by overdetermining each panel with spatial and temporal cues. Mise-en-page is of central importance here, too: if the artist gives us a long shot establishing all the salient spatial prompts in full, for example, the next few panels on the page will be able to reference these details to cue spatial continuity. In his study of film narration, Bordwell surmises that these conventionalized artistic options for the representation of space become part of the audience’s process of hypothesis testing. A classical narration will establish “more or less probable alternatives for spatial representation.” For example, in the classical Hollywood film, “a long shot can plausibly be followed by a long shot of a different locale, another shot of the same locale, or a closer view of the space; the last alternative is the most likely” (“Narration”: 112). The viewer or reader will be familiar with such schemata. Using them “to produce and test hypotheses about a string of shots,” the audience will often know “each shot’s salient spatial information before it appears” (ibid.). This is especially true of film, where the phenomenon of screen duration or projection time ensures that each shot eventually vanishes, to be replaced by a new one (cf. Bordwell “Narration”: 81). Here, the viewer must have a relatively reliable set of schemata to anticipate the next shot and not be surprised with each new datum. However, the comic book medium knows no such phenomenon as screen duration. On a typical diptych in the UnS, an average of 11 panels is simultaneously visible. The reader’s ability to scan the page and return to a previous panel for spatial and temporal cues if they are confused therefore becomes an important factor. Since typically, many of the panels on a given diptych cooperate in cueing spatial and temporal continuity, the shot sizes and compositions used need not be quite as predictable as in the classical Hollywood film. An artist may follow up a long shot with several long shots, for example, which would be an unlikely strategy in a classical film. To conclude, spatial continuity in the comics medium is not established through the “three sorts of cues” to be found in film, that is, the cues provided by “shot space, editing space, and sonic space” (Bordwell “Narration”: 113). While certain digital comics experiment with a sonic space, no such cues exist in most comic books. Verbal narration—dialogue and captions—is its rough equivalent, though. The phenomenon of editing, which is predicated on screen duration, does not exist in the comics medium either. Systematic mise-en-page takes its place, which may repli-

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cate some of the film medium’s editing strategies, but does not necessarily need to rely on them because of the simultaneous presentation of, on average, 11 panels. Cues establishing an individual shot space have their equivalent in the comics medium, though; we can simply replace “shot” with “panel,” resulting in the new term “panel space.” Following these findings, spatial continuity in the comics medium can therefore be characterized as the result of the page’s overdetermination with redundant spatial cues provided by panel space, the verbal narration, and the mise-en-page. Narrative causality thus makes “the sheerly graphic space” of the comics page “a vehicle for narrative” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 50). The mode of practice allows certain fluctuations in this pattern. In certain highly conventionalized circumstances, the system of narrative logic may relinquish its dominance to some extent and allow the system of space equal importance. Such a momentary shift in dominance occurs in 44 percent of all narrations in the UnS. To understand how the system of space may come to the fore, some preliminary thoughts on the comics medium’s basic properties are necessary. At its most basic, a comic book page is a material object—a piece of confined space. In and of itself, the comics medium knows no phenomenon comparable to that of duration or screen time. As such, comic books have much in common with visual arts such as painting or sculpture. In his classic account of the visual arts, the 1766 study Laocoon, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing therefore states that painting and sculpture employ “wholly different signs or means of imitation from poetry—the one using forms and colors in space, the other articulate sounds in time” (91). To Lessing, then, painting and sculpture are purely spatial arts with a very limited range of expression. They can only represent “objects existing side by side,” whereas poetry and prose may detail “objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other in time,” such as actions (ibid.). But is such a strict separation of the arts into the spatial and the temporal tenable? Lessing himself is not as dogmatic as he appears to be in making the distinction. For Lessing, works of visual art must be designed to warrant intense study and interpretation. In other words, they must represent what he calls “the fruitful moment,” the instant that makes for as many interpretations as possible (16). He defines this moment as follows: “Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the imagination. The more we see the more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see” (16/17). In other words, in Lessing’s theory of the fine arts, painting and sculpture are not purely spatial at all. Narrative and temporality are, in fact, integral parts of his definition. Lessing’s

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theories have been immensely influential, and they have also been debated by comics scholars. Groensteen, for example, insists that that the comics medium “by its very existence calls into question this dichotomy which was fundamental to the system of the arts for the longest time” (Groensteen “Un objet”: 53, my translation). He thus positions himself squarely opposed to Lessing’s supposed “ideology of purity” (“Un objet”: 29, my translation). In an influential analysis of the Laocoon problem, Mitchell also concludes: “The representation of bodies is easy or ‘convenient’ for painting. The representation of actions is not impossible, just more difficult” (102). It is from this point of view of difficulty that we should look at narration in the mode of practice and judge its achievements in overcoming this difficulty. Will Eisner, one of the pioneers of the graphic novel, sums up the intention of the classical comics artist as follows: “The most important obstacle to surmount is the tendency of the reader’s eye to wander. [T]here is absolutely no way in which the artist can prevent the reading of the last panel before the first…. Without [the] technical advantages [of film] there is left to the sequential artist only the tacit cooperation of the reader” (Eisner “Sequential Art”: 40). To Eisner, the greatest obstacle to overcome is that the reader’s eye may wander and eschew the linear unfolding of the narrative. But the idea that there is such a thing as a linear reading process is itself doubtful. Cohn suggests: “Immediately juxtaposed panels do not always represent the progression of moments of time. In all cases, panels seem to functionally divide up a conceptual space–that is additively built throughout the sequence–into units of attention…. Important to this, the meaning garnered for that ‘chunking’ emerges from the conceptual content of the representation itself—not from some overarching default principle like ‘space=time,’ ‘panels=moments,’ ‘closure,’ or ‘arthrology’” (Cohn “Limits”: 142). In other words, the reading process and the construction of the fabula are fundamentally non-linear, abstract processes. After all, “[i]mages are just significations made meaningful through cognitively based concepts, while ‘time’ is a mental extraction from the causation/change between them” (Cohn “Limits”: 134). Here is what the comic book artist is actively fighting, then: not the non-linear reading process, but the reader’s potential awareness of their process of assembling the fabula. It is also possible—and to most mainstream narratives, dangerous—that the reader will become aware of mise-en-page and the spatial foundation of the medium. To mainstream comics practitioners, such an awareness equals bad craftsmanship. To avoid such problems, comic book writers and artists have compiled an immense toolbox,

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overwriting the comic book page’s constitutive spatiality with temporal and causal cues. Foregrounded or flaunted spatiality only feature as creative options in very specific circumstances.14 Consider an example from the story “Beware the Steel Wind!” (DeMatteis and Budiansky “Wind”: n.pag., 1; figure 7). Here, foregrounded spatiality is used to compress a sequence of many redundant fabula actions into a dense syuzhet presentation that is comparable to a cinematic montage. In other words, the foregrounding of spatial relationships is compositionally motivated in that it fulfills the need for a device that condenses as many fabula events as possible into as little syuzhet space as possible. The visual narration in the panel do not cue a conventionally linear story. Instead, the diagram-like representation implies a relationship of dread and suspicion between various characters (shown as disembodied heads) and the female villain called Steel Wind, represented only in ominous silhouette. The spatiality of the images is attenuated by the fact that the verbal captions incorporated into the panel still cue a smooth causal and temporal progression. They elucidate what the different facial expressions in the visual narration are meant to signify: the performers, discontent with Steel Wind’s management of the circus, voice their concerns and are severely rebuffed by the villain. The spatial constellation of the visual narration is thus reintegrated into the causal progression. This pattern is typical of the use of foregrounded spatiality in the mode of practice: a highly

Figure 7. In this panel from Ghost Rider, foregrounded spatiality is used to compress a large number of redundant cues into a dense syuzhet presentation. Panel taken from John Marc DeMatteis and Bob Budiansky, “Beware the Steel Wind!” in Essential Ghost Rider Volume 4 (New York: Marvel, 2010 [1982]) n.pag. Image © Marvel Characters.

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spatialized visual narration will be composed in such a manner and coupled with verbal captions and dialogue on such terms that the image is effectively chunked into invisible panels. Compositional techniques and the verbal narration thus work to counter the breakdown of the narrative flow in the visual narration. Panels or pages that foreground spatiality in the mode of practice will therefore never cue purely abstract meaning. At the very least, they will be motivated compositionally, adding to fabula construction to some extent. Sometimes, their contribution to the fabula will be minimal, though. Instead, a different sort of motivation comes to the fore, which will be termed aesthetic and/or competitive motivation. Consider a double page spread or splash page from the previously cited Warlord story “Wolves of the Steppes,” for example (Grell “Wolves”: 350/351). Most of the fabula cues in this diptych are redundant: it shows the villain Deimos sitting on his throne, observing the series’ hero Travis Morgan from afar through a magic globe, as well as Deimos’s lover Ashiya and Morgan’s baby son, previously abducted by the villains. A caption in the upper right corner of the spread does not repeat any of these details, instead providing information about the storyworld, Skartaris. In other words, readers get very little fabula information from the large composition. Instead, the diptych comes to prominence as an aesthetically pleasing image, showcasing Mike Grell’s ability to draw beautiful, scantily-clad women (Ashiya) and powerfully exaggerated, muscular male anatomy (Deimos). The aesthetic quality of the drawings plays no small part in why readers will buy certain series instead of others, and there has always been intense competition between artists in mainstream comics. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mike Grell was among the most popular artists working in the mode of comic practice, and double page spreads such as this one are clearly meant to showcase his artistic prowess.

Metafiction: The Mode of Practice Takes Stock of Its Own History and Poetics Still, the uses of foregrounded spatiality in the mode of practice characterize this stylistic choice as a mildly self-referential strategy. Invariably, it will draw attention to the medium’s constitutive spatiality as well as to the narration’s efforts to overdetermine said spatiality with temporal and causal cues. Seeing that foregrounded spatiality is also often motivated aesthetically or competitively, it equally points to the non- narrative

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aspects of the comics medium such as its mode of production, the conditions for commercial success, and its reception by readers. Even if a spatial strategy is used to convey a psychological state, it will necessarily cue artistic motivation, in that the character’s mental condition is not merely pointed out in dialogue and/or naturalized in terms of facial expressions, but constituted by the comics medium’s basic spatial properties. Still, the use of self-referential devices such as foregrounded spatiality is never divorced from compositional and causal needs. It is nevertheless important to consider the “degree of self-consciousness” found in the UnS’s narrations, that is, the extent to which a syuzhet displays “a recognition that it is addressing an audience” (Bordwell “Narration”: 58), since self-referentiality is a major feature of almost half the narrations in the corpus. Bordwell states that “all filmic narrations are self-conscious, but some are more so than others” (ibid.). This is true of the stories in the UnS, too, although 56 percent of the narrations in the corpus only use self-referential devices in the most conventional sense. As analyzed in the section on exposition (“Exposition: An Intensely SelfReferential Practice”), a UnS syuzhet will very likely contain a metafictional opening and/or epilogue. There will also be captions containing notes from the editor or the writer. These reference previous stories, other series, the mode of production, individual comics creators, and sometimes the larger storyworld or fictional universe of the publishing house in question. None of these participatory devices should be underestimated in their effect. They let readers in on the narrational process by foregrounding their activity as an integral part of the creative process, and thus foster a sense of community with the comics’ creators. The frequent editorial references stress the complexity and the enormous fabula duration that the monthly comics serials usually entail. They impress upon readers the need to become specialists in the history of the serial in question and the respective company’s larger story world. Both DC Comics and Marvel Comics have cultivated specific styles of editorial intrusion. Metafiction is very often motivated in these terms, that is, in terms of a house style (77 percent of all self-referential narrations in the UnS appeal to this type of motivation). Generic motivation plays an important role, too. It is pertinent for 90 percent of all self-referential narrations in the UnS. The superhero genre, for example, is especially prone to periodically foreground and question its most basic contention, i.e., that a single man or woman with superhuman powers would be able to live up to the responsibility those powers entail. This kind of moral probing is not an invention of what Klock calls the “revisionist superhero story” of the 1980s (Klock “How to

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Read Superhero Comics”: 4); it is, in fact, a recurring, conventional plot that is used multiple times in the UnS. Most prominently, we find it in Marvel’s Warlock series, for example in the story “Death-Ship!” (1975) by Jim Starlin. Here, the eponymous protagonist fights a villain called the Magus, who is shortly revealed to be Warlock’s future self (Starlin “DeathShip”: n.pag.). Naturally, the discovery calls into question Warlock’s own moral status as the series’ superhero protagonist. However, plot conventions will invariably return the players to the status quo. Inevitably, the protagonist will find a somewhat unlikely solution to avoid his villainous turn in the future. The example from the story “Death-Ship!” is a clear-cut case of metafiction being emphatically cued by the syuzhet’s operations. Metafictional devices come to the fore in 44 percent of the narrations in the UnS. This is a sizable portion of the corpus, and enough to affirm that self-reflexivity is an accepted stylistic option within the mode of practice. The study of the UnS thus again affords us a glimpse of a comic book industry that is highly aware of its own history and rich body of conventions, schemata, narrative strategies, and themes. The artists working in the mode of practice also assume that their readers are as well-versed in its poetics as the artists themselves. The claim holds true that the 1970s and 1980s saw the beginning of a tendency within the mode of practice that was aiming to engage the history of American mainstream comics head-on. Many of the examples already given are indicative of such a trend. But the UnS contains quite a few more instances of such a project of historical poetics within the mode of practice itself. These efforts surface most clearly in the series All-Star Squadron (1981–1987). Already in its premise, the title is steeped in self-reflexivity: the stories take place on Earth-2, a storyworld separate from the regular DC Comics universe, and look backward in history, placing the action during the Second World War. This is historically significant in that, as has already been pointed out, the superhero genre itself was created shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, and put to propagandistic use during the war itself. Writer Roy Thomas thus chooses to have the history of the superhero genre and actual world history collide in All-Star Squadron. In every story, the reader is asked to bring his knowledge of world history and genre history to bear and to actively compare the comic book’s alternative history to actual history. Jenkins has called such works that engage in “historical reflection … within the pages of the superhero comics themselves” an “important subgenre” (“Multiplicity”: 29). He characterizes it as a “curious hybrid of historical fiction (seeking

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to understand the past through the lens of superhero adventures) and fictional history (seeking to understand the development of the superhero genre by situating it against the backdrop of the times which shaped it)” (“Multiplicity”: 30). To his mind, the subgenre is best exemplified in works like Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–), but titles such as All-Star Squadron demonstrate that the first instances of meta-historiographic superhero stories can already be found in the 1970s and early 1980s. The juxtaposition of actual history and generic history has important narrational consequences. The UnS stories usually favor individual agency and desire as the prime mover of causality. As previously pointed out, 78 percent of the narrations in the corpus are based on such charactercentered causality. However, in All-Star Squadron, the extrinsic norm of individual agency is often replaced by larger historical forces—i.e., the exigencies of the war—as the origin of all story actions. And while the superhero portions of the stories usually adhere to the genre’s basic schemata, the series also sometimes opts for other narrational modes. In the first issue of the series, entitled “The World on Fire!” (1981), the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 is represented (Thomas and Buckler “World on Fire”: 34–36). The sequence features no superheroes to save the day. Instead, Thomas and Buckler choose two ordinary American soldiers as their protagonists. Given that in its representation of the consequences of violent conflict, the mode of practice largely deals in property damage, not in human casualties, the outcome of the Pearl Harbor sequence comes as a surprise: the soldiers die a heroic death trying to save each other’s lives (Thomas and Buckler “World on Fire”: 36, 5–7). Such definitive and upsetting closure is almost unheard of in the mode of practice. In the UnS, only 4 percent of all stories end with overall closure; typically, only one or two plots are closed off per issue, and the end of a plot entails the restoration of order—certainly not the death of all protagonists. Thomas and Buckler’s deviation from the extrinsic norm for closure thus draws attention to its disavowal of convention and creates a certain amount of tension with the more conventionally superheroic portions of the story. This is not to say that All-Star Squadron seriously questions the superhero genre. The Pearl Harbor sequence takes great pains to provide all the conventional cues for tragic heroism, for example, and thus cushions the blow. The superhero portions of the stories are typically steeped in nostalgia and do not deviate from the mode of practice’s major extrinsic norms. Finally, there is no doubt that the series will integrate historical

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events into the framework of the mode of practice. The outcome of the Second World War will thus be interpreted in terms of triumphant closure and the restoration of order that the extrinsic norm demands.

Dramaturgy and Seriality: Episodic Serials, Foregrounded Segmentations and Dialogue Hooks All the features of narration cited in the previous sections shape and are themselves shaped by the mode of practice’s extrinsic dramaturgical norms. They formulate the narrative’s conflicts in the exposition, introduce the reader to the protagonists and antagonists as prime causal movers, create gaps and delay resolution, suppress important information and sometimes foreground the narrational process itself. By increments, we have therefore already arrived at a rough sketch of dramaturgy in the mode of practice: a self-conscious, dense expository phase sketches the story’s central conflict(s). It is followed by a long middle section that delays resolution in generically appropriate terms. The story’s climax brings closure and is followed by an epilogue that is often as self-referential as the exposition. This schema applies for most of the narrations in the UnS— that is, for the main plots of many of the stories. But a closer look at the corpus quickly shows multiple plot lines in almost every single syuzhet, as well as several distinct types of seriality that require further analysis. In this section, the aim therefore is to answer the following research questions regarding dramaturgy in the mode of practice. “Which basic approaches to seriality can be found in the corpus? What are the consequences of serialization for each syuzhet’s composition? How do comics creators working in the mode of practice sustain seriality? What is the practice’s attitude towards closure? And how do individual scenes participate in the establishment of causality and seriality?” Mittell distinguishes between four different modes of serialization in Television and American Culture (2010). Though developed for a different medium, his categories can be easily applied to comics. Anthology series feature “stand-alone narratives,” very often with an “independent storyworld”—episodes emphatically do not share the same diegesis. They are only “united by a shared title” and/or a genre such as horror or science fiction. Sometimes, they also feature a narrative frame with a recurring host who “introduces … each episode’s story” (Mittell “Television and American Culture”: 228). In the UnS, this type of serial is represented by titles such as All-Star Western Presents. An episodic series, on the other

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hand, presents the audience with a “consistent storyworld” with recurring characters (Mittell “Television and American Culture”: 229). However, “each episode is relatively independent.” The storyworld, characters, and their relationships “carry over across episodes, but the plots stand on their own, requiring little need for consistent sequential viewing or knowledge of story history to comprehend the narrative” (ibid.). In the UnS, the title Doc Savage is a good example of this type of seriality. Mittell calls the third type serial narrative. It features ongoing plots “traversing multiple episodes” (Mittell “Television and American Culture”: 230.). The serial narrative places much greater demands on its audience, prompting the reader or viewer “to construct a storyworld using information gathered from their full history of viewing, which … can go back decades” (ibid.). While serial narratives eventually close off storylines, they most likely will not do so “in the same episode in which the plot was introduced” (ibid.). By necessity, a finished storyline will have to be “replaced with even more suspenseful or engrossing narrative enigmas” (Mittell “Television and American Culture”: 230). Most narrations in the UnS exhibit features of this challenging type of seriality (94 percent). However, all titles (100 percent) in the corpus share traits of the episodic format as well. They will tell a largely self-contained story with only the bare minimum of serial cues in one installment, and fully serialize their plots the next, sometimes without closing off a single plot. In other words, 94 percent of all the narrations in the corpus are of a mixed type, combining features of both episodic series and serial narratives. Mittell calls a narrative with these characteristics an episodic serial (“Television and American Culture”: 230). Of the titles in the corpus, The Uncanny X-Men probably best exemplifies it, but the strategy is so prevalent in the UnS as to constitute the norm. The dramaturgy of the average narration in the UnS undoubtedly is the direct result of this prevalence of the complex (or at least complicated) episodic serial. It has already been pointed out that the syuzhets in the corpus develop three separate plots on average. Typically, one of those plots will be brought to a close in each individual installment of a series. In the classical Hollywood cinema, films often display “a double causal structure, two plot lines: one involving heterosexual romance (boy/girl, husband/wife), the other line involving another sphere—work, war, a mission or quest, other personal relationships” (Bordwell “Narration”: 157). Very often, a subplot in the UnS will be devoted to heterosexual romance, too. Sixty-two percent of all narrations in the corpus feature at least one love plot. In the classical Hollywood, the two plot lines will invariably be closed off, their closure often coinciding “at the climax: resolving one triggers the

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resolution of the other” (Bordwell “Narration”: 158). Very often, this is not the case in the mode of comics practice. Plots may parallel one another, and subplots will often be tied to the main plot in some manner. They may also be instrumental in the main plot’s closure, or vice-versa; in 78 percent of all narrations in the UnS, such dramaturgical interdependence or convergence at the climax occurs. But usually, an episode of a serial only terminates one plot. Two plots are left open and therefore serialized. The mode of practice allows for other narrational options, too. For example, the main plot and the subplot(s) need not converge or connect at the climax (or anywhere else, for that matter). The story “Something Wicked This Way Comes!” from The Uncanny X-Men #139 (1980) is a case in point. The issue is divided into two halves. The first half is dedicated to a soap opera plot (Claremont and Byrne “Wicked”: n.pag.). A new member called Kitty Pryde is introduced to the X-Men. In the following, Kitty gets to know her new team members. The plot is not finished; neither does it feature a conflict. It is suspended on a decidedly anticlimactic offer of iced tea to Kitty Pryde (Claremont and Byrne “Wicked”: n.pag., 5). The preceding pages are dedicated to developing the new character. Roughly at the issue’s halfway point, the second plot starts. It features some of the X-Men on a trip to Canada to fight a monster called the Wendigo. The two causal lines only connect insofar as some of the protagonists of the second plot feature in the Kitty Pryde sequence, too. Once the Canada sequence is on its way, it never reconnects to the Kitty Pryde plot within the issue at hand. Whether convergence is only deferred or not, the fact remains that plots in the mode of practice may build causal chains that are largely independent of each other. This strategy is likely to add to the narration’s complexity, or at the very least, to its complicatedness—after all, if a serial’s plots need not necessarily converge, they may proliferate indefinitely. In some comics of the 1970s and 1980s, writers like Chris Claremont made such an explosion in the number of serialized plots the dominant narrational strategy. While an individual issue was still likely to juggle only three different plots, the overall number of concurrent serial plot lines was potentially infinite. In each issue, some of the suspended plots would be continued, while the majority would not be developed any further. In some cases, the resolution to a plot line would thus be deferred for years on end. Such a strategy of plot proliferation and suspension further adds to the immense amount of memory work and research a reader in the mode of practice must invest. A closer look at the statistics also suggests other creative options than terminating one plot per issue. Logically speaking, the narration may end any number of plots in an individual installment of a serial if it intro-

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duces enough new conflicts for serialization to continue. A serial comic book must only introduce at least one new plot every odd issue for the numbers to hold true. Finally, as a last option, the narration need not leave any plots serialized; but this is only rarely the case. Total closure is only brought about in 4 percent of all UnS stories. It is usually only permissible for stories in anthology series such as “Billy the Kid…. Killer” from AllStar Western Presents Outlaw (Albano and DeZuniga “Kid”: 483–494; 1971). Here, the narration is allowed to kill protagonists and, in a surprise ending, reveal Billy the Kid to have been a woman in disguise—after all, it does not have to deal with the problems such twists and turns would incur if the story had to continue after the surprise effect has waned.15 The typical narration in the mode of practice will be an episodic serial with multiple ongoing plot lines, then. For the most part, these plots will be differentiated from each other spatially, temporally, and sometimes causally. Most radically, this can be seen in the previous example from the Uncanny X-Men story “Something Wicked This Way Comes!” where the two plots only share the same time and space for the briefest moment and are then kept entirely separate, never influencing each other’s causal line. This is one of the prime reasons why a syuzhet in the mode of practice will be segmented into sequences that are demarcated “by neoclassical criteria” as in the classical Hollywood film, meaning that they achieve “unity of time (continuous or consistently intermittent duration), space (a definable locale), and action (a distinct cause-effect phase)” (Bordwell “Narration”: 158). In our analysis of the UnS, the unity of action is considered the most important criterion in identifying a sequence. Thus, a series of soap opera scenes that develop the same plot—say, a love triangle among superheroes—is considered a clearly demarcated sequence, even though the scenes will not necessarily achieve the unity of space and time. The average syuzhet in the corpus has 3.48 sequences. This includes the exposition and the epilogue, leaving 1.48 sequences for each issue’s long middle phase. This relatively low number of fully developed sequences is best explained by considering the extrinsic norm for syuzhet length. The average comics issue in the UnS has 22 pages that must not be packed too densely. The extrinsic norm for mise-en-page attests to this: a comics page in the corpus will contain only five to six panels, which themselves may offer only a limited number of narrational cues (more on this in the section on mise-en-page, entitled “Five Basic Principles of Mise-en-Page in the Mode of Practice”). In Cohn’s terms, the mode of practice’s extrinsic norm for the chunking of narrational cues puts severe limits on the number of fabula events that can be conveyed in an individual issue. A syuzhet from

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the corpus thus only has the space to fully develop one or two sequences in its middle part. Some auteur writers16 and artists such as Jack Kirby and Frank Miller could even be said to have been busy eroding this relatively low number even further. Kirby’s Black Panther story “King Solomon’s Frog!” (1977) consists of only one sequence, a protracted chase scene. The same applies for the Daredevil story “To Dare the Devil” by Frank Miller and Roger McKenzie (1979): it only depicts a single long, virtuoso action sequence. By foregrounding their lack of segmentation, both narrations thus draw attention to the pleasure of skillful variation that is typical of genre fiction. A sequence need not function as a causal link in a larger story, these examples suggest; it can be enjoyed on its own, as a sophisticated, thrilling piece of artifice. What about the smaller unit of the individual scene, then? Bordwell’s analysis of the scene’s narrational work in the classical Hollywood largely applies to the mode of practice as well. According to Bordwell, a classical scene has two phases. Initially, the narration must provide all the necessary expository information. It “specifies the time, place, and relevant characters—their spatial positions and their current states of mind” (Bordwell “Narration”: 158). As soon as these cues have been given, the causal line(s) must be continued. Thus, “characters act towards their goals” (ibid.). The most important narrational task is two-fold. Causal lines established in previous scenes must be closed off to convey progress; at the same time, “new causal lines for future development” must be opened (ibid.). The comics creators must be careful not to terminate all causal actions; in other words, they must ensure that at least one line of action is “left suspended, in order to motivate the shifts to the next scene, which picks up the suspended line” (ibid.). A typical scene from the Spider- Man story “Murder by Spider!” should illustrate these operations (Strnad and Leonardi “Murder”: n.pag., 1982). The first three panels constitute the scene’s expositional phase. Time and space are established redundantly: a caption tells us that the action takes place “the next morning, at the editorial offices of the Daily Bugle” (Strnad and Leonardi “Murder”: n.pag., 1). The visual narration clearly confirms this identification of the diegetic space, showing a busy office and today’s headlines. Protagonist Peter Parker, pictured on the right of the first panel, has a gloomy, downcast look on his face as the direct result of the previous scene. His thought bubbles reiterate previous events, giving us the causal link that explains the protagonist’s bad mood: a murder has been pinned on his superhero alter ego, and he has been worryingly, uncontrollably violent (ibid.). The next panel already demarcates a shift towards action (n.pag., 2), closing off the line that explains the hero’s bad

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mood as soon as he decides to solve his problem. Parker declares that he doesn’t “like the way our fearless publisher is trying to implicate SpiderMan” (ibid.). The story’s new causal line will therefore be concerned with two goals: clearing Spider-Man’s name, and finding the old man’s true murderer. Newspaperman Robbie Robertson provides the first clue to set this new causal line in motion, telling Peter Parker that the old man “left behind a small fortune in antique furniture—and no living relatives to claim it” (n.pag., 1). The narration even foregrounds its work, having Parker exclaim that Robertson’s information “opens up a whole new line of thought!” (n.pag., 2). The detective story is thus set in motion; Parker will investigate the heirloom. Narrations in the mode of practice will often do their utmost to stress the clarity, unity, and dynamic nature of the causal chain that they cue. The mild foregrounding of the scene’s narrational work in the Spider-Man scene is only one example of this forcefulness. Another means of cueing causality is the so-called “dialogue hook,” which often sees a character utter their intentions at the end of one scene, only to present them acting on them at the beginning of the next (Bordwell “Narration”: 158). Hooks can be varied, too; for example, the verbal narration may ask a question at the end of one scene, and answer it in the visual narration of the first few panels of the next. This is the case in an example from the Batman and the

Figure 8. A dialogue hook glosses over the lack of direct causal connection between scenes, promising future convergence. Panels taken from Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” in Showcase Presents Batman and the Outsiders (New York: DC Comics 2007 [1984]) n.pag. Originally published in Batman and the Outsiders #8, March 1984. Image © DC Comics.

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Outsiders story “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle…” (1984, figure 8): here, superheroine Geo-Force ends a scene on the question, “…where’s Black Lightning?” (Barr and Aparo “Hand”: 220, 3/4), and the visual narration of the next scene shows us a cemetery and finally Black Lightning in front of a gravestone (Barr and Aparo “Hand”: 221, 1). This example is of note in that the hook does not really constitute a causal link. The Black Lightning scene does not necessarily follow from the Geo-Force force scene by any means. In this case, the dialogue hook can therefore be seen as a device that glosses over such a lack of causality. It establishes non-causal connections that once again amount to a promise: of future convergence and causal unity.

Five Basic Principles of Mise-en-Page in the Mode of Practice If anything, the dominance and unifying function of the system of narrative logic that we have observed time and again in the mode of practice should tell us one thing: there are certain effects that mainstream comics creators at the time uniformly sought to achieve. Their foremost job as storytellers was (and still is) to come up with paradigmatic options that achieve these effects while keeping the reading experience fresh and exciting. In turn, the notion of paradigmatic artistic options implies an initial situation involving a narrational problem and a number of permissible solutions. There are extrinsic norms that every comics artist working in the mode of practice must fulfill. Say, for example, that two scenes need to be cued as following each other both temporally and causally; the events in the first scene must be understood by the reader as leading to the events in the second scene. The artist is therefore faced with a problem: how do I convey this temporal and causal sequence? In the mode of comics practice, comics creators have a range of options at their disposal that can be used to solve the problem. Artists use verbal captions to suggest temporal sequence (“The next morning”); and they compose the visual narration in such a manner as to reinforce this claim by implying a progression from night to day. The comics creator may also employ a narrative hook, cueing the protagonist’s resolve to act upon his or her desires in the first scene (“I must investigate the old man’s murder”), and the execution of the plan at the beginning of the second. The list of paradigmatic options or solutions could be extended indefinitely. From this pragmatic point of view, it is possible to reintroduce the

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artist as an integral factor in the analysis of art. Bordwell suggests that poeticians adopt a “problem/solution model” in order to conceptualize individual agency in the study of film history (Bordwell “Film Style”: 150). Such a theoretical model has several advantages. Most importantly, from the problem/solution vantage point, stylistic history becomes “the history of practitioners’ choices” (ibid.). These choices may be dictated by historically distinct extrinsic norms, but they “need not be imposed from without” (ibid.). If, like Bordwell, we conceive of the artist as a “rational agent” (at the very least when it comes to middle-level narrational problems), innovations as well as conventional artistic choices can be explained in terms of competition with other artists, pleasure in the “exercise of skill,” “an artist’s urge to be different,” or the desire for new challenges both for the creator and the audience (ibid.). This study has already used such explanatory models in our analysis of the mode of practice thus far. Competitive motivation featured in the discussion of foregrounded spatiality, for example, where some artists would create splash pages of comparatively little narrative significance that mostly demonstrate their skills as draughtsmen. Such a theory also helps explain many of the experiments with self-referentiality that we have discovered throughout the UnS. The rational agent model thus makes it possible to discuss such a stylistic choice in terms of an intentional device with specific effects on the process of reception, not in terms of its interpretive meaning. But as much as it helps conceptualize artistic agency, it also “recognizes that individual action takes place within a social situation with its own demands” (Bordwell “Film Style”: 151). An institution such as the mode of comics practice “formulates tasks, puts problems on the agenda, and rewards effective solutions” (ibid.). This is the very basis of the notion of paradigmatic options. In Bordwell’s theory of the rational agent, the individual artist will therefore be forced to ask: “What is there for me to do?” (ibid.). His or her response to this question will be shaped by the tension between “individual initiative” and “group norms” (ibid.). We have spent most of this chapter answering the research questions that arise from such a problem/solution conception of artistic practice: which problems do artists working in the mode of comics practice typically face? What are the most common solutions to these problems? Which options does the paradigm offer to solve narrational problems, and to what extent are artists allowed to formulate deviant intrinsic norms? In this section, we will narrow our focus somewhat and isolate two aspects of comics craft that have hitherto only been considered in the context of larger narrational concerns: mise-en-page and visual style.

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The latter term requires some clarification. In film studies, the term mise-en-scène is widely used. Bordwell defines it as comprising all aspects of “staging, lighting, performance, and setting” (“Film Style”: 4). He differentiates mise-en-scène from other aspects of cinematic style such as “framing, focus, control of color values, and other aspects of cinematography; editing; and sound” (ibid.). This differentiation is partly based on the notion of the profilmic event (cf. Bordwell “Narration”: 14, 326). During the production of a narrative film, actors perform in a carefully prepared set. Their movements through this space, their interaction with material objects, their dialogue, and their facial expressions are rehearsed to bring out the most important narrational cues. Lighting is applied to these ends, too. In Bordwell’s model, these elements comprise the mise-en-scène. In a second step, the technical apparatus is brought to bear on the arrangement. The profilmic therefore cannot be conceived in terms of “an untransformed event to be recorded by the camera”; rather, it is “already an expressively heightened representation” (Bordwell “Narration”: 14). It is possible to criticize the strict differentiation between mise-en-scène and the technical process of shooting a film on exactly these grounds, though. Staging or blocking, as it is usually called by practitioners, will invariably have to consider technicalities. A film director will always rehearse a scene with the actual shooting process in mind. A strict separation of the profilmic event’s arrangement and the shooting process is therefore artificial and does not do the craft justice. This is the first reason why the terminology should not be transposed to comics studies without questioning it. On top of that, Groensteen rightly points out that the prographic in comics differs greatly from the profilmic. The comics artist is not concerned with extracting “a pertinent zone … within the profilmic continuum,” that is, staging and framing the narrationally salient parts of the profilmic event to the exclusion of others (Groensteen The System of Comics: 40). In fact, there is often no prographic event at all—the comics artist “transcribes a mental image” (Groensteen The System of Comics: 41). Even if the comics penciler uses live models or photographic reference, the original material will necessarily be transformed by the artist’s imagination and style as well as the properties of the medium. It is therefore unnecessary to differentiate between mise-en-page and other aspects of comics craft; the term is apt to cover the entire creative process. To conclude, this study defines mise-en-page as the systematic arrangement of syuzhet cues on the comic book page. What are the most important problems that an artist working in the mode of practice faces when it comes to mise-en-page and visual style?

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Our definition already points towards the central difficulty, which can be summarized by the question “How many narrational cues should I provide on each page and in each panel?” Or, in cognitive terms, “How must I chunk information to fulfill all of the important extrinsic norms?” If a page or a panel contains too many cues, readers will likely be confused. It will be difficult to discern causal and temporal sequence; spatial relations become dominant instead of causal and temporal links. On top of that, if readers are forced to linger on a panel for a long time to make sense of it, their attention will undoubtedly be drawn to the narrational process itself—but not in terms of suspense, surprise, or gamesmanship. Rather, readers will likely wonder why the comic book is making narrative comprehension so difficult. In comparison, a panel or a page that provides only a very few narrational cues is less dangerous for the narrational process. But if such a strategy were pursued over many pages, it would be impossible to tell a satisfying story, especially considering the severe constraints on page numbers in the mode of practice. As a conclusion from these findings, we can contend that mise-en-page in the mode of practice aims to convey an amount of narrational cues that is just right: it neither overwhelms the reader with salient features, nor does it rarify cues to such an extent as to make the narration break down. But what does just right mean in concrete terms? The answer to this question will likely vary historically. It is probable that the average narration in the comics mode of practice of today contains fewer narrational cues per panel and page than the comics of the 1970s and 1980s that we are concerned with. This phenomenon has been characterized as decompression by various practitioners and critics (for an example, see Meaney, “Planetary and Decompression”). Without the necessary quantitative data, we can still surmise from reading experience that this is largely because contemporary comics often use fewer redundant devices, and indeed accommodate fewer narrationally salient cues in an individual panel. For the UnS, it is possible to provide concrete numbers that tell us how information is typically chunked in the mode of practice. On average, a comic book in the corpus contains 121 panels. Considering that the normal comics issue has about 22 to 24 pages, this results in a total of five to six panels per page, or approximately 11 panels for each diptych. Artists will always vary panel sizes throughout the issue to suit the narrative’s ends; there is not a single comic book in the corpus that adheres to a strict grid for the entirety of the syuzhet. Splash pages, that is, pages containing only one large panel, are only rarely used. The average UnS comic book contains only 1.5 such single-panel pages.

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We also have data to find out which shot sizes are favored in the mode of practice. In film studies, shot sizes are categories describing the implied distance between the viewer of the film and the human protagonists in the frame.17 In analogy, we will speak of reader distance in comics. It is important to note that reader distance per se has no intrinsic meaning; its significance must be determined within the context of the comic book itself, or rather: within the context of the panel and its relationship to other panels. The extreme long shot and the long shot are the least anthropocentric of all framing methods—they are used to depict landscapes, cities, and the spatial relationships between bodies and material objects. For a panel to qualify as a long shot, it must show at least one human figure in its entirety. In an extreme long shot, the human figure can barely be made out. The representation of space comes to the fore instead (or the relationship of characters within said space). The mode of practice employs extreme long shots only sparingly. It favors ordinary long shots in which the human figure is clearly visible with some amount of detail. On average, a comics issue contains 66 long shots, that is, more than half of all the panels in the syuzhet will fall into this category. The next type of reader distance is the plan américain. It is more fundamentally anthropocentric, seeing that it shows the human figure from the knees up, dominating the frame. The term refers to the fact that this shot size is most often to be found in the Western genre, since it will show the holster and gun if a character is armed. It represents the leastused shot size in the UnS, at a mere 13 panels per story. The third category of viewer distance is the medium shot (see figure 9 for an example; Kirby “Frog”: n.pag., 1), which frames the human body from the waist up. As Bordwell and Thompson point out, at this distance, “gesture and expression … become more visible” (212). In other words, while we can (usually) still see some of the space surrounding the character(s), human action and expression clearly take center stage. Twentyseven panels of an average comic book in the UnS make use of this shot size, making it the second most frequent choice of practitioners. The final category of viewer distance is that of the close-up (figure 10; Claremont and Byrne “Wicked”: n.pag., 4). The term traditionally refers to the framing of “just the head, hands, feet, or a small object. It emphasizes facial expression, the details of a gesture, or a significant object” (Bordwell and Thompson “Film Art”: 213). The practitioners of the UnS use this viewer distance almost as sparingly as the plan américain. The average issue contains a mere 14 to 15 close-ups. The most surprising result of this quantitative study is the clear dom-

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Figure 9. The medium shot frames the human body from the waist up. Panel taken from Jack Kirby, “King Solomon’s Frog!” in Essential The Black Panther Volume 1 (New York: Marvel Comics 2012 [1977]) n.pag. Image © Marvel Characters.

inance of long shots in the mode of practice. Such a statistic would be highly unlikely in a classical Hollywood film. In a conventional cinematic editing sequence, a long short or “establishing shot will be linked by an analytical cut to a closer view, and then a series of shot/reverse shots will follow” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 55/56). The comics creators of the mode of practice instead choose to string along long shots, only occasionally interspersing the syuzhet presentation with medium shots and even less often close-ups. This is partly because they have come up with a variation of the long shot that is unique to the comics medium. Figure 11, taken from the Superman Team-Up story “…to Live in Peace—Nevermore!” (1979), is a typical example (Levitz and Dillin “To

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Figure 10. The close-up encompasses the head, hands or feet. It may also frame small objects. Panel taken from Chris Claremont and John Byrne, “… Something Wicked This Way Comes!” in Essential X-Men Volume 2 (New York: Marvel Comics, 2012 [1980]) n.pag. Image © Marvel Characters.

Live in Peace”: 260, 2). The panel has all the characteristics of a long shot, showing the entire body of two astronauts in their capsule. But Superman’s body is staged in such a manner, his face angled and framed so specifically as to amount to a close-up within the long shot. The panel thus cues two centers of narrational salience and interest—a long shot and a close-up—, and presents them in spatial and causal relation to each other. Long shots in the mode of practice will often be composed on these terms. They will usually contain at least two different salient compositional centers. One center will be framed as a long shot; the other as a medium shot or a close-up. These significant chunks of the composition will rely upon a “conception of frontality,” that is, faces will be “positioned in full, three-quarter, or profile view; the body typically in full or three-quarter

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Figure 11. This panel from a Superman Team-Up story contains both a long shot and a close-up. Panel taken from Paul Levitz and Dick Dillin, “…to Live in Peace—Nevermore!” in Showcase Presents Superman Team-Ups Volume 1 (New York: DC Comics 2009 [1979]) 260. Originally published in DC Comics Presents: Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes #13, September 1979. Image © DC Comics.

view” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson “Classical Hollywood”: 51). What Bordwell calls “an odd rubbernecking characteristic of Hollywood character position” (ibid.) is thus even more pronounced in the mode of comics practice, as can be seen by the unnatural angle on and positioning of Superman’s face in the composition. The long shot in the mode of comics

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practice is therefore not merely a tool to establish space and character movement within it. It is a technique that typically frames several other, different shot sizes. In other words, the long shot in the mode of practice is typically chunked into individual, invisible frames. This is the main reason why this reader distance is so clearly favored: it can accommodate several other framing techniques. On this basis, we can formulate the second of the basic principles of visual style in the mode of practice, the first being the principle of frontality. We will call it the principle of accommodation. A comics artist is faced with the problem of conveying as much information within a page as suits the narration’s ends without having the narration break down. Typically, he or she will find that a series of staggered, compositionally chunked long shots containing several different shot sizes is the most accommodating solution. The number of cues that can be conveyed without narrative breakdown will vary, of course, but it is a safe bet that there is a logical upper limit to the amount of fabula information a panel can convey before its spatiality is foregrounded. The analysis of the UnS shows that the average panel rarely provides more than 10 salient cues, cues being defined as indications of time; indications of space; actions, facial expressions, and body language; causal, temporal, and spatial cues within dialogue; and foregrounded material objects that are causally relevant. On average, each story in the UnS only makes use of a panel exceeding this limit of 10 cues 0.4 times. In other words, every odd issue in the corpus completely abstains from using panels containing more than 10 important narrative cues. We can conclude that there is a principle of limited salience at work in the mode of practice that restricts the provision of information per panel. The panel from Superman Team-Up also demonstrates some other important principles of visual style. Importantly, it does not show us the two astronauts in their capsule in isolation. It would have been conceivable, for example, to show Superman looking at the capsule in a second panel, in imitation of the cinematic angle/reverse angle technique. Such a choice would have been dangerous, though. Merely showing the space capsule in a medium as static as comics without establishing any direct spatial, temporal, and causal relations to another protagonist would have incurred the possibility of foregrounded spatiality. The prevalence of long shots containing at least two salient narrational centers therefore also points to a principle of relationality that governs visual style in the mode of practice. Practitioners will typically choose the reader distance that allows for the greatest amount of spatial, temporal, and causal relations to be unambiguously cued—the long shot.

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Figure 12. The low angle of this composition makes for a maximum of depth cues. Panel taken from Roy Thomas and Rich Buckler, “The World on Fire!,” in Showcase Presents All Star Squadron Volume 1 (New York: DC Comics, 2012 [1981]) 33. Originally published in All-Star Squadron #1, September 1981. Image © DC Comics.

This principle can also be seen at work in figure 12, taken from the All-Star Squadron story “The World on Fire!” (1981; Thomas and Buckler “World on Fire”: 33, 3), which establishes a spatial relationship between the characters, cues the protagonist’s (on the left corner of the frame) surprise at encountering the villain called Degaton, provides dialogue, and asserts the villain’s dominance by way of a low viewing angle. It would be wrong to assume that artist Rich Buckler only uses the low angle to make the villains as imposing as possible. The low angle is also necessary in a composition that needs to accommodate so many characters if the artist wishes to achieve any impression of depth at all. At a straight, eye-level angle, such a panel would be crowded with bodies that would only suggest depth because the characters in the foreground would be larger than those in the background; graphic overlap of the different picture planes would only cue a minuscule amount of depth. For an example of this flattening effect of the principles of accommodation, limited salience, and relationality on an eye-level composition, see figure 13 (Barr and Lightle “Black Lightning”: 271, 1). A low or high angle usually brings along other depth cues: the imposing throne in our example, converging compositional lines, and other features of material space. The unusual angles that are sometimes associated with comic books—often, artists will choose outrageously low or high vantage points on the action—are therefore not merely a sen-

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Figure 13. An eye-level composition reduces depth cues. Panel taken from Mike W. Barr and Steve Lightle, “The Execution of Black Lightning,” in Showcase Presents Batman and the Outsiders Volume 1 (New York: DC Comics, 2007 [1984]) 271. Originally published in Batman and the Outsiders #10, May 1984. Image © DC Comics.

sationalist exaggeration. They are also indicative of a principle of maximum depth that seeks to offset the flattening effects of the principles of accommodation, limited salience, and relationality. Again, the long shot yields the best results in this respect. The typical panel in the mode of practice will therefore be a long shot, shown from a high or low angle, and accommodating as many relationally salient frames-within-the-frame as desired without foregrounding spatiality—quite simply because these stylistic choices solve many of the basic problems a comics artist faces. How much room do these extrinsic norms leave for individual artistic agency? One way of successfully competing with other artists is pure artistic proficiency and an especially skillful fulfillment of the norms. As has already been pointed out, an artist such as Mike Grell distinguishes himself by being able to draw particularly beautiful, anatomically plausible bodies and by following fashion closely—Warlord replicates the makeup styles and dress codes of the 1970s faithfully.

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Another method of achieving artistic differentiation is the establishment of intrinsic norms. For example, in the New Teen Titans series, artist George Pérez deviates from the norm for mise-en-page somewhat. Issue 23 has an average panel count of seven per page, slightly higher than the usual five to six. As a result, narrational cues are more heavily chunked. Consider figure 14 for an example (Wolfman and Pérez “Kidnapped!”: 93). Here, Pérez is unafraid to isolate figures three times on a single page, in panels four, six, and nine respectively. He relies on the principle of relationality to be fulfilled purely by the relations between the panels, and by the dialogue within the panels themselves. In other words, the norm is still adhered to, but not quite as redundantly. The page contains a total of nine panels—more than a third more than the average page in the UnS. As a result, the panels are much smaller than usual, and therefore much less accommodating. Consequently, they do not contain as many concurrent shot sizes as is typically the case. Panel one only functions as a long shot, as does panel two. The flat eye-level shot of panel three mostly serves as a medium shot, but the overlap also creates close-ups. They do not necessarily become narrationally salient as close-ups, though: small as they are, they do not convey much in the way of facial expressions or emotions. Panel four is a medium shot, and only a medium shot: such observations could be continued indefinitely if one considers the issue in its entirety. The heavy chunking has advantages: the page becomes more easily readable, since each small panel provides narrational cues in cognitive bite size. The artist also has greater control over the amount of time it takes to read an individual panel, creating the impression of a brisk narrational rhythm. Readers at the time may also have felt that Pérez’s style is relatively modern, precisely because it is a little less redundant than the average syuzhet presentation. We should not underestimate this factor. The extreme redundant overdetermination of most books in the corpus is indicative of a somewhat didactic attitude on the part of the comics artist. Practitioners at the time still assumed that the average reader is a child who needs to be told what is happening in the story multiple times to ensure comprehension. Every redundant device that is omitted by an artist therefore amounts to an acknowledgment of the reader’s intelligence and maturity—something that would likely be appreciated by a mature comics readership. Finally, the intrinsic norm of a more heavily chunked style quite simply distinguishes George Pérez’s mise-en-page from that of most of his peers at the time. Alongside Pérez’s drawing style, it makes his miseen-page immediately recognizable, adding to his artistic individuality. Pérez is, in fact, one of the few artists from the UnS with something of an

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Figure 14. George Pérez’s mise-en-page is more heavily chunked than is common in the mode of practice. Page taken from Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, “Kidnapped!” in The New Teen Titans Omnibus Volume 2 (New York: DC Comics, 2012 [1982]) 93. Originally published in The New Teen Titans #23, September 1982. Image © DC Comics.

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auteur status. In such auteurist mise-en-page strategies, we can glimpse some of the most important changes coming to the mode of practice in the 1980s. As the audience for mainstream comic books grew older and more sophisticated, artists started to respond by making their work more challenging. Comic book narration became less redundant; conventions were questioned, parodied, subverted, or supplanted by conventions imported from other genres and media. The writers and artists of the British Invasion would have a major share in these developments.

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The British New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s Two men are falling from the sky (figure 15; Mills and Colquhoun “Blue’s Story”: n.pag., 3). The first, in the middle ground, can only be seen in silhouette, his right hand clutching a rope that evidently was previously attached to the Zeppelin that had carried him. The Zeppelin is going down, too; in the background we can see the burning wreck taking many more men to their death. The figure in the foreground is much more brightly illuminated, his eyes wide open in horror and disbelief. The ground is still far away, and we are left to surmise that he will likely spend long seconds crying “Nein! Nein!” before hitting the ground. That, at least, is what his speech bubble implies (panel 3). The year is 1917, and the crashing Zeppelin is part of the German air force. It has just attempted a bomb raid on London. In its efforts to evade the British air raid defenses, it was forced to retreat into the clouds, where it was struck by lightning and burst into flames. War stories were highly popular in the British comics mainstream of the 1970s. This preference for warlike adventure stories tallies with a general British nostalgia for the Second World War, when the final dissolution of the British Empire was still a few years off and British soldiers were engaged in an unequivocally righteous fight. The crash of a German Zeppelin might have served as a perfectly conventional triumphant ending to a British war comic: mission accomplished; the evil Germans have been vanquished by the resilient British. In many respects, this episode from Charley’s War (1979–1985), a World War I serial by writer Pat Mills and artist Joe Colquhoun published in the comics anthology Battle Picture Weekly, has worked hard to outwardly fulfill the conventions of the genre. Previously, a blind man with acute hearing was recruited to detect incoming Zeppelin attacks; the subsequent defensive action orchestrated by the sightless veteran forced the German flying machine to retreat. Finally, the Zeppelin goes down in a ball of fire. Yet complications arise in the causal chain 94

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Figure 15. Joe Colquhoun’s mise-en-page undermines the conventional moment of triumph in this spread from Charley’s War. Page taken from Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, Charley’s War: Blue’s Story (London: Titan Books, 2007) n.pag. Image © Rebellion. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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leading to this outcome. There is no individual or group of individuals who directly brings about the Zeppelin’s demise. After all, the flying vessel is struck by lightning; the British triumph is therefore a mere accident. The notion of a glorious victory brought about by individual agency may be called into question—that is, if readers pick up on the cue for ambiguity. The narration strongly underlines this lack of personal agency by marginalizing protagonist Charley Bourne severely. He is the second figure from the left in panel four, a mere onlooker left to react to the events. The page seen in figure 15 contains many more prompts that may cause the reader to doubt the triumphant nature of the narrative. Before we get to see the faces of Londoners cheering as the Zeppelin goes down, the narration makes an appeal to the readers’ own embodiment in the panel showing the falling men. Everything here is designed to convey the horror of plunging to the ground in the knowledge of imminent death, from the convulsions on the soldier’s face to the shape of the panel, whose lower outlines subtly imply a point of convergence where the soldier will impact. This is especially true if we follow Karin Kukkonen’s argument that, from the point of view of the cognitive sciences, readers may “experience bodily echoes of the motions and actions they observe,” especially if an image works as hard as this one to elicit what Kukkonen calls “motor resonance”: that is, the brain’s immediate and involuntary reaction to the depiction of bodies within a spatial field, an “‘embodied simulation’ of the characters’ bodies” (Kukkonen “Space, Time, and Causality”: 53/54). The impact of this physicality will likely be heightened because of its shocking breach of extrinsic norms for the depiction of bodies. The new wave of British comics, of which Charley’s War is a part, brought a fundamental change of conventions. Whereas traditionally in British comics, “violence went no farther than a sprained ankle for girls and a broken leg for boys” (John Sanders qtd. in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 8), serials such as Charley’s War would make much more drastic appeals to physicality, showing that “flesh and bone is ripped to shreds when bullets or bombs strike mere mortals,” as Battle editor Dave Hunt puts it (qtd. in Chapman “British Comics”: 129). This contrast between ordinary British serials and a new wave title like Charley’s War is not to be underestimated. This direct and horrifying address of the readers’ own physicality is juxtaposed with Londoners cheering. The suggestion is clear: whether this is a glorious victory is very much a question of perspective. A policeman nevertheless declares the scene “a proud moment” and suggests that the onlookers “sing the national anthem” (figure 15, Mills and Colquhoun “Blue’s Story”: n.pag., 5). The next panel shows the crew of the crashing

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German vessel singing their own national anthem in a somewhat heavyhanded parallelism that implies a fundamental sameness of the antagonists. The simultaneous presentation of these panels, in an instance of foregrounded spatiality, invites comparison between the warring factions. The suggestive mise-en-page thus undercuts the conventional triumphalist thrust of war comics at the time. Importantly, this reading is not forced upon the reader. No verbal caption draws attention to it; none of the Londoners doubt the righteousness of their cheering. The narration trusts the readers to pick up on visual cues, appeals to their own embodiment, and parallelized actions. It merely suggests that audiences formulate a critique of the conventional war comic on their own. Upon reading this story, readers may not just revise their view of genre conventions. They may also feel inclined to ponder questions of historiography—e.g., whether it is appropriate to structure an account of the London bombings during World War I in terms of victory and defeat. Charley’s War, in other words, is a work of metafictional historiography. One of its chief pleasures lies in the way it subtly asks readers to rethink both generic and actual world history, often pointing us to the fact that both are inextricably linked. In prompting the reader to both construct a generic war story fabula and a critique of the same, it bears many of the hallmarks of a narration that we will term, following Jason Mittell, complex (more on this notion later).

Cultural and Material Contexts of the New Wave There is no page of comparable complexity in the previous chapter’s unbiased sample. To some extent, this is an unfair statement, of course. The most important criterion for inclusion in the UnS was ordinariness, and Charley’s War has been picked for analysis in this chapter precisely because it is extraordinary. However, one would still be hard-pressed to find such complex mise-en-page in any Marvel or DC Comics book from the early 1980s. Most importantly, an American writer (or at the very least a series’ editor) likely would not have been able to resist the temptation to turn the page’s subtext into text through an explicit caption. Few writers and fewer editors would have tolerated the lack of redundancy and explicitness. The mode of practice equally would not have accepted the specific type of physicality that the page espouses. By and large, bodies in the American comics mainstream were (and still are) invulnerable and immortal. Still, in defense of American comics, it must be reiterated that Charley’s

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War is a somewhat rare achievement in the British mainstream, too—and yet its innovations were immensely influential. It is the purpose of this chapter to investigate how it was possible for the British comics mainstream of the 1970s and 1980s to produce such a densely layered page, or more broadly: complex serials such as Charley’s War. As an attempt at explaining this development, a short material history of the circumstances of production will be sketched out in this introduction to the chapter. Following that, we will investigate some of the most important narrative strategies that the British comics mainstream produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, leading up to the first actual works of the British Invasion. It is important to consider the American comic books created by the likes of Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Warren Ellis in the context of this new wave of British comics of the 1970s and 1980s: the American works by these writers are nothing if not a continuation of the complex narrational strategies first employed in the works covered in this chapter. In order to provide an overview of the British new wave comics, these historical considerations are followed by three case studies from some of the most important anthology titles of the time. First, we will analyze the aforementioned Charley’s War (1978–1988), with a sidelong glance at other war serials such as Major Eazy (1976–1978) and Darkie’s Mob (1976–1977). These series were initially published in the IPC anthology Battle Picture Weekly (1975–1988), a war comics anthology aimed at children and adolescents. Then we will have a look at the science fiction series Judge Dredd (1977–present), still published to this day in the science fiction anthology 2000AD (1977–present). Finally, we will consider the Marvelman stories written by Alan Moore and drawn by Garry Leach, Alan Davis, and Chuck Beckum (1982–1989), a superhero comic that is widely seen as one of the high points of the new wave of 1980s British comics. The series was originally commissioned by Dez Skinn for his Warrior anthology (1982–1985), a periodical aiming to publish comics for an adult audience, but later continued by American publisher Eclipse. Before we can examine these serials in greater detail, we need to consider the British mode of practice as a whole. What were the material circumstances of production in the British comics industry at the close of the 1970s? In striking similarity to the American mainstream, the British mode of practice was dominated by a duopoly throughout the 1970s. DC Thomson—not to be confused with the American DC Comics—hailed from Dundee; its rival, the Youth Group of publishing house IPC, from London (cf. Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 8, Chapman “British Comics”: 125). The few historical accounts of this rivalry between the major comics publishers make

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it difficult to characterize it conclusively, since they frequently contradict each other. For example, David Bishop writes that DC Thomson’s “titles were outselling its southern rival by three to one” at the beginning of the 1970s (8), while James Chapman asserts that each publisher “had a market share of around 40 per cent” (“British Comics”: 125). It is very likely, though, that Bishop is referring to comic book sales only, while Chapman’s numbers are meant to comprise the publishers’ entire output, which included magazines and publications for target groups other than children and adolescents. But the two historians also differ greatly on circulation numbers and their development throughout the 1970s. While David Bishop claims in the official history of the 2000AD anthology (“Thrill-Power,” 2009) that IPC’s Youth Group “tripled its total sales to five million copies a week by the end of 1973, overtaking DCT [DC Thomson]” (8), James Chapman paints an entirely different picture in British Comics: A Cultural History (2011). He calls the UK comics market of the 1970s “chronically unstable,” with “sales declining and the lifespan of new titles … significantly reduced from previous decades” (“British Comics”: 125). He also characterizes the British comics industry as severely afflicted not just by reader desertion, but also by economic factors such as the 1973 oil embargo, which “caused severe inflationary pressure that resulted in increased production costs” (ibid.) Publishers were thus forced to cut corners wherever possible. Chapman offers precise circulation numbers for many flagship titles: according to these, the popular Bunty anthology “dropped from 466,000 to 199,000” between 1971 and 1976, Judy “from 314,000 to 112,000,” “Victor from 340,000 to 195,000,” and so on (“British Comics”: 125). These are all DCT publications, but Chapman asserts that it was in fact IPC who was the most severely afflicted by this publishing crisis. Thus, “[a]t the start of the decade IPC had published 25 weekly comics, but this had dropped to fourteen by 1974” (Chapman “British Comics”: 125/126). Which version of events are we to believe, then? There are several good reasons why Chapman’s account is more reliable and plausible. His history of British comics is a scholarly work, while Bishop’s monograph is neither scholarly nor unbiased, since it was commissioned by Rebellion, the current publisher of 2000AD (formerly an IPC anthology). On top of that, Bishop’s numbers mostly come from interviews with John Sanders, who in the 1970s was Managing Editor of IPC’s comics division (cf. Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 11, Barker “Comics”: 17). Sanders might be embellishing his own achievements. Other scholarly sources corroborate this evaluation. Martin Barker, for example, in Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (1989), states that the decline in British comics sales “had reached almost

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epidemic proportions” in the 1970s, “and was approaching the point of no financial return” (Barker “Comics”: 17). Developments at the end of the 1970s also make Chapman’s and Barker’s narrative of a comics industry in a state of crisis much more convincing. Much like the film industry, which was suffering from the competition of television and rock music, comics were threatened by other media and “exposed to changes in popular taste” (Chapman “British Comics”: 126). At first, DC Thomson and IPC did not respond well to this pressure. Their mise-en-page, for example, had remained largely unchanged since the 1940s, often featuring a symmetrical nine-panel grid that did not allow for splash pages (or any deviations in panel size, for that matter) (see Chapman “British Comics”: 148, Murray “Signals”: 42, Barker “Comics”: 23). And while Chapman notes that an anthology like the Beano (a DCT anthology) targeted a pre-teen audience meant that it “was protected to some extent from social and cultural change,” it is nevertheless telling that “the Beano in the 1970s was not substantially different from the Beano in the 1950s” (“British Comics”: 126). Towards the end of the 1970s, publishers became much more adamant in trying to regain the youth audience. By and large, IPC came out the winner, for example by implementing new measures such as “commissioning market research” and generally being “more responsive to changing consumer tastes” (Chapman “British Comics”: 126). Both DC Thomson and IPC stuck with weekly anthology titles that contained serials of varying length (typically between one and six pages), but IPC decided to give their comic books a more immediately recognizable identity (cf. Millidge “Alan Moore Storyteller”: 64). Previously, anthology titles had largely been marketed according to normative gender models: melodrama and soap operas for girls, action-adventure stories for boys. Some flagship humor titles such as The Beano were positioned to appeal to both boys and girls. Now, IPC (and to some extent DCT) introduced “the first themed papers focusing on individual genres” such as football (Scorcher, 1970–74, and Roy of the Rovers, 1976–93), war stories (e.g., Battle Picture Weekly) and science fiction (e.g., 2000AD) (Chapman “British Comics”: 126). Unlike the American comics mainstream, then, the British mode of practice felt intermedial and intertextual pressure much more keenly, and had to respond to it. It was felt to be high time that the British comics anthologies change their outdated mise-en-page and adopt as well as invent new conventions, character types and genres. After all, their focus lay on types of narrative that, unlike the American superhero tales, were being successfully employed and constantly developed both in the film

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and the television industries: there were hardly any superhero films in cinemas (and those that were made could not be called successful), but there were plenty of action-adventure films and television series. Yet ambitions for change were apparently met with considerable hostility by the older generation of editors and managers working at IPC; in British comics, too, the generational conflict that had dominated Western culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s was being fought. Barker calls the publisher’s comics department “terribly tradition-bound at the time” (“Comics”: 17). Pat Mills, who was one of the most important architects of the new wave of British mainstream comics, regularly speaks of “saboteurs” in interviews, editors who were so inimical to changing the previously successful formulas that they “would tell me [Mills] with great delight every time the sales started to drop” on a new wave anthology such as 2000AD (qtd. in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 33). Talking about a particularly hostile editor called Jack Le Grand, John Sanders calls him “locked in his time” (ibid.). This generational conflict would nevertheless prove productive, motivating creatives like Mills to attempt ever more subversive narratives. Looking through interviews and accounts of the developments at IPC during the 1970s, it also becomes apparent that this transitional period was characterized by confusion and relatively lax managerial control, which is another important prerequisite that made innovations and the disavowal of previously immutable extrinsic norms possible. In one of the most significant moves in the development of this new wave of British comics, Sanders selected the aforementioned Pat Mills and John Wagner, another young comics professional, “to prepare a new boys’ comic” that “nominally” would be developed “within the boys’ department,” but in reality “would be directly answerable to Sanders” (Barker “Comics”: 17). When Wagner and Mills proceeded to lock themselves away in their office to prepare a dummy issue, largely without outward interference, the unconventional procedure was met with no resistance. In fact, nobody noticed their months-long absence. Pat Mills recalls what happened when the old guard finally realized that they had been circumvented: “Ultimately of course, only I think a few weeks before we went to press, the word got out. And in the boys’ comic department they were bloody livid” (qtd. in Barker “Comics”: 17). The result of this covert operation was Battle Picture Weekly, an anthology of war stories that would eventually also serialize Charley’s War and whose innovations were numerous. Importantly, it yielded to intermedial and intertextual pressure. As Chapman puts it, “[i]ts point of reference are not so much other comics … but war films … such as The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, Play Dirty and Kelly’s Heroes” (“British Comics”:

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129). Comics writer Gerry Finley-Day agrees that appropriating materials from other media was one of Pat Mills’s central strategies: “Pat’s thing was always to know a good blueprint from a film or some other source, something that could connect in readers’ minds” (qtd. in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 32). Kelvin Gosnell, one of the founders of the later IPC anthology 2000AD, remembers seeing Mills in his office “surrounded by pictures torn out of books and magazines as inspiration for stories and scenes…. You had to walk around them to get to him” (qtd. in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 16). While Mills was particularly eager to adapt materials previously successful in other media, he was not at all alone in his enthusiasm for popular culture. Kelvin Gosnell, for example, got John Sanders interested in a science fiction anthology that would eventually be called 2000AD by writing a memo that openly bespeaks his own enthusiasm for the genre (it is reprinted in full in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 9/10). In other words, the new wave of British mainstream comics was to be produced by the first generation of comics creators who had set out to be nothing but comics writers and artists. David Gibbons, who would go on to be the artist on Watchmen (1985/1986), one of the key works of the British Invasion, was also an early contributor to IPC’s 2000AD. He affirms that many of the contributors to the anthology were “artists who wanted to do comics, rather than wanting to be magazine illustrators or fine artists,” and “[w]riters who wanted to do comics, not that they really wanted to write novels or prose.” Importantly, this new generation of creators “knew each other as comics fans”—“we were very much doing the kind of material we’d love to read anyway” (qtd. in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 62). It is equally important to point out the cultural background of many of these new wave creators. Quite a few of them, like Alan Moore and Bryan Talbot, had emerged from the 1970s countercultural scene. Before their mainstream career, they had produced independent comix or commix (spelt thus to differentiate them from the mainstream mode[s] of practice). They brought along with them a very specific set of leftist, liberal, and dissident politics. Those who had not been part of the 1970s comix underground often at least shared the ambition, as Maggie Gray puts it, “for revitalizing British comics through innovative newsagent titles aimed at a wide audience, in competition with mainstream publishers” (Gray “Dead Roses”: 32). They were “committed to creative independence, social commentary, and exploration of adult themes, distinctly evocative of commix and self-publishing practices” (ibid.). Gray is talking about the contributors to Dez Skinn’s later anthology Warrior here. But Warrior’s publishing strategy can also be seen as a radicalization of many of the ten-

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dencies already apparent in Battle, Action and 2000AD. 2000AD and Warrior also shared many writers and artists. These new authorial ambitions constitute one of the reasons why it would be reductive to think that “the strategy for getting the comic upto-date was ludicrously simple: rip off all the latest film, TV, and other favourites,” as Barker puts it in his discussion of Action, the anthology Mills and Wagner created immediately after Battle Picture Weekly (Barker “Comics”: 19). It is true that the formula of “positioning the paper by basing strips on popular genre films would also be adopted successfully by Action and 2000AD” (Chapman “British Comics”: 129). But many of the people who produced the new serials and anthologies were genuine genre and comics enthusiasts, actively striving for innovation and new audiences. Most importantly, because of their knowledge of genre and comics history, they introduced a hitherto unknown level of self-referentiality to the British mode of practice. We also need to consider that narrative strategies that previously worked in standalone films are not necessarily effective in the comics medium and as serials. The following case studies will take a close look at what it meant to rework these formulas for serialization, and what important differences and inventions the remediation of these genre stories entailed. Martin Barker himself contradicts his own argument for the supposed simplicity of the new wave stories in his extensive analysis of the Action anthology (1976–1977) that Mills developed after the success of Battle Picture Weekly. “Deliberately orientated towards a new kind of juvenile reader—street-smart pre-adolescents” (Sabin “Adult Comics”: 52), Action featured “unorthodox and politically resonant heroes” such as “a German infantryman of the Second World War, a black boxer and a working-class secret agent” (ibid.). Later Action serials such as Look out for Lefty tackled even more sensitive topics such as football hooliganism (ibid.). The attitude of the stories was “cynical, anti-authoritarian and very violent” (ibid.), making the anthology an instant success with an intensely committed readership (cf. Barker “Comics”: 51–61). It also attracted the attention of the tabloids and became the center of a moral panic. Presumably, this was because of the highly explicit depiction of violence in the anthology. But in a close reading of some of the most important Action stories, Barker concludes that “Action stood at the very edge of a very radical politics” (“Comics”: 49), presenting readers with characters who were “up against outrageously unfair residues of authority, and trying to make their own authority in opposition,” “scratching together a makeshift morality” (“Comics”: 45). To Barker, this is the actual reason why Action incited a

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scandal in the media that in the history of British comics can only be compared to the media outcry against horror comics in the 1950s.1 What initiated the largely right- wing objections to Action was not simply the amount of explicit violence in the title; “[i]t was in fact a political objection” against its depiction of present day Western societies as authoritarian, essentially oppressive and morally repulsive (ibid.). As a consequence of the scandal, Action was suspended by IPC and finally cancelled. The comics’ audience did not take the news of the suspension lightly: “Kids ran the streets of Brixton on the day its withdrawal became known, shouting ‘They’ve taken away our comic!’ Cheated and ignored, no doubt another grain of general resentment against the way ‘authority’ treated them was laid down, another brick on the wall of helplessness” (Barker “Comics”: 49). From this intense commitment, Barker draws the conclusion that the readers related “to the comic as to a friend” and had “a complicated social relationship to it,” even “a kind of dialogue … in which the comic is seen to have a personality” (“Barker”: 60). Maybe there really was a degree of anthropomorphism at work. But instead of positing a social relationship with the material comic book, it is more likely that the stories in Action had such clear, recurring thematic and narrational patterns as to support what Jason Mittell calls an inferred author function. Mittell defines this as “a viewer’s production of authorial agency responsible for a text’s storytelling, drawing upon textual cues and contextual discourses” (Mittell “Complex TV,” ch. 3). In other words, the readers of Action had started to conceive of the stories in the anthology as the product of clear authorial intent spelling out a coherent, anti-authoritarian philosophy. Action stories were not merely to be understood, they required explication. This insistent thematic patterning that prompts close readings and fictions of the author is not an isolated phenomenon. For this new wave of British mainstream comics, authorship was going to become a central issue. The eventual demise of Action did not spell the end of the movement. In a way, censorship only furthered narrational complexity. 2000AD, considered by many to be the spiritual successor to Action and developed by Pat Mills and John Wagner (cf. Chapman “British Comics”: 145), continued to publish highly politicized stories with an even bleaker outlook. It also “demonstrated the same anti-authoritarian attitude that Martin Barker has identified in Action” (Chapman “British Comics”: 147). Ben Little contends that it even “exceeded the political vigor of its precursor” (“British Invasion”: 145). While highly successful, especially towards the mid– 1980s, 2000AD nevertheless did not give rise to the kind of scandal that Action had evoked. Little attributes this to three factors: first, 2000AD

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moved “content into the fantastic in order to deprive the censors of a direct line of attack” (“British Invasion”: 146). Because they were science fiction stories, the 2000AD serials “were less offensive to the critics on the right who could not see just how political they were” (ibid.). The second important factor that helped 2000AD escape the censors was its “mode of address”; to be precise: its dual mode of address, aiming “at children and adults at the same time” (ibid.). 2000AD “started to engage in narratives that, while internally logical to any ten-year-old reader, would be peppered with references that make sense only to a far more adult audience” (Little “British Invasion”: 146/147). Finally, the science fiction anthology showed an “ability to adapt to the changing political milieu of the late 1970s and 1980s,” charting “the changing political milieu of the late 1970s and 1980s,” most importantly “the disintegration of the left in the fallout of Thatcher’s phenomenal and unlikely success” (Little “British Invasion”: 146/147). In other words, it continued Action’s tendency towards systematic thematic patterning, demanding the adult reader’s full attention and cueing not just an understanding of the narrative, but also an interpretation. It is only par for the course that 2000AD was also the first mainstream anthology “to credit writers and artists” (Chapman “British Comics”: 149), thus initiating “a gradual shift of power away from publishers to creators” (Bishop “ThrillPower”: 38). The construction of an inferred author function was now not just publicly acknowledged, but also officially invited. The debut of the anthology Warrior in 1982 should be considered within this wider context. Publisher Dez Skinn had previously worked in the UK comics mainstream, notably for IPC and as editorial director for Marvel UK (cf. Millidge “Alan Moore Storyteller”: 74, Gray “Dead Roses”: 32). He went on to hire many of the creators who had previously worked for him on IPC and Marvel UK titles. Millidge cites Steve Parkhouse, Steve Moore, David Lloyd, and Steve Dillon among Skinn’s recruits (“Alan Moore Storyteller”: 74), to which should be added Alan Moore, Garry Leach and Alan Davis, the initial Marvelman team. Warrior was meant as a publication that would do away with the problems that arose from working for a large company such as IPC. Skinn guaranteed “a greater degree of creative freedom, and a share of copyright ownership and royalties on sales” (ibid.; see also Gray “Dead Roses”: 33). The title dispensed with the dual address of 2000AD, instead deliberately “targeting … an older audience” and opting for a “close association with fandom” (Gray “Dead Roses”: 33). Artists “were given full creative control over their work, and intensive collaboration (rather than an assembly-line division of labour) was encour-

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aged, often at the cost of meeting deadlines and maintaining consistent publication frequency” (ibid.). This very likely contributed to the fact that “the title never made a profit to share” (ibid.). However, Warrior was not meant to be a radically alternative venue, instead occupying what Maggie Gray calls an “interstitial siting” (“Dead Roses”: 33). This means that it attempted “to establish a production practice that transcended the quantitative and instrumental logic of the comics market,” but was still able to “compete within mainstream newsagent distribution” (ibid.). Like 2000AD, it heavily relied on genre offerings, providing superhero, fantasy and science fiction stories. In a further radicalization of IPC practices, Warrior also put even greater efforts into blurring “the boundaries between professional atmosphere and amateur or fan, author/reader and worker/artist” (ibid.). At the same time, the creators’ involvement “in the growing fan scene of the early 1980s, including regular cons … [and] proliferating selfpublished fanzines” (ibid.) put even more emphasis on the rise of the inferred author function.

Complex Serials By and large, these are the most important material factors that need to be considered to properly contextualize the beginnings of the British Invasion. They also constitute the framework for this chapter’s overall thesis. As pointed out previously, in the late 1970s, changes in the wider culture, a considerable loss in comics readership, and a changing of the guard within corporate structures made it possible for a small number of British comics creators to deviate from the then-current mode of practice in British mainstream comics. These creators were allowed to develop strong intrinsic norms and to subvert many of the hitherto monolithic extrinsic norms. We will characterize this new mode of practice, following Mittell’s model for the analysis of contemporary television serials, as complex comics. Essential to this is a type of complex seriality that we have also found at work in the American mode of practice: what Mittell calls “a shifting balance” of “episodic forms under the influence of serial narration” (“Complex TV,” ch. 1). The narratives of the British new wave comics, too, often reject “the need for plot closure within every episode that typifies conventional episodic form” (ibid.). Instead, they tell ongoing stories with occasional episodic interludes, “with the underlying assumption that a series is a cumulative narrative that builds over time, rather than resetting back to a steady- state equilibrium at the end of every

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episode” (ibid.). In serials such as Charley’s War, central characters die unexpectedly, protagonists shift continuously, narrative strategies are varied with practically each new episode, and there is only a modicum of status quo that the series returns to again and again. The differences to the relative stability and predictability of the American mode of practice could hardly be more pronounced. The British new wave is also predicated on a new type of complex temporality. Before we take a look at the new wave’s uses of the narrational system of time, though, it is important to stress that one of the foundations of serial temporality remains untouched in the new complex comics. These serials are still largely published on a weekly basis, leaving a sizable temporal gap between installments. To Mittell, this break between episodes is one of the defining features of serial narratives, lodging “serial temporality … primarily without the realm of screen time” (or, in the case of comic books, reading time). The waiting period between episodes “facilitates the habitual and ritualistic consumption of a series” (“Complex TV,” ch. 1). It also turns the gradual process of reception into an overtly social event: readers discuss the latest episode with their peers, write reviews, fan fiction or pieces of analysis, and construct an inferred author function. The temporality of the stories themselves changes fundamentally with the new mode of practice. As exemplified in the Charley’s War example, these serials heavily foreground the system of time, focusing on explorations of the past and its mediation instead of the classical narration’s insistence on forward momentum. Often, the creators of the new wave systematically present the past as enigmatic and its representation(s) as unreliable (for the notion of the past as enigma, cf. Mittell “Complex TV,” ch.1, and the following chapters). This practice feeds into the larger poetical project of complexity: if past events are difficult to gauge, it becomes more challenging to formulate hypotheses as to the narrative’s progression. A tendency in new wave comics towards ambivalent characters with an enigmatic past, presented with little narrational depth, makes for a much more exigent and complex process of reception. Additionally, the accumulation of important fabula information that the new type of seriality brings along—every previous episode is in some way important to an understanding of the larger whole—equally puts much greater demands on the audience. The prevalence of ambivalent narrative strategies also potentially renders readers’ relationship with the storyworld and the protagonists more complicated: in the British new wave comics, tests of allegiance with highly problematic characters come to the fore. Because of all of these factors, readers need to consider the narrative’s cues much more attentively

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in order to guess at the story’s development and outcome. The narration in new wave comics often duly obliges this need for hints and allusions, densely layering its mise-en-page with a multitude of patterned references both intertextual and intra-diegetic. At the same time, the tendency towards ambiguity on the one hand and overdetermination on the other may cue readers to not just construct a complete, linear fabula, but also an interpretation. In Making Meaning (1989), David Bordwell differentiates between four different ways audiences make sense of narratives. Readers and viewers construct “referential meaning” by responding to unequivocal worldbuilding prompts and fabula cues (“Making Meaning”: 8). They also pick up on cues to make “explicit meaning,” that is, they assign “a conceptual meaning or ‘point’ to the fabula and diegesis” on the basis of cues that explicitly state this meaning (ibid.). The audience may also deduct “covert, symbolic, or implicit meanings” on the assumption that the narration “speaks indirectly” (ibid.), repeatedly suggesting a specific interpretation but not spelling it out completely. Finally, readers and viewers may construct “repressed or symptomatic meanings that the work divulges ‘involuntarily’” (“Making Meaning”: 9). As the terminology implies, this was originally the domain of psychoanalytical theory, but the practice has since been adopted by many theoretical schools. To Bordwell, not all of these activities constitute acts of interpretation. Instead, he posits that “the activity of comprehension constructs referential and explicit meanings, while the process of interpretation constructs implicit and symptomatic readings” (ibid., my emphases). Bordwell spends much of Making Meaning arguing for the highly conventionalized nature of interpretation and against academic interpretive practices, stressing that “even the most putatively radical theories … leave the conventions of … interpretation untouched” (“Making Meaning”: 27). Instead of producing knowledge about specific cultural objects and practices, interpretation itself “has become a going concern to be maintained at all costs” (“Making Meaning”: 26), and “[t]he construction of implicit or symptomatic meanings is a routine institutional activity, a body of ongoing craft practices that draws upon abstract doctrines in an ad hoc, utilitarian and ‘opportunistic’ fashion” (ibid.). To produce interpretations, scholars look for “compatibilities that the film affords with respect to concepts currently in circulation in criticism” (“Making Meaning”: 31). Alternatively, critics will treat a film as “recalcitrant data,” looking for “aspects of the film not at first interpretable in an acceptable way” (“Making Meaning”: 30). The final goal, of course, is to make the object fit the theory after all (“Making Meaning”: 30). Interpreters “also pick out patterns—

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repetitions, variations, inversions—which can be invested with significance,” as well as “salient passages,” those “‘key portions’ that most clearly or vividly instantiate the meanings” to be ascribed to them (“Making Meaning”: 32). In the process, scholars “make stubborn data meaningful” (ibid.). In short, to Bordwell, these practices are “generally unconstrained by rules of formal demonstration,” and their “inductive processes frequently rely upon ‘quick and dirty’ corner-cutting rules of thumb” (“Making Meaning”: 33). This is why he chooses not to interpret. I would suggest, though, that to forego the interpretive dimension of narrative and its many cultural practices is to overlook the important part which the actual cultural objects play in what Bordwell calls “Interpretation, Inc.” (“Making Meaning”: 21–28). To some extent, Bordwell revises his earlier attitude in Poetics of Cinema (2008), where he introduces three categories to conceptualize the process of reception, a “continuum of activities” that is made up of “perception, comprehension, and appropriation” (“Poetics”: 46). Perception is the “bottom-up” foundation of reception; its “uptake occurs in milliseconds” (“Poetics”: 45) and “feeds into comprehension and appropriation” (“Poetics”: 46). To Bordwell, to arrive at comprehension, we “construe the outputs of … perception as representing hierarchical patterns of actions, a conception, or simply a train of sensuous elements.” To comprehend a narrative, the audience thus “applies a wide range of knowledge” to make sense of what they are experiencing (“Poetics”: 47). In the broadest sense, comprehension can therefore be defined as the level of reception upon which most members of the audience would agree. Bordwell himself somewhat sketchily characterizes it as the level of processing at which “there are many convergences” among recipients, but also readily admits that comprehension “is evidently a matter of degree; some viewers get more, some get less.” After all, “not everyone has the same set of conceptual schemes” (“Poetics”: 47/50). Appropriation, on the other hand, is comparable to interpretation (although Bordwell also includes phenomena such as fan culture and mood management in this category). It represents a “much more top-down” process (“Poetics”: 48), drawing less on perception and comprehension than on pre-existing schemata. In other words, when a viewer appropriates or interprets narratives, “she may stray far from the phenomenal” experience of comprehension. Thus, viewers may employ narratives “to validate a theory” or by presenting them as “praiseworthy representations of political positions,” to give but two examples (“Poetics”: 48). As “Interpretation, Inc.” began to lose its grip on the American academy, Bordwell thus relinquished his disdain for interpretation somewhat, reframing it as an essential part of the process of reception.

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In the case of mainstream comics at the beginning of the 1980s, artists clearly coveted the many benefits that interpretability brings along: cultural distinction, recognition as a bourgeois artist instead of a proletarian artisan, economic gain, meaningful interactions with readers, and so on. This is without evoking the possibility that comics artists make meaning of and with their own works, too, and are emotionally and intellectually invested in their own comics’ thematic suggestiveness. Interpretability or openness for readerly acts of appropriation is one of the major factors in the rise of the new wave and the British Invasion. The following case studies will investigate how these comic books invite us to make meaning, and to what ends they integrate interpretive cues into their complex narrational styles. This is not to say at all that they are meant to be definitive interpretations themselves. This study is interested in how these comic books invite us to make meaning, and will therefore only touch upon potential explications when they are helpful in exploring their role in the reading process. Explication and quasi-narratological theorizing are part and parcel of the pleasure of reading a new wave comics serial. A sizable part of the audience of a successful complex comic book will also find enjoyment in observing the narration at work, watching it juggle an immense accumulation of storyworld information while struggling to balance the need for an enigmatic past with the steady distribution of fabula information, and orchestrating an often daunting number of serial and episodic plots. In short, the audience of these books does not merely “get swept away in a realistic narrative world”; they also take pleasure in watching “the gears at work, marveling at the craft required to pull off such narrative pyrotechnics” (Mittell “Complex TV,” ch.1). Following Harris (1981), Mittell suggests the term “operational aesthetic” (ibid., my emphasis) for such a style, that is, a syuzhet patterning that insistently cues the viewer or reader to watch and delight in the very process of narration. Very often, the serials of the new wave have also been cast in the light of a so-called “new realism.” Interviewed by Martin Barker, for example, IPC’s John Sanders states that “the stories in the ‘new-wave comics’ were to be ‘realistic’” (qtd. in Barker “Comics”: 19). Martin Barker points out three important aspects of the reality effect often experienced by the readers of these comic books. To him, verisimilitude in war serials such Charley’s War “could mean either more acknowledgement of the horrors of war, therefore more direct showing of violence and its consequences; or it could mean the creation of story-forms which are full of tension and anguish, loneliness and uncertainty; or it could mean, much more politically, facing through the stories some of the moral and political questions

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generated by war” (Barker “Comics”: 19). At this point, it is possible to frame this new realism from the point of view of poetics: the “more direct showing of violence and its consequences” implies intrinsic norms of embodiment for the new wave serials that do away with the previous extrinsic norms that posited physical invulnerability for all protagonists. The “loneliness and uncertainty” of these new British comics can equally be seen as the result of narrational choices: the reader’s experience of “tension and anguish” is the direct consequence of the suppression of key fabula information, a pronounced lack of insight into the characters’ psychology, and the emphasis on unreliable representations of the past. And Barker’s final trait of the new realism, its negotiation of “the moral and political questions generated by war,” directly corresponds to this study’s contention that these new serials are systematically patterned for interpretation, even sometimes overdetermined with cues prompting an explication. In the following, we will also have a look at these reality effects at work in the actual comic books.

Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra, Major Eazy (1976–1978): The Pleasures of the Unpredictable As pointed out before, the editors of Battle Picture Weekly encouraged the development of intrinsic norms and the systematic subversion of extrinsic norms, and creators duly obliged them. These innovations and breaches of convention take roughly two different forms in Battle, exemplified by the serials that will be analyzed in this section. Both are to some extent meta-historiographic, in that most of their intrinsic norms aim at cueing an examination of history and its status as a narrative. Karin Kukkonen and Anja Müller-Wood point out that the emphasis on the historicity of popular culture is a central feature of the British Invasion (“British Perspectives”: 156). These early IPC serials can be considered the ground zero of this tendency. The series of the new wave differ in their type of historical self-referentiality, though. Many of the serials in Battle are self-reflexive in that they are mostly concerned with previous narrative representations of war in different media. In other words, their selfreferentiality is largely generic. The enjoyment of their operational aesthetic hinges on the subversion of genre tropes that are presented as outdated and historically contingent. Battle serials such as Major Eazy (1976–1978) thus largely operate on the threshold between comprehension and appropria-

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tion: they invoke the readers’ historical knowledge of war narratives and draw attention to their constructedness, but their syuzhet presentations only offer limited potential for interpretation. This tendency is best exemplified by Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra’s serial Major Eazy. Other Battle series equally lay bare the conventions and dramaturgical conceits of war narratives, but they do so in order to create thematic patterns that readers can appropriate for their interpretations and to raise questions about the narrative status of history itself. They mobilize many more topdown processes and mental schemata, encouraging interpretive mappings and the application of abstract theories. Charley’s War repeatedly asks whether the conventions of the British war comic are adequate to represent the realities of the First World War. John Wagner and Mike Western’s serial Darkie’s Mob (1976–1977) investigates World War II and its popular representations on similar terms. In the following, this study will therefore differentiate between generic self-referentiality, operating largely at the level of comprehension, and interpretive self-referentiality, which cues acts of appropriation. It is important to point out that no clear borders exist between the two types. All the generically self-referential series in Battle invoke thematic readings to some extent. The difference lies in the degree of thematic patterning which makes interpretive appropriations possible: while Major Eazy serializes the same intrinsic norm to cue the same anti-authoritarian interpretation over and over again, Charley’s War employs a wide array of different intrinsic norms and sustains a large number of thematic patterns throughout its run. Importantly, both types of self-reflexivity seem to have had a similar reality effect on readers of the anthology: they make the comics serials more difficult to predict, thus fostering the illusion of an ambiguous reality. From our historical perspective, decades after the release of the first issue of Battle Picture Weekly in 1975, this is often baffling, and confirms the suspicion that the impression of realism these comics evoked in the 1970s was largely the result of intrinsic norms and the systematic disregard of extrinsic norms. Consider Major Eazy, published in Battle Picture Weekly from issue 45 (10 January 1976) until issue 171 (10 June 1978), written by Alan Hebden and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra. The eponymous protagonist, fighting for the Allies in Italy during World War II, is portrayed as “[u]northodox, undisciplined and unshaven” (Rutter “The Man Behind the Major”: n.pag.). He routinely reacts with seeming indifference to lifethreatening situations. In the very first episode, he “calmly drive[s] up” to an intense battle “in his own camouflaged Bentley sports car” (Rutter “The Man Behind the Major”: n.pag.) and ends the conflict “in seconds” (Hebden

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and Ezquerra “Major Eazy”: n.pag., 4/5). At the end of the installment, Eazy has his Bentley fixed to a tank and towed away to camp so that he can have a nap in the driver’s seat (Hebden and Ezquerra “Majory Eazy”: n.pag. 3/4). This is hardly a plausible portrait of an officer in World War II. In fact, Major Eazy announces from the very first panel introducing the protagonist that its central point of reference does not necessarily lie in any notion of verisimilar “reality.” Instead, it is concerned with other narratives: Eazy is the spitting image of actor James Coburn, who in the 1970s mostly starred in Westerns, thrillers, and war films, playing characters of the “hard man” prototype. Eazy’s behavioral pattern, writer Alan Hebden points out, “stemmed from Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’ character” (qtd. in Rutter “The Man Behind the Major”: n.pag.), who was the protagonist in the Sergio Leone Westerns A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). But how can we characterize this pattern, and what is its effect on the process of reception? With this first episode, Major Eazy announces that its protagonist will not adhere to the extrinsic norms of previous war comics, which would have dictated a much more cautious approach to a deadly battle. Essentially, the intrinsic norm established in this first installment and subsequently serialized entails that the protagonist, faced with a thoroughly conventional conflict such as the first episode’s skirmish, will invariably act counter the genre’s conventions. This makes it difficult for the reader to gauge how Eazy will solve each episode’s dilemma, especially since the narration provides no depth cues for him outside of what he divulges in dialogue. Hebden and Ezquerra supply no captions detailing Eazy’s emotional state or thoughts. Eazy wears a permanent poker face. His body language is permanently relaxed and hardly ever indicative of future actions. Thought bubbles are (mostly) reserved for supporting players. This systematic omission of cues that would make for safe hypothesis testing is probably what Hebden refers to when he states in an interview that “the key thing is that he [Eazy] is enigmatic” (qtd. in Rutter “The Man Behind the Major”: n.pag.). The intrinsic character norm in the Major Eazy serial is therefore predicated on three factors: the foregrounding of a conventional conflict as precisely that; a guessing game for the reader as to future events based on an extreme paucity of cues and redundancies; and Eazy’s eventual surprising and amusing solution to the situation. Here is an example of the formula at work. In this story, a commando of British soldiers under Eazy’s command has taken an Italian village from the German Wehrmacht. In the following, Eazy goes to visit the local bar-

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bershop to get a much-needed shave. But in a wholly conventional twist, the Germans return in force to retake the village. The proper reaction to this turn of events in a conservative war comic would be either a tactical retreat or an against-all-odds guerrilla fight against the German soldiers. But Eazy does no such thing: “I can’t leave yet, Daly—not in the middle of a shave. You lot clear out—that’s an order,” he announces (Hebden and Ezquerra “Major Eazy”: n.pag., 4). The serialized intrinsic norm for the character tells us that Eazy has a plan to somehow thwart the German operation, but the narration remains characteristically suppressive about it. No caption, no line of dialogue gives any hints. One of only a few cues a reader might pick up on is a realistically motivated part of the visual narration: Eazy, sitting on the barber’s chair, is covered by a cloak that suggests he might be hiding something. The setting where the protagonist patiently waits for the villains to arrive also provides intertextual hints for the savvy reader. Audiences who are well versed in 1960s and 1970s popular culture will have no doubt that we are about to witness an unconventional duel scene of the sort that the Italian Western had popularized in the 1960s and 1970s. Italian Westerns would often situate the duel in an unexpected location away from the town’s main street, where such scenes would typically be played out in American Westerns. The protagonist who confronts his enemies while getting a shave is practically a convention in and of itself in the Italian Western. This intertextual reference, if recognized, should strengthen the reader’s theory that Eazy will use deceit to come out the victor, since such morally questionable strategies are common for characters like Eastwood’s Man with No Name. Clearly, an operational aesthetic is at work here. Seasoned readers of the serial will recognize the intrinsic norm and delight in the circumvention of a conventional solution to the conflict. They will scan the page for any hints such as the concealing cloak and may pick up on the reference to Italian Westerns. The lack of narrational depth eliminates redundancies, making it more challenging and involving for the audience to discover cues that can form the basis of hypothesis testing. It will be all the more rewarding to have guessed correctly, as panel six of the same page indeed shows Eazy shooting the arriving German soldiers with two guns he had hidden underneath the cloak. He subsequently forces a surviving German officer to finish his shave, threatening the enemy with yet another weapon concealed underneath the cloak—a hand grenade, its pin already removed. If Major Eazy has any hints of a pattern of intrinsic norms that aims for more than the pleasure of cleverly ridiculing conventions by appropriating conventions from other genres, it could be related to Barker’s

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contention that the new wave IPC anthologies had an anti-authoritarian attitude. Anti-authoritarianism is readily apparent in Eazy’s behavior: he has no respect for his superiors, works predominantly alone and refuses to adhere to the rules every other British soldier has to obey. But the ultimate authority in these war stories is the genre itself as it had been played out in previous war comics. The rebellious attitude of Major Eazy is thus firmly rooted in a self-referential style that delights in foregrounding conventions as conventions, not as accurate representations of reality. Or, to put it differently, Major Eazy’s realism, if anything, is predicated on knowing the conventions and being able to circumvent them (if only by selecting a different set of conventions from a different genre). As already pointed out, this sequence also demonstrates that Major Eazy is a remarkably ambivalent character, another important part of the intrinsic character norm for the series. After all, he has no qualms to use deceit, and shoots the German soldiers in cold blood. This is a blatant breach of the former extrinsic character norm for war comics, which demanded that British soldiers show a certain amount of chivalry and treat the opposition fairly. The only thing the reader can be certain of is that Eazy is “loyal to the allies,” as Hebden puts it, and that “he does have morals” (qtd. in Rutter “The Man Behind the Major”: n.pag.). Nevertheless, the series sometimes comes close to portraying him in a villainous light, as when, in a later episode, he shoots an Italian woman in the back without any apparent provocation (Hebden and Ezquerra “Major Eazy”: n.pag., 7). The narration does its utmost to ensure that this is a shocking moment. The woman is, of course, beautiful, and drawn in such a style as to reflect less the ideals of the 1940s than those of the mid–1970s. She supposedly only bears an innocent gift of flowers for the Allied liberators. However, such a gift had previously been discovered to be booby-trapped with a bomb, and Eazy kills her, fully convinced that she is the terrorist. In a rare instance of narrational depth, he even lets us know of his certainty: “[S]he’s just about to lay out some more of those fun flowers of hers,” he says (Hebden and Ezquerra “Major Eazy”: n.pag., 6). The breach of the intrinsic character norm is a telltale sign that an important variation is taking place, and indeed, no bomb is discovered in the dead woman’s flowers. A few panels later, it is revealed that the doctor who has been called to the scene is involved in the terrorist activities and has replaced the deadly bouquet with a non-lethal one. This turn of events supposedly restores the status quo: Eazy was right after all; his ruthlessness is justified by the results. To some extent, such a variation of the intrinsic norm is to be expected after a few episodes, since any narrative norm grows stale if it is not some-

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times shaken up. On the other hand, the deviation may suggest to the astute reader that Eazy’s status as righteous hero is only predicated on yet another convention: the fact that his eccentric and morally dubious modus operandi always yields the desired results. If the woman had indeed been innocent, this would have conclusively shown Eazy as a highly problematic character. Major Eazy only flirts with this possibility, though. This variation of the intrinsic norm is not serialized, and its destabilizing effect is never repeated. However, several other IPC series would fully embrace the strategy.

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra, Mike McMahon, et al., Judge Dredd (1977–ongoing): Serializing Anxiety Major Eazy was first published in Battle Picture Weekly in 1976, which had been around since 1975. At the time, the creators of Battle, Pat Mills and John Wagner, were already working on a new science fiction anthology that would be called 2000AD. Its first issue is cover dated February 26, 1977; and as of this writing, 2000AD is still being published. After the experiments with intrinsic norms in Battle Picture Weekly and Action, Mills was certain that he had a winning concept that he could continue to exploit: “I had a formula for creating a hero and his action story,” he says in an interview with David Bishop (qtd. in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 11). The character norm introduced in serials like Major Eazy or Darkie’s Mob would become one of the central templates for 2000AD, and for many other comics serials, too, British or otherwise. However, this intrinsic character norm did not become an extrinsic norm in the British mainstream mode of practice. Such a notion would entail that creators working in the mainstream would have no choice but to model every protagonist after the likes of Eazy; this was patently not the case. Rather, an ambivalent hero or heroine presented with little narrational depth becomes a viable paradigmatic option in the wake of Battle and Action. Characters such as Eazy and Darkie had a fundamental effect on extrinsic norms that had hitherto demanded perfect clarity, a preponderance of narrative statements instead of enigmas, and copious redundancies in the syuzhet presentation. They do not constitute extrinsic norms themselves. In 2000AD, this new character template would be reincarnated in the character of Judge Dredd. The eponymous serial debuted in the second issue of 2000AD (cover dated 25 March 1977), but in these early stories and the surrounding paratexts within the anthology there is little to indi-

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cate that “[f ]rom the beginning, [Dredd] … was the most popular story in the comic” (Barker and Brooks “Judge Dredd”: 199) or “the flagship of 2000AD” (Chapman “British Comics”: 125). The series only becomes a regular cover feature—a certain indicator of popularity, or at least the editors’ hopes for it—around issue 59, cover dated April 8, 1978. Afterwards, though, Dredd rapidly asserts his dominance over the anthology, and equally quickly, the character’s absence from the cover is the exception rather than the rule. As pointed out previously, 2000AD shifts the politicized and sophisticated style of Battle and Action into the realm of science fiction and/or the fantastic in a (largely successful) bid to escape censorship. For this reason, Judge Dredd takes place in a “dystopian, nihilistic vision of the future” (Chapman “British Comics”: 152). The serial begins in the year 2099, and its main setting is Mega-City One, a “vast cancerous growth” on the east coast of what were formerly the United States of America. The city has a “population of over 400 million” (Barker and Brooks “Judge Dredd”: 199/200). Outside the walled urban space lies an equally immense wasteland devastated and badly contaminated during a global nuclear war. On this Cursed Earth, as the city dwellers call it, “only scattered human communities … and mutants” survive—many of them outcasts from the city (Chapman “British Comics”: 152). The serial focuses heavily on worldbuilding, presenting us with an urban environment that bears many similarities to 1970s and early 1980s Britain and the United States, albeit in satirical exaggeration: “Unemployment runs at 87 per cent, crime is endemic and acts of random violence are commonplace. An underclass of the homeless and mutants lives beneath the city in the ruins of the old subway system. The tedium of a jobless existence drives many citizens mad (known as ‘going futsie’) and there are frequent outbreaks of ‘block mania’ as the inhabitants of the giant tower blocks wage war against each other. It is a society in terminal breakdown” (Chapman “British Comics”: 152). In order to counter these problems, democracy has been replaced with a judge system that ruthlessly cracks down on any infringement of the law. Many commentators point out that the Judges, to whom Dredd belongs, are “judge, jury and executioner all in one” (Barker and Brooks “Judge Dredd”: 201), but that is a radicalization of the concept that the serial would only introduce gradually. For a sizable number of installments, the Judges are mostly portrayed as a particularly ruthless and exceptionally able police force. They are in control of all branches of the political system—society is ruled by “a Council headed by the Grand Judge” (Chapman “British Comics”: 152)—but trials are not held on the scene of the crime

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as in later episodes of the serial. Dredd himself is the epitome of the Major Eazy intrinsic norm: humorless and grim, his obsession with the law is often taken to the point of satire. He seems to have no emotions except for anger, and in a comical exaggeration of Eazy’s poker face, he never, ever takes off his helmet. Like many of the Battle and Action serials, Judge Dredd also largely does away with captions or thought bubbles that would provide us with any insights into the protagonist’s mind.2 In short, even if the serialized intrinsic norm for Dredd’s character has been learned after a few episodes, he remains difficult to gauge. The experience of reading the first five years of Judge Dredd stories nevertheless differs considerably from the experience of reading a Battle serial like Major Eazy or Darkie’s Mob. In part, this is because Dredd focuses on different aspects and modes of storytelling: worldbuilding and satire, for example. But even more importantly, the weekly Dredd stories were initially written by a committee of different creators, and a great number of editors had story input, too. The trade paperback collections list the following writers for the initial five years of the serial: Pat Mills, John Wagner, Alan Grant, Robert Flynn, Kelvin Gosnell, Charles Herring, Malcolm Shaw, Joe Collins and Chris Lowder. It would appear that the majority of stories were written by Wagner and Grant, working under an impressive number of pseudonyms such as John Howard and T.B. Grover. According to Wagner and Grant, this practice was due to the fact that IPC did not want readers to know that they were writing dozens of serials across an impressive number of IPC titles. “We responded by coming up with the most ridiculous pseudonyms we could…. We were writing under 14 different pseudonyms at one time,” Wagner and Grant recall (qtd. in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 96). Whether intentionally or not, this multiplicity of authorship contributes greatly to the complex process of reception that Judge Dredd demands. Reading the stories, it becomes increasingly obvious that there is no consensus among the writers as to how we should interpret the character and his actions: different writers produce sometimes radically different thematic patterns. Wagner and Grant recall that “Pat [Mills] always wanted Dredd to be the hero,” an unequivocally moral figure, though certainly drastic in his methods (qtd. in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 72). Wagner and Grant, on the other hand, were convinced that Dredd “shouldn’t be a nice guy” (ibid.). At best, he is “partly the hero, but more so the villain” (ibid.). IPC Managing Editor John Sanders, on the other hand, insists that he had the character developed because he wanted “a comic in which the violence was done on the side of justice,” where “[t]he people who were getting it really deserved it, and they were getting it from the law” (qtd.

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in Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 22). In other words, he was looking for a (ideologically highly questionable) pretext to deliver the violence that had supposedly been responsible for the moral panic over Action. As a direct consequence of this confusion over the character, the series “has been interpreted both as an assertively right-wing law-and-order narrative and as a left-liberal critique of the police state” (Chapman “British Comics”: 158). What few commentators care to acknowledge, though, is that in these early years of the serial, Judge Dredd can be both, changing its colors from episode to episode. This unresolved tension between two fundamentally different thematic patterns, too, makes for a demanding process of reception. Week after week, readers encounter one or the other version of the character, and are solicited both to find an explanation for these contradictions and to negotiate their own moral attitude towards Dredd and the serial as a whole. How can we grasp this fluctuation of the character norm from the point of view of the reader? Mittell, following Smith, differentiates between three different aspects of character engagement for audiences. The most fundamental factor is character recognition. Readers “need to differentiate between characters and other figures, who do not rise to the level of character, such as background extras in a group scene” (Mittell “Complex TV,” ch. 4; cf. also Smith “Engaging Characters”: 82/83). They also need to be able to discern the relative importance of a character to the narrative as a whole. In a serial, this is especially challenging, since “characters are positioned in fluid but meaningful tiers of primary lead characters, secondary supporting characters, tertiary recurring character, nonrecurring guest characters, and background extras” (ibid.). In other words, recognition is an open-ended process for most serial narratives, as the importance of specific characters within the cast’s hierarchy tends to fluctuate. The second factor of engagement is character alignment, itself consisting of character attachment and character access (Mittell “Complex TV,” ch. 4; cf. also Smith “Engaging Characters”: 83/84). Attachment designates “the process by which spectators are placed in relation to characters in terms of access to their actions” (Smith “Engaging Characters”: 83). Charley’s War, a serial which will be analyzed in the next section, tracks its protagonist closely at first, but then starts to experiment with attachment, e.g., by following the exploits of a different character for a while and leaving Charley behind, or by focusing on material exposition. Character access, on the other hand, largely corresponds to what Bordwell has termed narrational depth. It details the extent to which we are allowed insights into “subjective interior states of emotions, thought-processes, and morality” (ibid.). The

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third factor of character engagement is allegiance, “the moral evaluation of an aligned character” based on our access to his or her interior life as well as “exterior markers, including … appearance, behaviors, [and] interactions” (ibid.; cf. also Smith “Engaging Characters”: 84/85). These categories are helpful in characterizing the audience relationship with Judge Dredd: while the norms for the recognition of and alignment with Dredd hardly ever change in the serial, character allegiance is constantly foregrounded by the narration. To fully engage with Judge Dredd, readers must constantly ask two questions: “What is my moral opinion of Dredd? And which features of the narration make it so difficult to determine the extent of my allegiance to him?” The dominant intrinsic norm that Judge Dredd serializes is a constant test of allegiance, then. Such a strategy would not have been unthinkable in the American mode of practice; the penchant for soap opera plots in Marvel Comics practically demands a similar approach. The decisive difference lies in the extent to which Dredd puts the readers’ allegiance to the test. While Spider-Man might do something morally questionable, the deed will never be so reprehensible as to alienate readers definitively, or make them question his fundamental status as a hero. Another important difference lies in the thematic suggestiveness of the pattern—Judge Dredd never falters in providing cues for a variety of different appropriations while it puts our allegiance to its protagonist to the test. The “Troggies” story from the first year of the serial demonstrates how subtle and evocative the serial’s narration can be. At first glance, the two-parter tells a conventional action story: an investigation of the disappearance of Mega-City One citizens leads Dredd to the abandoned subway tunnels underneath the city. He soon discovers that the so-called “Troggies” are responsible for the kidnappings, that is, “weird types from the 20th century who couldn’t adjust to the furious pace of modern life” and subsequently “took refuge underground” (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 01”: n.pag., 1). In direct contradiction of this version of the story, the Troggies are convinced that the “normals” drove them underground, and in a deluded attempt to “even the score” (ibid., 4), they are planning to level all of Mega-City One by way of a number of well-placed explosives in the subway tunnels. Naturally, Dredd manages to stop them. At the end of the story, he comments: “You don’t have to look in the subways to find creeps as dangerous as the Troggies. Mega City is full of people with an axe to grind. As long as they exist, no Judge can ever rest easy!” (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 01”: n.pag., 6). At this point, attentive readers of IPC anthologies will be attuned to

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thematic patterns that go counter the main thrust of the narrative, and they will consequently be on the lookout for an intrinsic norm to cue a different perspective on the action. In this case, the intrinsic norm takes the shape of a divorce of the genre plot from the worldbuilding. The visual narration takes great pains to present us with a distinct identity for the Troggies: almost without exception, they look like 20th-century counterculture types, if slightly the worse for wear (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 01”: n.pag.). Their leader, called Slick Willy, dresses like Elvis and speaks like a 1950s beatnik; his lines are laced with clichéd phrases such as “daddy-o” and “slay ya later, alligator” (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 01”: n.pag., 4). Appropriately, his associates refer to him as the “prime cat of the troggies” (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 01”: n.pag., 6). Slick Willy’s henchmen include hippies and skinheads (presumably of the non-fascist variety). The visuals thus cast doubt on Dredd’s version of the story, and invite an interpretation of the Troggies as the 20th century’s failed revolutionaries and subcultures. Seen in this light, we must seriously question our allegiance with Dredd— if the Troggies are leftist, liberal revolutionaries, our protagonist literally becomes “the Man.” The worldbuilding complicates our relationship with the protagonist and antagonists even further. For example, the visual narration shows us that the Troggies are enslaving people to build their tunnels. Those slaves individuated enough in the panels as to be clearly discernible are women. And the Troggies’ plan for revolution entails nothing but death and destruction—it is even suicidal. As Slick Willy puts it, “in ten seconds we’ll be flying high to that great Elvis concert in the sky” (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 01”: n.pag., 3). All of these details invite interpretation: the enslaved women could be seen as pointing to the inherent sexism of parts of the 1968 project, and the Troggies’ murderous as well as suicidal plan might suggest comparisons to the violent radicalization of the left in the 1970s, if one is so inclined. In sum, if recognized as meaningful, all of these cues may evoke an impression of a stalemate. Both factions are repulsive, but the Troggies have the slight advantage of being the oppressed and having had lofty goals, at least initially. Small wonder, then, that 2000AD, and in particular Dredd, are often associated with a nihilistic punk attitude and the general disillusionment of the left following the failed revolutions of the 1960s and the rise of Thatcherite conservatism (cf. Little “British Invasion”)—especially considering that this thematic pattern suggesting utter hopelessness is not at all unique to the “Troggies” story, but heavily serialized.

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As Judge Dredd continues and the roster of writers shrinks, the test of allegiance becomes one of the series’ dominant patterns. Typically, a longer storyline showing Dredd as almost unequivocally heroic and morally righteous will be followed by a shorter installment that casts the protagonist in a completely different light. In the one-off episode “Punks Rule,” for example, Dredd cracks down on a quarter of the Mega-City ruled by criminals. The visual narration characterizes them as punks; they have installed their own, highly cynical judge system that only serves their own gain. Dredd goes in to teach the insurgents a lesson. Up until this point, the scenario is entirely conventional. A conflict is established, and it is our expectation that after a number of delaying and complicating action scenes, the problem will be solved, with Dredd coming out the winner. Remarkably, the narration suspends the extrinsic norm dictating that these delaying sequences must present the protagonist with serious obstacles. As Dredd walks through the quarter’s main street, he brutally shoots or captures rebels left, right, and center, without any apparent effort. There is never any doubt that he will not encounter any noteworthy complications. Without any apparent effort, he callously dumps the surviving criminals into a garbage truck (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 02”: n.pag.). To add insult to injury, he finally exiles the survivors from the city for 10 years, revoking their citizenship (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 02”: n.pag., 3, 4). His speech at the end of the curiously non-dramatic episode is almost overtly fascist: “Let every man know that citizenship is a privilege—not a right” (ibid., 6), he states. The lack of cues that would focus the reader’s attention on the conflict foregrounds Dredd’s outrageous behavior, and for the attentive reader, this narrative strategy will very likely cue a test of allegiance. These examples also demonstrate that the audience of Judge Dredd must be prepared for anything: no extrinsic norm is sacred. One episode presents us with a Shakespeare-quoting circus performer who aims to jump off a ledge towards a solid steel plate, only to dematerialize by way of a miracle gadget and pass through the steel, re-materializing for a safe landing in a pool. Dredd is hoping to get the Chief Judge to ban the dangerous stunt before it is too late. Under conventional circumstances, this deadline scenario would make for a limited number of story hypotheses. Dredd will be successful in banning the jump mere seconds before it is executed, we might surmise. A subsequent robbery attempt at the circus may cue us to conclude that the jump will somehow be delayed or entirely aborted. In any case, the action/adventure genre in its conventional incarnation demands that the hero somehow reach his goal. No such thing hap-

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pens; in the end, the circus performer goes “SPLAT” (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 03”: n.pag.). And yet all the narration’s previous operations had cued a completely different outcome. This, too, is characteristic of early Judge Dredd installments: a number of stories fulfilling extrinsic norms will be followed by an episode that gleefully subverts the rules, and flaunts its transgression to boot. What is the effect of this subversion of extrinsic norms and the constant test of allegiance concerning the protagonist? First of all, the series continuously draws attention to the narrational process itself. Like its Action and Battle brethren, Judge Dredd serializes an operational aesthetic; one of the series’ chief pleasures lies in recognizing generic conventions as well as the rules that had previously characterized the British mode of practice played out against intrinsic norms. But by constantly making us question our allegiance to the protagonist and insistently announcing that it aims to make hypothesis formation somewhat difficult, Judge Dredd also serializes uncertainty and confusion. This strategy is apparent in the series’ other thematic patterns, too. I have already touched upon the series’ “future shock” theme in my analysis of the “Troggies” story. During its first five years, Judge Dredd returns to this idea time and again, often in stories about “Futsies,” future-shocked citizens who, “unable to cope with the pressure of 22nd century life,” go on “mad killing frenzies” (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 03”: n.pag., 1). In order to sustain a thematic pattern, it must be made recognizable. Judge Dredd does this by serializing terminology (“Futsie,” “Troggies”) and by way of worldbuilding: the narration frequently mentions Mega-City One’s immense unemployment rate, for example. The careful repetition and variation of intrinsic norms is equally key to the self- referential aesthetic that cues interpretation. Some episodes will return to the intrinsic norm from the “Troggies” story, pitting worldbuilding against the conventions of the action/adventure genre. In one installment of the series, Dredd is called in to investigate a number of different future shock cases. The narration does its utmost to show that none of the perpetrators are hardened criminals; rather, they all suffer from the immense boredom and anxiety of unemployment. The first group of Futsies destroy their block’s cleaning robots. In the following panel, they are happily scrubbing the floors and cleaning the windows (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 03”: n.pag., 1). In a different vignette, a caretaker is replaced by a robot and not even allowed to “come down sometimes… and help … out” (panel 3). The robot simply declines his request, declaring him “too inefficient” (panel 4). Driven mad by the immense

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amount of spare time, the former caretaker shoots a rifle at passersby from his apartment window. The other Futsies in the episode are presented on similar terms. Dredd’s approach to the unemployed’s plight is always the same, too: he brutally cracks down on the Futsies. The former caretaker turned sniper, for example, is sentenced to “hard labour for the rest of [his] … life” (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 03”: n.pag., 2). Naturally, the criminal is delighted at the thought of getting to work again. Presented with these violent and simplistic answers to a larger societal problem, there can be no doubt for smart readers that the conventions of the action/adventure story are entirely inadequate to deal with the “future shock” problem. The narration also offers copious cues onto which readers might map interpretations: at the time of publication (2000AD issues #117/118, cover dated June 16/23, 1979), Margaret Thatcher had just come into office for the first time; while unemployment was yet to rise to the extremes of the early 1980s, it was already relatively high at 5.3 percent (cf. Rogers “How Britain Changed”). There is little here to prevent readers from assuming that the Futsies’ future shock is, in fact, their own. A different intrinsic norm employed in the “future shock” pattern is directly connected with one of the central features of the American mode of practice: the considerable amount of space in the exposition devoted to the villain’s/s’ plans. Judge Dredd often employs the same formula, but manages to use it for thematic patterning, too. The episode entitled “The Forever Crimes” largely takes place in “The Forever Towers Home for the Semi-Dead”—a place where the very old, the terminally ill and the dying are kept in suspended animation (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 03”: n.pag.). Clients are only reanimated for minutes at a time in cases of emergency or for short visits from their family. Thus, their scant remaining lifetime can be stretched out almost indefinitely. The first page of the story teaches us how this technology works, but leaves the readers to make all of the crucial inferences themselves (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 03”: n.pag.). An initial caption vaguely informs us of the new life-prolonging technology (panel one). The institution’s proprietor, a doctor Gold, is pictured operating the machinery, ordering a nurse to bring a resident “up to minimum life temperature” (ibid.) and telling Judge Dredd to keep his interview with the patient brief, since the old woman only has “two hours of total lifetime” left (panel two). The narration trusts that readers have previous experience with such concepts as cryogenic sleep from other science fiction narratives, or else that they will logically deduce from these oblique cues how the process works. This,

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too, constitutes part of the complexity of the British new wave: a narrational strategy that we might call inferential exposition. It is as of yet unclear whether the introduction of cryogenic methods to prolong life is merely a piece of worldbuilding or actually relevant to the plot, and the narration remains equally suppressive about the role of doctor Gold—hinting only at his deeper involvement by clearly individuating the character and by showing him anxious to keep the interview as short as possible. Very quickly, though, we learn that doctor Gold has used the trance-like state of his patients to extract compromising knowledge about relatives from them. He has made use of the information to blackmail his patients’ relatives. In an entirely conventional conclusion to the detective story, Gold is duly punished. Taken on its own, it would be difficult to ascribe any meaning to this exposition devoted to detailing scientific advances. But within the larger “future shock” pattern, longtime readers may recognize that the notion of progress is constantly called into doubt in Judge Dredd: new technology either brings about misery and unemployment, or it is used by villains and crooks for their own selfish gains. It therefore makes little sense to analyze individual stories from Battle Picture Weekly, Action or 2000AD without their serial context. Taken on their own, episodes from Judge Dredd may appear like relatively simple action/adventure or detective stories that occasionally flirt with subversion, satire and a satirical portrayal of fascism. Their appeal only becomes palpable when read serially. Only then, patterns of intrinsic norms and themes, clashes of convention and subversion, and tests of allegiance come to the fore, destabilizing our reading experience and compelling us to make meaning. One of the most famous Dredd serials, introducing the villain called Judge Death, is another case in point. Judge Death, a skeletal monster in a Judge uniform, has come from another dimension, whose very own judges had observed that “all crime was committed by the living.” Naturally, they drew the only logical conclusion: “life itself was made illegal” (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 03”: n.pag., 2) and quite thoroughly exterminated. Now, the monstrous Judge Death, adorned with supernatural powers, has set his sights on Dredd’s dimension. Based solely on the Judge Death episodes in isolation, it would be difficult to arrive at a meaningful interpretation. The installments, beautifully drawn by Brian Bolland, tell a horror/action-adventure story hybrid that ends in the inevitable defeat of Judge Death. But after three years of Judge Dredd stories, the narration offers enough subtle cues for appropriations: a Gothic reading might conceive of Death as Dredd’s Doppelgänger, taking the pro-

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tagonist’s modus operandi to the point of absurdity. And seen from the “future shock” angle, Judge Death is the incarnation of the desires of MegaCity One’s citizens for change—any change at all, even if it entails the horrors of the apocalypse. The narration encourages such interpretive mappings, for example through ambivalent visual cues. When Judge Death stumbles into a night club, the DJ is individuated in a two- panel sequence (Wagner, Mills et al. “Judge Dredd Case Files 03”: n.pag.). Artist Brian Bolland shows him wearing a curious pair of glasses that makes his eyes look like they are bulging, veins popping in a cartoonish mockery of horror. On the next page, the DJ is attacked by Judge Death, and as the villain kills him, the glasses become richly symbolic (figure 16). After all, as the DJ screams in agony, the mockhorror of his costume becomes actual horror. If one is so inclined, the interpretation that Judge Death brings the citizens of Mega-City One what they desire is not entirely implausible, and it is seriality that lends such appropriations credibility and weight. Figure 16. Serialized thematic and narrational patterns make it possible to appropriate the DJ’s death on richly symbolic terms. Page taken from John Wagner, Pat Mills, et al., Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 03 (Oxford: Rebellion, 2010 [1979/1980]) n.pag. Image © Rebellion. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, Charley’s War (1979–1985): An Explosion of Intrinsic Norms In many ways, Charley’s War differs considerably from the new wave serials analyzed so far. Written by Pat Mills and drawn by Joe Colquhoun, the series was published in Battle for an entire decade (1978–1988). For the British comics mainstream at the time, such longevity is remarkable and bespeaks the serial’s immense popularity. Protagonist Charley Bourne is very different from Major Eazy or Judge Dredd. Naïve and not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, he lies about his actual age to sign up as a soldier in the First World War. Nothing about his past is enigmatic; he comes from a working-class family, and before he was a soldier, he was an omnibus repairman. The narration will always let us in on his thoughts and emotions, providing captions and thought bubbles as well as giving Charley highly expressive facial features and body language. His character prototype, too, makes for effortless hypothesis formation: morally upright and highly resilient, Charley will (almost) always do his utmost to counter the horrors of war with humanity and dignity. Instead of focusing the complex narration on the protagonist, Charley’s War chooses to deploy its intrinsic norms elsewhere. As a matter of fact, it heightens its complexity in comparison to Major Eazy and Darkie’s Mob by inventing an impressive number of such intrinsic norms, constantly challenging the reader with new narrational patterns that must be learned to enjoy the serial. Often, Charley’s War is concerned with historiography and its status as narrative. Typically, it employs intrinsic norms to undercut staples of the conventional war-as-adventure story, such as the primacy of individual agency, nationalism, and the insistence on easily defined goals that must be reached. These intrinsic norms are then serialized, that is, repeated and varied with great insistence, to the point where it becomes impossible to enjoy the series without acknowledging and dealing with the self-referential aesthetic that points to the meta-historiographical theme. Readers are not merely engaged because they wonder what will happen to Charley Bourne, but also because the narration insistently cues two other questions: how will the story be told, and in how far is the manner of telling it significant? Practically all the intrinsic norms that Charley’s War employs aim at establishing a variety of different perspectives on World War I. However, the series is careful not to introduce any radical narrative strategies during the first few episodes. Instead, Mills and Colquhoun slowly prepare the way for self-referential norms that later come to dominate entire episodes. The first few installments of the series are devoted to (relatively) straight-

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forward war narratives that at first glance seem predicated on individual agency. In one of the early episodes, for example, a British soldier called Alfred is hit by a German sniper and bleeds to death in a shell crater. Charley is forced to watch him die and promises “to settle the hash of the Jerry” who shot Alfred (Mills and Colquhoun 2004: n.pag., 1). Charley believes that during a night raid on the enemy, he will have a chance to take revenge. And indeed, the story culminates in a duel between the sniper and Charley. Our protagonist wins the fight, but significantly, chance plays a major role in his victory. Struck by Charley’s bayonet, the German sniper tumbles down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck (Mills and Colquhoun 2004: n.pag., 4). Already this early in the serial, the intrinsic norm prescribing an ambivalent causal chain of events is in place. This norm calls into question the protagonist’s agency that we also identified in the Zeppelin example at the beginning of this chapter. For such details to become salient, they must be recognizably patterned and serialized— as indeed they are. The intrinsic norm of perspectivity that Mills and Colquhoun introduce on the episode’s final page is much more immediately effective (Mills and Colquhoun “August”: n.pag., figure 17). The British soldiers have returned from the successful night raid to celebrate their victory. An officer named Sergeant Tozer proclaims that during the next “big push,” British cannons will “shell the Jerry lines to bits,” which prompts the men to cheer (panel five). But the diagrammatic mise-en-page on the second half of the page immediately puts doubt on this propagandistic take on the war. The montage in panel six foregrounds spatiality; with its staggered representation of the dying soldiers, it invites comparison with the equally staggered preceding panel of the cheering soldiers. Taken on its own, this parallelism already suggests that the triumph is momentary and meaningless in the context of the larger war, as we know from our present-day perspective. But the narration nevertheless cues this reading repeatedly and makes it explicit by giving us an insight into the commanding officer’s thoughts, who is certain that “[w]hen the Battle of the Somme begins,” his men “will die on the poppy fields of France” (panel seven). Some might consider it a dramatic fault that the wording strongly implies our contemporary perspective on the First World War— we know how catastrophic this battle will be—but its effect cannot be debated: the triumph of the preceding story is severely compromised now that we are cued to consider it from our contemporary point of view. Such mise-en-page strategies quickly establish diagrammatic spatiality as a perspectivity cue. Even in these early episodes, we can find other examples that are subtler and more suggestive at the same time. The page

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Figure 17. An example of the often highly complex temporality of Charley’s War, cued in this case by foregrounded spatiality. Page taken from Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, Charley’s War: 2 June 1916–1 August 1916 (London: Titan Books, 2004) n.pag. Image © Rebellion. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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shown in figure 17 (Mills and Colquhoun “August”: n.pag.) puts considerable demands on readers, for example. Purely on a syuzhet/fabula level, it provides an immense amount of important information: in presenting us with a seemingly inconsequential conversation between soldiers, it (re-)establishes the somewhat antagonistic relationship between the characters of Ginger and Charley—Ginger uses a newspaper caricature to make fun of Charley (panels 1–3). It also introduces the character nicknamed “Pop,” a soldier belonging to the generation of Charley’s parents. In the following panels, varyingly mediated flashbacks provide Pop’s back story: his “missus got blown up in a shell factory explosion” and “his two boys were killed by poison gas” (panels 7–10). We are also shown, in a mixed analepsis, that the soldier called Lucky survived the attack during which Pop’s sons were killed (panels 8/9). The final panel presents us with an image of Pop’s boys in an official military photograph, while a caption in Charley’s handwriting provides yet another brief flashback, telling us that Pop “used to run the Pie and Mash shop down Kelvin Road” near where Charley lived in London (panel 10). The immediate purposes of this dense web of multimodal media, temporalities, and narrative framings are diverse: it establishes and re-establishes relationships and characters, providing strong first impressions for Pop upon which readers can base their hypotheses as to how his subplot will progress. It equally delivers some comic relief and appeals to both pathos and embodiment. The page also advances the series’ worldbuilding, showing how the war was represented in the media and by propaganda, introducing an older generation’s perspective on World War I, and foreshadowing the use of poison gas in future episodes. All these factors contribute to the steady, reliable construction of the fabula, although the density of information makes fabula assembly a demanding task. Importantly, the page can also be read as a diagrammatic montage, foregrounding its own multiperspectivity and complex mediation. Charley’s War itself, this intrinsic norm suggests, provides just one further perspective on World War I, or rather: it is a fragmentary compilation of many such perspectives. This is not to say that any of these perspectives are marked as being fundamentally unreliable. Rather, the serialized thematic pattern suggests that the many points of view evoked throughout Charley’s War are necessary to come to a well-rounded understanding of the First World War. The narration on this page also announces that Charley’s War is what we will call a network narrative. In a network narrative, as David Bordwell defines the term, characters share “more or less the same space-time

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framework,” that is, the same storyworld, but they “pursue discrete goals” (Bordwell “Poetics”: 199) that typically do not converge in a main causal line. For some of these characters, “lines of action intersect, in one-onone convergences or more inclusive relationships,” but some plots and protagonists may not meet at all. They may never even become aware of each other for the entire duration of the narrative. Intersections may be foreshadowed, as when characters set “appointments or deadlines …, but to a high degree the convergences are controlled by chance” (ibid.). Thus, in this shared storyworld, “some initially unconnected characters typically meet by accident” (ibid.), and they may just as quickly be separated again, and permanently so. The chaotic background of the First World War offers the ideal motivation for such strategies. Charley’s War is a reluctant network narrative, choosing to stay attached to its title character for long stretches of time and only occasionally branching out. This is likely because the British mode of practice at the time would not have tolerated a more fundamental dispersal of protagonists. Still, for a mainstream serial to change protagonists, sometimes for months on end, was a major feat at the time. Even today, the strategy puts considerable demands on readers. After all, every change in character attachment also changes the reading process considerably. In the context of Charley’s War and the British Invasion in general, it would be useful to differentiate between network narratives and nexus narratives. A nexus narrative will temporarily show all the characteristic features of a network narrative, but eventually, it will return to a single pre-established protagonist or group of protagonists who is often shown to be at the center of all intersecting causal lines. This narrative model and the even more challenging network narrative will be of great importance to many later works of the British Invasion. Mills and Colquhoun quickly develop a multitude of intrinsic norms that bring about changes in the narration’s character attachment. For example, many episodes center around a deserter from the French Legion called Blue (reprinted in Mills and Colquhoun “Blue’s Story”), while another sizable portion of the series is devoted to the experiences of Charley’s brother Wilfred in the Royal Air Force (reprinted in Mills and Colquhoun “Death”). Apart from these major shifts in perspective, Charley’s War is always liable to leave its protagonist behind abruptly for short or medium length stretches. Prior to the new wave anthologies, the British mode of practice would hardly have tolerated that a series switch protagonists. In the American mode of practice, such strategies were equally off limits.

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It is important to note that these shifts in character attachment have little in common with the American penchant for narrational omnipresence. As pointed out in Chapter 1, conventional comics typically only detach the narration from the protagonist(s) briefly to communicate all pieces of information necessary for the construction of the fabula. Character attachment is never foregrounded to draw attention to mediation or to create thematic patterns. Narrational omnipresence in the American mainstream is in the service of causality and individual agency, whereas in later chapters, Charley’s War often temporarily abandons the concept of an individualized protagonist entirely. For example, the series employs an intrinsic norm that we will term material exposition, which often delegates Charley to the sidelines. Consider an episode from a story line entitled “Operation Wotan” (figure 18; Mills and Colquhoun “October”: n.pag.). This entire installment is dedicated to the material realities of the trench war. “The brutality of trenchfighting has never been equaled, with men fighting in the mud in savage hand-to-hand combat,” a caption tells us (figure 18, panel 2). The accompanying visual narration shows us this material reality in horrifying detail. Colquhoun draws the entire episode in a particularly noisy style, overdetermining each panel with excessively muddy specifics and a multitude of figures. It thus becomes difficult to make out the action in each panel, since they are much less obviously pre-chunked for consumption than is normally the case. In other words, the noisy presentation constitutes an intrinsic norm that foregrounds the narrational process itself and needs to be interpreted—most likely in terms of a “realistic” representation of combat. As readers take in these first few panels, they will conclude that they are not going to learn anything much about Charley on this page. Instead, they are cued to grasp the rules of trench fighting, and their consequences for a conventional adventure plot. “A trench had to be taken, traverse by traverse … with dozens of bombs thrown in front of the attackers,” a caption in panel three tells us, and the visual narration shows three German soldiers doing exactly that. In the following panel, we see the results of their actions: a hand grenade exploding in mid-air, apparently after a British soldier has failed to throw it back in time, and another grenade falling to the ground, with yet another British soldier desperately trying to grab it and chuck it back. Again, these panels are dedicated to showing how a story of individual agency is unthinkable in a storyworld that obeys these material rules. Conventions must bow to blind chance and overwhelming physical force. The story drives this point home even further

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Figure 18. An example of material exposition in Charley’s War: the narration marginalizes the protagonist, dedicating the majority of the syuzhet space to the presentation of the material realities of the First World War. Page taken from Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, Charley’s War: 17 October 1916–21 February 1917 (London: Titan Books, 2006) n.pag. Image © Rebellion. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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by including and regularly referring to an actual map of the trench system (Mills and Colquhoun “October”: n.pag., 3). If we allow even just a few elements from the historical, material circumstances into the diegetic world, and agree to follow its rules, conventional narrative will break down. Consequently, the reader trying to spot Charley in this story will only find him in four out of 22 panels. He makes no meaningful contributions to the action. In combination, these intrinsic norms—noisy mise-en-page, material exposition, appeals to the body, and the absence of individual agency— constitute the “realism” of this episode of Charley’s War. As a thematic pattern, they potentially cue the interpretation that the conventional adventure story is inadequate as a tool of historiography. These intrinsic norms, especially the norm concerning material exposition, are repeated and varied again and again throughout the series. Charley’s War also consistently prompts readers to doubt the national(ist) emplotment of war at the same time as it undercuts its own genre. Instead, the narration serializes intrinsic norms that suggest we stop thinking of World War I in terms of a fight of nation against nation and focus on class conflict instead. More often than not, Charley’s upperclass officers are the working-class grunts’ worst enemies, not the German opposition. Men of privilege, frequently represented by a character called Lieutenant (later Captain) Snell, send soldiers to their death for a drink of water (Mills and Colquhoun “Return”: n.pag.) and ignore pleas for reinforcements because tea has yet to be served (Mills and Colquhoun “October”: n.pag.). This strategy of reframing the conflict in terms of class is not restricted to the British side, either. Time and again, the narration foregrounds that the Germans, too, are waging war with complete disregard for the lives of the working-class men who must bear the brunt of the fighting. For example, German officers send proletarian cooks, road diggers and supply bearers against the British to serve as cannon fodder (Mills and Colquhoun “October”: n.pag., 1). For the greater part, this pattern tailor-made for appropriations is predicated on the intrinsic norm for material exposition, and grounded in meticulous research. In one instance, the narration also employs metaphor to further the thematic patterning; it is here that this reading becomes exceedingly obvious. An episode of the serial is dedicated to a cricket match “between officers and men” (Mills and Colquhoun “Return”: n.pag., 1) in a supposedly “‘quiet’ sector of the grim Ypres salient” (ibid.). The similarities between the war and the match could hardly be any more evident, but Mills and Colquhoun still have the match interrupted by a

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German attack, which prompts swift retaliation by the British artillery. The dialogue drives the parallelism home: “The artillery are having their own private game over there, Sid,” Charley comments (panel 3; Mills and Colquhoun 2008: n.pag.). Nevertheless, the British Lieutenant Snell insists on continuing the match even though “those shells are coming awfully close,” declaring it “unthinkable” to “lose against the men” (panel 7). In some panels, the visual narration now becomes noisy and ambivalent: the same speed lines indicate the impact of shells and the trajectory of the cricket balls. The verbal narration subtly underscores this confusion, pointing out that “an artillery duel” begins “between the British battery and the unseen guns on the Messines ridge” (panel 3). In other words, it is never explicitly stated at whom the British guns are shooting. Inevitably, the scenario leads to the death of one of the working-class soldiers. Again, it is obvious that this intrinsic norm begs for interpretation; we are asked to reframe the First World War in terms of a conflict between upper-class and working-class. This desire for clarity can be attributed to three different factors. For one, for all its rebellious attitude, Battle Picture Weekly is a mainstream publication after all, and to some extent still subject to extrinsic norms that restrict ambiguity and subtlety. However much Charley’s War does away with redundancies and establishes highly demanding intrinsic norms, especially in later chapters, it is still beholden to a tradition that prizes unequivocal communication. On the other hand, it is essential to consider that these stories were largely intended for a youthful audience, and an allegorical reading that may appear self-evident to an adult will not necessarily be obvious to a 12-year-old. The very fact that an enjoyment of Charley’s War requires a basic grasp of the concept of allegory shows an immense rise in complexity, both compared to the American mode of practice and to the previous British mainstream norm. We also need to consider that the complex style of the British new wave aimed squarely at the construction of an inferred author function, or at the very least a distinct, somewhat sophisticated reputation for each anthology. This required a delicate balancing act between subtlety and easy interpretability.

Alan Moore, Garry Leach, Alan Davis and Chuck Beckum, Marvelman/Miracleman (1982–1985): Serial Complexity and Authorship While the working conditions at IPC made the complex serial strategies of Charley’s War and Judge Dredd possible, one should not infer that

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editors granted their creators complete autonomy. Alan Moore, who wrote serials such as The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984–1986) and Skizz (1983– 1994) for 2000AD, recalls that there was copious editorial interference. Worse still, IPC often changed scripts and entire pages without consulting the creators. There were limits, for example, to the reduction of redundancy that IPC would tolerate. In Moore’s final episode of Skizz, drawn by Jim Baikie, there is an emotional farewell sequence between the alien creature called Skizz and the girl who has been taking care of him throughout the series. Moore “just wanted them to look at each other, then he [Skizz] reaches forward, and they just kiss each other, and then he’s gone. There’s no words at all, just a three-panel silent sequence” (Moore and Leach “Dream”: 17). But when the writer received the finished story, “they’d put all these balloons in saying: ‘No words, Skizz. Just … farewell’” (ibid.). Moore was appalled that he would now be associated with such melodrama: “I mean, can you imagine that a big, strapping, working-class lad like myself would write dialogue like that?” (ibid.). Editorial interference was not just restricted to such details. Corporate structures still put considerable constraints on artistic freedom in almost every respect. And while IPC had been the first British mainstream publisher to provide creator credits in their publications, they still chose to retain the copyrights for their serials (cf. Bishop “Thrill-Power”: 38, Gray “Dead Roses”: 33). The stories writers like Moore and artists like Baikie produced would be owned by the corporation, based on a strict work for hire model. The previous generations of British comics artists had largely accepted this model, but the new wave creators were much less inclined to follow suit. After all, unlike their predecessors, they considered themselves artists, not artisans. Self-publishing endeavors and independent publishers sprang up to accommodate this new self-image. Dez Skinn’s Warrior is a case in point: the contributors to the anthology “retained ownership of the characters and strips they created” (Gray “Dead Roses”: 33). Vested with “full creative control over their work,” writers and artists “were allowed to develop original and sophisticated material,” at least as long as it fit within Warrior’s model of providing genre content for more mature audiences (ibid.). Warrior also took a stab at permanence, asking its creators to “produce self-contained story arcs, with a view that these would later be collected in book form” (ibid.). This is not a trivial detail. For one, it had consequences for the types of seriality that Warrior espoused: finite serials instead of potentially endless episodic narratives. But we also need to bear in mind that today’s practice of collecting comic books in hardcover or paperbacks was not at all common at the time—

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neither in the UK nor in the United States. Mainstream comic books were still largely ephemeral objects, with individual issues vanishing from newsstands quickly, never to return. By and large, the only way to acquire older episodes was to scour the back-issue bins in specialist shops. In short, an independent publishing venture such as Warrior offered an environment in which the hold of traditional practices was even less firm. For many of the Warrior serials, the result was a further radicalization of the strategies developed in the most important IPC anthologies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alan Moore soon proved to be Warrior’s most innovative and uncompromising creator with the serials V for Vendetta (drawn by David Lloyd, 1982–1988) and Marvelman (drawn by Garry Leach and Alan Davis, 1982–1985). The dates in parentheses chart the year from the first to the last installment of each series, and they also point to a decisive change in the new wave. V for Vendetta began serialization in Warrior, but its final episodes were published in the United States by DC Comics, with a major hiatus between 1984 (the year of the last Warrior episode) and 1989 (the year Moore and Lloyd brought the series to DC Comics). The publication history of Marvelman is much more convoluted; an ongoing legal dispute prevented reprints of the title for decades.3 Suffice to say that in 1985, this second Moore serial for Warrior was also picked up by an American publisher called Eclipse (cf. Ó Méalóid “Poisoned Chalice 9”). Moore continued to write the series until 1989, when he handed it over to his friend Neil Gaiman and new artist Mark Buckingham. For fear of legal action from Marvel Comics, Eclipse changed the titular character’s name to Miracleman (ibid.). At this point in the chronicle of the British new wave, we have therefore arrived at the point where the transnational genesis of these serials becomes impossible to overlook. It stands to be argued that neither the American mode of practice nor its British equivalent are in any way essentially American or British. Upon closer inspection, the American comics mainstream presents itself as much less culturally stable than supposed: (some of ) the superhero genre’s conventions, for example, could be conceived of as appropriated from 19th-century melodrama—the focus on the villain, the (largely) clearcut morals, the prevalence of damsels in distress, etc., lend weight to such a contention. And melodrama certainly is a transnational phenomenon, as it was adopted in different cultural contexts, but it remains without any readily identifiable national origin.4 The productive juxtaposition of visual and verbal narration is an entirely transnational practice, too, emerging with the advent of the modern media—there is no such thing

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as an “original” multimodal practice from which all other similar phenomena would have taken their initial cue. If we thus “interrogate the ‘naturalness’ of some of the borders, boundaries, and binaries that we may not have questioned very much in the past,” as Fisher- Fishkin proposes (“Transnational Turn”: 22), the identity of the American comics mainstream with the U.S. and the British mode of practice with the UK becomes a problem rather than a certainty. In how far, if at all, can we still speak of “American comics” and “British comics” from this point of view? The approach offered in this study presents a solid methodology to still differentiate between an American and a British mode of practice (as well as a British new wave) while carefully avoiding any essentialism(s). We have characterized the American mode of practice as a historically contingent set of material and narrational norms and principles, aiming at specific readerly effects. There is nothing fundamentally American about these norms and principles; neither are they, taken individually, unique to the United States. Canonical narration in the British mode of practice, for example, bears many similarities to the American mainstream: among many other things, the two practices share the primacy of causality and the basic principles of mise-en-page elaborated upon in the previous chapter. It differs in a number of respects, some of which have already been outlined in this chapter, and many more of which will be developed in the following pages. The notion of a historically variable mode of practice thus furnishes us with a means of framing cultural and economic activities without reifying them in terms of an essential national identity. A thoroughly historicized poetics also gives us precise tools to identify what Miettinen calls the “multilayered transaction of creators, texts, and capital that flows across various national borders” (Miettinen “Truth”: 15) in terms of concrete narrational practice. Thus, as we identify, analyze, and catalogue continuities as well as deviations from norms, the “multidirectional flows of people, ideas, and goods and the social, linguistic, cultural, and economic crossroads generated in the process” (Fishkin “Transnational Turn”: 22) become concrete. In the early 1980s, we witness changes in the American comics mainstream that are predicated on these same mechanisms of circulation and hybridization. The group style of the British new wave and the American mainstream mode of practice entered negotiations with each other, and in the process, the face of mainstream comics was changed considerably, especially in the United States. This is not at all the first time British and American comics have met. Marvelman itself provides an example of this, since the series is not Moore, Leach and Davis’s original creation. Rather, it was one of the very

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few actual British superhero comics, originally serialized from 1954 to 1963. Its publisher, L. Miller & Son, had been in the business of reprinting the popular American superhero series Captain Marvel in the early 1950s. When reprint rights were withdrawn in 1954, Miller decided to replace Captain Marvel with a new creation called Marvelman, a character who was, in fact, a shameless copy of the original American superhero. Surprisingly, this practice “seems to have escaped the notice of the litigious US publishers,” since “Miller published 346 issues of Marvelman and the same number of [spinoff title] Young Marvelman between 1954 and 1963” (Chapman “British Comics”: 176). Chapman notes that the transnational origins of the title are quite conspicuous in the series itself, which represents “an uneven mix of American and British influences” (ibid.). The original Marvelman stories from the 1950s and 1960s blend “American locations—cityscapes of skyscrapers and streetcars—and adopted American slang (‘Holy Macaroni!’)” with telltale uses of British idioms (ibid.), for example. How significant is the choice of Marvelman for a 1980s revival from the transnational point of view then, and for the poetics of the British Invasion? An answer to this question requires a short digression into comics history. In both the UK and the United States, comics were the product of 19th-century newspaper and magazine culture.5 And yet comics creators in the United States and the UK were working according to somewhat different sets of norms and principles. For one, the protagonists of British popular culture in the late 19th and early 20th century differed considerably from those found in the United States. The UK publishing industry made great strides to ensure that the scenarios and heroes reflected their readers’ daily lives. This often included the mild subversion of authority figures. Ally Sloper, the hero of an early comic book-like serial that debuted in 1867, is a case in point. Sloper “represents everything that the hardworking, respectable working classes should not be” (Chapman “British Comics”: 20): he is a lazy vagrant and occasional conman with no work ethics to speak of. Sloper can be called the role model that large portions of British comics would aspire to in the 20th century. On top of that, British comic books exhibited the class consciousness that is so typical of British fictions, and a tendency towards social realism (see Gravett and Stanbury “Great British Comics”: 20). Anti-authoritarian attitudes would remain a staple as well, as can be seen in anthologies such as The Dandy and Beano, but also in Charley’s War.6 These narrative norms were not conducive to establishing a niche for superhero comics. And yet despite all this, Alan Moore keeps affirming his desire to

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write the Marvelman serial in interviews from the early 1980s. “My greatest personal hope is that someone will revive Marvelman, and I’ll get to write it,” he says in a 1981 conversation with David Lloyd (Moore “Writer’s Viewpoint”: 7). Bearing in mind the context provided, how can we frame this wish to restore a relatively obscure title to the limelight? Why would Moore want to work in a genre that the discourse has clearly marked as American and that has never been particularly successful in the British comics mainstream? Part of the reason must lie in a childhood and youth that was rich in transnational experiences. Moore grew up in a postwar Britain that saw more and more products of American popular culture arrive in the UK. At the same time, the original “British Invasion” of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones produced music that was impossible to classify as “specifically British” or “specifically American.” Globalization brought American mainstream comics to British newsstands, too. Moore was an aficionado of the superhero genre. He “became a Marvel zombie, which was an enjoyable thing to be up ’til about 1968” (Moore “Guy Lawley and Steve Whitaker”: 27). The wish to write a superhero title can therefore be explained from personal attachment to and profound knowledge of the genre’s history, as well as a cosmopolitan attitude that resulted in the wish to escape the generic and cultural boundaries of the British mode of practice. We might also consider this seemingly unlikely move from the point of view of authorship. The writers and artists of Battle, Action and 2000AD had already devised methods that solicit the reader to devise interpretations and construct an inferred author function. Practically all the narrational means detailed in the preceding chapters contributed to this development. These strategies had no small part in raising the cultural prestige and economic cachet of British comics artists. They had also been applied to practically all the major British (boys) comics genres at the time: war, science fiction, action-adventure. There was hardly any genre left in which a new writer could have made his mark. It was therefore only natural for a newcomer like Moore to ask the question Bordwell posits as central to the artistic process: “What is there for me to do?” (Bordwell “Film Style”: 151; see also Chapter 4). For Moore, the answer lay in setting his sights on a different genre, and on the American mode of practice. The new wave’s methods are largely self-referential and predicated on a collision of different means of emplotment. Mills, Wagner, Grant et al. foreground the necessity of asking which kinds of narratives and protagonists are more productive, morally sound, and therefore worthy of our allegiance. Charley’s War, Judge Dredd and their like solicit such ques-

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tions, too, but these serials work largely from within the British mode of practice, and with or counter its historically specific means. Of course, there is a case to be made that these series’ metafictional operations, too, are based on transnational negotiations. After all, Major Eazy productively synthesizes British war comics, the Italian Western, and the American war film, all of which are themselves amalgamates of other genres and narrative traditions. Judge Dredd relies on our recognition of character types, scenes, and conventions from American films like Dirty Harry (dir. Don Siegel, 1971), which in turn had taken cues from Italian and Japanese genre films. The list could be extended indefinitely, and the idea of a specifically “national” culture would only be further complicated by more examples. The difference to Marvelman lies in the extent to which the transnational origins come to the fore. By engaging a genre identified as so profoundly American, and with the toolbox of the British new wave, Moore effectively inaugurated the British Invasion. He would flaunt the clash of the American mode of practice with the new wave’s group style, cueing new interpretive appropriations and compelling the reader to construct an inferred author function with even greater insistence.7 The application of the new wave’s strategies to the superhero genre would invite one interpretation above all: the notion that these techniques and their effects were somehow particularly British. The creators of the British Invasion fostered this image as much as they could. First and foremost, they filled their works with copious markers of British identity—Marvelman takes place in a recognizable contemporary Britain, and V for Vendetta is a compendium of the more oppressive aspects of London architecture, for example. But they also emphasized their methods’ supposed Britishness in what Mittell calls “orienting paratexts” (Mittell “Complex TV,” ch. 8). These are materials “that explicitly strive to continue storyworlds across platforms” (ibid.). They “exist outside the diegetic storyworld, providing a perspective for viewers to help make sense of a narrative world” (ibid.). Very often, orienting paratexts are creator interviews or essays. In a 1984 interview, for example, Moore voices his apprehension that V for Vendetta (artist David Lloyd, 1982–1989) “might be too British to translate well” (Moore “Guy Lawley and Steve Whitaker”: 34). He cites American star artist Frank Miller as among the book’s fans, but slyly adds that Miller “had one problem. He didn’t know who Guy Fawkes was!” (ibid.). This is indeed problematic if one considers that the protagonist of V for Vendetta wears a Guy Fawkes mask throughout the whole series, and never takes it off. The performance of Britishness thus began quite early for the creators of the British Inva-

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sion, and nudged readers towards a specific perception of their work. V for Vendetta, Marvelman, and the later titles were to be considered other to the American comics mainstream. They were meant to be considered difficult, challenging, and in need of copious annotation—especially for American readers. How does reading Marvelman differ from reading Charley’s War or Judge Dredd, apart from the obvious change in genre and the interpretive prejudice that the choice of genre and orienting paratexts try to instill in the reader? The early IPC new wave serials like Major Eazy are characterized by a careful, slow deployment of intrinsic norms; usually, only one or two innovations are brought to bear at once. This pattern changes with the arrival of Charley’s War, which serializes the use of an immense variety of innovations, if with a constrained number of potential thematic mappings. Judge Dredd constitutes a further radicalization, since its complexity centers on the protagonist, making the process of assembling a clear-cut fabula more difficult and continually forcing us to reflect upon our allegiance to Dredd. By blending conventional genre stories with much less reliable narratives, Dredd serializes the pleasures of confusion and anxiety. Marvelman takes these strategies to the point of overdetermination. Practically with each new episode, readers need to learn anew how to read the series because of the sheer number of new intrinsic norms that are deployed. The thematic and operational patterns that the series accumulates soon become overwhelming, to the point where it is no longer possible to identify merely two or three dominant strands, as in the case of Dredd or Charley’s War. In short, making meaning becomes much more difficult. Synthesizing a single coherent interpretation from the onslaught of cues is a daunting, if not impossible task. Most of this complexity stems from the specific type of temporality at work in other new wave titles, but very much taken to new extremes in Marvelman. The first story arc of the series is predicated on an enormous enigma, a giant, diffused gap introduced in the first two episodes. Marvelman opens this gap by way of an irritating prologue: an 11-page story that seemingly mimics the mise-en-page, graphical style and narrational mode of the original 1950s serial.8 Consider the first page of the prologue, for example (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag.). The visual style is heavily reduced, almost cartoonish. Panels are conventionally chunked, with little extraneous noise. The mise-en-page perfectly captures the American mode of practice, in particular the convention of the selfreferential exposition, by repeating the series title in the upper right corner, for example, and by arousing interest as to the narrative’s future:

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“What will it [the future] be like? Can even the mightiest men in the universe protect us from its onslaught?” a caption asks. Even the focus on the villain’s plans is expertly imitated. The narration immediately introduces a certain Kommandant Garrer “of the science Gestapo” in the second panel, who announces his plan to “conquer the world of yesterday” through time travel. On the following pages, Garrer’s “chrono cruisers” arrive in the past, where the Marvelman/Miracleman family will be tasked with stopping the invasion. But this first page also contains irritating cues that break the illusion of perfect imitation. They clearly foreground the system of time. The original episodic serial would likely not have included references to specific dates; and yet, the opening splash panel tells us that the story takes place in 1956, making the year the largest piece of expository prose on the page. The caption above the date even tells us that we are to consider “1956” the chapter title. This is the first hint at what Atkinson calls “an ontological shift” that the series has undergone (Atkinson “Time of Heroes”: 49). By acknowledging that 26 years have passed since the publication of the original story, the narration leaves us to surmise that Marvelman “is no longer suspended in a world where time is limited to narrative evens, which can be endlessly cycled and repeated” as in the superhero serials of the American mode of practice (ibid.). The very notion of a Marvelman story being divided into separate books and chapters should arouse curiosity, too. After all, such differentiation implies anything but an episodic series that reverts to the status quo with each new installment—the avowed preference of the original serial. In other words, the narration is already inviting us to an interpretive mapping. We are to consider the following pages from the point of view of (both generic and actual) historiography, and to look out for further clues that this prologue can be productively framed as commentary on the original Marvelman tales. However, for some readers who are invested in the history of the Marvelman series, the interpretive process might be complicated even further. They might realize that this mysterious prologue is, in fact, not a pastiche of the 1950s comic book at all; it is a reprint of a 1956 story originally written and drawn by Don Lawrence (Ó Méalóid “Poisoned Chalice 9”). Except for the new expository materials and a new final page, the episode has not been changed. Depending on the reader’s knowledge, the story thus initiates similar but different operational and interpretive questions: is this is a straight pastiche or a reprint? Why are we presented with this dated material, pastiche or otherwise? Will the series continue to present itself in terms of playful imitation? How can we

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make the ambivalent thematic cues given on the first page meaningful? Characteristically, Marvelman makes readers wait until it provides further cues that confirm the meta-historiographic reading strategy as valid. A suitable term for this strategy would be pattern delay—that is, the systematic delay of generic or operational patterns that confirm or disconfirm the audience’s hypotheses. Such spacing out of cues becomes an intrinsic norm in itself: if readers must wait for the confirmation of their predictions or at least the continuation of the pattern, the delay casts doubt on their hypotheses and thus complicates the reading process. Owing to its nature as a reprint, much of the rest of the chapter is indeed a conventional 1950s superhero yarn; only the time travel mechanics of the plot serve to sustain the foregrounding of the system of time. The Marvelman family battles Harrer and his minions. There are some complications, but these are quickly overcome. Finally, Harrer is defeated by way of some further time travel, as Marvelman and Young Marvelman journey to the future and prevent Harrer’s army from embarking for the past in the first place. Understandably, Kid Marvelman is somewhat confused: “S-so…. Garrer was never here, because he never left 1981! It sounds unbelievable…” (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag., 7). Marvelman’s reply finally continues the meta-historiographic pattern begun on the first page: “Maybe so, Kid. But that’s the way it was…. Or was it?” (ibid.). If readers have picked up on the newly added thematic cues of the episode’s first page, this conclusion should become salient as more than a conventional coda to a superhero story. It inaugurates a pattern of prompts that is meant to cast doubt on the reliability of this representation of the past, and representations of the past in general. Readers who are aware that the story is a reprint will again have a similar but different experience. The reframing of the tale as the new series’ prologue and the suggestive time travel theme draw attention to the time that has elapsed since its original publication. The narration suggests that there is a different way of reading the narrative, a hidden layer of symptomatic meaning that only needs to be uncovered. In other words, both for longtime readers of Marvelman and those coming to the chapter without any historical knowledge of the series, the past becomes unreliable—specifically, as will be seen later on, the period between 1957 and 1981.9 The entire prologue could even be read allegorically, as both an announcement of theme and apology to nostalgic readers: the new version of Marvelman will be invasive and do injury to past representations of the character by cueing unsympathetic symptomatic readings. Importantly, the prompts for such thematic mappings are delivered

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in an oblique fashion. No captions explicitly announce or even imply the theme, and the narration never gives any indication whether it is indulging in pastiche or recycling an original 1950s story. First-time readers might not even pick up on these prompts. Most will likely have to revisit the prologue at some point to construct its significance within the larger serial. For now, this chapter offers precious few hints as to how the series will be narrated—surely the new Marvelman will not merely engage in pastiche—, and the few existing cues point towards a highly complex use of the system of time. At this point, it is helpful to differentiate between three types of reader hypothesis. There are fabula or comprehension hypotheses, that is, surmises concerned with plot progression. Aside from offering a clearcut episodic fabula, this first chapter of Marvelman leaves the reader with few hints as to how the story will proceed. In fact, given its retro stylings, there is even considerable doubt that this sequence will be integrated into the new series’ larger fabula. Instead, readers are prompted to formulate operational hypotheses, that is, to guess at how the series will continue to be narrated. The prologue also initiates thematic hypotheses: the audience will start to pick out thematic patterns and attempt interpretive mappings. Clearly, this first chapter of Marvelman favors operational and thematic hypotheses over fabula hypotheses. The following chapter will confirm the operational hypothesis that the series grants pride of place to the system of time. It is immediately apparent that there is barely any visual continuity between the two installments. Consider figure 19, a page depicting a dream of Michael Moran, the human alter ego of Marvelman (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag.). Garry Leach’s mise-en-page is much noisier than the preceding chapter’s, reveling in minute details that are not necessarily narrationally salient, and rendering anatomy much more precisely. Even though the compositions and coloring still heavily chunk the panels for consumption, the reading process is thus slowed down considerably. The first panel of the page is spatialized, offering a montage that helps identify the entire sequence as a dream. The dream images themselves are horrendous, making appeals to the reader’s own embodiment that would have been out of place in the pastiche sequence: they show human figures in dissolution and convulsing in pain and shock (panels four and five). Without having read any of the captions, the mise-en-page therefore already furthers our previous operational and thematic hypotheses. Namely, we now surmise that the narration is asking us to differentiate between a “realistic” mode of representation and an “historical and unreliable” mode by comparing

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their wildly different narrational styles. Thematically, this juxtaposition does not just weaken the authority of the prologue as a reliable representation; it also destabilizes the “realistic” mode’s claims to verisimilitude. This last interpretive step is not strictly necessary, of course, and strictly belongs to the realm of interpretive appropriations. As if formulating these difficult operational hypotheses were not enough, the narration also deploys the intrinsic norm for inferential exposition on the page. A caption in the first panel tells us, “He [the protagonist Michael Moran] is not alone. Like firebirds in red and yellow, two other figures soar beside him. He cannot see their faces.” The visual narration is equally suppressive, showing a yellow figure below the caption but failing to make it easily identifiable. Readers are left to draw conclusions on their own: very likely, the red figure is Young Marvelman, who wears a red costume, and the yellow figure is Kid Marvelman, whose superhero suit is yellow.10 Michael Moran, Marvelman’s alter ego, seems to be dreaming of a catastrophic past event, an explosion in space with unknown consequences. On the preceding page, the chapter title has informed us that the time is 1982, announcing a considerable gap between the prologue and the present day. Apparently, the dream sequence is meant as a first effort to fill this diffuse gap, but the narration is being troublingly suppressive. At the end of the dream sequence, we have no idea whether Young Marvelman and Kid Marvelman survived the incident, when it took place, and what happened in the many intervening years. Its status as a dream and the fragmentary style even put doubt on the veracity of the few factual cues that we are given. After this onslaught of intrinsic norms, the following pages make use of more conventional expository techniques and present us with a middleaged Michael Moran living in a decidedly familiar 1980s Britain. He wakes up from his nightmare with a migraine. He has trouble accepting changing gender roles: “I should be the one who earns the money, not you,” he tells his wife (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag., 4). Moran works as a journalist, and in this first regular episode, he is sent to report about an antinuclear protest at a nuclear power station. Most importantly, he seems oblivious to the fact that he is, in fact, Marvelman. Having forgotten that the magic word “Kimota”—“Atomik” spelt backwards—has the power to Opposite: Figure 19. The diagrammatic mise-en-page asserts the system of time’s dominance in this sequence. Page taken from Alan Moore and Garry Leach, Miracleman Book One (Marvel, 2014 [1982]) n.pag. Image © Marvel Characters.

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change him into the invincible superhero, he has lived as an ordinary human being for decades. This discovery further solidifies the notion of the temporal gap between 1957 and 1981 as the series’ central conceit. As terrorists try to take control of the power station, Moran is taken prisoner and “dragged through a swing door” with glass windows, the writing on which reads “LAKESMERE ATOMIC POWER STATION AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag.). Once through the door, “ATOMIC,” now in reverse, reads “CIMOTA,” of course. Inevitably, Moran’s inner superhero is revived. While cleverly varied, this memory loss scenario and subsequent recovery is a staple of the superhero genre. In other words, Marvelman, too, relies upon the pattern of rhythmical alteration of intrinsic norms and predictable sequences, especially at the beginning of the serial. The enigma of the large temporal gap remains firmly in place, and the rest of the series’ first major story arc is devoted to filling it. After the first two episodes, the fabula questions cued by the gapping are clear: why did Michael Moran forget his superhero identity? What happened to Kid Marvelman and Young Marvelman? What is the story behind the traumatic incident that Michael Moran has been dreaming about? And what became of the original series’ extended cast? It is crucial to note how these questions will be answered. The narration will deliver answers to all of them, but the historical gap will never be entirely closed. Instead, the answers evoke new, more specific questions. Typically, these will be left permanently open. The fate of Jonathan Bates alias Kid Miracleman is the first example of this intrinsic norm that makes the gap permanent. Bates survived the explosion in space that Michael Moran has seen in his dream, and he did not forget about his superhero identity like his mentor. He grew up as the only being with superhuman powers on the planet, and as Moran comes to visit him, it is revealed that he has become an extremely wealthy businessman, residing in an immense skyscraper. The visual narration thus amasses intertextual cues that prepare readers for the coming revelation: the genius industrialist is a very common supervillain prototype, best exemplified by Superman’s arch enemy, Lex Luthor. Bates’s skyscraper is shown as a suitably Gothic locale, first introduced in an intimidating low angle long shot against a gloomy sky (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag., 6). All the signs point towards the fact that Bates has taken a villainous turn, and the narration swiftly confirms it: despite Bates’s declaration that he has lost his superhuman powers, Michael Moran discovers that his former junior partner never reverted to his human body, preferring to stay

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superhuman permanently. Upon this revelation, the inevitable battle between Marvelman and Bates ensues. This causal chain is perfectly conventional and unsurprising, and as such it softens the blow of the many violations against the American mode of practice. For one, Bates’s turn towards evil is permanent, and thus violates the practice’s extrinsic character norm that dictates no major deviations from an established character prototype. For the time being, Bates’s change is also left largely unexplained. In other words, the question evoked by the gapping technique becomes more specific, changing from “What happened to Bates?” to “Why has Bates become a villain?” The visual narration has offered up some conventional if ambivalent cues that might answer this question. Greed for profit may have corrupted him, for example. But the reader will soon be confronted with the possibility—later, the reality—that this change will never be fully explained. As the enigma remains firmly in place, the past becomes an engine producing ambiguous cues for interpretive mappings, not definitive narrative statements that help predict the future. The narration is quick to offer opportunities for explication(s). The fight scene ends on a familiar note, that is, on a causal connection that takes individual agency out of the equation. Like Moran, Bates has a magic word that turns him into a superhuman (and back). It is, quite plainly, “Kid Miracleman/Marvelman.” The villain almost manages to kill Marvelman, but in his moment of triumph, Bates launches into a monologue, accidentally mentions his own secret superhero identity, and reverts to his human body (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag.). Surprisingly, it is that of the child he had left behind years ago; Bates’s human body has not matured like his superhuman body. Astute readers will observe that our superhero protagonist has made no actual contribution to this outcome. Chance is the decisive factor in this causal chain, again undermining the American mode of practice. The fact that Bates’s human alter ego is a child begging Marvelman not to hit him and asserting his innocence initiates a new pattern of cues. First of all, this turn of events evokes new fabula hypotheses based on the question “Is the child lying?” Very quickly, the narration assures us that there is no reason to believe that the 12-year-old shares the villainous attitude of its superhuman equivalent. Young Bates is indeed perfectly harmless. Instead of pursuing this angle, we must formulate other fabula hypotheses: when will the child’s evil Doppelgänger emerge again, if at all? Any answer to this question must hinge on an operational hypothesis. What is the intrinsic norm governing the release of evil adult Bates? For

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now, the narration provides no answer to this question, leaving us with the sole and rather troubling hint that chance might play a central role. This makes the child a largely unpredictable factor in the ongoing narrative. The narration also starts cueing interpretive hypotheses. If Bates has indeed remained a child, should we take this as a hint helping to explain his alter ego’s change? Readers might feel inclined to attempt an interpretive appropriation based on (folk) psychology to answer the hermeneutic pressure the enigma exerts. How would an actual 12-year-old react to the permanent removal of all checks and balances? What does (folk) psychology say about the moral development of children? Can we draw connections to narratives with (somewhat) similar scenarios, for example, Golding’s Lord of the Flies? In later chapters, the narration will provide a stream of further cues that encourage an explication of Bates’s development, but never enough to attain the status of fact. Kid Miracleman will remain a highly ambiguous character until the end. As a further complication, this revelation of innocence cues readers to question their (non)allegiance with the character. The brutal adult incarnation of Bates is clearly marked to be morally repellent, but the crying child makes an appeal to our empathy. This constant test of allegiance will be serialized, too. The victorious conclusion of the fight scene, a mostly unambiguous convention in the American mode of practice, thus becomes a multiple source of anxiety for the reader in Marvelman, overdetermining the syuzhet presentation with a mass of ambiguous cues. For the rest of Alan Moore’s run on the series, Marvelman will be predicated on this central strategy of rendering the past enigmatic and unreliable. The chapters focusing on Bates can, in fact, be considered a mere prelude to the series’ treatment of its protagonist. In rapid succession, the remaining major questions evoked by the series’ gapping strategy are answered with characteristic ambivalence. In the chapter entitled “Zarathustra” (reprinted in Moore and Leach “Dream”), Marvelman is given to understand that the stories of the original 1950s series never actually happened. Rather, the Marvelman family was subject to a cruel military experiment meant to breed superhumans (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag.). To “fully control the thought processes and motivations of these potentially catastrophic creatures, an entirely artificial reality set” was constructed. The protagonists were put through “a juvenile but effective scenario in which the creatures believe that they have been made into ‘super-heroes’ by a semi-mystical entity named ‘Guntag Borghelm’” (ibid., 2). Under heavy sedation, our heroes experienced “fantasies” containing

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“deliberate contradictions” meant “to stretch the subjects’ credibilities to the fullest.” These superhero scenarios were meant to program them with an “artificial belief-system that will endure under stress” (ibid., 3). In a particularly cruel twist, these experiments were led by one Emil Gargunza, a man who has not merely lent his name to Marvelman’s 1950s nemesis, but also his appearance. The traumatic explosion in space that Marvelman has been dreaming about was the British military’s doing: having decided to terminate the experiment, Gargunza sent the Marvelman family off on one final adventure in space. The nuclear blast was meant to kill the supermen. This reframing of the series’ continuity, for all its daring, contains reassuringly conventional cues. The plot in which a villain brainwashes the hero is somewhat familiar from conservative superhero comics; our analysis of the American mode of practice contained at least one example of this trope in action. Gargunza’s previous status as villain remains in place, too. The chapter thus provides a solid foundation for the reader to predict that Marvelman will confront and battle the villain because of his deeds, and this will indeed be the case. This is the only consolation that the narration has to offer. Moore and Davis subvert the brainwashing trope by extending the duration of the ploy massively—it now encompasses the entire original run of 1950s and 1960s Marvelman stories. Gargunza’s monologue serves a double function. It provides fabula information that (partly) fills the historical gap, but most of all, it cues thematic mappings. In fact, Gargunza’s choice of words is highly reminiscent of narratological terminology and ideological criticism. In how far do the old Marvelman episodes put a strain on our suspension of disbelief? What are the “deliberate contradictions” in their plots that Gargunza mentions? And can these tales really be read as ideological indoctrination, “juvenile but effective” in creating easily manipulable human automatons? In other words, the 1980s Marvelman picks up on the American mode of practice’s self-referential strategy of demanding that readers accumulate a body of knowledge about comics history. Crucially, Moore and Davis extend this body of knowledge. They ask that readers take inventory of the original Marvelman’s poetics, and that they formulate a moral and ideological critique, either affirming or disconfirming what Gargunza proposes. The narration suggests such readings time and again, for example by presenting the whole of the chapter as a series of flashbacks within flashbacks, foregrounding mediation. Apart from these thematic mappings, what is the effect of this revelation on the reading process? Crucially, it renders the protagonist

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ambiguous. How will Michael Moran react to the fact that his past is a construction, his identity a conventional superhero prototype? Do the predictive models for his character type still hold? It turns out that Moore and Davis use this fundamentally troubling reframing of the past as psychological motivation to further destabilize the protagonist, and consequently the process of hypothesis formation. From this point onwards, the narration makes a point of demonstrating that Moran will sometimes behave like a conventional superhero, but increasingly, his actions will not be predictable in terms of generic conventions and extrinsic norms. This unreliability is further underlined by yet another pattern of cues suggesting that Moran’s human and superhuman incarnations are, in fact, separate and very different people. In turn, this implies that the reader needs two different predictive models if he is to come to terms with the character(s). From the first pages of chapter two, the narration also introduces an intrinsic norm for physicality that equally complicates the process of hypothesis formation. When Michael Moran, turned into Marvelman for the first time in decades, encounters his wife Liz, the visual narration shows the couple in intimate embrace (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag., 6). The verbal narration grants us insight into Liz’s thoughts and emotions. Her appraisal of the situation is overwhelmingly physical: “He [Marvelman/Michael Moran] holds her, and his touch is frictionless as mercury. The restrained power in his arms makes her feel like glass” (ibid.). Readers are left to draw their own conclusions. Mercury, after all, is a highly toxic element that produces noxious fumes and is poisonous upon skin contact. Liz’s feeling that she is “like glass” likewise implies immense danger—a false, even accidental move by Michael might kill her. In short, the verbal narration complicates readers’ response to the visual narration. We are prompted to adopt Liz’s embodied perceptions and emotional response. The conventional image of an embrace is thus destabilized; the visual representation will likely cue anxiety rather than solace and warmth. The narration also encourages readers to adopt an outside perspective on the superhero protagonist, that is, Liz’s: without any insights into Marvelman’s emotional and intellectual life, he thus becomes even more of a liability to both the “normal” human characters and to the process of hypothesis formation. From the first pages of the narrative, Michael Moran therefore emerges as a potential threat because of his superhuman physicality and because of the relative lack of narrational depth for his character. That this danger may be involuntary makes his character yet more difficult to gauge for readers.

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This pattern is sustained throughout the series by different means, and mostly, the narration will aim at establishing “realistic” physicality as an all-encompassing intrinsic norm. When Marvelman battles Bates for the first time, the supervillain grabs a child and hurls it out of one of the skyscraper’s windows (Moore and Leach “Dream”: n.pag.). Marvelman manages to save the boy; the visual narration shows this in a series of panels suggesting that we view these proceedings from the point of view of the mother. The angle on the action does not change on the page’s first four panels, presenting the mother’s head in close-up and the superhero’s actions in a long shot, largely obscured by the distance and falling rain. The mise-en-page further suggests the mother’s subjective view of the scene by chunking the dialogue into small parcels and spreading it out over the panels. The noisy presentation, shot size and heavy chunking imply that the action moves too fast for her to fully comprehend. When Marvelman returns the child to her, the superhero has to admit that the boy “might have broken a couple of ribs” due to “the speed he was travelling” (panel four). As far as physical verisimilitude goes, this seems a likely outcome; if a child’s body moving in freefall were suddenly stopped by a practically inert body like Marvelman’s, a few broken ribs amount to a happy ending. However, in the next panel, the mother cannot help but call Marvelman a “bloody monster” despite the fact that the hero has saved her child’s life (panel five). The mise-en-page that strongly suggests we adopt her subjectivity makes an appeal to the readers’ emotions and embodiment, compelling them to adopt the mother’s point of view. In sum, this sequence foregrounding the intrinsic norm for physicality further erodes our trust in Marvelman. The norm is also complicated by another factor: it does not always apply, despite the narration’s best efforts to pretend otherwise. Marvelman contains any number of sequences— superhero battles and otherwise—that function according to a more traditional superhero physicality, showing bodies that might scratch and bruise, but are more robust than one would suspect from sequences such as the battle between Marvelman and Bates. In other words, the narration makes use of a fluctuating norm for physicality, again complicating the process of reception considerably. Readers do not simply have to surmise how a “realistic” body would react, they also need to predict when verisimilar embodiment will apply. Piling such intrinsic norms on top of each other, the series works hard at escalating the reader’s anxiety levels. The chapters following the great reveal of Marvelman’s past further exploit the diffuse temporal gap,

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devoting much space to flashbacks that explore different characters’ back stories. Notably, we learn more about Gargunza, whose origin story is littered with Cold War references. Again, it is worth reaffirming that this obsession with history and its mediation directly opposes the temporality of (most of ) the American mode of practice. In this respect, too, readers’ expectations of a superhero story are undermined. These chapters also serve as delay for the inevitable confrontation between Marvelman and Gargunza. While the preceding episodes have worked at eroding our faith in the protagonist’s predictability, his actions are nevertheless shocking. He brutally murders Gargunza’s guards (Moore “Red King”: 76), proving that the hints that he may abuse his powers involuntarily were mere red herrings. When he finally discovers the villain in his hideout, Marvelman carries Gargunza into Earth’s orbit, kisses his creator good-bye and throws him back down to earth. In a harrowing panel sequence, we witness Gargunza burning up upon reentry into the stratosphere, until in the final panel, his charred pelvic bone impacts the earth (Moore “Red King”: 82/83). This macabre detail, too, alongside the kiss in the stratosphere, leaves itself wide open for interpretive mappings. Readers might construe these cues in terms of intertextual references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, which characterizes the relationship between the monster and its creator in terms of father and son. The fact that only Gargunza’s pelvis remains may suggest psychosexual readings. Both these explications may help readers come to terms with Marvelman’s unsettling behavior, but importantly, they do not resolve its ambiguity, moral or otherwise. While the narration will occasionally allay the readers’ anxiety by referring to superhero conventions—these early Marvelman stories by Moore culminate in an apocalyptic final battle with Bates, the former Kid Marvelman—it is nevertheless clear by this point that the project of overdetermination and subversion of genre norms is aiming for a zero point at which the story will no longer be recognizable as part of the conventional superhero genre. Once Bates is out of the way, and with him the final clearly identifiable genre trope, Marvelman effectively takes over Earth and remakes it in his own image. The series thus also disavows the fundamental extrinsic norm dictating that the superhero react to outside pressures instead of being proactive, and embarks on a thought experiment of a different kind: what would a storyworld look like if this extrinsic norm were suspended? These continuing installments will focus heavily on the “test of allegiance” model, devising copious intrinsic norms to distance the reader from the protagonist’s actions and invoke moral assess-

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ment.

Summary: New Wave, New Paradigmatic Options “In the end,” Alan Moore asserts in the 1985 essay Writing for Comics, “it is effect which governs the success of an individual piece of artwork or a whole artform, and while abstract critical considerations concerning the inherent quality of a work might give us a few useful handles with which to grasp and appreciate a work more fully, art still succeeds or fails in terms of the actual effect it has upon the individual members of its audience” (Moore “Writing for Comics”: 5/6). The preceding section showed how the British new wave were writing for specific effects, making use of strategies that quickly come to characterize a group style. For all its complexity and radical design, Marvelman must therefore not be considered an entirely unique work of genius. Rather, the series is a momentary point of culmination in a paradigmatic shift in the British and the American modes of practice. The British new wave was only able to (partly) work against established practices in the UK because of certain historical and material circumstances, e.g., a generational changing of the guards inside publishing houses. Its success was also predicated on the slow introduction of intrinsic norms. By serializing these norms one at a time, Mills, Wagner, et al. gradually got an impressionable young readership used to narrational innovation and challenge. Over the course of five years, 1977–1982, the developments escalated, and extrinsic norms started to topple much more rapidly, to the point where a creator like Alan Moore was allowed to dismantle the superhero genre until it became practically unrecognizable. It is nevertheless important to assert that the new wave did not entirely redefine the entire British comics mainstream: these works were very much isolated phenomena, constricted to a few anthologies and largely produced by a small band of creators. While other titles certainly felt the pressure to innovate these new, sophisticated serials exerted, it would nevertheless be more appropriate to speak of a group style that created its own niche in the comics market where the mode of practice could be systematically undermined. The British mainstream decidedly did not change overnight into an industry producing only complex serials. It is equally important to point out that many (if not all) of the effects analyzed need the conventional mode of practice as a point of reference.

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We can draw a direct parallel to the art film here, which also “requires the classical background set because deviations from the norm must be registered as such to be placed as realism or authorial expression” (Bordwell “Poetics”: 157). The “realism” of Charley’s War, Marvelman et al. is somewhat less apparent without the knowledge of previous narrative style(s), and for titles like Major Eazy, it may be wholly historically specific. This is not to say that the complex narrations of these serials are not effective on their own. Their heavy emphasis on ambiguity, the body, and thematically suggestive cue patterns will likely always ensure that they have an impact on readers, no matter how comics savvy. Taking all of this into account, we can consider the British new wave (and consequently, the British Invasion) in terms of an ever-expanding set of new paradigmatic options instead of a fundamental paradigm change. Within certain cultural and economic niches, the mode of practice now allowed for self-referentiality of both the generic and the thematic type, building patterns of cues ready-made for the reader’s interpretive activity. As readers discovered that it is pleasurable to learn how to read a serial such as Charley’s War anew with each installment, the mode of practice started to allow for fluctuating intrinsic norms that make the reading process continually challenging. Strategies aiming to render the series’ protagonist ambiguous became especially pervasive: the removal of any narrational depth is a favorite, and so is the focus on an enigmatic past that the narration will not make readily accessible. This tendency to render certain portions of the syuzhet for maximum ambiguity has its necessary counterpart in episodes that fully obey generic rules. Even Marvelman offers its readers superhero fights, supervillains, and serial melodrama, if in a rather distorted and often anxiety-inducing shape. Once it has discarded the last superheroic elements, the series makes itself recognizable by way of other frames of reference: dystopia, fantasy, science fiction, myth. Much of the preceding chapter was spent pointing out the effect of these new paradigmatic options on the reading process. But thematic overdetermination, ambiguation, and intrinsic norms have an impact that goes well beyond the time spent with the actual comic book in hand. We have thus far neglected what Mittell calls the most important aspect of serial temporality: the waiting period between installments. Reading Marvelman, it becomes impossible not to yield to the pressure of cues suggesting interpretive appropriations. In a serial that regularly provides copious operational and thematic prompts, sometimes to the detriment of fabula cues, it is also difficult not to give in to the intentional fallacy

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and construct the anthropomorphic fiction of a genius author whose unique vision unifies the work. With the waiting time between episodes, there would be copious opportunity to add to the inferred author function. Even in the United States, a select audience of comics readers now started reading 2000AD and Warrior. Among them were DC Comics editors like Karen Berger and Len Wein, who would later travel to the UK and start to court writers like Moore and artists like Brian Bolland, inviting them to start writing and drawing serials for U.S. publishers (cf. Khoury “Extraordinary Works”: 83, Moore “Guy Whitaker and Steve Lawley”: 34). Apparently, the complex strategies foregrounding authorship and cultural otherness had been effective, as Alan Moore asserts in interviews time and again: “Nobody wanted to actually say, ‘But he’s talking rubbish. They all sort of said, ‘He’s an English genius, and you must be a fool if you don’t see it,’ which did me well for a while” (qtd. in Millidge “Alan Moore Storyteller”: 108). There is no doubt that Moore et al. themselves were complicit in furthering this public image of “English genius” (or British genius for that matter). Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison singles out the central role authorial performances would play for the British Invasion: “The Americans expected us to be brilliant punks and, eager to please our masters, we sensitive, artistic boys did our best to live up to our hype. Like the Sex Pistols sneering and burning their way through ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ we took their favorite songs, rewrote all the lyrics, and played them on buzz saws through squalling distortion pedals…. Most important for me, we were encouraged to be shocking and different” (Morrison “Supergods”: 186). As the first British writers and artists migrated to the United States, the dominant lines of interpretation were thus already forming: the “brilliant punks” from the United Kingdom were to do battle with the stocky authority figure of the American mode of practice. From the beginning, comics fans and professionals cast the changes the group style brought as a conflict of national identities. From the vantage point of this essentialist interpretation, heavily suggested by masses of orienting paratexts, the British Invasion had now begun in earnest. As a project of comics poetics, its origins lay much further back in the 1970s.

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Alan Moore and the American Mode of Practice There is another aspect to consider in this historical account of the British Invasion: its material and economic circumstances of production. Despite its markedly transnational makeup, a title such as Marvelman was still the product of the British publishing industry (at least initially), with a very limited American audience. The transition to the U.S. comics market had yet to occur for the new wave comics creators—and it is this transatlantic shift that will be the focus of this chapter.1 In the following, we will consider two works by Alan Moore and various collaborators, that is, the American horror serial Saga of the Swamp Thing, written by Moore and drawn by Stephen R. Bissette, Rick Veitch et al., and the highly complex meta-historiographic superhero serial Watchmen (1986–1987), by Moore and artist Dave Gibbons. Again and again, these series have been singled out by critics and fans as integral to the changes occurring in the American mode of practice of the 1980s. The purpose of this chapter will be to reframe the immense influence of these titles from the point of view of poetics. For Moore, the move to the American comics mainstream came in early 1983 in the shape of a phone call. Both parties involved in the ensuing conversation have confirmed the following version of events, so we can assume that there is some truth to the story: Moore picked up the receiver, and the caller identified himself as Len Wein, a well-known DC Comics editor and writer. Wein expressed interest in hiring Moore to work on DC titles. To Moore, this apparently sounded so unlikely that he assumed he was the victim of a prank call. In fact, he recalls that he “thought it was [V for Vendetta artist] David Lloyd doing a funny voice” (qtd. in Millidge “Alan Moore Storyteller”: 108). Moore promptly hung up the phone. Wein, “assuming the connection had been broken accidentally” (Wein “Random Thoughts”: 37) dialed Moore’s number once more and “introduced … [himself ] again.” Moore replied, “No, who is this really?” (ibid.). Luckily, Wein was finally able 158

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to convince Moore of his identity, and Moore agreed to come up with a proposal for the floundering DC horror serial Saga of the Swamp Thing. For the comics poetician, these events should make for more than just an amusing anecdote. First of all, Moore’s incredulity is proof of the relative insularity of the British comics industry at the beginning of the 1980s, where border-crossings did occur, but were still relatively rare. Equally importantly, the fact that a large American company such as DC Comics was actively seeking new talent abroad indicates that the British new wave’s authorial performances had been a success. Years later, Wein would justify his recruitment drive by stating that he “had been a fan of Alan’s work on 2000A.D,” for example (ibid.). Stephen R. Bissette, the main artist on Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing run, recalls that he had “fantasized how cool it would be if we could work with that new British comics writer, Alan Moore” before he started out on the title. His intense admiration for Moore had made Bissette seek out “each and every new issue of Warrior as it slunk across the Atlantic at an increasingly erratic pace.” He had also “begun to search for scarce-as-hen’s-teeth issues of 2000AD … in hopes of finding more Moore” (Bissette “Moore and Me”: 218). Finally, the fact that DC Comics was reaching out to writers and artists who had made their mark by challenging the traditional mainstream mode(s) of practice allows for some speculation as to the contemporary state of the comics industry in the United States. Much like the UK mainstream, the American comics market at the beginning of the 1980s is typically seen as being in a transitional phase. Gabilliet identifies three important factors that caused the crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s: the changing relationship between mainstream and alternative comics, increasing conflicts between publishers and creators concerning authorship, and the shift from conventional newsstand distribution to a dedicated system that aimed at specialist comics shops (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 85/86). The latter phenomenon is especially important and is at the root of the industry’s predicament, since the new distribution system catered for an entirely different audience. This is due to the fact that from the 1960s onward, the American comics market began to change, at first gradually, but later at an almost exponential pace. Initially, comics knew only one system of distribution—the traditional channels that also shipped newspapers and magazines to the entire United States. For more than three decades, this system had served the mainstream comics industry well; but by the 1970s, it became clear that this success was not to last. “Across the nation, supermarkets were replacing mom-and-pop stores,” Howe writes, “and few had interest in maintaining spinner racks filled

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with low-profit-margin comics” (Howe “Marvel Comics”: 168). Those retailers who still chose to sell comic books demanded they be given heavy discounts and that unsold books be made returnable (ibid.). Distributors even went so far as to rip the covers off unsold copies (these often exceeded sold copies in their numbers; see Howe 219) in order to return the covers to the publishers for a full refund—only to then proceed to sell the coverless comics “at a reduced price—all at a profit to the distributor” (Howe “Marvel Comics”: 168/169). In short, the traditional distribution channels were becoming less and less profitable for the publishers, and contributed to decreasing print runs. In the long term, a replacement for or at least an alternative to these structures was highly desirable. The comics mainstream found this alternative in the so-called “direct market” founded by Phil Seuling in 1973. Seuling, who distributed comics to specialty stores, “approached Marvel and DC about getting the same 60 percent discount that wholesalers enjoyed,” with the significant difference that he “would agree to pay for all unsold copies” (Howe “Marvel Comics”: 169). This was financially feasible for him because, unlike the traditional distributors, comics shops were invested in keeping a back log of old issues for collectors (ibid.). This new direct market got off to a slow start in the 1970s, but by 1979, it was clear that it was the future of comics distribution. By then, “the roughly 750 comic stores [in the United States] may have accounted for only 6 percent of Marvel’s gross sales, but those $3.5 million in sales had grown from $300,000 in 1974, and from $1.5 million in 1976” (Howe “Marvel Comics”: 219). In short, comics publishers were slowly becoming aware of the fact that the dedicated comics enthusiasts who visited specialty shops would make up a major part of their future audience, while their former readership of children and adolescents who picked up their comic books in a grocery store or a supermarket’s magazine section would continue to dwindle. This is not to say that Marvel, DC et al. were ready to give up on their traditional market. Instead, as Gabilliet puts it, “[t]he 1980s were characterized by a desire of publishers to maximize their revenues in the two distribution systems, all the while expanding the direct sales system in which they saw the future of the industry” (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 87). The direct market brought new challenges for the mainstream publishers. For one, Marvel and DC now had to consider a savvier audience of adolescents and young adults who were more discerning and actively sought out innovation and sophistication. As one of many results of this development, the comics industry started to experiment with two new publishing models: “the limited series,” that is, “titles published over a pre-

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defined number of issues to test the viability of new concepts and/or artists,” as well as the so-called “graphic novel, which was the industry term for books that offered new stories in the style of the European album” (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 87), printed on quality paper and often eschewing the dictates of unlimited seriality in favor of finite narratives. These changes were not enough to dominate the direct market. In specialty stores, Marvel or DC serials were now competing with comics by smaller or so-called alternative publishers. While during the 1960s, these small presses had produced truly alternative comics that had little in common with the mainstream’s genre works,2 this gap had now closed. Much like in the UK, where publications such as Warrior were offering stories that differed only marginally from those found in the mainstream IPC or DCT anthologies, the alternative publishers in the United States had recently “abandoned the initial spirit of protest in order to grant a greater creative freedom to … [their] artists” (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 85). The “divide between the large publishers and the alternatives had [thus] been reduced at the level of content,” but there was still one crucial difference between the two factions competing for the comics store audience: quite often, “the small publishers offered better financial conditions and a greater freedom of expression” (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 85/86). The results of this newly leveled playing field were manifold, but an important aspect is best summarized by a term coined by Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein, who speak of “conflicts of authorization” (Kelleter and Stein “Autorisierungspraktiken”: 260/261, my translation). According to Kelleter and Stein, the production of narratives for the commercial mass media is “characterized by a division of labour and multiple authorship from the outset,” which in turn leads to a “proliferation of and competition between responsibilities … and professional identities” (“Autorisierungspraktiken”: 260, my translation). In other words, the assembly line mode of production typical of the comics mainstream makes authorship necessarily a contested ground, with creators and publishers competing for the title. In mainstream comics, the publisher as corporate entity, editors, writers, pencilers, inkers, and colorists all have a claim to authorship. These conflicts of authorization, always a source of strife in the mainstream comics industry, now finally come to the fore at the close of the 1970s as the artistic ethos of the alternative presses begins to gain hold in the comics mainstream. As a result, there is no doubt that both Marvel and DC Comics experienced an exodus of talent, or at the very least had to constantly renegotiate their stance on authorship. Star artists like Frank Miller either

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departed from the large publishers or began to use the situation to their own advantage, achieving increasingly better deals for themselves (for an example, see Howe “Marvel Comics”: 248). The fact that publishers other than DC and Marvel often offered comics creators a stake in intellectual property rights and royalties while the majors were stubbornly refusing to budge incensed comics writers and artists and sometimes lead to outright rebellion. Jack Kirby, the co-creator of most classical Marvel heroes, is perhaps the most prominent example. He embarked on a heavily publicized feud with his former publisher, calling “Marvel’s and DC’s comics ‘ads for toys,’” dismissing the work-for-hire model as unethical, and claiming with considerable panache that he had in fact created most of the 1960s Marvel comics himself, without any significant aid from his supposed co-creator, Stan Lee (Howe “Marvel Comics”: 244). These attacks on industry practices became more difficult to ignore as the direct market gained in importance—and with it an audience of comics readers who bought books for their creators as much as for the characters, and who closely followed the public debates about comics authorship. In short, the American comics mainstream at the beginning of the 1980s had entered a phase where “it was no longer feasible to conceive of profitability solely in terms of characters, and publishers needed to think in terms of the creators that breathed life into them” (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 89). To a certain extent, comics publishers, too, “took on the logic of ‘auteur’-driven creation,’” especially since there was money to be made when “certain titles dominated the market over a particular time because their auteurs, at that precise moment, stood out from the pack” (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 90). Certain concessions were made—DC guaranteed its creators a 4 percent royalty on profits “after 100,000 copies of a title were sold” (Howe “Marvel Comics”: 246), and Marvel quickly started its own program of granting “incentives” to the creators of popular titles (ibid.). However, Marvel were careful to avoid the word “royalty” itself, at the instigation of their lawyers. An internal memo at the publisher warned that “most definitions of that word [i.e., ‘royalties’] contain language which … [indicates] that it is a payment to an ‘owner’ or ‘author,’” which is why “incentive” was by far the preferred term (qtd. in Howe “Marvel Comics”: 246). Such telling details underline that these quarrels over authorship were far from settled. In fact, they were to rage all throughout the 1980s, as further milestones in the debate such as the 1986 “Creators’ Bill of Rights” attest. In this proclamation, a group of prominent comics writers and artists asserted basic rights such as “full ownership of that which we fully create,” “full control over the

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creative execution of that which we fully own,” and “prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits” (McCloud “Reinventing Comics”: 61/62). For by far the greater portion of work done for DC or Marvel Comics, most of these demands have not been met to this day. After this brief survey of the American comics industry at the beginning of the 1980s, it should be possible to answer with greater precision why Alan Moore received that phone call in the spring of 1983. Len Wein— and by extension, DC Comics—was looking for comics creators with star potential, that is, writers and artists who had learned to create a public persona and perform effectively both through their work and by way of orienting paratexts. Such prodigies were rare, and the few stars the two majors had fostered could not be relied upon to continue working there, considering the majors’ stubborn refusal to fully acknowledge them as authors in contractual terms, not artisans or hired guns (in public, auteur status was welcomed as a powerful marketing tool, of course). Owing to these fluctuations and to the relative scarcity of creators who had auteur potential, the American majors had little choice but to go on recruitment drives outside the United States. The tacit assumption on the part of DC Comics must have been that the writers and artists of the British new wave would be grateful for the considerable pay raise and greater public exposure that the American comics industry would provide, and refrain from joining the ranks of their more seditious American peers, at least for a while. In exchange, DC was ready to grant the British creators considerable artistic license—an attempt at artistic rejuvenation that was sorely needed because of the changing, more demanding comics audience and competition from alternative and small press publishers. This evaluation is corroborated by many interviews in which the creators of the British Invasion detail their transition to the American market. In his autobiography, Scottish writer Grant Morrison affirms that the U.S. publishers were seen as a Godsend by British comics creators “dreaming of an escape from the dour drizzle of seventies Britain, the paranoid, warhaunted epic of the Thatcher years” (Morrison “Supergods”: 187). To them, “America was jet cars and spacemen and film stars, and America wanted us. America’s superheroes welcomed us and lay back while we took our scalpels to their sagging, exhausted bodies” (ibid.). Alan Moore, too, states in a 1995 conversation with Paul Hogan that he “was pleased because it was DC Comics” who first approached him to write for the American comics market (Moore “Tales from the Crypt”: 72). He lists two major reasons that compelled him to accept the job offer: for one, the higher page count and greater production values of American monthlies would

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end the restriction to “eight-page stories and black-and-white art” (ibid.) that was common in the British comics anthologies. But the participatory perspective of the comics fan who would get access to all his childhood toys seems to have been of equal importance: “I had been reading DC comics since I was seven,” Moore elaborates, “and it was great to have a chance to play in that universe. Which I did—they let me go berserk, eventually” (Moore “Tales from the Crypt”: 72). Even a cursory glance at Moore and Bissette’s initial Saga of the Swamp Thing installments confirms that DC really did allow Moore to “go berserk.” The tool kit of the British new wave made the transition to the American mode of practice almost completely intact—and this should come as no small surprise considering how radically the new wave style infringes upon the American practice’s carefully guarded extrinsic norms. In Swamp Thing, Moore immediately repeats his strategy of rendering the serial’s accumulated past events highly ambiguous by throwing a different light on an important part of the protagonist’s origin story. This is how the story went before Moore and Bissette came aboard the title: scientist Alec Holland is working on a revolutionary “bio-restorative formula” when his laboratory is attacked by a group of criminals out to steal Holland’s work. In the course of these tumultuous events, the lab bursts into flames, and Holland himself is set ablaze. He stumbles out of the building and falls into swamp water, which has been suffused with his formula. The swamp flora and the formula save his life, but they also turns his body into a monstrous hybrid of plant and man. It is now Holland’s goal to restore his human physicality.3 But in Moore’s second Swamp Thing story entitled “The Anatomy Lesson,” it is revealed that the bog monster never was a human scientist to begin with. The series’ protagonist is in fact a sentient plant that wrongly believes itself to be human. This stratagem turns what was once a noble, righteous, and human protagonist into an unpredictable wild card for the reader. The Swamp Thing becomes an ambivalent, uncanny stranger who only looks like the series’ previous protagonist, but cannot be entirely relied upon to behave according to predictable patterns. Time and again throughout the series, the titular monster will regain a sense of stable identity, that is, it will start to behave according to the mode of practice’s extrinsic norms again. At other times, it will relapse into much less predictable monstrosity that goes counter the mode of practice. The Swamp Thing thus becomes a creature of intrinsic and extrinsic norms, oscillating between the fulfillment and the subversion of mainstream conventions. This familiar strategy of disrupting the readers’ process of hypothesis

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testing undoubtedly flies in the face of the American mainstream’s norms for protagonists. After all, the Swamp Thing now no longer has a clearly defined larger goal (as opposed to the goal-oriented hero/ine that the mode of practice usually demands), has trouble defining its own identity because of its uncertain past (as opposed to the prototype-driven, clearcut approach to heroism of the mode of practice), and cannot be relied upon to behave in a morally sound manner. In fact, the Swamp Thing’s first act upon the discovery that it is not human at all is to kill the villain who has revealed the new origin story—which is something the previous incarnation of the character would never have done. Typically, the American mode of practice denies its protagonists such radical actions (in the UnS, only the morally ambivalent Western heroes like Jonah Hex kill villains, for example). In short, we can believe Moore when he says that he did not even attempt to adhere to the rules of the American mode of practice and the Comics Code, which demanded self-censorship from Marvel and DC Comics: “When I started doing Swamp Thing, I decided I’d just ignore the [Comics] Code [Authority] and let them slap me into line, rather than try to second-guess them,” he states in conversation with Gary Spencer Millidge (qtd. in Millidge 115). Perhaps inevitably, the series quickly caught the attention of the censorship office. After an initial seven installments, the Comics Code Authority (abbreviated CCA) refused to approve issue 29 of Saga of the Swamp Thing—apparently not due to its subtle depiction of incest and necrophilia, but because it features “a double-page spread of live rotting zombies attacking a girl,” as Moore recalls (qtd. in Millidge “Alan Moore Storyteller”: 115). But instead of, in Moore’s words, “slapping the writer into line,” DC Comics “made the decision to publish the issue without the seal [of the CCA]” (Millidge “Alan Moore Storyteller”: 115). Starting with issue 31, Saga of the Swamp Thing even “became the first regular monthly title to be published without the ubiquitous CCA stamp, replacing it with a simple typeset ‘Sophisticated Suspense’ across the top of the cover” (ibid.). This move is proof of DC Comics’ eagerness to match the sophistication of the alternative presses to accommodate the new direct market. The radical rupture with the previous modus operandi was justified by sales figures, too. Many commentators point out that the series increased its print run by almost 600 percent during Moore’s stint on the title, rising “from 17,000 to a staggering 100,000 per issue” (Millidge “Alan Moore Storyteller”: 117). Some perspective is required here so as not to exaggerate the series’ (and Moore’s) success. According to Sean Howe, Marvel’s The X-Men serial sold more than 300,000 copies a month during the early

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1980s, with “several other titles selling over 200,000, and almost everything else selling over the 100,000 mark” (Howe “Marvel Comics”: 246). In other words, the 100,000 copy print run of later Saga of the Swamp Thing issues is only staggering compared to the disastrous numbers prior to Moore’s appointment, and not at all on par with the industry’s greatest successes of the 1980s. Still, the series’ popularity and enormous influence on the development of the mode of practice proved that the British new wave style was a bankable commodity. It is therefore an integral part of this chapter’s thesis statement that we must consider Saga of the Swamp Thing and the later Watchmen (1986– 1987) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, often seen as the “real” inaugurating serials of the British Invasion, as continuations of the new wave style. Both in Saga of the Swamp Thing and Watchmen, we find all the narrational staples of titles such as Marvelman: the complex temporality and process of reception, the penchant for ambiguity and intrinsic norms, the shallow narrational depth for the protagonist(s), and the alternating pattern of adherence to generic rules and their subversion. In and of itself, this provides little reason to consider Saga of the Swamp Thing and Watchmen in-depth, since the risk of repetition is considerable. But both Swamp Thing and Watchmen extend and fulfill the new wave poetics to a substantial extent, creating new narrative models that the American mode of practice would eagerly adopt and modify in the following decades. Most importantly, Moore’s run on Saga of the Swamp Thing seizes upon the nexus narrative model that was identified and defined in the chapter on Charley’s War and develops it further. Over the course of just a few issues, the Swamp Thing itself becomes a relatively marginalized figure who acts as a nexus for a perennially rotating cast of secondary characters. Typically, these changing bit players also bring along different genres as well as rules and conventions, thus complicating the reading process and allowing comics creators to “make it new” with each story arc. Additionally, the nexus model allows for formal and narrational experimentation, as challenging intrinsic norms and artistic distinction from the reigning mode of practice become de rigueur. In the course of the following chapter, we will therefore explore how Moore and a host of artists slowly develop the nexus concept in the course of their 44-issue run on Saga of the Swamp Thing. Saga of the Swamp Thing was influential due to the openness of its nexus concept—it showed other comics creators how it might be feasible to switch and mix genres and conventions within the same series with impunity as well as considerable economic success. On the other hand, the esteem in which Watchmen is held even outside dedicated comics cir-

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cles can be attributed to how it radicalized the new wave style to the point where imitations became difficult within the working conditions of the American comics mainstream. In other words, if Saga of the Swamp Thing is ready-made for imitation within the specific production circumstances of the mode of practice, Watchmen ended up being occlusive due to its uncompromising use of the new wave’s narrational strategies. For one, the series is one of the high points of the 1980s conflicts of authorization. Its mise-en-page is so overdetermined with overt references to its own constructedness as well as to its creators that it is irresistible not to construct an inferred author function—even more so than in the case of Marvelman. Apart from its contribution to the 1980s conflicts of authorization, Watchmen also draws attention to the audience’s process of making meaning by moving away from the nexus narrative model and closer to the network narrative. Apart from the character of Rorschach, who at certain points in the story has a nexus function by driving the conventional detective story along and establishing connections between the characters, Watchmen has no easily identifiable central protagonist. Instead, it features a group of characters with individual, largely unconnected causal lines, which is typical of the network narrative. In presenting these causal lines and the storyworld the characters inhabit, the narration constantly compels the reader to unify the interpretive cues it provides. But as often as Watchmen helps establish coherent readings, it thwarts and mocks the unifying process, especially by foregrounding and subverting the mode of practice’s strategies for the construction of narrational coherence. At the same time, the narration continuously draws attention to the fact that the reader’s isn’t the only ongoing process of appropriation. All the characters are making sense of the storyworld based on roughly the same cues. Readers are encouraged to compare their own meaning-making to that of the characters through an immense variety of narrational strategies, but especially through the heavy use of parallelisms conveyed through means such as foregrounded spatiality, (non-)causal hooks, flashbacks, and so on. In an orienting paratext from 2008, Moore himself points out that it is indeed not the host of possible interpretations that make Watchmen stand out. According to the writer, “the stuff that makes Watchmen radical is not really the stuff that’s in the plot. It’s not dark treatments of super-heroes— I mean, that had been done before” (Moore “Watchmania”: 110). Instead, “the most radical thing about Watchmen” is, to Moore, “the storytelling, the ideas behind it, things that only really emerged in the telling” (ibid.). Framed from the point of view of poetics, it is the constant subversion and manipulation of the conventional reading process germane to the

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mode of practice through innovative narrational means that made the book a classic, not so much the wealth of potential appropriations its complex style affords, most prominently in terms of a vague “deconstruction” or “revision” of the superhero genre. 4 Within the American comics mainstream, this kind of intricate, densely layered syuzhet presentation indeed proved difficult to emulate. As Jon Cormier points out, many other comics copied those new wave strategies that were easily replicable, abandoning “thought balloons, sound effects, and heroism” (Cormier “Nothing ever Ends”: 88). But “how many of those same comics tried to create visual metaphors to reflect the plot and character relationships as Watchmen did?” (ibid.). The book’s innovations are certainly not limited to inventive uses of metaphor; but Cormier has a point. Many of the prominent narrational strategies in Watchmen’s tool box found hardly any imitators. This is not because of other creators’ limited intellect or talent compared to Moore’s, but because of the immense amount of time and dedication a project such as Watchmen requires—time and dedication that the mode of practice rarely rewards economically. At the same time, the window of opportunity was closing rapidly. By the end of the 1980s, the tide had already turned, and the conflicts of authorization within the mode of practice were now leaning more heavily in the direction of the artist rather than the writer as the prime comics auteur. Most of the industry’s new bestsellers were now produced by the Image generation of comics creators—so called after the publishing house they founded after fleeing Marvel and DC Comics, i.e., Image Comics—whose works, in keeping with the Image name, “gave … priority to visual style to the near total exclusion of the writing” (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 104). The American mainstream thus only briefly granted the British new wave and certain other maverick writers full sway. It assimilated those narrative techniques that were immediately compatible with its own traditions, adjusting the paradigm only to accommodate models such as the nexus narrative. By and large, the mode of practice proved resilient to the British Invasion.

Saga of the Swamp Thing (1984–1987) and the Rise of the Nexus Narrative Previously, this study discussed the concept of the nexus narrative in the context of Charley’s War. That series employs a relatively straightforward variation of the model with Charley as the nexus character (cf. Chap-

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ter 2). Sometimes, Charley’s encounters with other soldiers will trigger a change in narrational attachment, and characters such as Blue or Charley’s brother will take Charley’s place as protagonist for varying stretches of time. The narration rarely employs more than two distinct causal lines though—Charley’s and the new protagonist’s. Invariably, Charley’s strand will serve as a frame narrative. In every case, the narration eventually returns to its prior attachment to Charley; his status as the actual protagonist or nexus of the story is never contested. In Saga of the Swamp Thing, the nexus model is modified to take on more features of what Bordwell calls the network narrative. Our definition of the network narrative will now be expanded upon to encompass the additions Moore and his artists make to the nexus format. As pointed out previously, a network narrative “centers on several protagonists” who “pursue discrete goals, whereas others may have no goals at all” (Bordwell “Poetics”: 199). While causal lines are kept distinct (at least for a certain amount of time; sometimes indefinitely), these characters “inhabit more or less the same space-time framework,” that is, the same storyworld at roughly the same time (ibid.). In some cases, the separate causal lines “may intersect, in one-on-one convergences or more inclusive relationships”—in other words, total causal convergence is possible, if rare (Bordwell “Poetics”: 199). Certain features of the network narrative that were of little importance to the Charley’s War model now rise to prominence in Saga of the Swamp Thing. In Charley’s War, the means by which distinct causal lines are established, brought to convergence and disbanded are limited. In a fully- fledged network narrative with a multitude of characters, these means necessarily multiply. Very often, the convergence of causal lines is caused by chance instead of goal-oriented actions. Thus, “initially unconnected characters typically meet by accident” (ibid.). In a different incarnation of the network narrative, previous connections between characters may exist, but the narration does its utmost to conceal them, making use of delayed and distributed exposition so that “[r]ight up to the end we may be still learning about long-term connections among the characters” (ibid.). Usually, the narration’s prime task will be to establish such connections between characters, sever them again and introduce new relationships. Bordwell therefore isolates three central concerns of network narratives: they will “reveal connections, anticipate connections, and conceal connections” (Bordwell “Poetics”: 207). A network narrative’s “narrative structure [thus] rests upon the perpetual commingling of the characters” (ibid.), to the point where the basic dramaturgical necessity of reshuffling relationships “vies with causal logic as the impetus for the

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action” (ibid.). By withholding information, delaying and distributing exposition, and foregrounding the element of chance in the causal chain, the network narrative thus often “exposes the act of narration, inviting the viewer to build inference out of teases, hints, and gaps” (Bordwell “Poetics”: 200). The logic of concealment, anticipation, and revelation will be essential to many of Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing stories. It has already been pointed out that network narratives tend towards self-referentiality. After all, as causality loses its grip as the dominant narrational system, chance and the foregrounding of artifice take its place. This has important consequences for the process of reception. To Bordwell, it is “[c]entral to our engagement” with these narratives “that characters, situations, and activities tend to parallel one another” (Bordwell “Poetics”: 211). Very often, “[i]t’s not just that [the protagonist of causal line] A knows B and may meet C. We are expected to register, if not consciously note, that A, B, and C are held up as alternatives along some scale of judgment. In a more causally driven film, such parallels are subordinate to the goal-driven primary action. In watching a network narrative, however, we’re often coaxed to notice how characters are sharply similar or different from one another” (Bordwell “Poetics”: 211). Thus, “as causality slackens, parallelism fills the gap” (Bordwell “Poetics”: 212), and the audience is compelled to compare the different plots, taking note of “likenesses and differences” and appropriating them accordingly (ibid.). Very often, these parallelisms will cover highly conventional themes such as “contrasting romantic couples—different styles of loving, we might say” (ibid.). The network narrative therefore distinguishes itself as a model that promotes interpretive appropriations, a feature naturally much coveted during the 1980s conflicts of authorization. Such foregrounded parallelisms between different causal lines will be a central trait especially of the narration in Watchmen, but they are equally important for Saga of the Swamp Thing. Bordwell is primarily a film scholar, which is why the investigation of network narratives in Poetics of the Cinema does not cover the implications of using network structures in a serial, albeit in the less radical format of the nexus narrative. Why did the comics mainstream react so favorably to this new narrational mode which allows comics creators to constantly introduce new characters and marginalize the title character? Any explanation of the nexus narrative’s success would have to consider the intense focus on the villain in mainstream comics at the time. As elaborated in Chapter 1, the comics mode of practice of the 1970s and 1980s wastes little time and space on the protagonist during the exposition.

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Instead, it relies heavily on readers’ prior knowledge and the activation of superhero schemata and prototypes to render the hero as a solid basis for hypothesis testing. Much more syuzhet effort is put into the portrayal of the villain(s) and their evil machinations. In other words, American audiences were well prepared for a narrational model that marginalizes the protagonist to an even greater extent and instead focuses on other causal agents. On top of that, the distinct causal lines connected by the nexus protagonist will typically adhere to generic rules, making them easily palatable for the mode of practice. This compliance with extrinsic norms can easily be delayed and complicated in a nexus narrative. As (sometimes entirely) new characters are introduced with each story arc, the narration will do its utmost to conceal their relevance, only hinting at the generic schemata that will eventually be brought to fruition. In other words, the nexus narrative as conceived by Moore and his fellow writers is fundamentally concerned with the previously mentioned concept of pattern delay, that is, the systematic dispersal and suppression of generic cues. This type of delay, somewhat uncommon in the mode of practice, is further complicated by delayed pattern elimination, that is, the narration’s tendency to introduce various possibilities of generic actuation which will only gradually be eliminated until a dominant genre or set of conventions emerges. This is necessary because the nexus narrative will usually aim at total convergence—unlike the network narrative, which need not necessarily unify all its causal lines. A typical Swamp Thing story from the Moore run might present the reader with various causal lines at the beginning that open up a host of ways in which the story’s central conflict might be resolved. Initially, the narration will not show any signs of favoring a single strand. During Moore’s first arc on the series, for example, we are introduced to the Floronic Man, a plant-themed villain who is portrayed as the Swamp Thing’s evil Doppelgänger 5; long-time human supporting players Abby and Matt Cable; and the Swamp Thing itself, who is undergoing a paralyzing identity crisis after its new origin story has been revealed. In its state of nervous breakdown, the Swamp Thing seems unable to counter the Floronic Man’s attacks on humanity. Moore and Bissette duly introduce a fourth causal line that might potentially resolve the conflict: since at the time, the Swamp Thing storyworld was part of the larger diegesis of the DC universe, we get to see many of the major DC superheroes such as Superman, Firestorm and Green Arrow react to the worldwide ecological crisis the Floronic Man brings about by turning Earth’s flora against mankind (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: 84). This short sequence demon-

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strates the processes of pattern delay and delayed pattern elimination perfectly. The verbal narration participates in the postponement of a conventional resolution by announcing that the superheroes are unable to act against the Floronic Man, too. After all, the villain supposedly acts as the representative of planet Earth’s downtrodden nature by lashing out against humanity. Violence—the superhero genre’s preferred means to solve conflicts—is therefore not an option. As Green Arrow points out, “So what do we do? Threaten to beat up the trees?” (ibid., 4). The visual narration also expends considerable effort to participate in the process of pattern delay and delayed pattern elimination by showing the heroes’ faces as mere outlines or obscured by heavy shadows, making it difficult or downright impossible to read their expressions. Yet more cues on these pages aim at making the readers question their mental prototypes and schemata for these well-known, typically valorous characters. The verbal narration, for example, does not employ the word “superheroes,” but instead chooses the somewhat Nietzschean term “overpeople” for Superman, Green Arrow et al. (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: n.pag., 3). The failure of a violent solution to the Floronic Man’s attacks allows for the interpretive mapping that the superhero genre in its mode of practice incarnation only offers inadequate solutions to conflicts that are not tailormade for its conventions. In short, the narration uses every conceivable means to alienate readers from these characters, making it difficult to gauge whether the superheroes will participate in defeating the Floronic Man. Having read the sequence, readers can neither predict with certainty that the resolution of the story will adhere to the rules of the superhero genre, nor can they fully eliminate the possibility; there is no way for the audience to decide whether the sequence merely delays a generic solution or eliminates it (it turns out that the latter prediction is correct). Importantly, if the readers were to frame these pages as delay, the superheroes’ causal strand would still be difficult to employ in the process of hypothesis testing since it only partially adheres to generic convention. To a certain extent, delay is motivated realistically, in that a plausible pretext is given as to why the heroes are unable to intervene. Mostly, though, it is motivated on self-referential terms, casting doubt on the validity of the genre and the notion of generic resolution itself. This is a highly uncommon strategy in the mode of practice, and likely to destabilize the reading process considerably. It would nevertheless be wrong to speak of this initial Swamp Thing arc in terms of a network or nexus narrative. However, during these first few issues of Moore’s run on the title, we can observe the first attempts

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at nudging the series’ format in this direction. The depiction of well-known superheroes as shady, unpredictable and ineffective is indicative of the desire to use new characters instead of heavily prototyped figures, for example—freshly devised characters whose behavioral patterns need to be learned or, as in the case of Superman and company, at least learned anew by the readers. Much like in the beginning of the new wave, we can therefore observe a certain didactic impetus in these early installments of the series, where rather more harmless versions of the new formats and intrinsic norms are used to accustom readers to the new style. As befits this pattern of slow introduction of innovative narrational means, the arc ends on a highly conventional note, despite the story’s unsettling beginning and self-referential pattern delay. After a long period of brooding, the Swamp Thing comes to its senses, confronts the Floronic Man and defeats the villain. The narration thus allays the readers’ fears that the series’ protagonist might really have turned into an unpredictable monster—at least to a certain extent.6 Neither the superheroes nor the human supporting players make any major contributions to this resolution. In other words, the demands of the mode of practice are largely met, even though the unusually extensive delaying sequences, almost all at least partly motivated on self-referential terms, will likely linger in readers’ minds. Much like the narration only briefly flirts with employing new characters, this initial arc therefore only introduces readers to the notion that the protagonist might merely feature as a marginalized nexus figure in the series. In the following issues, Moore, Bissette et al. slowly escalate the patterns introduced here, teaching the mode of practice readers how a nexus narrative works in increasingly complex iterations. Already at this early stage, operational and thematic hypotheses are foregrounded: the narration compels readers to reflect upon and predict the manner of narration, but also which interpretive mappings the frequent disavowal of the mode of practice allows. The first fully-fledged nexus narrative in the series is a two-parter, the inaugural episode of which is entitled “The Sleep of Reason,” the second “A Time of Running” (both are reprinted in the first volume of the series). In a quantitative sense, the Swamp Thing hardly features for a considerable part of the narrative. The story totals 68 pages, but its protagonist only appears on 30 of these, meaning that more than half of the syuzhet space is fully dedicated to secondary characters. And while the Swamp Thing has a deus ex machina function at the end of the story when all the formerly distinct causal lines converge, many of the bit players contribute heavily to the resolution of the story’s central conflict while the

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Swamp Thing hardly adds anything to the causal chain. On top of that, quite a few of the secondary characters are either completely new inventions or imported from the larger storyworld of the DC universe. The DC stock character contingent is represented by Jason Blood, a human being who occasionally turns in to a demon called Etrigan. Much like the superheroes of the previous arc, this migrant from other DC titles is made unreliable by a variety of means that cast doubt on the applicability of his usual character prototype. The first 17 pages (105–122) of the story function largely according to network narrative logic in that connections between seemingly distinct causal lines are concealed, anticipated, and revealed. Crucially for the nexus narrative, the reader expects that most of these causal lines will not remain separate, since the master extrinsic norm of causality dictates convergence. The overarching operational and fabula question is therefore: how will these apparently disconnected strands be made to cohere? During the long expository phase, the emphasis is firmly on the suppression of any cues that would answer this question. Consider the very first story page for a typical example of delayed pattern elimination and concealment of connections (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: 105). Here, it is immediately apparent that the narration is flaunting its suppressive attitude. The composition shows the arrival by bus of a new player in Baton Rouge where much of the story takes place. The first three panels either do not show this new protagonist at all or cast his face in shadow, revealing only an ominously lit pair of eyes and a curious streak of white hair. For savvy readers of DC Comics, these visual traits might be enough to recognize Jason Blood, also known as The Demon, a relatively minor supernatural character. The fourth panel, which finally shows Blood’s face and his characteristic bushy eyebrows, should certainly suffice to finally activate the anti- hero’s prototype schema, if it is available. Typically, Blood is as ambivalent a character as the mode of practice will allow. Due to his symbiotic connection with the demon Etrigan, he will not necessarily act in a morally sound manner, but neither will he transgress against the mainstream’s character norm and act wholly amorally. His intrinsic character norm dallies with moral transgression, but almost invariably bows to extrinsic character norms in the end (cf. Snider 57 for more on The Demon’s character prototype). However, the verbal narration on this page does its utmost to cast doubt on the applicability of this anti-hero prototype. Blood behaves in a gleefully sadistic manner, treating the salesman Harold Price—whom he met during the bus ride—with utter contempt. He announces Price’s imminent death—“at 5:32 this evening you will be

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impaled by a swordfish” (panel six)—and Blood’s crooked smile indicates that he derives a perverse pleasure from the announcement. Clearly, this is not quite the Jason Blood DC readers are familiar with. In equally suppressive fashion, the narration in this sequence fails to provide any reason why Blood has come to Baton Rouge. The dialogue hook in the final panel seemingly stitches together this initial scene and the next. But upon further inspection, it mocks the device’s conventional use as it frustrates the readers’ desire to see causal connections between the Swamp Thing and the Jason Blood character. As we encounter the Swamp Thing for the first time in this story, a caption tells us: “That [Jason Blood’s arrival in Baton Rouge] was an hour ago and forty miles away” (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: 107). In other words, the caption provides spatial and temporal correlatives, but omits any causal pointers. The long expository phase of a nexus narrative is necessarily characterized by such a refusal to acknowledge the predominance of the system of causality, since the nexus narrative’s most important aim is to delay causal convergence as much as possible. This suppressive sequence thus establishes the intrinsic norm(s) according to which the rest of the exposition will be constructed. Instead of introducing a clear-cut conflict that will have to be solved, the narration only evokes questions. Consider the categories of character recognition and allegiance, for example. Following this introduction, readers have no way of telling whether Blood will be the protagonist of the story, a secondary character or a mere bystander. Given the character’s nonprototypical behavior, it is even possible that Jason Blood will turn out the villain, a hypothesis that is lent some weight by the fact that the mode of practice usually grants pride of place to the heavy during the exposition. Blood’s callous behavior should also make readers question their allegiance to the anti-hero as much as it will make his behavior less predictable. It is equally unclear whether the appearance of Blood gives preference to the character’s typical generic trappings. Is this going to be a Gothic story about demonic possession? Or will a different genre come to the fore? The syuzhet cues only pile up possibilities, but refuse to eliminate any of them. As more and more causal lines are introduced, the reader must therefore juggle an increasing amount of fabula and operational hypotheses without any signs of causal convergence that would eliminate some of the options. In a flashback sequence, recurring character Abby Cable tells the Swamp Thing about her new job “at the Elysium Lawns Center for Autistic Children” (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: 110). On her first day, a boy called

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Paul especially caught her attention because of his horrific drawings. In one especially vivid page from Paul’s sketchbook, a white monster can be seen dismembering a child, while a caption warns that “[i]f you do not spell well, nobody has a job for you. Also, the Monkey King will come and that’s it!! And you are dead forever!” (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: 111, 2). This evokes the question whether the Monkey King might be real, of course (it turns out that he is), but it also suggests any number of other queries: is the plot centering on Abby Cable and Paul connected to the Jason Blood strand? If so, who is the villain, the Monkey King or Blood? In how far will the Swamp Thing be involved in these plots? Will the Monkey King story end up the one causal line that is typically brought to a climax in a monthly mode of practice installment, or is this merely the ritually suppressive exposition for a plot that is going to be serialized? In a comic book that adheres fully to extrinsic norms, these questions would be answered at this point, seeing that the concealment of connections goes counter the norm of clear-cut causality and coherence. Saga of the Swamp Thing chooses to delay convergence further, instead introducing at least one more causal strand in a sequence in which Abby’s estranged husband Matt falls under the spell of a demonic power (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: 115). Importantly, the suppression of causal connections foregrounds other readerly activities such as appropriation. The narration puts much effort into providing cues for interpretive mappings, mostly by the means most characteristic of network and nexus narratives: parallelisms that invoke comparison. Sequences are linked by dialogue hooks that imply thematic rather than causal connections, for example. Matt Cable, possessed by a demon, is “in a very personal heaven,/… a most private nightmare,” two captions tell us. The first is to be found on the final panel of a Matt Cable sequence, the latter is superimposed on a panel showing Paul, the child troubled by the Monkey King (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: 115/116). At the most basic level, this verbal hook implies a thematic rather than (or maybe in addition to) a causal connection between the scenes, and the reader is invited to establish it. Both the Matt Cable plot and the Paul plot center on desire and its moral ambiguity, to give the example of an almost immediately apparent interpretation. Matt Cable has been granted the power to animate material objects by the forces of Hell, and he promptly uses it to create a farcical puppet version of his estranged wife that must obey his every whim. The story of Paul and the Monkey King is somewhat subtler. Paul had to witness his parents’ death at the hands of a creature that they unintentionally summoned by way of a Ouija board. This does not

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necessarily imply a causal connection between the child’s desires and the Monkey King’s horrific actions. However, after the parents’ murder, the monster comes up to Paul’s room, and instead of attacking the child, it “nuzzle[s] against him” and “kisse[s] his [Paul’s] hand” (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: 118, 5–8). This is among the more obvious cues that it might be possible to construe a link between the Monkey King’s actions and Paul’s aggression against his parents, which in turn comes to the fore in his own violent enforcement of their authoritarian rules even after their deaths. In this sense, the comparison of the two sequences demonstrates how the fulfillment of desires may equal both dream and nightmare simultaneously. The two narrative strands never converge—the Matt Cable plot is in fact serialized and does not participate in the Monkey King story at all. But the nexus format, with its penchant for delaying causal connections, makes it possible to firmly connect them on terms other than the dramaturgical. As generic concerns and extrinsic norms are suspended, at least for one third of the total syuzhet space, operational and interpretive hypotheses can come to the fore, which is among the major achievements of the nexus format. As is always the case when a narrative is in such intense negotiation with the mode of practice, there must come a point when the extrinsic norms reassert themselves and causality is paid its due. The Swamp Thing two-parter announces the beginning of causal convergence and the end of delayed pattern elimination in an almost explicit fashion after about a quarter of the syuzhet has elapsed. Harold Price, the salesman whose imminent death Jason Blood had announced on the very first page, is impaled by a stuffed swordfish in a freak accident, as predicted (Moore and Bissette “Saga”: 124). In other words, readers can finally eliminate the first figure from the list of actors; Price will not be an important causal agent in the story. A few panels prior to this, Jason Blood’s search for an unnamed demon by way of a Ouija board has already channeled expectations in a different sense: it solidifies the hypothesis that Jason Blood will not be an antagonist in the story, but very likely one of Paul’s saviors. From here on in, ever more potential story actuations are eliminated until the Monkey King is defeated by an alliance of the Swamp Thing and Blood in a fashion that is perfectly acceptable for the mode of practice. Much of the rest of Moore’s run on Saga of the Swamp Thing can be characterized as a continuous experiment with the possibilities of the nexus narrative. Hitherto, the Swamp Thing has always featured as the deus ex machina whose intervention towards the end of each story usually brings about (partial) closure. However, for large portions of the syuzhet,

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the protagonist hardly contributes to the causal chain at all. In volume two of the series, Moore et al. introduce an inversion of this schema: a story in which the Swamp Thing acts as the initiator of the causal chain and features on almost every page, but mostly as a mere bystander after events have been set in motion. Other, secondary characters act in his stead. We will refer to this narrative strategy as deferred agency. In this episode of the serial, entitled “Down amongst the Dead Men,” the Swamp Thing enters the DC universe’s underworld in search of his beloved Abby Cable—a tale with an obvious intertextual debt to Dante’s Divina Commedia. The following scene is representative of the deferred agency model that this nexus narrative follows (Moore and Bissette “Love and Death”: 122). The Swamp Thing encounters the Spectre, the spirit of God’s vengeance in the DC universe. The Spectre bars the way to Hell, where the Swamp Thing hopes to find Abby’s soul. The bog monster’s Virgil in this scene is the Phantom Stranger, yet another of DC’s numerous supernatural heroes. The visual narration on this page makes no secret of the fact that agency has been transferred from the Swamp Thing to the Phantom Stranger: medium shots and close-ups are reserved for the Spectre and the Phantom Stranger, while the Swamp Thing is either only shown in a long shot with his back to the reader, excluded from the panel entirely or marginalized. The series’ protagonist has no lines in this scene either; the conflict is entirely solved by the Phantom Stranger. As is the network and nexus narratives’ preference, it is predicated on a causal line that is distinct from the Swamp Thing’s, as the solution to the conflict rests on the Spectre’s and Phantom Stranger’s back story. The Spectre refuses the Swamp Thing and the Phantom Stranger entry to Hell because Abby’s “return from death” would “render life itself meaningless” (panel three). The Phantom Stranger replies to this argument by asking: “Then what of Jim Corrigan?” (panel four), which prompts the Spectre to let the wanderers pass. In the following, the narration only offers the bare minimum of an explanation for this mysterious exchange, almost fully dispensing with redundancy. The Swamp Thing asks, “Who was … Jim Corrigan…?” to which the Phantom Stranger replies, “He was … while he lived” (Moore and Bissette “Love and Death”: 123, 2–4)—“he” being the Spectre. For readers unfamiliar with these characters, this explanation will likely remain somewhat obscure. DC aficionados will know that the Spectre was originally Jim Corrigan, a police officer who was killed in the line of duty and reborn as the spirit of divine wrath (for more on Corrigan’s character prototype, see Snider “DC Comics”: 176). Much like the Divina Commedia reflects 14th-century Italian society and beliefs, the Swamp Thing’s

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descent into Hell maps (part of ) the metaphysics and accumulated back story of the DC universe, if in a decidedly more tongue-in-cheek fashion. The relative absence of conventional mode of practice dramaturgy—there is no violence here, no agency on the side of the protagonist, and the conflict is decidedly abstract, lacking an easily identifiable villain—again furthers interpretive appropriations, which the narration encourages with copious intertextual cues. The nexus model also proves an excellent means of making up for the limitations imposed upon character change in the mode of practice. Moore’s run on Saga of the Swamp Thing has a vaguely Bildungsromanlike structure, portraying the protagonist on a journey from the ground zero of destroyed identity in “The Anatomy Lesson” to the Thing’s acceptance of his plant status and induction into a circle of so-called “plant elementals” that make up the “Parliament of Trees.” Along the way, the Swamp Thing falls in love with Abby Cable and enters into a relationship with her. He also experiences several relapses into monstrosity, which makes for a fluctuating character norm that oscillates between conventional hero status and a more ambivalent, less predictable schema. However, the potential for fundamental character change is still very limited in the mode of practice. Saga of the Swamp Thing certainly transgresses against extrinsic norms to a certain extent by rewriting the protagonist’s character prototype almost entirely, and by making it less reliable. But in the end, the mode of practice’s norm for protagonists still asserts itself: the Swamp Thing will not deviate wildly, and certainly not permanently, from the rule that demands morally acceptable behavior of (almost) all protagonists. In other words, the intrinsic character norm in Swamp Thing pushes against the boundaries of the original benign state—deviation— return to original benign state paradigm by way of its fluctuating character norm, but it never shatters them. This is one of the ways in which the British new wave comics differ fundamentally from much of the British Invasion works. Profound and radical character change beyond an initial makeover proves largely out of the question in the American mainstream. Saga of the Swamp Thing makes up for these limitations in highly inventive ways. Most of all, it employs the nexus narrative model to open up a multitude of perspectives on the main character. Typically, this is achieved by circumventing the extrinsic norms for character attachment and character depth: instead of staying close to the protagonist, the narration attaches itself to secondary characters. And instead of providing copious depth cues for the hero, Saga of the Swamp Thing often defers narrational depth to secondary characters, giving us their perspective on

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the Swamp Thing, while the protagonist remains all but mute. There are copious examples of depth deferral in Moore’s run on the title, the most famous probably being the story “Pog,” written by Moore and drawn by Shawn McManus (reprinted in Moore and Bissette “Love and Death”: 141– 163). In this installment of the series, the narration is attached to a band of small, reptilian aliens who crash land in the Swamp Thing’s bog home, mistaking it for “the Lady”—a substitute for their destroyed home world that is “as envirginomental as the old one” (Moore and Bissette “Love and Death”: 144, 3). As can be gleaned from this quote, the creatures speak a patois that turns their every line of dialogue into an intrinsic norm that must be learned. While certainly decipherable, their language provides for a genuine alienation effect, providing a fresh perspective on the storyworld (and, to a certain extent, the reader’s own). As Pog, the creatures’ captain, points out, the aliens’ home world was a place where “all of critterdom confraternated pleasably (sic), and nokind launched a presumptive strife against no otherkind” (Moore and Bissette “Love and Death”: 152, 2). Importantly, the inhabitants of this planet “showed no disreglect of our lady, and she showed none to us” until “a solitribal breed of misanthropomorphs” appeared “who refused to convivicate with elsefolk,” “constricted their own uncivilization, and exclucified anykind else from joining it” (ibid., 2/3). The visual narration strongly implies that these “loneliest animals of all” (ibid., 4) are human beings, but the narrational attitude is demanding enough not to make this conclusion explicit. The environmental devastation caused by man resulted in the creatures’ flight from the planet. The Swamp Thing has next to no agency in the story, and the rigorously deferred character and depth attachment also ensure that it does not utter a single line of intelligible dialogue. In the end, the aliens discover that this new Lady is not free from “the loneliest animal” at all, and after sustaining devastating losses, they flee from Earth. In the course of the syuzhet presentation, the narrative’s intrinsic norms open up any number of potential interpretive appropriations. They may cast doubt upon one of the central premises of the series itself, for example—the Swamp Thing’s inefficiency in saving the creatures makes the concept of an environmental superhero an unlikely proposition. The strategy of deferring narrational depth, agency and attachment is repeated time and again in Moore’s Swamp Thing issues. It can especially be found in later installments, which see the Swamp Thing on a long odyssey through space after he has been forced to leave Earth. The story “Exiles” repeats the intrinsic norm from “Pog” by putting the Swamp Thing into an environment where an alien language is spoken—with the impor-

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tant difference that this time, the aliens’ dialogue is indecipherable, requiring readers to scan the pages for important information in the visual narration instead of relying on dialogue (Moore, Veitch and Bissette “Reunion”: 31). “Loving the Alien” provides narrational depth only for a completely alien organism, a gigantic life form adrift in space that picks up the Swamp Thing and processes it in its body as a potential mate (Moore, Veitch and Bissette “Reunion”: 86). In every respect, this is the series’ most radical experiment with depth deferral, in that Moore and artist John Totleben frame the alien intelligence in terms of a complete dissolution of the mode of practice’s visual style. Most pages do not come conventionally chunked into separate panels; only the captions are spaced out over several boxes. In fact, at several points the repetition of frames in the visual narration makes a mockery of conventional chunking in that each subsequent frame obscures the previous panel, making it illegible (e.g., Moore, Veitch and Bissette “Reunion”: 86). On the same page, the principle of frontality is presumably observed for the Swamp Thing, but it is difficult to tell with absolute certainty since the marginalized figure is only shown in outline—the alien environment, such is the implication, heavily impedes the protagonist’s as well as the reader’s perception. The principle of relationality is compromised, too: while the story always puts the Swamp Thing in relation to a multitude of confusing spatial and material cues within the alien ship, none of these prompts are made narrationally salient apart from a distinct sense of physical danger. There are barbs and spikes reaching out for the protagonist, and they certainly look like a threat for the Swamp Thing’s body, but we are left clueless as to any other functions they might have. In short, the narration conveys otherness simply by refusing to narrate in spatially as well as causally unambiguous terms. In turn, these experiments with deferral make it possible to appropriate the protagonist’s largely untouched character schemata and prototype from different perspectives, contributing to a pervasive sense that the series “makes the character new” with each new episode when in reality it barely does. The interpretive fertility of the nexus model alongside its demand for intrinsic norms and pattern delay that invariably draw attention to the process of narration itself offer ample reason for readers to pursue the construction of an inferred author function. Saga of the Swamp Thing thus develops a fundamentally open narrational model that offered a solution to two of the most pressing problems for creators in the American comics mainstream at the time: the means to continually rejuvenate non-finite serials without entirely disavowing extrinsic norms, and

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a powerful set of tools to prevail in the decade’s conflicts of authorization. Unsurprisingly, the series’ influence is felt to this day.

Watchmen (1986–1987) and the Network Narrative “Do not read Watchmen first,” Walter Hudsick warns newcomers to the American comics mainstream (Hudsick “Reassembling the Components”: 8). From the point of view of historical poetics, this is good advice. After all, to only consider Watchmen in isolation or merely in contrast to the American comics mainstream of the 1980s harbors the danger of thinking it a sui generis work. This is not to belittle Moore and Gibbons’s contribution to comics history at all. This section will insist that Watchmen’s narrative strategies were not emulated to quite the same extent as those of Saga of the Swamp Thing because its creators took the new wave style to new extremes, producing a work of great narrational complexity and variety that has no equal in the new wave works preceding it. It is merely to say that even Watchmen did not suddenly appear out of thin air. But Hudsick has something else in mind in formulating this warning. To him, Watchmen “is not your best introduction to the comics idiom” because “[u]nless you’re a comics fan, you won’t have the fluency in the comics form and familiarity with the super-hero genre to unlock the story’s hidden messages” (Hudsick “Reassembling the Components”: 8/9). For Hudsick, there is a specific way in which the comic is to be interpreted, and this “correct” view of Watchmen requires an immense knowledge of comics history. It is imperative, for example, that the reader know the superhero prototypes—most of them previously published by the dormant Charlton imprint that Watchmen publisher DC Comics had acquired some years before—that the cast of Watchmen is loosely based on: When Dr. Manhattan zaps Viet Cong troops into oblivion with a gesture, we’re meant to recall Captain Atom trading power blasts with Commie super-villains, suddenly given real historical and political context. When Nite-Owl flies over the city in his google-eyed craft Archie, we’re supposed to see Blue Beetle in his flying Bug, now hobbled by his insecurity and sexual dysfunction. When the uncompromising Rorschach lectures on morality, we hear the Question holding forth, except now the voice of a sociopathic loner replaces that of a crusading TV reporter [Hudsick “Reassembling the Components”: 13/14].

In short, Hudsick reads Watchmen as “a self-referential history of the evolution of comics as well as the product of that evolution”—the comic

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can (and to Hudsick, must) be appropriated and unified in terms of (generic) historiography (Hudsick “Reassembling the Components”: 20). Backe concurs that Watchmen is “a text about comics narration and the history of the medium” (Backe “Under the Hood”: 123, my translation), but he also identifies a multitude of other possible interpretations. Watchmen can also be considered “a text about power and politics” as well as “morals, religion and responsibility” (ibid., my translation). It also treats “the relationship between men and women, mothers and daughters”; in short, the comic is “emphatically a treatise of gender and family discourses” (ibid., my translation). For Paik, the comic’s infamous ending of utopia achieved by way of mass murder negotiates the repressed underpinnings of violence that are part and parcel of the romantic longing for revolution: It is as though Moore, through his character Ozymandias, says to the liberal sympathizers of progressive revolutionary change, you long for a peaceful and humane political order but remain too tender-hearted to come to grips with the harsh truth that revolution is warfare and entails violence. If such an undertaking is to succeed, it will involve the deaths of innocents. So why not confine the inevitable butchery to a single horrifying event, the incalculably beneficial outcome of which will be the abolition of war? Ozymandias refuses to divorce utopia, as most utopians do, from the terrors of the apocalypse but grants it its proper place within the latter’s overarching framework of rejuvenating destruction and shattering deliverance [Paik “From Utopia to Apocalpyse”: 38].

And for Klock, Watchmen at its core effects a “destabilization of the assumptions that make superhero comics work” (Klock “How to Read Superhero Comics”: 62). After reading it, “[t]he superhero stories read as a child must be entirely reevaluated” (Klock “How to Read Superhero Comics”: 67)—to the point where Watchmen must be considered an attempt to pronounce the genre itself dead from ideological shortcomings. These are but a few examples of the most prominent strains of interpretation the serial has made possible in the past. Most of all, they demonstrate the comic’s performative openness—Moore and artist Dave Gibbons have overdetermined the mise-en-page with ambivalent cues for interpretive appropriations, and their meticulous work has yielded rich fruit since the book’s original publication from 1986 to 1987. There is only one thesis upon which practically all commentators agree: that Watchmen is anything but a conventional superhero comic. And yet, this idea could be contested. Watchmen complies with many of the mode of practice’s extrinsic norms. Consider the way in which the American comics mainstream of the 1980s frames character change, for example. In the beginning of the narrative, many of the protagonists are

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portrayed as having deviated from their character prototype. Dan Dreiberg, whose secret superhero identity is Nite-Owl, has ended his career as a masked adventurer with the implementation of the Keene Act in 1977— a piece of legislation that banned all vigilante activities in the storyworld of Watchmen. The narration portrays the Dan Dreiberg of 1985 as a meek, chubby middle-aged bachelor with self-esteem issues. Unsurprisingly for mode of practice readers, when Dreiberg puts on the Nite-Owl costume again towards the end of the story, he regains his former confidence and agency. In short, the arc of Dreiberg’s character change is framed as a return to a prototype, in adherence to the mode of practice’s extrinsic norm for character change. The same pattern applies for other characters, most prominently Laurie Juspeczyk. Watchmen offers many other generic pleasures, too. Much like the mode of practice, it grants pride of place to the villain and his machinations: starting with the murder of the Comedian in the opening sequence and its subsequent investigation by Rorschach, the entirety of Watchmen can be conceptualized as a reconstruction of Ozymandias’s plot to establish world peace. Rorschach’s enquiries follow the conventions of the detective story, too. Comics readers are entirely familiar with the superhero/detective story hybrid since it has long been a staple of mainstream series such as Batman. And just as predictably, Watchmen ends with a confrontation between the superheroes and the villain. Most readers—much like the critics cited above—would consider this view of Watchmen false. This is because reading Watchmen does not feel like reading a conventional mode of practice comic book at all. The reasons for this discrepancy are familiar by now: overdetermined mise-en-page, pattern delay, delayed pattern elimination, the foregrounding of interpretive and operational cues, gapping for ambivalence, and an even more radical use of the network narrative. Put more succinctly, Watchmen defamiliarizes and complicates the reading process in two ways. For one, it employs and fulfills generic conventions and tropes, but manages to destabilize our processing of these cues by various means. On the other hand, the comic frequently suspends adherence to the mode of practice’s norms, instead using the means of the network narrative to conceal and suppress connections between causal lines and to delay convergence. The narration announces this intrinsic norm of fluctuation between almost fully compliant genre fiction and the network narrative from the very beginning. On the initial pages of the first chapter, we make the acquaintance of two police detectives presumably investigating a murder—we later find out that the victim is the Comedian, a government-employed superhero. This

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introduction to Watchmen’s central detective story should make the reader surmise that the two policemen will feature as protagonists who will be instrumental in driving along the plot. But on page four, the detectives surprisingly decide “not [to] raise too much dust over this one” since a thorough enquiry might mean that “masked avengers” would be “cutting in” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: I, 4, 3). The following panels see the visual narration retreating from the two figures. This implies the loosening of narrational attachment, until finally we are no longer following the detectives and their exploits. Instead, the page’s final panel makes another character salient, a red-haired, slightly disheveled-looking figure whose importance to the story at large the narration carefully suppresses at this point. It turns out that the two detectives will not contribute much to the causal chain after all, appearing only as bit players in a much larger network narrative. The detective plot will thus be suspended time and again, just as much as the role of detective and the concomitant causal agency will frequently be deferred. In fact, in hindsight it could be said that the final panel of the page announces the deferral, since the red-haired man is later revealed to be the civilian identity of Rorschach, who will from now on be the driving force of the detective plot. Delay and suspension are not the only means Watchmen employs to draw readerly attention to generic conventions. Unsurprisingly, Watchmen sees Moore redeploy the complex temporality found in many new wave and British Invasion books, if with an important modification. The temporal gap that Watchmen invokes is even larger than those found in the series’ new wave predecessors: time and again, the narration implies that we need to consider almost the entire 20th-century history of the storyworld to make sense of the narrative. To fill this gap, the narration makes copious use of flashbacks. In fact, sometimes complete sections are devoted to flashbacks, such as chapter IV, which recounts Dr. Manhattan’s life story, or chapter II, which unfurls the history of the Minutemen, that is, Watchmen’s major superhero team. In this sense, the narration goes directly against the mode of practice, devoting parts of almost every page to historiographic concerns that do not necessarily propel the genre plot. Importantly, the representation of the past is reliable here—the enigma is not at all established by the flashbacks themselves, which deal entirely in narrative statements. Instead, past events are used to destabilize those parts of the narrative that comply with generic norms. If we reconsider the Dan Dreiberg character arc, for example, it quickly becomes apparent that, while parts of the extrinsic character norm are fulfilled, other unwritten laws of the mode

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of practice are subverted. Consider the principle of strong first impressions, for example. When we are first introduced to Dreiberg, the narration does its utmost to paint him in a sympathetic light (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: I, 9). In the first scene featuring the character, the dialogue implies that he goes to visit Hollis Mason, his predecessor as the NiteOwl, quite frequently, spending time with the pensioner for purely altruistic reasons. Their nostalgic conversations about their superheroic past “are what keeps [him] … going,” implying both concern for the pensioner and genuine fondness—a sympathy that is also conveyed by Dreiberg’s body language and facial expressions. At the end of the two scenes introducing Dreiberg, the narration also invokes the reader’s empathy, juxtaposing the former hero’s slumped, limp figure with his lost superhero prototype. An advertisement for Mason’s car repair shop in the foreground invokes both Dreiberg and Mason as “obsolete models” (ibid., 8), and the sequence’s final panel juxtaposes the rigidity and poise of Dreiberg’s superhero costume with his hunched over body (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: I, 13, 5). In other words, we are presented with a likable figure that has clearly strayed from the right path, and a return to the character prototype is framed as desirable. In a mode of practice comic, these strong first impressions would form a reliable basis for hypothesis testing. Dreiberg would remain a likable character, and at some point, he would don the costume again, returning to his character prototype and regaining agency. To some extent, Watchmen adheres to these principles. Dreiberg will never be painted in a truly unsympathetic light, and he indeed puts on the spandex again. But as we learn more and more about his past, we are given cues that should make us doubt whether this compliance with the norm is indeed an unambiguous affair. Dreiberg can be seen participating in a 1966 meeting of the Crimebusters, for example, the short-lived successor to the Minutemen. A certain Captain Metropolis, who has convened the group for the first and last time, outlines its aims: by “banding together as the Crimebusters,” the heroes will be able to fight the “new social evils” that “emerge every day: promiscuity, drugs, campus subversion, you name it!” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: II, 10, 2). A chart seen in several panels reveals the team’s other targets: “anti-war demos” and “black unrest” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: II, 11, 4). In other words, the Crimebusters, if they had not been disbanded almost immediately, would have been the superhero equivalents of the reactionary forces trying to stem the tide of 1950s and 1960s liberal societal change. While Dreiberg does not participate in the dialogue much, is unlikely to have participated in formulating these

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supposed evils, and is the first to point out that the group should disband, he is nevertheless associated with racism and reactionary politics. These cues are liable to result in a test of allegiance for readers (unless they subscribe to right-wing views, of course). On top of that, the scene can be appropriated as commentary on the mode of practice, for the Crimebusters would have been proactive superheroes with an effective a priori mission statement, unlike the superhero protagonists of the UnS. The goals as formulated by Captain Metropolis and various pieces of dialogue clearly point to this infringement of the extrinsic norm: “Given the correct handling,” Ozymandias says, “none of the world’s problems are insurmountable” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: II, 11, 1). The sequence therefore implicitly evokes those questions that the mode of practice usually carefully circumvents: what constitutes a “problem,” and how do we define its “correct handling”? The results for the reader’s relationship with the character of Dan Dreiberg may be manifold. Most of all, interpretive cues such as these are designed to make us question the extrinsic character norm. Is it really a good idea for Dan to put on the costume again if this superhero were to fight for questionable causes? Is resolution on generic terms truly desirable? This technique of slowly filling in gaps to make personal motivations and the return to superhero prototypes ambivalent is repeated with great insistence for all of Watchmen’s major characters. Laurie Juspeczyk becomes a superhero because her mother pressures her into it. The Comedian serves as the willing tool of the American government, and during the Vietnam War kills a Vietnamese woman pregnant with his child. These historical cues strongly compel readers to perform an interpretive mapping of the superhero genre itself, to thoroughly historicize it and consider it from the point of view of ideological criticism. These insistent thematic patterns are what the proponents of the revisionist or deconstructivist theories latch onto, not necessarily the narrational work of the superhero genre in Watchmen itself. The fulfillment of an extrinsic norm in Watchmen is therefore almost never congruent with that satisfying moment readers might know from the mode of practice—the moment when all but one generic pattern is eliminated and predictions are either confirmed or disconfirmed. On top of that, the somewhat diluted pleasure of conventionality is offered only sparingly in Watchmen, since pattern delay and delayed pattern elimination are taken to new heights by Moore and Gibbons. Most prominently, it takes almost the entire series for the villain to be revealed and the protagonists to return to their superhero prototypes. It is therefore unsur-

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prising that the audience will embrace a character who drives along the conventional detective story like no other figure in the comic, that is, Rorschach. From his first introduction, the syuzhet cues indicate an intrinsic narrational norm for the character that differs immensely from that of all other protagonists (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: I, 7). In this sequence, Rorschach is shown doing detective work: he wants to find out who killed the Comedian. In panels two and three, he measures the depth of the Comedian’s wardrobe with his arm. The outside suggests a more spacious interior than his rough measurement of the inside indicates. In the subsequent three panels, Rorschach goes on to corroborate these findings with a more precise measuring instrument that he fashions out of a clothes hanger. Finally, his investigation leads him to the discovery of a secret compartment containing the Comedian’s superhero costume and assorted memorabilia. The scene is remarkable for several reasons. First of all, it displays a complete absence of the overdetermination and foregrounded spatiality that is characteristic of Watchmen’s mise-en-page. Its lack of redundancy compared to the mode of practice is equally striking. Readers must follow the visual narration very closely and draw their own conclusions from Rorschach’s actions, since no captions or thought bubbles make his rationale redundant. In other words, the audience is challenged to produce narrational depth themselves—and every conclusion extends the causal line, drives the plot along, and reveals new connections (the murder victim had a secret identity, he was a superhero). This is in stark contrast to almost the rest of the cast of Watchmen, who spend much of the narrative nostalgically pondering the past and delaying the return to their prototype schemata. Unlike Dan Dreiberg or Laurie Juspeczyk, Rorschach never deviated from his prototype, making him the only character with unequivocal generic agency. As the gap of Rorschach’s past is filled, the narration does its utmost to render his efficiency as problematic as possible. It does so by offering contradictory and troubling motivations for Rorschach, painting him as “a fervent ultra-conservative” and “a nihilist with a strong Nietzschean bent” (Phillips “Blotting out Reality”: 64), a sociopath with psychosexual hang-ups, a radicalization of Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko’s “The Question” and “Mr. A” characters, complete with Ayn Randian Objectivist bent (cf. Phillips “Blotting out Reality”: 66), and so on. In short, the syuzhet provides an immense number of polyvalent cues for interpretation that cannot possibly be unified, except perhaps by the common thread of repulsiveness. Rorschach nevertheless remains highly popular with readers and has become a favorite target for interpretations—not necessarily because

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readers are covert fascists or sympathize with psychopaths. Instead, it can be argued that Rorschach is given such an inordinate amount of attention by readers because his character offers the most solid foundation for hypothesis testing. He provides a minimum of predictability and causal agency in a syuzhet otherwise dominated by pattern delay and loose network narrative structures, where causality’s usually firm grip as the dominant narrational system slackens often. How does the fluctuation between genre fiction and network narrative typically work in Watchmen? The first three chapters offer a solid example. First, we are introduced to the central detective story concerning the Comedian’s murder—the investigation of which is immediately cancelled by the two policemen. This constitutes the first oscillation from genre fiction to a much looser network narrative. In the following, Rorschach quickly takes on the function of detective, and becomes the narration’s agent to uncover the relationships between the primary characters, if only on the most basic terms (as is characteristic of the network narrative, many connections such as the identity of Laurie Juspeczyk’s father will remain concealed for much longer). Rorschach’s visit to Laurie Juspeczyk and Dr. Manhattan in the first chapter (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: I, 22/23) is indicative of his function as both detective figure and catalyst for the revelation of connections: he comes to see his former vigilante colleagues to warn them about a potential superhero killer on the loose, and to recruit them in the investigation. Rorschach’s visit with Dr. Manhattan and Juspeczyk has a network narrative function, since their meeting reveals (part of ) the characters’ connections to each other. It also triggers the unveiling of further links between characters—because of Rorschach’s visit, Laurie decides to call Dan Dreiberg to set up a meeting. Bit by bit, Rorschach’s actions, alongside copious flashbacks, thus bring the network to light. By the end of chapter two, readers are familiar with a large cast of characters and their common past as superheroes. Many of the causal lines are no longer distinct, and even though most of the characters have not even come close to returning to generic agency, the reader can start to formulate hypotheses for how the lines might nevertheless converge in a concerted investigation of the Comedian’s murder that will eventually unveil the villain of the piece. To delay convergence and destabilize the reading process once more, the beginning of chapter III must therefore be the moment the narration redeploys a host of new network narrative cues. Consider the second page of chapter III (Moore and Gibbons III, 2). Here, the narration establishes (or in some cases, makes salient for the first time) at least four new plots.

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The dominant plot here is that of the downtown New York newsvendor and the boy reading a comic book close to his newsstand. But the beginnings of multiple other plots are scattered throughout the page. For example, the visual narration does its utmost to include the “Institute for Extraspatial Studies” in the background, compelling readers to ponder its significance. In fact, its connection to the villain’s larger plot will only be revealed very late in the story, and so this micro-story, minimal and bereft of actual characters though it is at this point, evades convergence for the longest time. As already stated, the newsvendor and the boy reading the pirate comic book are foregrounded here, establishing a causal line with only the bare minimum of contact with the other plots. Situated as the boy and the newsvendor are in the middle of Manhattan, most of the protagonists will cross this nodal point at some point or the other. These characters make no major contributions to the larger plot, as the readers will find out, and yet they feature in the syuzhet time and again. The audience will therefore be compelled to ponder their function. In true network narrative fashion, this strand is purely comparative, offering a more pedestrian perspective on the story’s larger events. On the same page, the narration introduces yet another causal line that, unlike the newsvendor plot, reveals its distinctness from the get-go: the boy is reading a comic book that is presented as a story-within-the-story, a pirate yarn entitled Tales of the Black Freighter. Finally, the last panel of the page reintroduces us to the red-haired, scruffy man who already featured on the first page of the story bearing a sign that says, “THE END IS NIGH.” Later, it is of course revealed that this is Rorschach in his civilian identity, but for now, the narration continues to conceal this direct connection to the larger narrative. How can we conceptualize the effect of this multitude of new plots on the reading process? They may cue the three previously mentioned kinds of hypotheses, albeit with a disproportionate bent towards the operational and thematic. First of all, readers will wonder how (and if ) these new strands will converge with the detective story, that is, they will try to phrase fabula hypotheses. But since this line of inquiry is unlikely to be fruitful—the narration is too suppressive to provide solid grounds for such surmises—the audience will have to consider these new plots from a different angle. They might formulate operational hypotheses—readers may wonder whether the story-within-the-story will be continued in the same obtrusive fashion, for example. It will also be of interest whether the narration will continue to use this extremely noisy and dense mise-en-page in the future, packing multiple plots and even entirely distinct diegeses

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on a single page. Finally, the reader will have no choice but to consider the disconnect between these plots from an interpretive point of view. If no causal relationship is discernible, the individual strands are much more likely to be scanned for thematic similarities. The narration foregrounds this reading strategy as the most satisfying by having the newsvendor say, “See, everything’s connected. A newsvendor unnerstands that. He don’t retreat from reality” (panel four). The syuzhet employs a large assortment of means to emphasize the thematic parallels between the different strands. Among its most prominent strategies to make the many parallelisms of Watchmen salient for the reader is a variation of the dialogue hook, which can be witnessed on this page from chapter III as well. The comic book-within-the-comic book shows the protagonist of Tales of the Black Freighter in two high angle panels, standing in the wreckage of his ship (panels six and seven). Both panels are overlaid with dialogue spoken by the newsvendor, who states, “He’s a survivor” (panel six). The newsvendor thus seemingly points out the status of the Black Freighter protagonist in redundant fashion even though he is entirely unaware of his statement’s polyvalence—he is referring to himself in the third person. It is important to emphasize how this usage of the dialogue hook differs from the mainstream practice. There, hooks are used to establish causal connections; they almost always promise convergence on these terms. In this example from Watchmen, the dialogue hook can offer no such thing, since there is no way in which the superhero diegesis could merge with the Tales of the Black Freighter storyworld. The hook can therefore only constitute a thematic cue, not a causal one. It is essential that this type of dialogue hook establishes no causal connection at all, since in this manner, it draws attention to the readers’ own process of meaning- making. Effectively, the audience is shown that they are establishing non-causal, purely abstract links that have no factual basis. In this way, Watchmen both encourages and destabilizes appropriation, making it a necessity for lack of causal momentum and pointing out its constructedness at the same time. To create further thematic parallelisms and to heighten the potential for interpretive appropriations, the narration takes great care to keep Watchmen’s major causal lines distinct for long stretches of time. Noncausal hooks such as the one previously discussed are used with great insistence—the narration clearly aims to make readers doubt that causal unification on generic terms will eventually come. Here is one more example of the principle at work: as the Comedian is buried in chapter II, a simultaneous, separate strand shows Laurie Juspezcyk visiting her mother

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Sally in a retirement home (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: II, 2/3). Sally asks her daughter to put out her cigarette, since “[a]t my age ahhum you wanna take care of yourself,” but without really voicing the request. In typically passive-aggressive fashion, she just opens all the doors and windows of her apartment to get rid of the fumes. This prompts an angry reaction in Laurie: “Look, I’m putting it out, okay? It’s dead. Extinguished” (ibid., 9). The first panel of the page that immediately follows this panel shows the Comedian’s casket, surrounded by mourners—once again highlighting the disconnect between the banality of an extinguished cigarette and a funeral, and cueing interpretive hypotheses at the same time. Watchmen’s symbolism also trades in polyvalence. For example, the narration repeats the so-called “Hiroshima lovers” pattern throughout the syuzhet: the shadows or silhouettes of two lovers embracing, sometimes seen in actual life (72.1/72.2; Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: I, 24, 4; VI, 8, 6), as graffiti (72.3; Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: V, 11, 5), or in abstraction as a Rorschach pattern (72.4; Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: VI, 4, 9). Even though the symbol is often closely linked to Rorschach’s plot, the meanings evoked by it are incompatible. Even if we restrict the interpretation to Rorschach’s perspective, we are faced with a palimpsest of different associations. The narration suggests, for example, that Rorschach unconsciously connects the lovers to his troubled relationship with his mother (cf. Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: VI, 3/4), his own repressed sexuality (cf. Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: V, 11, 5), and to the symbol’s performative status itself. To Rorschach in his existentialist frame of mind—one of many incongruous versions of the character the narration presents—the pattern is also representative of a fundamentally meaningless world that is only lent significance through projection (cf. Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: VI, 26). For another version of Rorschach, the symmetrical outline is symbolic of a world that can be made sense of if it is rigorously categorized in binary oppositions (cf. Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: I, 24, 6/7). If we add perspectives other than Rorschach’s to the mix, the clash of meanings becomes even more obvious. At various points, the Hiroshima lovers are associated with the failure of human relationships and community in general, for example, and they are used as a bitter counterpoint to the mass murder of large portions of New York that closes the story (cf. Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: XI, 27, 3, very much marginalized on the left; and Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: XII, 4/5). Backe contends that these “polyvalent signifiers” constitute a “turning away from the traditional unity of artistic forms” that is typical of Post-

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modernism (14, my translation). To him, the polyphony of contradictory meaning(s) found in Watchmen constitutes a new form of realism that reflects a “nature which is chaotic by necessity: if everything is connected in reality, it is only par for the course that this should be the case in art, too” (Backe “Under the Hood”: 15, my translation). From the point of view of poetics, this conclusion can be expanded upon to a certain extent. During and after the reading process, interpretive appropriations will necessarily occur; there is no escaping them in a narrative as suppressive and self-reflexive as Watchmen. If anything, the highly divergent critical voices cited at the beginning of this section attest to this. Most readers will indeed not be contented by the statement that Watchmen defies a unified reading. Instead, the comic’s narration puts much effort into making any attempt at synthesis as difficult as possible. In a very real sense, then, the process of interpretation itself becomes Watchmen’s dominant theme. The narration frequently employs foregrounded spatiality to promote a holistic view of the comic as material object—we are solicited to re-read Watchmen, to roam the panels, pages and sequences in non-linear fashion in order to make our interpretation as informed as possible. Consider another page from a later chapter (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: VIII, 25): here, the Tales of the Black Freighter diegesis is juxtaposed with two other largely non-convergent network plots. There is the newsvendor’s causal line, and a very minor subplot involving a gang of drug addicts called “Knot Tops” (after their hair style), or “Katie Heads” (after their preferred drug, the fictional KT28). On a first reading, the juxtaposition of these plots will likely make little sense to readers. The newsvendor/Knot Top plot shows the Katie Heads furious over the fact that the controversial antihero Rorschach has been sprung from prison. The remaining three panels show the protagonist of the Black Freighter story on his raft kept afloat by bloated corpses, closing in on his hometown. The initial impression of this page is one of anxiety- inducing, fragmentary chaos—two disconnected storyworlds clash on the page for no apparent reason. However, when re-reading the book, the parallels between the stories become apparent. The Knot Tops are about to make a mistake: thinking that the original Nite Owl, i.e., Hollis Mason, is responsible for springing Rorschach from prison, they invade his home and kill him. In fact, Hollis never left his house; his successor as Nite-Owl, Dan Dreiberg, is responsible for the prison break. This knowledge is available to the readers at this point. What they would not know on a first reading is that the protagonist of The Black Freighter, his mind addled from his traumatizing experiences as the victim

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of a shipwreck, is about to make a very similar error of judgment. Thinking that the pirates who sunk his ship have massacred his entire town, he goes on a killing spree, disposing of the supposed villains. In his mad rage, he does not realize that his home town is, in fact, entirely untouched—he is merely hallucinating the pirate invaders. Inevitably, he will finally kill his own family. On a re-reading, it is relatively easy to discover that the diagrammatic mise-en-page is cueing us to compare the two plots, with the conclusion that the protagonists of both stories suffer from a very limited perspective on the events and fail to draw the right conclusions from the data available to them. In turn, this finding should produce a more general line of enquiry: do the comic’s copious other causal lines show such parallels too? Upon closer inspection—roaming the comic’s many diagrammatic page layouts—the crisis of meaning-making becomes obvious. We find examples of other characters whose confidence in their view of the world equals murder and madness. Ozymandias’s genocidal plot to bring about world peace is the most prominent example. At many other points, the secret identity of the superhero is equated with a reduction in complexity, the willful disregard of a holistic perspective. This interpretation is cued with great insistence in the case of Dan Dreiberg. Dan asserts that his superhero costume, with its telltale reduction of the visual field by way of a pair of goggles, helped him be proactive: “[n]o matter how black it got,” he says, “when I looked through these goggles…. Everything was clear as day” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: VII, 8/9). Other characters fail entirely to make meaning. Dr. Manhattan, for example, spends the whole of chapter IV pondering his life story, and does not succeed in finding the appropriate manner in which to frame his biography. The blue captions present him especially at odds with finding the right moment with which to begin the tale, and so he starts over and over again from different points in time: “It is 1985. I am on Mars. I am fifty-six years old” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: IV, 2, 5); “[i]t is 1948, and I am arriving at Princeton University” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: IV, 3, 9); “[i]t’s May 12th, 1959: my first day at Gila Flats” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: IV, 4, 1), and so on. To Kukkonen, this fruitless search for the correct “frame of reference” that “brought Jon to his current situation” constitutes “a polyphony of beginnings and causes” that ultimately does not produce a single “correct” solution (Kukkonen “Neue Perspektiven”: 29/30, my translation). Even though the reader “can easily construct a coherent biography” from the syuzhet cues, the anxiety brought about by the failed emplotment remains (ibid.). It is even aggravated by the fact that with each new start,

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meaning-making invariably reaches a cul-de-sac. “The morality of my activities escapes me,” Dr. Manhattan says of his time as a crime-fighter in the 1960s (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: IV, 14, 2). To quell a riot against vigilantism in 1977, he teleports the protesters back to their homes. Consequently, “two people … suffered heart attacks upon suddenly finding themselves indoors” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: IV, 22, 6). Manhattan’s justification of his actions hardly sounds convincing: “More would have suffered during a riot, I’m certain” (ibid.). His failure to synthesize meaning from the events of his life is especially significant since his point of view is comparable to the reader’s. After a devastating accident, he no longer perceives time in a linear fashion, but is instead able to experience the fourth dimension spatially. To him, “time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: IX, 6, 6). The history of the storyworld is to Manhattan like a material comic book, a spatial structure that can be explored at will. If he is unable to make sense of it and derive agency from his holistic perspective on the storyworld’s spatio-temporal makeup, how should the reader? This is not to say that Watchmen’s uses of foregrounded spatiality cannot be appropriated on emancipatory terms. The noisy, diagrammatic mise-en-page may frequently point out the failure of meaning-making, but the non-linear view it propagates can equally often be interpreted as a prerequisite for moral action. Parallelisms such as the juxtaposition of the Black Freighter story with the Knot Tops’ murder of Hollis Mason grant the possibility of such an interpretation, as do many other instances of heavily spatialized mise-en-page. Upon re-reading the book, for example, it becomes impossible to overlook the countless ways in which the syuzhet implicates Ozymandias as the villain well in advance of the final reveal. During the Comedian’s funeral, an isolated medium shot of Ozymandias is overlaid with the priest’s sermon, speaking about “sins” for which God is “justly displeased” (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: II, 9, 3). When Rorschach visits Ozymandias to inform him of the Comedian’s murder, the final panel of the scene shows an Ozymandias action figure bent into a highly suggestive unnatural posture that may imply the character’s moral twistedness to the reader. The narration facilitates such interpretations for other characters and plots, too. A sequence from chapter IX ties foregrounded spatiality directly to the notion of truth and the resolution of Laurie Juspeczyk’s sub plot (Moore and Gibbons “Watchmen”: IX, 23), for example. Here, the

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mise-en-page brings together panels as well as snippets of dialogue from a wide variety of previous scenes in a simultaneously present collage, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the Comedian is, in fact, Laurie’s father. Not only does this comic book perspective on time and space establish one of the final links in the network narrative; the revelation also constitutes the causal cue that finally compels Dr. Manhattan to action. Foregrounded spatiality is therefore both in Watchmen: as overdetermined, seemingly chaotic mise-en-page, especially on a first reading, it constitutes a potential source of readerly anxiety; but it may also bring about moral agency. Only one thing is certain: without fail, these highly complex and challenging narrative strategies solicit interpretations and help readers construct the inferred author function, cementing Moore’s status in the American comics mainstream of the 1980s. From the point of view of poetics, Watchmen could therefore be characterized as a text carefully oscillating between poles without ever fully committing to one or the other. It straddles the divide between genre fiction and network narrative, making a problem of both. The network narrative furthers anxiety rather than agency because of its disavowal of causality and convention, whereas the standard superhero story is portrayed as ideologically as well as morally problematic, despite (or maybe because of ) the pleasures of seeing extrinsic norms fulfilled and agency asserted. At the same time, Watchmen hesitates between framing its own narrational means of overdetermination and foregrounded spatiality as a source of disquiet or emancipation. This fragile equilibrium, carefully sustained over a long syuzhet distance and tailor-made for appropriations, represents a considerable achievement that required meticulous planning, immense efforts at worldbuilding, and a slow, methodical syuzhet construction that involved the invention of numerous new narrative devices. Such an obsessive production process is alien to the mode of practice with its insistence on monthly publication schedules and its still dominant extrinsic norms. Given this catalogue of Watchmen’s sophisticated and complex poetics of ambiguity, it should be obvious why it found few imitators.

Summary: The New Narrational Template and Its Cultural Niche Watchmen’s transgressions against the mode of practice’s extrinsic norms, in other words, are too numerous to count (even though any num-

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ber of rules are ultimately obeyed). Why did the U.S. comics mainstream even tolerate such a work? To sum up the reasons for this relative permissiviness briefly, it was suggested at the beginning of this chapter that the early 1980s found the American comics industry in a time of transition, caught between two fundamentally different target audiences: the traditional youthful fans who bought comics off spinner racks in grocery stores all over the United States, and the new direct market, which catered to specialist stores and a more sophisticated, mostly adult readership. The latter group proved more artistically discerning and much more invested in discourses of authorship. As a result, the American mode of practice slowly discovered that auteurism was a bankable commodity, resulting in aggressive conflicts of authorization between comics creators and publishers. A greater demand for comics auteurs—creators whose public personas and work could be marketed on the grounds of a unique style—was another consequence of this change in the comics market. The fact that U.S. publishers reached out to British comics creators like Moore in the early to mid–1980s can therefore be considered proof that, on the one hand, the authorial performances inherent in titles such as Miracleman had been effective. On the other hand, this almost unprecedented transatlantic recruitment drive also corroborates the demand for new auteurs. The mainstream publishers suspended the laws of the mode of practice to an unprecedented extent in a bid to compete with the alternative presses and to please their auteurs as well as the Direct Market audience. This dynamic made it possible for the complex British new wave style to transition to the U.S. mainstream comics industry almost fully intact. Titles such as Saga of the Swamp Thing and Watchmen were allowed to make full use of the complex narrative strategies formerly found in the British anthologies. DC Comics even went so far as to relinquish the selfimposed censorship of the Comics Code Authority for Moore. Watchmen can be considered the most radical exponent of the new wave style: with its overdetermined mise-en-page, ambitious meta-historiographic gapping strategy and polyvalent hooks and symbols, it puts an immense strain on readers used to the mode of practice’s redundancies, predictable generic patterns, and clear-cut causal chains. And by delaying generic fulfillment to an unprecedented extent, it takes the American comics mainstream closer to a fully- fledged network narrative than ever before, loosening the dominance of the narrational system of causality and foregrounding operational and interpretive hypotheses. Like the new wave titles analyzed previously, Watchmen is deeply indebted to the mode of practice, playing off its extrinsic norms as much as it fulfills them itself.

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The nexus narrative model introduced in Saga of the Swamp Thing proved much more influential. This is partly because it offered comics creators a plethora of means to revitalize the experience of reading a serial that is largely compliant with the mode of practice. By marginalizing the protagonist(s), it allows for the introduction of new characters with each story arc—be they stock figures from the larger shared universe, or entirely new creations. In turn, these characters can be presented in terms of a network narrative, only slowly revealing causal connections between initially distinct plots. In a nexus narrative, the reading process thus becomes considerably more complex than in the typical mode of practice story: readers must predict which causal lines will converge and which will not make any important contributions to the causal. And since these individual plots invite thematic comparisons, seeing that they are kept causally separate for as long as possible, they may also be used to foreground the formulation of operational and interpretive hypotheses. This greater capacity for interpretation and meaning-making, as well as the focus on the pleasures of an operational aesthetic, in turn strengthens the creators’ position in the raging conflicts of authorization. The nexus narrative thus proved a potent tool in the construction of inferred author functions. Equally importantly, series marked as the creation of auteurs were liable (if certainly not guaranteed) to fare well economically. The influence of the nexus narrative on the American comics mainstream remains considerable. In 1993, six years after Moore’s run on Saga of the Swamp Thing ended, DC Comics founded the Vertigo label, an imprint for mature readers whose marketing put great emphasis on auteurism and whose many successful series owe no small debt to the many narrational strategies introduced to the mode of practice by Moore and his collaborators. Vertigo thrives on nexus model to this day. The most prominent—certainly the most famous—example is The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman and a host of artists (1989–1996), which clearly adopted the nexus model introduced by Saga of the Swamp Thing and took it to new intertextual heights. It would be possible to characterize a host of other Vertigo serials as nexus narratives: Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s The Unwritten (2009–2015), for example, as well as Hellblazer (various writers and artists, 1988–2013); Shade, the Changing Man by Peter Milligan and various artists (1990–1996), or Fables (2002–2015), by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham all fit the bill. At the same time, the very foundation of Vertigo is indicative of the fact that by the end of the 1980s the window of opportunity that had made the transatlantic migration of the new wave style to the American main-

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stream an easy one was closing. The experiments of Saga of the Swamp Thing and Watchmen were only allowed to continue within the clearly delineated boundaries of a dedicated imprint. This is not to say at all that these titles had no impact on the mode of practice outside the confines of Vertigo. The influence of these initial British Invasion titles would make itself felt throughout the entire mode of practice, be it in the shape of a new editorial laxness in the enforcement of extrinsic norms, the fullfledged adoption and extension of the nexus model in titles such as Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson’s Astro City (1995—ongoing), or in the pointed rejection of new wave narrative techniques by the next generation of mainstream comics and artists, because what was formerly seen as revolutionary was now considered staid and conventional by some. The following chapter will be dedicated to tracing these further developments.

4

“What is there for me to do?” Case Studies in the Second Wave of the British Invasion The extent to which the new wave style came to be associated with the person of Alan Moore cannot be understated. Neither should we underestimate, as already hinted at in the previous chapter, the degree to which “the Alan Moore style” would soon be institutionalized. Karen Berger, the editor responsible for recruiting many of the British Invasion creators for the American comics industry and founder of the Vertigo imprint, emphasizes that the initial Vertigo books, almost all by British creators, had a “shared sensibility” that would not have emerged “if it wasn’t for the brilliant and magnificent Alan Moore, who blazed the trail of insurrection with his groundbreaking, literary work on Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen” (Berger “Introduction”: 8). While it is impossible to quantify the extent to which “the Moore style” became the gold standard in the Vertigo offices, this should demonstrate that Moore’s work had considerable clout with Vertigo editors, likely bordering on house style status. Moore himself has observed in countless interviews that his Swamp Thing run “led to Vertigo where you could kind of factor y farm a particular … ambiance because it proved popular” (Moore “Watchmania”: 125). Famously, Moore has also called Vertigo and a disproportionate part of the U.S. comics mainstream since the release of Watchmen and Swamp Thing an extension “of a bad mood that … [he] was in” at the time of their publication (Moore “Robinson”). From the perspective of historical poetics, these are imprecise observations, since Moore cannot be called the sole originator of the new wave style—although he must certainly be credited as the creator who alerted a much larger public to it, and as one of its most radical and innovative proponents, if not the most radical. Yet the strong authorial performances in Swamp Thing as well as 200

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Watchmen, fueled by the late 1980s conflicts of authorization, soon singled out Moore as the solitary genius against which all upcoming writers would have to measure themselves—especially if they were British. Before we embark on a discussion of the further development of the British Invasion, some more historical and material context is necessary to grasp why Moore’s migration did not remain an isolated incident—and how the U.S. mode of practice changed as we make the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s. In scholarly accounts as well as fan circles, Moore is usually considered the spearhead of the first wave of the British Invasion. He is then joined in the U.S. comics industry by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, and Peter Milligan (cf. Round “AngloAmerican Graphic Narrative”: 327). These writers in turn “were instrumental in launching DC’s Vertigo imprint at the start of the 1990s with the revisionist titles Sandman (Gaiman et al., 1989–1996), Animal Man (Morrison et al., 1988–90, #1–26), Doom Patrol (Morrison et al. 1989– 1993, #19–63), and Shade, the Changing Man (Peter Milligan and Chris Bachalo 1990–1996)” (Round “Anglo-American Graphic Narrative”: 327). The dates suggest a time frame for the first wave between 1984, the year of Moore’s U.S. debut, and 1990, when Peter Milligan supposedly rounded off the first wave with Shade, the Changing Man. According to Round, the second wave consisted of writers “such as Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, and Mark Millar” (Round “Anglo-American Graphic Narrative”: 327). The first of these British comics creators to enter the U.S. market was Garth Ennis, who inherited the Vertigo serial Hellblazer from Jamie Delano in 1991. Yet this implies a gap of only one year between the first and the second wave, from 1990 to 1991, which hardly merits the differentiation between two separate phases. The impression of a sizable delay between the migrations of these comics writers is probably due to the fact that Ennis, Ellis, and Millar only rose to prominence later in the decade. Alongside penciler Steve Dillon, Ennis enjoyed great success with the Vertigo serial Preacher starting in 1995. Ellis joined the star writer ranks with titles such as Transmetropolitan (with penciler Darick Robertson, 1997–2002), Planetary (with penciler John Cassaday, 1999–2009), and The Authority (with penciler Bryan Hitch, 1999–2000). Millar only became a major player at Marvel Comics after the turn of the century. As it stands, the two waves model only makes sense if we consider commercial and/or artistic success the most important reference points. Alternatively, the dates also suggest— perhaps more persuasively—a first wave consisting of Moore and artists like Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland starting in 1984 (Bolland got his first DC Comics work even earlier, at the beginning of the decade), and a

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second wave of British creators entering the U.S. mainstream around 1988 in a steady stream that has not broken off to this day. This is the approach that this study will adopt. The thriving transnational comics tradition in the wake of Moore’s Atlantic crossing is not merely due to the success of Watchmen and Swamp Thing and the considerable prestige bestowed upon British comics creators in the United States in their wake. It is also a consequence of developments in the British comics industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Much like the U.S. market, Great Britain experienced a boom in comic books aimed at a more mature audience in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This development was narrowly confined to just a few years. As Chapman observes, anthology titles such as “Crisis, Deadline, Heartbreak Hotel, Revolver, Strip, Meltdown, Xpresso, Blast! and Toxic! all came—and, with the exception of Deadline, went—within three years between 1988 and 1991” (Chapman “British Comics”: 231). 2000AD, too, tried to go with the times and profit from the newfound cultural cachet that titles such as Watchmen, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Art Spiegelman’s Maus had brought the medium. This change in direction was made possible by the fact that Fleetway, their new publishers, “were completely rudderless” at the time (directorial director John Davidge qtd. in Chapman “British Comics”: 232). But almost without exception, these endeavors to establish an adult comics market failed to win over a sufficiently large readership. Importantly, they lasted long enough to serve as entry points for new talent. For example, Warren Ellis got his start writing for Deadline and Blast! and Garth Ennis initially published stories in Crisis. The collapse of the mature comics segment in Britain practically forced comics creators to seek their fortunes elsewhere, driving them “into the arms of American publishers” (ibid.). The U.S. comics industry had indeed been slightly more successful in establishing niches for an older and more diverse readership. The Vertigo imprint offered the British talent such a haven, replicating and developing the “undefined middle ground between corporate comics and alternative ones, popular genres and more personal work” (Singer “Grant Morrison”: 93) that the British anthologies like Warrior and Deadline had not quite managed to popularize. Despite Karen Berger’s assertion that she “has sought to distinguish Vertigo titles from the superhero comics that dominate the American comics industry” (Singer “Grant Morrison”: 92), practically all the 1993 launch titles were based on some former DC Comics superhero serial (e.g., Animal Man, Shade, the Changing Man, and The Sandman). In other words, Vertigo’s poetics were based on generic hybridity from the very beginning, com-

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bining the mode of practice’s extrinsic norms with narrational innovations, and sometimes productively pitting them against each other. Vertigo is thus positioned to make transitions both from and to the comics mainstream relatively easy for both creators and readers. If we were to describe its function in the larger publishing apparatus of DC Comics (and ultimately Warner Brothers), this liminal positioning is key, granting the imprint a justification for its existence that goes well beyond sales figures. Singer points out that Vertigo is “an imprint caught between publication models and, sometimes, between audiences” (Singer “Grant Morrison”: 93). The latter implies that Vertigo has not necessarily produced solely bestsellers. Especially in the Direct Market, it is only rarely able to compete with the more mainstream offerings of DC and Marvel. Even Vertigo’s greatest hit to date, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, only became truly competitive in the Direct Market after the collapse of the Image Comics and collectible boom of the early 1990s. This was a speculator craze created by the comics industry to boost sales. For a few brief years at the beginning of the 1990s, publishers—Image Comics especially—had a rising number of collectors convinced that comics enhanced with gimmicky foil covers “were in some way going to be scarce or valuable in the future” (Morrison “Supergods”: 245). For a while, this greatly increased back issue prices, “and comics stores enjoyed a boom time that left the Image crew very wealthy indeed” (ibid.). Vertigo entered the market in this climate, where comics often “resemble[d] pinup catalogues” (Morrison “Supergods”: 243) and were “built to service the demand of collectors at the expense of the occasional purchasers who are only interested in comic book reading” (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 157). After the inevitable collapse of the speculator bubble, Vertigo emerged as a sound long-time investment for DC Comics. It would serve as a grooming ground for creators, giving writers like Morrison space to experiment, develop their inferred author functions, and build a readership. Since the imprint often grants full or partial creator ownership, DC could also use Vertigo serials as incentives or rewards for successful mainstream creators. For many writers and artists, this established a pattern quite familiar from Hollywood auteurs: “one for them, one for me,” that is, one serial at DC Comics proper, tailored for mainstream success, and one published by Vertigo to explore more provocative subject matters with greater stylistic and thematic freedom. And even if Vertigo comics do not necessarily command extensive audiences, they are frequently up for awards and well received by critics, earning them the status of prestige projects that benefit the larger DC Comics brand.

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The comparative liberty enjoyed by writers and artists working on Vertigo serials also helped change the mainstream’s publishing models and serialization strategies. Gaiman, Ellis, Ennis, and their peers were allowed to write stories that were “structured over six or eight consecutive issues” and thus already “formatted for their ultimate publication in trade paperbacks,” where they would enjoy much greater permanence (Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men”: 100). The paperback format made it possible for stores outside the Direct Market to carry and successfully sell titles such as The Sandman. From the second half of the 1990s, all mainstream publishers gradually followed suit, now structuring their stories for paperback consumption. Vertigo thus became DC’s most successful tool to manage the mainstream’s conflicts of authorization: a publishing niche where the quarrels between corporation and creatives could be put to rest to mutual benefit. The following sections are dedicated to tracing the permutations of the new wave style in the U.S. comics mainstream in the wake of Alan Moore’s initial U.S. work, with a special focus on the Vertigo label. A closer look at the poetics of three important serials—Ennis and Dillon’s Preacher, Ellis and Cassaday’s Planetary, and Morrison and Quitely’s Flex Mentallo—will illuminate just what constitutes the greater freedom the new wave style afforded comics creators, and determine the major constraints on their imaginations. It is one of the central contentions of these sections that the new wave poetics, now almost entirely associated with Moore, came to dictate house styles and provided fresh extrinsic norms. This laid the groundwork for the economic as well as artistic dynamic that the artists and writers of the British Invasion would have to negotiate. On the one hand, they had much to gain from adopting and conforming to the new wave style: an immediate public association with the British Invasion and its economic as well as artistic successes being the most important incentive. On the other hand, British creators aiming to enter the American mainstream had to ask themselves the question that Bordwell considers central to all artistic endeavors: “What is there for me to do?” A mere imitation of Moore’s style would perhaps find a Vertigo editor’s approval, but in the long run, it would make authorial distinction of any sort difficult. The creators of the second wave therefore had to make this tension between the need for a certain amount of conformity on the one hand and artistic distinction on the other hand productive—they had to make themselves recognizable as part of what was quickly becoming the tradition of the British Invasion and differentiate themselves as much as possible within these structures. Poetics gives us the necessary tools to

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track the continuities with as well as the divergences from the new wave style that the British comics creators following Moore bring to the table. Broadly speaking, the writers and artists of these three serials negotiate the pressures of tradition by yielding to the demand for nexus narratives to some extent while adopting and heavily revising the model at the same time.

Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher (1995–2000): Overaffirming the Mode of Practice At some point, Jesse Custer and Proinsias Cassidy, two of Preacher’s main characters, get into a discussion about the relative merits of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. “You can tell a lot about a person by which of the two they like, got me?” Custer says. “Fella likes Stan an’ Ollie, he likes a good plot an’ good characters, doesn’t like the story getting’ lost in the style. He’s probably a stand-up guy. A fella prefers Chaplin…” “He probably rapes sheep,” Cassidy concurs (Ennis and Dillon “Proud Americans”: 151). It is very tempting to appropriate this throwaway sequence in terms of poetics. The Preacher serial itself, Jesse Custer seems to proclaim, is squarely in the Laurel and Hardy camp, where the system of causality is the undisputed dominant, total convergence is guaranteed, and style never comes to the fore as an end in and of itself. Rather provocatively, Custer nudges us towards equating this conservatism with the moral righteousness of “a stand-up guy,” whereas based on the same cues, readers might liken Chaplin’s sophisticated, self-referential technique to sexual perversion, if they are so inclined. Importantly, these conclusions are ours to draw—Preacher rarely attempts to cut short the process of appropriation, even if its narration often comes dangerously close to affirming reactionary values and an attitude towards gender roles taken straight from early John Wayne films. Equally importantly, the direct application of the Chaplin/Laurel and Hardy analogy to the serial itself could easily be refuted as an accurate characterization of the average Preacher syuzhet. Few of the serials analyzed so far come this close to a pure operational aesthetic, for example—Preacher often revels in its narrative cleverness. Very often, the series’ syuzhet presentation is closer to Chaplin’s sophistication than to Laurel and Hardy’s supposedly no-nonsense approach to storytelling. But if we leave aside any thematic concerns and narrow the statement down to a reassertion of the system of causality as the dominant, the assessment is entirely correct.

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To some extent, this pointed rejection of an important part of the new wave style comes with the territory. Preacher is a revisionist Western taking place in the contemporary United States. In Jesse Custer, the series sports a protagonist who has consciously modeled his identity and moral compass after John Wayne’s on-screen persona. Custer makes every effort to behave like a white-hat Westerner in a scenario that has no shortage of villains, often grossly deformed characters that very much merit the black hat of the classical Western’s antagonist. The series’ larger plot makes the Manifest Destiny ideology driving many a classical Western film explicit while adding an atheist spin. Possessed by a half-demon, halfangel spirit, Jesse Custer seeks out the Christian God in order to hold him accountable for what Jesse considers His botched Creation. The goal is no less than to salvage the American Dream by eliminating religion from it. This clearly defined aim spells out the road map for the series: the narration will delay Jesse’s encounter with God for some 60 chapters or monthly issues by throwing obstacles at the protagonists. Preacher will import its scenarios not just from the Western but from any number of (largely cinematic) genres. It will also cover just about any cultural cliché about the United States imaginable, from inbred hillbillies and religious fanatics to provocatively stereotypical Irish immigrants and racist Texan sheriffs. Still, Ennis and Dillon’s most important narrational tool remains the nexus narrative. In Preacher, they seize upon the model’s inherent pull towards self-awareness and escalate it to the point of parody. In the series’ most important intrinsic norm, they repeatedly raise the number of individuated causal strands beyond anything ever attempted by Moore or their fellow Vertigo creators, thus laying bare the device. At the same time, the serial hardly ever conceals the connections between its individual plots; the strategies of pattern delay and delayed pattern elimination so familiar from Watchmen, Swamp Thing, and other Vertigo titles never comes into play. We might therefore speak of an attenuated nexus narrative. The Proud Americans arc from the third volume of the series illustrates the intrinsic norms operational in this model perfectly. The larger plot here is straightforward and goal-oriented enough to conform to mode of practice standards. Jesse Custer’s friend, Irish vampire Cassidy, has been kidnapped by the Grail, a large and powerful conspiracy of Christian fanatics who want to hasten Christ’s Second Coming. A former member of the German special forces GSG-9 who goes by the telling name of Herr Starr serves as the villainous face of the organization (although one needs to add that Starr also has an agenda of his own, namely to choose his own

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candidate to present to the world as Christ’s second coming rather than relying upon the Messiah’s actual descendant). Cassidy has been hidden away in the Grail’s headquarters, a mountain fortress named, none too subtly, Masada. Naturally, Jesse comes to the rescue. As is to be expected, there will be obstacles to overcome that will delay the inevitable, that is, Cassidy’s eventual escape from the Grail. The most important difference to a mode of practice operation—and a nexus narrative from, say, Moore’s Swamp Thing run—lies in the sheer number of characters and causal lines introduced during the story arc’s initial three issues or chapters. All plots are launched in full accordance with the mode of practice’s extrinsic norm for strong first impressions. The parade of causal lines begins with a particularly suppressive opening salvo, a flashback showing an angel falling to Earth in a ball of fire (Ennis and Dillon “Proud Americans”: 35). The event is observed by two U.S. fighter pilots on their plane, who serve as mirrors for the readers’ own disorientation during this sequence. Since the narration does not provide us with any cues to contextualize the scene in the larger story arc— tellingly, the splash page of the falling angel does not feature any captions or dialogue that would contextualize the scene in the larger causal chain— readers need to activate their prior knowledge of the series. The familiar iconography of the angel should at least serve as a guarantee that causal convergence will come, since these supernatural entities have hitherto always been firmly connected to Jesse’s search for God. In relatively quick succession, the series then introduces more new characters, the first of which is a mobster named Frankie, hired by Herr Starr with the sole objective to torture the captured Cassidy. Frankie is little more than a bit player, a very minor impediment between Jesse and Cassidy, but he is nevertheless given an excessively long introductory sequence, wherein he recounts the loss of his genitals in a quarrel with a rival mob in extremely graphic detail. Afterwards, readers know what to expect of Frankie—namely, a casual approach to extreme violence. At the same time, the immense amount of syuzhet space dedicated to these strong first impressions draws attention to the extrinsic norm for the introduction of new characters itself. In the following, two more major players are introduced: Allfather D’Aronique, the Grail’s equivalent of a Pope, who is so fat that his private jet’s landing gear breaks upon hitting the runway at Masada (Ennis and Dillon “Proud Americans”: 85). In exaggerated imitation of the mode of practice, this introductory sequence fares in ritual suppression at first, showing the plane’s wheels malfunctioning before providing the reader with the causal chain necessary to reconstruct the accident. It thus gives readers the

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opportunity to add up two and two before the Allfather’s physique is made explicit, engaging the audience and investing the Allfather’s first impressions with the readers’ agency. Finally, the syuzhet adds another new plot in the form of a teenager carefully guarded by the Grail, since he is the last living descendant of Jesus Christ (Ennis and Dillon “Proud Americans”: 93). The result of hundreds of years of inbreeding between Christ’s offspring, he is introduced urinating on the roses in the Masada gardens and spouting nonsense interspersed with lines from the Bible: “Suffer the little children! Humperdumperdo! Fishers of men! Humperdum!” (ibid.). Clearly, a pattern emerges here, indicating how Preacher frequently undercuts the mode of practice precisely by following its extrinsic norms. The first impressions detailed here are, in fact, too strong, making each character’s prototype overly redundant and laying the technique bare as a mere device. Instead of rejecting the mode of practice, Preacher thus unmasks its artificiality through satirical overaffirmation. Granted, this represents a difference from the actual mode of practice only by degree— whether readers consider the series’ crass show of allegiance to extrinsic norms as satirical is a question of appropriation, not of the middle level of narration. But Preacher patterns its syuzhet presentation so insistently with instances of exaggerated compliance with extrinsic norms that its ambivalent stance on conformity becomes difficult to overlook. The way all of these plots are then brought to convergence in the second half of the arc exhibits similar cues for overaffirmation. Proud Americans features many more characters and plots than the ones already enumerated. Any attempt at a comprehensive overview would have to include Marseille, Herr Starr’s personal aide; Tulip, Jesse Custer’s girlfriend; the Saint of Killers, a vengeful spirit with a grudge against Jesse; and God Himself, who puts on an appearance towards the end of the arc. Naturally, not all characters will be serialized—most plots will have to be closed off at the end of the Proud Americans story. Owing to the sheer multitude of causal lines, closure must come in rapid succession, which foregrounds convergence and the mechanics of the nexus narrative. But the syuzhet presentation does its utmost to cue this foregrounding as much as possible, and by any means necessary. Consider the following page from the volume, for example (Ennis and Dillon “Proud Americans”: 173): here, Herr Starr drops Allfather D’Aronique from a helicopter, and the rotund man of the cloth duly lands on Marseille, Starr’s assistant, and the descendant of Jesus Christ, supposedly leading to the off-panel demise of the three of them. In a somewhat unlikely turn, Marseille and the teenager see the massive body coming and have time to exchange last words

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(“Today shalt thou be with me in paradise”) instead of quickly stepping aside, and this improbability only adds to the self-referentiality of the moment: the three characters are being killed off merely for dramaturgical reasons, and the lack of verisimilitude may make the device discernible for some readers. This foregrounding of (nexus) narrative mechanics is not an isolated incident by far. In fact, this type of absurd escalation is serialized in Preacher, and repeated according to an escalatory logic, forming an intrinsic norm that readers are expected to pick up on quickly. With each new attenuated nexus narrative, the number of plots must rise higher still, and resolution(s) must come under even more absurd and overtly artificial circumstances. The intrinsic norms for escalation and overaffirmation do not merely pertain to Preacher’s permutation of the nexus narrative either. Consider the manner in which the German villain Herr Starr is portrayed throughout the series, for example—specifically, Starr’s body. In the course of the narrative, Starr is disfigured in increasingly grotesque ways, forming a pattern that cues readers to formulate operational hypotheses rather than fabula hypotheses: how will the comic book’s creators take these mutilations to new heights (or perhaps more fittingly, lows)? It is irrelevant to the plot at large whether Starr loses a leg or his genitals; the intrinsic norm thus emerges as a highly self-reflexive narrative game based on the same escalatory logic already identified. It begins with a fight between Jesse Custer and Starr during the Proud Americans arc, where Custer ends up cutting Starr’s bald head with a knife in such a suggestive way as to permanently give Starr the appearance of a giant penis (Ennis and Dillon “Proud Americans”: 165). In the following, the syuzhet presentation frequently singles out Herr Starr’s intrinsic bodily norm by way of foregrounded spatiality—itself a highly rarified technique in Preacher that attracts attention to itself whenever it makes one of its infrequent appearances. In one example, the syuzhet presents readers with a grid-like miseen-page (Ennis and Dillon “Dixie Fried”: 66). In nine practically identical close-up views, Herr Starr contemplates his newly disfigured appearance in the mirror. The dark comedy of this sequence is not just derived from the self-referential repetition of the same image that should alert even the most slow-witted reader to the visual analogy of male genitalia. The final panel also transgresses against Starr’s previous character norm. Hitherto, Herr Starr has been presented as a fairly conventional villain, which necessitated that the narration never give us any access to his emotions and thoughts. The repetitive patterns on this page, showing Starr’s unmoving face, follow and overaffirm this depth norm. But Starr’s only line of dia-

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logue on the page, the “Shit” of the final panel, grants us access to his previously suppressed emotional world after all, immediately dissolving the aura of mystery surrounding him. In the following, Starr’s body will be continuously maimed. This constitutes not only an intrinsic norm, it must also be considered an overaffirmation of several extrinsic norms. For one, villains in the mode of practice are frequently disfigured. Mainstream comic books will often exteriorize their villains’ corrupted inner world in this manner; Starr therefore recognizably exhibits many of the features of a mode of practice heavy. Drennig also identifies Starr as a villain “who conforms almost exactly to all the main character traits political caricaturists have attributed, and still do attribute, to German subjects” (Drennig “Otherness”: 134). Specifically, he points out that “the grotesque body has long been a feature of the iconographical German seen from an American perspective” (ibid.). But is this grossly overdone version of the stock German villain thus really “reduced to little more than an anti–German caricature” (ibid.)? A different reading would be that Starr is the stereotypical German villain made visible as such, at least potentially—readers are cued to perceive him as a reductive, absurd convention. Being overaffirmed to such a degree, the character makes new appropriations of the stock villain possible. Readers may enjoy Starr’s unfortunate physical degradation as somewhat juvenile, blackly humorous entertainment; they might even see their own resentments towards Germans affirmed; or they might experience discomfort at the pleasure evinced by Starr’s degradation, seeing that the character’s essentialism and constructedness is consistently foregrounded. In some appropriations, Preacher may thus exhibit a stance towards genre fiction that is every bit as ambivalent—and maybe more productive, due to the series’ uncomfortable insistence on the joys of conventionality and stereotyping—as those afforded by Watchmen or Marvelman. Appropriations of Herr Starr, and of all the series’ main characters, in fact, are complicated still by several means. Preacher may mainly trade in an exaggerated compliance with extrinsic norms, but frequently, the narration demonstrates that this is merely one option among many. From time to time, the syuzhet presentation will switch modes to a practice that is more familiar from previous new wave books. Namely, it will exploit the fact that all the characters had lives previous to the narrative’s beginning by drawing attention to this diffuse historical gap and filling it by way of lengthy flashbacks. Very often, these flashbacks will not be quite as compliant with the mode of practice as the rest of the serial, trading the goal-oriented, causality-heavy poetics of the series at large for a more

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fragmentary, ambivalent and character- centered approach. In short, Preacher announces the new status quo for Vertigo serials by way of these abrupt code switches: the mode of practice and the new wave style have become paradigmatic options of equal standing at this point, and comics writers and artists can tap into them at will. This is not to say that these flashbacks relinquish the mode of practice entirely. As a matter of fact, Ennis and Dillon’s approach to historical gapping owes much to the mode of practice’s convention of the origin story detailed in Chapter 1 in the section on the representation of time. Importantly, these are origin stories offered long after readers have first been introduced to the characters, reversing the pattern familiar to readers from the mode of practice. Instead of providing the audience with an origin story—and therefore a reliable character prototype—from the very beginning in order to stabilize hypothesis testing, Preacher’s intrinsic norm of illuminating the characters’ past only with considerable delay aims to destabilize the formulation of reliable inferences. The historical background provided relatively late in the game for Herr Starr, for example, manipulates the villain’s character prototype to such an extent as to put this more ambivalent, historicized version of Starr in overt conflict with the caricature that readers have become familiar with until this point. This change to the prototype is already announced in a subtle modification of the character’s name: while in the main series, the villain is always referred to as Herr Starr, other characters typically refer to him merely as “Starr” in this origin story. The character’s stereotypical German-ness, this maneuver announces, will be much more muted in this origin story. In an expository sequence taking place in 1972, we witness a band of GSG-9 troopers capture a plane. They kill the terrorists who had hijacked it in the process. While fictionalized, this is clearly a reference to the 1977 terrorist hijacking of the Lufthansa plane Landshut, firmly contextualizing Starr in actual German history. In a blatant appeal to the readers’ emotions, the sequence ends with a splash page showing Starr with a girl in his arms, half of her head torn to pieces by a stray round (Ennis, Dillon and Snejbjerg “War in the Sun”: 15). “This is not the way the world should be,” an unusually emotional Starr comments. Surprisingly, his facial features, which usually do not betray any emotional life, hint at sadness here. Besides the emphatic mise-en-page as a singlepanel splash, other syuzhet cues suggest that this sequence is meant to shake up our understanding of the character. The panel is the first to clearly individuate Starr and show his face in the story, for example, since he has worn a gas mask up until this point. The syuzhet presentation greatly

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underlines the symbolic dimension of this unmasking in the preceding two panels (Ennis, Dillon and Snejbjerg “War in the Sun”: 14, 5–6). In the face of such tragedy, the narration suggests, we get to see the true face of the villain, and learn about his somewhat altruistic motivation. However, this divergent portrayal is quickly destabilized. Just a few pages later, Starr affirms that the girl’s death was tragic because “she could have been strong, healthy, productive” (Ennis, Dillon and Snejbjerg “War in the Sun”: 20, 3), in a clear echo of totalitarian views of the individual. He also asserts that “democracy is for ancient Greeks” (Ennis, Dillon and Snejbjerg “War in the Sun”: 19, 6), asserting the character’s ties to fascism. In other words, Preacher employs historical gapping to subvert the mode of practice principle of strong first impressions, demonstrating that its initial compliance with extrinsic norms will not necessarily form the basis for reliable hypothesis testing and foregrounding the “strong first impressions” model as a mere device. In the end, historical gapping thus integrates itself into the larger pattern of appropriative cues that without fail emphasize the constructedness and conventionality of the series’ main characters. This model becomes especially effective because it is serialized: in turn, each of the protagonists will receive the historical gapping treatment, which will invariably call into question his or her previously established prototype to a certain extent. Jesse’s best friend Cassidy thus turns out a much more ambivalent figure than his initial “lovable Irish rogue” prototyping suggests, recasting him as a wifebeater and drug addict. Jesse’s girlfriend Tulip is shown to have briefly worked as a hired killer. And Jesse himself incessantly replicates the violence that has been inflicted upon him by his family in the past, leading to a telltale statement by one of his childhood tormentors as Jesse chokes him to death: “Prouda you, boy” (Ennis and Dillon “Proud Americans”: 125, 3). For some readers, the fact that Jesse’s gender politics have avowedly been shaped by heteronormative and patriarchal John Wayne characters might be equally dubious. Jesse’s problematic stance on gender is featured on the plot level time and again. Most prominently, he abandons his girlfriend Tulip at various points in the narrative to keep her from harm—despite Tulip’s protestations and her forceful condemnation of Jesse’s discriminatory attitude. For attentive readers, the series’ protagonists and antagonist may consequently emerge as ambivalent figures whose artifice is highlighted by the constant clash of contradictory prototypes. Much like the previous new wave serials, Preacher thus makes its tense relationship with the mode of practice productive while at the same presenting itself as a post-new wave title, able to negotiate its relationship with the U.S. comics industry’s

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extrinsic norms on its own terms. It quickly ensured Ennis’s status as a star writer and produced a successful inferred author function—despite Ennis’s relative reclusiveness, especially compared to fellow Second Wave writers such as Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis.

Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, Planetary (1998–2009): Watching Genres at Work Like Moore and Ennis, Ellis built a career on the productive tensions between the mode of practice, the new wave style, and his own approach to narration. In one of the central documents of turn of the century U.S. mainstream comics, Ellis’s “Old Bastard’s Manifesto,” this ambivalent relationship becomes especially apparent. “Fuck superheroes, frankly,” Ellis begins the essay’s most important paragraph in typically crass and provocative fashion (Ellis “Manifesto”: 78). He then likens the predominance of the superhero genre in U.S. comics to the following imaginary scenario: “It’s like every bookstore in the planet having ninety percent of its shelves filled by nurse novels. Imagine that. You want a new novel, but you have to wade through three hundred new books about romances in the wards before you can get at any other genre. A medium where the relationship of fiction about nurses outweighs mainstream literary fiction by a ratio of one hundred to one. Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else” (Ellis “Manifesto”: 78). The solution Ellis suggests is not a total makeover of the mode of practice in favor of “mainstream literary fiction,” but a version of the hybrid model that the British Invasion had popularized. He proposes to (metaphorically) kill the superheroes and “[r]ip from their steaming corpses the things that led superhero comics to dominate the medium—the mad energy, the astonishing visuals, the fetishism, whatever—and apply them to the telling of other stories in other genres” (ibid.). In a marketplace so obsessed with a single genre, even this proposition seems hardly feasible, and Ellis is aware of it himself. “I am part of the problem,” he admits, conscious of the fact that his status as a star writer is almost wholly dependent on superhero work. His “old bastard” persona—Ellis was 32 when he wrote the essay, which makes the performance more evident than anything else— demands that he add one final “Fuck you” to this acknowledgment of complicity, though. What are we to make of this influential essay, then, if it cannot be

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taken literally, as a call for a “violent overthrow” meant “to reclaim the comics industry” (Ellis “Manifesto”: 77)? On the one hand, the “Old Bastard’s Manifesto,” alongside many other contributions to the conflicts of authorization at the time, had an impact after all: the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s saw some generic diversification, the proliferation of star writers, and more experimentation in the mode of practice. Briefly, the U.S. comics mainstream also put certain comics creators on an almost equal footing with intellectual property like Superman or Spider-Man, highlighting the creatives’ names on paperback covers in font sizes only a few points smaller than the titular hero’s. The essay had an activist function, in other words. By adopting the “Old Bastard” persona and grossly exaggerating his disavowal of the mode of practice, Ellis openly engages in an authorial performance that has roughly three further aims: the multitude of essays written by Ellis around the turn of the century1 also greatly bolstered his inferred author function, exploiting the rise of the Internet for hitherto unparalleled public exposure. Additionally, orienting paratexts such as the “Old Bastard’s Manifesto” became integral parts of the process of reception by highlighting the British Invasion’s ambivalent stance towards the U.S. mode of practice.2 The final function of the “Old Bastard” performance should not be underestimated: the persona of the curmudgeonly but ultimately idealistic writer makes for a highly entertaining spectacle that kept the audience reading, despite Ellis’s often biting criticism of the mode of practice and its publishing models. Series such as Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary (1998– 2009), published around the same time as the Come in Alone series of essays that the “Manifesto” is part of, may thus come to be seen as theory and activism put into practice. To an unprecedented extent, appropriative mappings will now often have to take the author’s stance on the mode of practice and its most coveted genre into consideration. In many ways, Planetary is designed to fuel such interpretive practices. Presented as an archeology of 20th-century popular fictions, the series follows a band of three superheroes who, instead of engaging with villains and upholding the status quo, are out to map and uncover the “secret history” of their storyworld. In most of the series’ 27 chapters, Planetary’s protagonists explore a new phenomenon of popular culture, be it superheroes, Godzilla films, 1920s pulp fiction or the British Invasion of American comics itself. Especially during the first half of the series, the heroes mostly act as (somewhat) scholarly witnesses. They occasionally engage in ideological criticism of the generic conventions played out before them, but they only rarely interfere in the action. Following the by now familiar tradition of

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pattern delay, the serial only introduces a set of recurring villains after about a quarter of the chapters has elapsed. It thus highlights its reluctance to conform to extrinsic norms and makes its eventual belated compliance productive for interpretations. Even from such a casual and incomplete overview of Planetary’s basic narrational design, it is hardly surprising that commentators like Julian Darius interpret the series as negotiating the “tension between Ellis’s revisionist tendencies” and the so-called “reconstructive” movement that was en vogue in mainstream comics at the time, that is, the turn of the century (Darius “Reconstructionism”: 54). According to Darius, reconstructionism is a narrational mode that, while “keeping much of revisionism’s sophistication of narrative and format, … rejected realism as the application of high-art concerns upon a fundamentally unrealistic genre,” that is, superhero fiction (Darius “Reconstructionism”: 56). It is important to note here that Darius equates “realism” with the new wave style and similarly innovative practices of the 1980s and 1990s as exhibited, to give a non–British Invasion example, in comics like Frank Miller’s Batman books. In terms of poetics, purveyors of the reconstructionist movement came to reaffirm the mode of practice as a concrete reaction to phenomena like the British Invasion. At the same time, reconstructionist serials like Kurt Busiek’s Astro City also allowed for some of the less controversial narrational sophistication of the 1980s and 1990s to be carried over: sophisticated appropriations were still encouraged and fostered by the reconstructionist comic books, but the acerbic ideological criticism afforded by works such as Watchmen was rejected. For Darius and various other commentators, Planetary must be placed within this context. To them, the series encodes the tension between Ellis’s declared distaste for superheroes and the mainstream’s newfound appetite for conformity. How are such appropriations of Planetary made possible by the comic book itself? As always, an important part of the answer lies in the specific type(s) of ambiguity that Planetary cultivates. The narration cues ambivalence by several means: it employs the veteran strategy of historical gapping in a new variation, for one. It also makes use of the nexus narrative model, drawing attention to familiar techniques such as deferred agency to prompt interpretive hypotheses on the part of the reader. Finally, the series introduces an intrinsic norm for delay commonly described as “decompression” that allows readers to integrate scenes that are fully compliant with the mode of practice into their interpretive activities (cf. Meaney “Decompression”). Planetary’s manipulation of the system of time needs to be considered

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first, since much of the ambiguity created by other devices depends on the serial’s gapping strategy. Very much in keeping with its British Invasion forerunners, Planetary makes a diffuse gap of the entire 20th century, insistently cueing the lacuna in every chapter. In the series’ first chapter, the Planetary team discovers a hidden compound in the Adirondacks untouched since the close of the Second World War. In the course of the issue, the focused gap of what happened in the facility in 1945 is at least partially filled: a group made up of characters clearly homaging 1920s and 1930s pulp heroes built a computer called “the Snowflake” there. The Snowflake was meant to bring an end to the Second World War by running simulations of Earth so perfect as to be indistinguishable from the real thing. The engine was meant to produce and destroy universes where different solutions to the conflict would be tested, until a viable plan for peace would be found. Inevitably, the population of one of the hypothetical Earths created by the Snowflake revolted against their simulation’s imminent demise, found a way to cross the barrier between the Snowflake and reality, and fought the supercomputer’s inventors for their survival. In the world of Planetary, the pulp heroes won this battle and the superheroes lost, leading to a storyworld that is markedly different from the dominant Marvel and DC Comics diegeses: in this alternative scenario, the superheroes did not replace the pulp heroes in the public imagination in the 1930s; rather, superheroes and pulp heroes eliminated each other. Planetary uses foregrounded spatiality to cue the historical gap between 1945 and the present of 1999 in the series’ first chapter (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book One”: I, n.pag.). Here, a page shows Axel Brass, the series’ equivalent of pulp hero Doc Savage, in two panels. In both, he is depicted in the same space and approximately the same posture, but in between the panels, 54 years have elapsed. Panel one presents Axel immobilized after the apocalyptic battle against the simulated world’s superheroes, and in panel two, we see Axel decades later—he has not left the spot, having guarded the Snowflake in complete seclusion. Around him, the space has deteriorated significantly over the decades. Much like Brass, the reader is entirely unaware of what happened in the outside world in the intervening years between 1945 and the year in which the series opens, 1999. But the narration insists that the gap is even wider, since the series’ protagonist, Elijah Snow, was born in 1900 and has lost all memory of his life. In other words, the narration announces in this first issue that it will exploit the century-spanning gap to continually open new gaps-withinthe-gap, some diffuse, some focused. Elijah Snow’s life story, for example, is largely presented as a series of focused gaps, answering such questions

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as: why did he lose his memories? What is the secret behind his longevity? Why did the titular Planetary organization recruit Elijah? In the manner of the murder mystery or detective story, the syuzhet will slowly answer all these questions. Importantly, though, the syuzhet presentation in this first chapter also opens many gaps that will never be filled. As the Planetary team explores the hidden Appalachian facility, they discover a hall full of trophy cases, for example (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book One”: I, n.pag.). These cases contain all sorts of wondrous artifacts that are marked with plaques: “The Vulcan Raven God,” “The Hull of the Charnel Ship,” “Vestments of the Black Crown,” “The Murder Colonels,” they read. Readers familiar with the mode of practice will recognize the trophy room trope from titles such as DC’s Batman serials or the Justice League of America, where these mementoes always refer to past adventures and activate the reader’s body of knowledge of the storyworld. In Planetary, the stories hinted at by these exhibits will never be told. In tandem with the historical gapping for each of the characters which withholds at least part of the strong first impressions that are so crucial for the mode of practice, Planetary therefore announces a fundamentally and sometimes permanently suppressive, ambivalent narrational style that makes safe hypothesis testing problematic. The series’ gapping style thus also entails a tendency for incomplete prototyping, that is, readers are left in the dark as to some crucial aspects of the protagonists and antagonists for the longest time. This is especially apparent with regard to the Four, the series’ villains. William Leather, for example, one of the four antagonists, is often shown traversing solid matter, surrounded by an eerie blue glow (e.g., Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book Two”: 14, n.pag.). In the mode of practice, the rules for his supervillain prototype would be detailed in pseudo-scientific detail, minutely explaining the rules for Leather’s superpowers. Readers of mode of practice stories will always be aware of what a protagonist or antagonist can and cannot do, making the characters’ actions eminently predictable. Planetary’s narration offers no such prototypes. Instead, it surrounds its characters with an air of mystery until the end, making them difficult to gauge. To varying degrees, this model applies for the rest of the Four as well, and even for the series’ protagonists—we are never entirely certain what Jakita Wagner’s or Elijah Snow’s powers entail exactly. This strategy of incomplete prototyping is further complicated if one considers the Four from an intertextual point of view. Planetary’s villains are clearly marked to be equivalents to Marvel’s Fantastic Four, the band

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of superheroes whose eponymous serial inaugurated the Marvel Universe at the beginning of the 1960s. When it comes to the Four, Planetary thus refers to the storyworld of the Marvel Universe instead of the real world— the storyworld of the Marvel Universe takes its place. As soon as readers come to understand that the Four are meant to represent a variation of the Fantastic Four, they are cued to compare the two groups of characters, detecting similarities and divergences. In most cases, Planetary will not make the conclusions evinced by these cues explicit, leaving major gaps that feed into interpretations. The Four can thus be appropriated on Darius’s terms, as an actuation of the “revisionist” or “deconstructionist” movement: their incomplete prototypes, so similar to and dependent on the original superheroes,’ may be used to call into question the Fantastic Four’s morality, for example. The narration provides plenty of prompts that may nudge readers in this direction. It especially emphasizes the Four’s use of advanced technology, which they systematically withhold from the world at large. After a brief survey of the Four’s New York base, for example, Elijah Snow is certain that “[t]he things we’ve seen here alone: if I understand them right, then they alone could save millions of lives a year” (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book One”: 6, n.pag., 2). William Leather only responds: “We’re adventurers, my crewmates and I. If savvy readers compare the Four to their Marvel equivalents, it will quickly become evident that the Marvel heroes, too, benefit from fantastic technical means while the rest of their storyworld must make do with the technology readers will be familiar with from the real world. When it comes to technical tools, the narration therefore implies, the only difference between the villainous Four and the heroic Fantastic Four is that for the latter, the technology gap is never made narrationally and morally salient. These strategies for ambiguity and unreliability that so centrally depend on temporal gapping even extend to the series’ protagonists, if in slightly more subtle ways. The absence of a clear-cut prototype for Elijah Snow, for example, may already cue tests of allegiance for some readers, although the narration initially gives readers little reason to doubt Snow’s fundamentally moral nature. But Planetary also serializes the occasional moment of ambiguity for Snow. This strategy reaches its climax in a scene towards the end of the series where Snow decides that in order to defeat the Four, he will have to surprise them—that is, he will have to use their own questionable means against them. Later on, we can see the result of this change: Snow torturing the captured William Leather by puncturing Leather’s eyes (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book Two”: 22, n.pag.). The

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verbal narration references conventional superhero and supervillain prototypes by having Snow say: “I have been counselled to remain calm and remember the differences between you and I” (panel one). Instead of heeding this advice, Snow has chosen to no longer adhere to the moral code that the mode of practice dictates for superheroes—they do not torture the villains to gain information. Snow chooses to justify his behavior on the grounds of an archaic an-eye-for-an-eye morality, citing an episode in both characters’ past in which, supposedly, Leather killed a friend of Snow’s: “You remember the Nautilus? You remember who I was with? Who you shot? I remember that” (ibid., 3). Importantly, the narration does not make this change in moral justification entirely explicit, instead leaving it to the readers to draw their own conclusions. The audience will never be in the know as to what happened on the Nautilus—Elijah’s remark opens a focused historical gap that will not be filled. The historical ambivalence created by the permanent gap makes Leather’s past behavior as villainous and as deserving of punishment as each individual member of the audience would like it to be. Some readers will hopefully find the use of torture reprehensible, no matter how Leather may have acted in the past, even though the narration in no way privileges such a reaction. In fact, much like in the case of Watchmen’s Rorschach, readers may revel in Snow’s newfound (generic) agency without giving much thought to its moral cost. For attentive readers, though, these occasional moral roadblocks may make it difficult to appropriate Planetary on purely reconstructive grounds, further sustaining the series’ carefully orchestrated tension between an affirmation of the mode of practice and its rejection. The narration’s handling of the nexus narrative model exhibits similar features. On the one hand, Planetary reduces the complexity of the nexus narrative. Instead of presenting a multitude of plots with the Planetary team as the connecting tissue, the series establishes an intrinsic norm that dictates that each issue be concerned with only one new causal line. Especially during the first half of the serial, Elijah Snow and his band of archeologists will explore a new facet of 20th- (and sometimes 19th-) century popular culture in each chapter, and habitually, each of these plots will be brought to a close at the end of the issue. To give but a few examples: chapter one explores the era shortly before and during the Second World War, when pulp fiction gave way to superhero narratives in the public imagination of the United States. Chapter two sees Planetary visiting a remote Japanese island, where the monstrous protagonists of the Godzilla films have gone to die. And chapter three plays out an ambivalent and

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highly violent homage to the so-called Heroic Bloodshed genre that dominated 1980s Hongkong cinema, especially from our Western point of view. In most of these nexus narratives, the Planetary team itself takes a backseat to the plot newly introduced in the chapter, relinquishing agency to varying degrees. However, the strategy of deferred agency so familiar from Saga of the Swamp Thing is not merely replicated here. Instead, the narration often foregrounds the lack of Planetary’s active involvement in the plot, thus eliciting fabula and interpretive hypotheses. Why is the Planetary team so ineffective, especially compared to superheroes from the mode of practice, who typically act as the main causal agents alongside the villains? Why do these supposed superheroes choose not to interfere in the action? Importantly, these appropriative questions can only come to the fore because the deferred agency model is insistently serialized. What is equally crucial, this strategy can only be effective if readers have the necessary mental schemata to compare Planetary’s deferred agency model to the much greater causal efficiency of heroes in the mode of practice. As always, the British Invasion’s poetics are therefore symbiotically entwined with the mode of practice, establishing a productive tension rather than rejecting classical narration. Chapter two of the series is exemplary of Planetary’s permutation of the nexus narrative. On the first story page (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book One”: II, n.pag.), the suppressive narration pointedly chooses not to introduce any characters in the first three panels, instead detailing the arrival of a small, wind-tossed boat at a pier in shot sizes and compositions that do not individuate any of the sketchily represented human players. The craggy mountains in the background imply a remote and hostile environment, but no caption serves to corroborate these hypotheses; nor are we given the exact time and location. The final panel of the page equally highlights the narration’s suppressiveness: it shows a low-angle shot of four Japanese men, the one in the middle singled out by the composition and his heroic pose. The first line of dialogue uttered by the supposed protagonist only evinces more questions: “It does us good to have our genitals frozen into small blue dead things,” the man says. Readers thus have only scant information upon which to base their fabula predictions, and to arrive at any surmises at all, some thematic rumination will be inevitable. The men seem to have come to this uninviting place for ideological reasons—the protagonist’s unintentionally comical opening lines seem to imply a ritual of purification, a relinquishing of sexuality through physical hardship. The character’s headband, showing the Japanese flag, also suggests a strong connection to nationalism. At this point, then, the

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reader can only hypothesize that the rest of the story will be concerned with the progress of this ritual of purification, and that at some point, the Planetary organization will come into play. The intrinsic norm underlying this nexus narrative, the narration thus announces on this introductory page, will be equal to the dramaturgy of the ritual as dictated by the protagonist. In other words, the story will be fundamentally difficult to predict, seeing that its turns follow the whims of a madman. The expository information quickly added to these foundations do not make the intrinsic norm any more predictable: the leader of the band, called Ryu or “Master Storyteller,” aims to become the “paramound leader of Japan” after overthrowing the Japanese parliament. The revolutionaries’ visit to a forbidden island in the north of the Japanese islands is intended as a boot camp for the coup (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book One”: 2, n.pag., 2/3). Readers familiar with the historical figure of Yukio Mishima might recognize the parallels to Mishima’s 1970 attempt at a revolution in Japan. They will therefore have a slight advantage, in that they will be able to predict the Master Storyteller’s violent death at the end of the chapter, in direct analogy to Mishima’s real-life demise. The rest of the constitutive elements of the narrative do not exhibit further parallels to Mishima’s life. On the island, the band of crazed nationalists discovers the corpses of gigantic monsters which, though unnamed by the syuzhet, are immediately recognizable as the cast of Japanese monster films. In quick succession, the visual narration shows us the rotting carcasses of Godzilla, Mothra (a gigantic moth), and Ghidorah (a three-headed dragon). The Master Storyteller immediately recognizes these remnants as “our dreams,” that is, symbols of the Japanese nation that “offer … welcome within their very bodies” and “remind us of our greatness and horror” (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book One,” 2, n.pag., 3). He insists that the members of his group eat the monsters’ rotting flesh as a rite of passage. This association of Godzilla with Japanese nationhood is a standard interpretation of the monster, brought to bear especially on the early films of the 1950s and 1960s (cf. Kalat 9–52). By associating Mishima’s/the Master Storyteller’s nationalism with that of the monster films of the 1950s, the narration thus activates the readers’ intertextual as well as historical knowledge and invites appropriations on these terms. The narration drives home the need for interpretation by its suppressiveness and the fragmentary, unpredictable nature of the story: for this story to make any sense at all (and to be enjoyed), interpretation is essential, since the actual fabula is flimsy and incomplete.

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Since an individual issue of Planetary typically offers only between 22 and 24 pages of syuzhet space, the story is wrapped up quickly. In typical deferred agency style, the Planetary team arrives on the island hours after the Japanese nationalists, and only gets to witness the group’s ignominious end from afar. The would-be revolutionaries are killed by the island’s international team of sentries, who in turn conveniently fall victim to the same chemical agents they had used to dispose of the intruders. All that is left for Planetary to do is to catalogue the monstrous remains (both human and non-human), reconstruct the events, and, in a final twist, witness the rebirth of the monsters: the last page of the chapter shows a giant dragon flying over the island, very much alive. Since the syuzhet offers no explicit causal chain that would explain this surprising rebirth, interpretive hypotheses are again strongly encouraged. The most immediately apparent explanation for the return of the monsters is that they have been freed from the ideological shackles of nationalism through the symbolic death of the Master Storyteller and may now be appreciated in a state of purity, as aesthetically pleasing, wildly imaginative pieces of artifice. Whether readers accept this idea of a popular culture freed from ideology is entirely up to them—the narration does not dictate any explanations or interpretive choices. Readers of Planetary must decide for themselves whether they wish to uncouple ideology from aesthetic pleasure. Such interpretive work also directly feeds into the questions surrounding the Planetary team’s stasis, too: through the rhythmic repetition of serialization, readers may be made to understand that such ambivalent political, aesthetic, and moral tensions as the one detailed above are at the center of the protagonists’ reluctance to assume responsibility and act. These tensions are not just serialized by the nexus narrative, or, rather, Planetary also comes to rely on an intrinsic norm for delay within the nexus narrative to develop its thematic patterns. In many ways, we may already conceive of the Master Storyteller/Godzilla chapter in terms of delay. Both in a dramaturgical and an interpretive sense, the chapter delays the Planetary team’s agency and complicates any moral justification for taking action. Repeated time and time again throughout the series, delay thus becomes the series’ most flaunted narrational feature. Very quickly, Planetary also establishes the formal intrinsic norm for mise-enpage by way of which it will foreground its many delaying sequences. This style is typically called “decompression” by commentators. “The key idea” behind this specific mise-en-page strategy, Patrick Meaney writes, “is slowing the pace of stories, decreasing the amount of panels on a page and letting the story ‘breathe’” (Meaney “Decompression”: 108). Decom-

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pression can be seen at work in four pages from chapter 18, entitled “The Gun Club” (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book Two”: 18, n.pag.). They depict the present-day descent to Earth of a space capsule that was fired into orbit in the late 19th century. On average, these four pages hold 2.75 panels, which is slightly below the panels-per-page rate for the entire issue (~3.7, itself less than the average 5.5 in the mode of practice). The amount of panels per page therefore acts as a minor cue that the intrinsic norm for delay or decompression is in operation on these pages. Other factors are more relevant: for one, there are no captions or word balloons here that make the images redundant or add information to them; the reader must make sense of the panel sequence without any verbal aids. Each of these panels is also low on narrationally salient relations between objects or characters (of which there are none in this sequence). At most, these panels put two objects in relation to each other: the space capsule and a modern-day satellite; the space capsule and planet Earth; the space capsule and the site from which it was originally launched. In other words, from this evidence at least, decompression can be described as a relinquishing of the principles of accommodation, limited salience, and relationality, which would dictate a much greater density of causally relevant cues. On the other hand, these panels exhibit an immense increase in redundancy: four panels are used to show the capsule getting closer to Earth, whereas in the mode of practice one or two such panels, aided by verbal captions, would have sufficed. The same applies for the rest of the sequence. Three panels are used to show the approach to the launch site, two to three to detail the devastations caused by the crash. From a purely narrational point of view, much less would have done the job and reliably cued fabula construction. This decrease in narrational density in addition to an increase in visual redundancy most likely accounts for Meaney’s impression that decompression “lets the story breathe” and “slows the story’s pace.” In fact, the pacing of this sequence is very much in the eye of the beholder: given the amount of redundancy on display here, the complaint that reading time is shortened would be just as valid. Readers looking only for fabula cues will finish the average issue of Planetary in just a few minutes. It would be shortsighted to merely attribute the many instances of decompression in Planetary to a lazy writer aiming to stretch out every plot point as much as possible. In Planetary, decompression is a foregrounding device that draws attention to otherwise often wholly conventional sequences that fully comply with genre conventions—in this case, the fetishized landing of a spaceship. Very often, the narration will refuse

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to comment on these sequences, leaving the visuals entirely bare. Series artist John Cassaday also often changes his style noticeably for these sequences, opting for more visual noise and composing his images for maximum aesthetic pleasure. The Gun Club scene aims to capture the sublime beauty of space and the desolate landscape of the launch site, for example, as well as the spectacle of the crash. Thus highlighted, the decompressed scenes are meant to elicit interpretive queries: why is this largely conventional sequence singled out? Do I accept it as a purely pleasurably scene that executes a generic convention perfectly, evoking the thrill of spectacle and the sublime as well as the mystery of what the capsule might contain after more than a century in space? Or do I take the historical and ideological context into account that the rest of the issue provides in spades? The narration thus cues a tension between aesthetic pleasure and ideological dubiousness, in this instance by foregrounding the delaying sequence. The cues that may counteract the joys of decompression for some readers already begin on the chapter’s title page (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book Two”: 18, n.pag.). Here, the mystery of the contents of the capsule is already answered, albeit without making the solution explicit. The titular “Gun Club,” it would appear, was a 19th-century association composed purely of men (the gender politics of the association are made even more explicit in the final panel of the chapter, showing three men in the capsule saying their good-byes to their wives, the composition careful to show the women on the outside of the capsule). Very much in the spirit of Jules Verne novel From the Earth to the Moon (De la Terre à la Lune, 1865), the Gun Club constructed a large cannon, seen here in the background, that was meant to launch a manned capsule into space. The three men in the center of the composition, clad in primitive and likely dysfunctional space suits, are the astronauts. The attire of the men surrounding them is suggestive. First of all, the iconography confirms the polyvalence of the “Gun Club” title: two of them are carrying rifles; one of the astronauts sports a revolver on his hip. Their clothing and armament suggests the Old West and the myths of the American cowboy as well as the supposed right to indefinite expansion of U.S. territories. The launch of the space capsule may thus, at least for some readers, be put into the context of violent colonialization or empire building, patriarchy, and the ideologically charged 19th-century obsession with exploration. Importantly, none of these potential appropriations are made explicit by the syuzhet presentation. The narration is extraordinarily suggestive, but it never relinquishes the ambiguity of its images. Finally, the

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pleasure of the delaying sequence may equally be dampened by the contents of the capsule—for inevitably, the primitive space ship only reveals the dry bones of the three 19th-century explorers. Very often, decompression is also tied to the deferred agency model, showing events that the Planetary organization either chooses not to interfere with or is unable to influence. The intrinsic norm thus comes to be closely associated with the protagonists’ lack of agency, a fact that the narration exploits towards the end of the series. The two-parter “Mystery in Space” is clearly modeled after Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama (1972), which tells the story of mankind’s first encounter with alien life in the form of a mysterious spaceship that enters the solar system and is subsequently explored by astronauts. In “Mystery in Space,” the Planetary team sends a group of so-called “angels” to investigate a similar alien vessel on the fringes of the solar system. Mysterious beings that “came down on Germany in the thirties,” the angels are “happy … so long as they’re fed with information” (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book Two”: 19, n.pag., 2). As (supposedly) mere recorders of data, they make the perfect plot device for the deferred agency model: by sending the angels, the Planetary team gets to survey the inside of the alien vessel from the safety of Earth. In the course of the story, several decompressed sequences showing the angels’ telemetry equally foster the impression that the intrinsic norm for deferred agency is followed perfectly. We get to see the inside of the alien ship, which harbors the gigantic corpse of a being that looks very similar to the Marvel Comics character Galactus, an alien being that subsists by consuming entire planets. In the angels’ fragmentary footage, we also observe the primitive humanoids that have evolved around the pseudo-Galactus’s rotting carcass. Little about this set-up indicates that the deferred agency norm will be broken; but as Jacob Greene, one of the villainous Four, surprisingly enters the alien vessel, Elijah Snow detonates Greene’s space ship by way of explosives secretly brought along by the angels, thus setting Greene adrift in space. As his team mates react with incredulity to this radical strategy, Snow angrily comments, “Did you somehow believe I would not use everything in my power to wipe these animals out?” (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book Two”: 20, n.pag., 2). Much like his torture of William Leather, Elijah’s elimination of Greene is a highly ambivalent move, for many reasons: it cruelly strands Greene in outer space, and terminally so—Snow’s decision thus equals a death sentence. Crucially, the destruction of all escape vessels also traps the angels aboard the alien ship. The narration implies that Snow was ready to accept

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this betrayal as collateral damage, and the angels’ later assertion, given only in reported speech, that “the object is so rich that it will take them a thousand years to record it all” (Ellis and Cassaday “Planetary Book Two”: 20, n.pag., 4) will perhaps only go so far to alleviate these moral concerns for some readers. What is crucial from the point of view of poetics is that this moral ambiguity is again a product of the tension between the mode of practice and the new wave style. As Planetary all but gives up on the deferred agency and nexus narrative models in later chapters, signaling a return to the causal efficiency of the mode of practice, the narration does its utmost to inspire ambivalent readings of this sudden breach of its own intrinsic norm(s). Planetary, too, thus comes to be a morally and ideologically highly productive narrative by exploiting the tension of intrinsic versus extrinsic norms, of the British Invasion style versus the mode of practice. The series must be considered a further radicalization of new wave tendencies in that it makes the moral ambiguity of a return to the mode of practice’s agency much more difficult to dismiss: while it is easy to dissociate oneself from the megalomaniac Adrian Veidt, Watchmen’s genocidal villain or hero (depending on one’s point of view), Planetary’s Elijah Snow is both a callous torturer and brutal adherent of Realpolitik and a wryly sympathetic, witty antihero with cosmopolitan values and the best intentions. The readers’ emotions are also manipulated with great skill by Planetary’s narration. Ellis and Cassaday’s serial centrally relies on the readers’ pleasure at seeing generic conventions fulfilled to convey ambivalence and foster appropriations. Finally, Planetary evolves the new wave style inventively, practically by reversing one of the British Invasion’s central tenets: instead of overdetermining the mise-en-page with potentially meaningful cues, Planetary pares its syuzhet presentation down to the bare minimum, foregrounding the fundamental ambiguity of all images, no matter how dense the visual field. In Planetary’s poetics, even a perfectly conventional sequence can thus become salient and productive for appropriations.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, Flex Mentallo (1996): Turning the New Wave Style Against Itself By pitting the mode of practice and the British Invasion’s intrinsic norms against each other in this manner, Planetary is constructed to deny its readers thematic unity: through its carefully calibrated ambivalences,

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it becomes immensely difficult to ascribe definitive meanings or positions to the series. In this sense, Planetary’s poetics are very much in line with new wave predecessors like Watchmen, although Ellis and Cassaday’s serial distinguishes itself from Moore’s 1980s work by introducing emotion as a complicating factor, following generic patterns instead of delaying them, and largely rejecting the mise-en-page style of overdetermination. In Flex Mentallo (1996), a four-issue miniseries spinning out of Vertigo’s Doom Patrol serial, Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison and penciler Frank Quitely recognize the omnipresence of ambiguity as central to the British Invasion’s poetics. Instead of complying with this default mode, Morrison and Quitely choose to foreground their disavowal of ambiguity to distinguish the book and their inferred author functions from other British Invasion creators. To do so, they construct their syuzhet using typical British Invasion devices—but in Morrison and Quitely’s version, the British Invasion poetics ultimately makes coherent readings possible instead of blocking them. Roughly, Flex Mentallo tells three separate stories that are based in distinct storyworlds: the first is a surrealist detective story starring Flex Mentallo, a comically exaggerated, homoerotic hardbody superhero modeled after the protagonist of a 1960s bodybuilding advertisement (cf. Morrison “Supergods”: 268). Flex pursues “The Fact,” a former member of a superhero team to which Mentallo once belonged, too (the quotation marks are an integral part of “The Fact”’s name). This story takes place in what we will designate as storyworld (1). However, there is a catch here: like “The Fact,” Flex Mentallo was originally a fictional character in “a homemade comic book created by a kid called Wally Sage” until Flex was “brought to life by Wally’s psychic powers” (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: n.pag., 1, 5/1, 6). This story-within-the-story, detailing Flex and “The Fact”’s adventures as explicitly fictional superheroes, constitutes storyworld (2). How “The Fact” was able to literally leap off the comic book page is unknown. Recently, the comic book escapee has been seen planting bombs in public places, “hospitals, schools, banks, offices, you name it” (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: n.pag., 1, 3). Invariably, these bombs have turned out to be ineffective, because they merely look like cartoon bombs—they do not contain any explosives. Flex’s search for “The Fact” is therefore motivated by two separate questions: how has “The Fact” been able to perform metalepsis, that is, the leap from one storyworld to the next, or from fiction to what Flex considers reality? And why has he been planting mock bombs? At a glance, this setup already hints at Flex Mentallo’s treatment of

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the mode of practice. Flex’s quest for “The Fact” only vaguely resembles a conventional superhero-versus-supervillain scenario, since “The Fact” has not committed any serious crimes. If anything, “The Fact”’s subversion of the status quo is of a symbolic nature, evoking interpretive hypotheses rather than fabula surmises. The mysterious circumstances of “The Fact”’s metalepsis also foreshadow that the system of causality will not be the dominant in the Flex Mentallo story—after all, this overtly self-reflexive plot point is almost solely concerned with operational and appropriative questions, too. From the beginning, the reader is thus cued to read Flex’s story on abstract, metafictional terms. Flex Mentallo’s third plot, played out in storyworld (3), concerns Wallace Sage, by his own description a songwriter in a band and “quite famous” (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: 1, n.pag., 5), although the narration provides no cues that would corroborate this statement. Sage has supposedly taken “two ecstasy tabs … acid … a bottle of vodka … and … paracetamols,” conceivably “a whole bottle,” in an attempt to kill himself (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: 1, n.pag., 3/4). He spends most of the story either in his messy flat or in an alleyway, hallucinating throughout a night of (supposedly) drugged stupor, and reminiscing about his past to a Samaritan over the phone. The Samaritan’s lines of dialogue are never given in speech bubbles. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Wally’s phone does not contain any batteries. Wallace Sage may not share Grant Morrison’s name, but there are copious cues that should make the parallels between the author’s and Wallace’s biography obvious to readers familiar with the author. The writer has pointed out these similarities in orienting paratexts; the best summary can be found in Morrison’s autobiography: “The book [Flex Mentallo] was part biography, real and imagined—the story of a life I might have led if the Mixers [a band Morrison was part of in the 1980s] had been successful. I saw it as the memoir of an “Earth-2 Grant Morrison,” so I gave him my own childhood, and he inhabited a rough facsimile of my West End terraced town house. He was me with my cat and visiting girlfriend, my comic books, aliens, and white-hot blitzkrieg visionary nights” (Morrison “Supergods”: 270). In other words, Flex Mentallo doubly prompts its audience to conceive of it in terms of life writing. It solicits expectations that, true to the conventions of the (auto-)biographical genre, Wallace Sage will overcome his current crisis by a thorough re-examination of his past and emerge a more fully-formed person from the ordeal. This generic hypothesis is strengthened by the story’s references to Morrison’s own biography, and in turn, the many autobiographical clues provided by the syuzhet

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presentation strengthen the writer’s inferred author function, thoroughly linking Flex Mentallo to Morrison’s authorial persona. There is another world or narrative level to consider here that, despite not actually featuring in the syuzhet presentation, is insistently if obliquely cued: the reader’s world. The fact that the narration thus presents us with four distinct (story-)worlds should immediately trigger operational and interpretive hypotheses, the central question being: how do these storyworlds interact? The identity of Flex Mentallo and “The Fact”’s creator with the dying rockstar of the biographical narrative—at the very least, they share the name “Wallace Sage”—already points the way. From the beginning, the narration gives subtle hints that at specific points, the storyworlds will merge; “The Fact”’s off-panel metalepsis will not remain an isolated incident. Since the notion of metalepsis is essential to this discussion of Flex Mentallo, a more thorough examination of this device is now in order. Originally, the term was imported from rhetorics for narratological use by Gérard Genette in his 1972 monograph Narrative Discourse. According to Genette’s definition, we must consider as metaleptic “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse” (Genette “Narrative Discourse”: 234/235). In other words, metalepsis does not only occur when a representation of the author addresses or enters a storyworld, or when the characters of a storyworld address or interact with a fiction of the author. In Genette’s conception, a breach of narrative levels—the “intrusion … by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe … or the inverse”—suffices to constitute metalepsis. The concept of several distinct storyworlds, or narrative levels, as well as of a reality that exists outside these diegeses, is therefore a prerequisite of metalepsis. In her essay “Metaleptic Machines,” Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that the metaphor of the stack is most productive to conceptualize the different storyworlds that clash and intermingle in metalepsis. Following Ryan, a stack is “a multileveled data structure whose components are processed in an order known as LIFO: last in, first out, as opposed to the queue, whose order of processing is first in, first out” (Ryan “Metaleptic Machines”: 439). To Ryan, a narrative containing several distinct storyworlds can be viewed as a stack of layered storyworlds, adding more and more layers or storyworlds whenever a new embedded tale is introduced (ibid.). Usually, stacking works according to the last in first out principle: “[w]hen a story is completed, it is popped from the stack, and the narration returns to the preceding level” that introduced the completed embedded

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tale (Ryan “Metaleptic Machines”: 440). So as not to confuse the reader and provide closure in the correct, linear order, the stack “must be taken apart in the reverse order of its construction,” since it “would be logically dangerous for a narrative to jump from the third to the first story level without revisiting and closing the story of the second level” (ibid.). Metalepsis therefore constitutes a systematic violation of the LIFO principle, seeing that it is a “grabbing gesture that reaches across levels and ignores boundaries, bringing to the bottom what belongs to the top or vice versa” (“Metaleptic Machines”: 441) and opening “a passage between levels that results in their interpenetration, or mutual contamination” (Ryan “Metaleptic Machines”: 442). If we accept the notion of the stack operating according to the linear “first in, last out” principle as the norm for stories-within-stories, it also becomes apparent that embedded narratives always imply a hierarchy of storyworlds. By differentiating between an ascending and a descending metalepsis, John Pier alerts us to this trait of the device. According to Pier, a descending metalepsis occurs when a narrator and/or narratee “cross(es) the boundary between two narrative levels,” descending from reality into the storyworld (Pier “Métalepse”: 250, my translation). The same term applies when characters breach the boundary of their storyworld, moving down the stack from their diegesis into the embedded tale below (Pier “Métalepse”: 251). Conversely, an ascending metalepsis must be diagnosed when a character “moves up a level …, liberating himself or herself from diegetic enclosure and chronology…” (Pier “Métalepse”: 252, my translation). If we combine Pier’s model with Ryan’s concept of metalepsis, reality as inhabited by the reader thus sits at the top of the stack’s hierarchy, and the rest of the descending order of storyworlds is determined by the first in, last out principle. From a cognitive point of view, metalepsis thus represents a considerable challenge for readers. If a stack of narratives has been contaminated, readers must first identify the formerly distinct storyworlds—a task that may be more or less difficult depending on how forthcoming the syuzhet is in its distribution of the relevant information. The re-separation of the storyworlds may be complicated further by the fact that metaleptic interpenetration may scramble conventional chronology by violating the “first in, last out” principle. In other words, metalepsis may entail a complex, a-chronological temporality that the reader must put back in the correct order. This ordering process requires that the reader also accurately identify the original hierarchy of the storyworlds, that is, their order of descent from reality. Finally, the overtly metafictional technique of metalepsis will

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invariably cue interpretive hypotheses: why has metaleptic contamination occurred in the first place? Which meaning(s) can be ascribed to the interpenetration of distinct storyworlds, and to the manner in which their entanglement is narrated? Metalepsis thus emerges as another device that fundamentally depends on the mode of practice: it defines itself against and only becomes productive in cooperation with the linear temporality and inviolable hierarchies of conventional storytelling. In Flex Mentallo, readers must rise to the device’s challenges. One of the most striking features of the comic’s use of metalepsis is the extent to which the narration will go to suppress the actual moment of contamination. Almost from the first page, the fact that the storyworlds are metaleptically entangled is cued with great insistence and with a great variety of means, but the actual breach of the boundaries between the storyworlds is suppressed until the very end of the serial in a by now familiar gapping maneuver. By serializing its suppressiveness in this manner, the narration draws attention to the fact that the metalepsis is performed and constructed by the reader throughout most of Flex Mentallo. This suggestively suppressive pattern is initially serialized by relatively obvious means. During the first chapter, readers’ attention may be drawn to what appears to be a fly, first seen buzzing around Flex Mentallo in his introductory scene (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: I, n.pag., 2/3) and then pictured in Wallace Sage’s storyworld, in front of a table filled with drug paraphernalia (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: I, n.pag., 1). The fly—later revealed to be a pair of miniature superheroes—therefore serves as a first indicator of metalepsis, seeing that it has evidently crossed the boundary between the two storyworlds. The verbal hook connecting Flex’s introduction to Wallace Sage’s first appearance also ties into the operational hypothesis that the repetition of the fly motif suggests. Commenting on “The Fact”’s act of symbolic terrorism, a caption gives access to Flex’s thoughts: “I realized that it wasn’t a bomb at all,” he ruminates on “The Fact”’s mock terror campaign, “[i]t was a key. And it was about to open the strangest door of all” (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: 1, n.pag., 5/1, n.pag., 1). The hook, in typical British Invasion style foregoing the original causal function of the device, thus fosters the theory that the two storyworlds will be linked through metalepsis. Taken on their own, these cues point to the contamination of the storyworlds, but they only barely help the reader establish a hierarchy of narrational levels. Up until this point, all the audience has to go on in their reconstructive work is the fact that Flex’s diegesis is drawn in a more minimalist style, often omitting backgrounds and employing clichéd scenery

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such as a 1930s police department that should be familiar from film noir. The style of the Flex Mentallo pages thus draws attention to their own artifice. Wallace Sage’s apartment, on the other hand, is full of cues that point to the material drabness of reality: the floor is littered with paper and empty bottles, the living room table laden with the debris of drug addiction. It is thus tentatively possible to declare the Wallace Sage storyworld superior to Flex Mentallo’s metaphysical detective story in the hierarchy of narrative levels—that is, closer to reality. In the following, the syuzhet presentation corroborates this readerly hypothesis in a sequence heavy on foregrounded spatiality (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: 1, n.pag.). The diptych shows Wallace Sage in his living room, crawling around the floor looking for the phone amid the clutter of his chaotic, depressed existence. He stumbles upon childhood comic book drawings, which happen to continue the story of Flex Mentallo. The miseen-page here serves two functions. First of all, it supports the thesis that Wallace Sage is indeed the creator of both Flex Mentallo and “The Fact” by showing Wally with the crudely drawn comics he made as a child that introduced these characters. It thus confirms the hypothesis that Wallace’s storyworld is indeed the originator of Flex Mentallo’s diegesis. But these pages also complicate the series’ temporality greatly through their diagrammatic mise-en-page. Panel three of the first half of the diptych makes use of a sophisticated drawing style and coloring, showing “The Fact” swinging on a rope and getting ready to kick the villain called Waxworker in the face. Panel four is in clear spatial, temporal, and causal sequence, showing the execution of the kick. But now, “The Fact” is drawn in an amateur, childish style, clearly in pencil, and no coloring work has been done. Up until this point, readers had very little reason to doubt that the Flex Mentallo story and the Wallace Sage story were unfolding at the same time. But now, they have reason to doubt the accuracy of this spatio-temporal hypothesis. After all, the superimposed speech bubble tells us that Wallace Sage “hasn’t seen this stuff for ages,” and in the next panel, Wallace confirms that these pages were drawn when he was a child. The operational questions arising from this seemingly paradoxical mise-en-page are: when does the Flex Mentallo story take place—simultaneously with the Wallace story, or during the rock star’s childhood? And if the Flex Mentallo plot is a flashback, played out on the pages of Wallace’s self-created comic book, then why has its syuzhet hitherto been presented in a different, much more finished and sophisticated style instead of young Wally’s crude linework? The answer to these questions is essential to any readerly theory as

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to how metaleptic contamination has come about in Flex Mentallo’s stack of stories. It is also of central importance to any workable theory of the series’ temporality. The following page, seen in figure 34.2, provides the clues needed to make sense of the confusing data: in panels four and five, we witness the continuation of Flex’s story, again drawn by young Wallace Sage, but the pages are even more unfinished. The pencilwork has been left without inks midway through. The implication is that this is the point where Wally chose not to complete the comic book years ago. And yet the following pages continue Flex’s detective plot in unbroken spatial, temporal and causal continuity with Wally’s sketchy comics pages, now again presented in Frank Quitely’s style. The only possible explanation, tellingly never made explicit by the syuzhet presentation, is that the story is now finally being brought to closure in Wallace Sage’s unconscious after years of neglect—but without his full awareness of the process. Based on this hypothesis, readers will be able to make sense of the temporal relationship between the two storyworlds: since the Mentallo plot represents Wallace Sage’s mind, its lax and sometimes paradoxical uses of the system of time may be explained in terms of memory work. The metaleptic interpenetration of Flex Mentallo’s storyworlds thus comes to be motivated psychologically; the narration again insists that the Flex plot must be read symbolically, as a pop-psychological working through of Wallace’s past. Readers must thus prioritize interpretive hypotheses over fabula surmises if Flex Mentallo is to make any sense at all. The narration foregrounds the necessity of appropriating the comic on (auto-) biographical and psychological terms time and again. In this manner, it continuously undermines the dominance of the system of causality. At certain points, a confluence of the hitherto largely distinct narrative voices of Wallace and Flex takes place, to the point where it becomes impossible to tell who is speaking. To give an example: when Flex visits an abandoned school in chapter one, the scene ends with the following caption, supposedly presenting us with Flex’s thoughts: “It all came back to me in that place” (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: I, n.pag., 6). However, the verbal narration on the next page, which seemingly continues Flex’s inner monologue, ends in a speech bubble explicitly linked to Wally (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: I, n.pag.). This confusion of narrative voice should feed into readerly theories that Flex represents certain aspects of Wallace’s personality and must be considered identical with Wally. The first two panels of the page also point to an imminent metalepsis in the visual narration, showing Flex Mentallo in a doorway looking in on young Wallace in the classroom—but in typically

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suppressive style, the syuzhet denies the reader the definitive moment of contamination, when Flex crosses the threshold. In a similar instance, the narration indicates that the phone is ringing in a police office where Detective Harry Christmas has just given Flex further details about “The Fact”’s activities. Unfortunately, Christmas is too busy trying to swat the aforementioned fly to answer the phone (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: I, n.pag.). The next panel shows Wallace Sage lying on the kitchen floor, phone in hand, repeating “Nobody’s home. Nobody’s home.” If readers pick up on these cues, the conclusion that Wallace has tried and failed to communicate with his own unconscious mind is inevitable. Again, this foreshadows the ultimate convergence of the two hitherto distinct storyworlds without making the metalepsis entirely explicit. Symbolic, psychological, and historical readings are also encouraged by a slackening of causality in the Flex Mentallo story. As Flex’s search for “The Fact” progresses, he enters the seedy Ocean Bar—a perfectly clichéd location to gather information in a conventional detective story. In a mode of practice scene of this sort, readers would expect Mentallo to leave the bar with crucial causal information as to “The Fact’s” whereabouts and plans. However, the narration grants Flex no such success, instead depicting the superhero’s bizarre encounter with a woman who declares that she had her “whole body … tattooed” in order to join the superhero team known as the “Legion of Legions.” If her dreams of becoming a superheroine do not work out, she will simply “be a super-villainness” instead, she casually remarks (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: II, n.pag., 2). The young woman goes on to detail the members of the Legion while lasciviously licking up the milk Flex ordered: “Lord Limbo, The Gentleman Gorilla, Rex Ritz and Sparkly the Glamor Boy…. The ‘Fact.’” Upon mentioning the object of Flex’s quest, she immediately leaves the bar, providing no concrete causal cue to further propel the plot. A few pages later, Flex is given the next clue in the detective story by mere accident: a faceless tramp tells him that “The Fact” has found a “teleport tube” to the Legion’s headquarters “a couple of blocks from here” (Morrison and Quitely “Flex Mentallo”: 2, n.pag., 4). Even this furthering of the causal chain is ostentatiously vague. If readers have not come to accept the story’s dream logic by this point, they might wonder how exactly Flex comes to find the teleport tube based on this inexact information—which of course he does in the next scene. The narration thus highlights its dismissal of the system of causality, and encourages more abstract readings of the bar scene. Flex’s encounter with the aggressively sexual young woman could easily be appropriated

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on biographical terms. If the series’ first chapter, with its naïve drawings and flashbacks to school days, represents childhood, this second chapter deals with puberty and its experiments with identity and sexuality. The metaphorical liquidity and formlessness implied by the very name of the Ocean Bar supports such a reading, as does the woman’s indifference as to whether she will end up a superheroine or a supervillainness—as long as she is accepted by a peer group. But the narration also invites savvy readers to another interpretive mapping, one less concerned with (auto-)biography than with comics history. Situated as the scene is towards the end of the chapter, the young woman also provides an implicit summary of the development of U.S. mainstream comics during the so-called Silver Age. This was a period which saw the rise of series detailing the adventures of superhero teams made up of decidedly bizarre characters, and which led to the moral ambiguity and experimentation of the “Dark Age” or “Bronze Age,” often identified with books like Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. In other words, we are to compare the historical development of U.S. mainstream comics with Wally’s personal development. The series cues this potential interpretive mapping consistently throughout its run, most clearly on its covers, each of which is a pastiche of historical comic book designs. The cover to chapter one imitates the garishly colorful style of a 1940s “Golden Age” serial; chapter two emulates an EC Comics design from the 1950s, standing in for the “Silver Age.” The cover to issue three is the most obvious appropriation, directly copying the design of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, thus announcing the chapter’s links to the “Dark” or “Bronze Age” of mainstream U.S. comics. And the final issue’s cover points towards the future, imagining it as a self-reflexive bricolage of the past. Much like conventional autobiography, the “Ages” model of comics history is broadly teleological, insisting on a development towards ever greater sophistication and maturity. By cueing readers to map both (auto)biographical and comics historical readings onto Flex Mentallo, the two teleologies may thus come to reinforce each other, and inspire optimism instead of the moral ambiguity and stalled agency so typical of the British Invasion. Most importantly, this overdetermination of the page with historical and biographical cues can be easily unified thematically. For most readers, it is unlikely to produce any overt contradictions or crippling ambiguities. From the point of view of poetics, Flex Mentallo can thus be seen as turning the narrational means of the British Invasion against themselves:

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here, foregrounded spatiality, a complex temporality and an overdetermined mise-en-page allow for the production of meaningful, coherent interpretations instead of moral and ideological quandaries. Even the potentially unsettling device of metalepsis is ultimately used to unifying effect, declaring the contamination of the stack of storyworlds a prerequisite for the memory work of autobiography. These affirmative gestures are not to be confused with facileness, though. Flex Mentallo makes its readers work to arrive at their meaningful interpretations like few of the British Invasion serials, littering its syuzhet presentation with gaps, reshuffling chronology, implying metalepsis instead of spelling it out, and overdetermining its mise-en-page. It also practically forces readers to make use of orienting paratexts. Without a primer course in comics history and Grant Morrison’s biography, reading Flex Mentallo is a much poorer experience. Apart from its reliance on the history of the mode of practice, it is also the serial with the fewest ties to the U.S. comics mainstream in this entire study. Despite its iconographic and historical references to superhero comics, its poetics has little in common with mainstream norms and conventions. Only the surreal and causally slack detective plot and the confrontation with the series’ “villain” at the end—yet another version of Wallace Sage—occasionally stand in thematically productive tension to the mode of practice, as does the occasional appeal to conventional superhero prototypes and superhero history.

Summary: A Style of Many Tensions Still, even Flex Mentallo requires that its readers be familiar with the mode of practice in order for its narrational strategies to take hold. And yet, considering these three exemplary analyses, it becomes apparent that the poetics of the British Invasion’s second wave is no longer merely determined by the tension between the mode of practice and the new wave style. Instead, the relationship between stylistic systems becomes triangular. In answering the question “What is there for me to do?” comics writers like Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison must negotiate the mode of practice, the new wave style, and a new narrational toolbox of their own. In Preacher, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon distinguish themselves both from the comics mainstream and the overbearing shadow of Alan Moore by a gleeful overaffirmation of the mode of practice. Their variation of the nexus narrative, which we have termed an attenuated nexus narrative, makes no effort to conceal causal connections between

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its individual plots. Instead, the average Preacher syuzhet flaunts its conformity with venerable strategies such as providing strong first impressions and neatly brings its causal lines to convergence. By way of this overaffirmation, Preacher lays bare the conservative device(s), making conventions, clichés and stereotypes recognizable as such and paving the way for appropriations. At the same time, Ennis and Dillon demonstrate that the new wave style has now become a paradigmatic option—merely one viable narrational mode among many. Preacher occasionally switches modes to the less causally determined new wave style, opening historical gaps and offering fragmentary as well as morally ambivalent flashbacks that aim to destabilize the prototypes and schemata that the narration has previously overaffirmed. The series thus makes the most of its own liminal status between the comics mainstream and more subversive practices by making its tensions the overt theme, thus ensuring star status for both Ennis and Dillon in the conflicts of authorization. Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary serial does not deviate from the precedents set by Moore, Mills, Wagner and the other new wave architects quite as radically as Preacher does. It dutifully reactivates the historical gapping strategy found almost everywhere in the new wave serials, for example, and it does so almost from the first page. In practically every Planetary chapter, a multitude of focused and diffuse gaps is opened, some of which are filled, and some of which are left permanently open— thus fostering the readerly impression of a fundamentally ambivalent storyworld that will not divulge all its secrets. This ambivalence especially comes to the fore in the series’ intrinsic norm for character prototypes. The mental schemata necessary to accurately predict the protagonists’ and antagonists’ actions are never fully spelt out by Planetary’s narration, making for a challenging process of hypothesis testing and a string of potential tests of allegiance. This is especially valid for Elijah Snow, the serial’s hero, and the Four, its band of heavies. The series’ permutation of the nexus narrative also makes the diminished agency of the protagonists that is so typical of this narrational model an overt theme. The narration cues readers to appropriate the final rupture with the deferred agency format in favor of concrete causal action explicitly on moral grounds, equating the narrational preferences of the new wave and the mode of practice with specific moral quandaries. The new narrational tool of decompression, so central to Planetary’s poetics, replicates this tension between the mode of practice and the new wave: the narration drastically distinguishes the mise-en-page of certain conventional sequences from the rest of the series and thus attempts to make the fulfillment of conventions as aes-

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thetically pleasing and recognizable as possible. These decompressed sequences are put into productive conflict with surrounding cues that may or may not prompt readers to question their own pleasure at seeing norms and rules obeyed. Planetary thus mostly distinguishes itself from previous new wave works by foregrounding and evoking the joys of conventionality, skillfully incorporating the reader’s (positive) emotions into its larger narrational design. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Flex Mentallo, on the other hand, does not rely on the schemata and prototypes of the mode of practice to quite the same extent. Even though it employs the full narrational repertoire of new wave poetics—foregrounded spatiality, historical gapping, and an overdetermined mise-en-page, just to give a few examples—it greatly distinguishes itself from its British Invasion forerunners and peers by rejecting the ambivalence that has hitherto been central to the new wave style. However, before its syuzhet presentation can be meaningfully appropriated in terms of life-writing or autobiography, Flex Mentallo challenges its audience in every imaginable way. Centrally, the narration demands that the reader reconstruct the hierarchy and temporal relationship between its stack of storyworlds—a task made difficult by the fact that the four diegeses cued by the series have become contaminated by metalepsis. In familiar suppressive fashion, Flex Mentallo’s narration hints at the circumstances and logic of metaleptic interpenetration, but mostly leaves it to the reader to make sense of its complex and fragmentary syuzhet presentation. Once readers have grasped that the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the storyworlds can be conceptualized in psychological terms—both Flex Mentallo’s and “The Fact”’s diegeses are the product of Wallace Sage’s imagination—it becomes possible to read and unify Flex Mentallo as conventional life writing and comics historiography.

CONCLUSIONS

Imagined Readers and the Strange Afterlives of the British Invasion A closer look at the poetics of the movement’s second wave thus further underlines the challenge to the reader that the comics of the British Invasion represent. While both the mode of practice and the complex style(s) of the British Invasion rely on the same schemata, prototypes, and extrinsic norms to function, they differ greatly in the concepts of the reader. For the purposes of this concluding chapter, we are going to reconstruct these implicit theories of the reader, and thereby open a slightly different perspective on the findings of the preceding chapters. Here are some of the questions that any creator working in the U.S. mainstream would have to ask before constructing a comics narrative, if not necessarily in the same words, and not necessarily consciously: how do I imagine my readership? How can the cognitive and affective processes of reading, fabula construction, and appropriation be conceptualized, and to what extent can the narration take advantage of these working principles? How much of the story should be predictable, and how much ambivalence can the audience take? How redundant should a syuzhet presentation be, and how fragmentary, to offer a pleasurable challenge rather than come across like a chore or evoke confusion? Should the reading process be demanding at all? Does the foregrounding of operational and appropriative cues put too much of a strain on the reader? Is it desirable that the narration cue abstract interpretations that go beyond mere fabula construction? How much sensory data can my audience take in while scanning a single panel, page, diptych, or issue? Should the reader be invested in discourses of authorship and appropriation to make sense of my work? Which fully formed schemata and prototypes do my readers reliably bring to the table? And how can I exploit this readerly knowledge? 239

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Based on the conclusions from chapter one, this is how the mode of practice imagines its audience: readers of U.S. mainstream comics of the 1970s and 1980s are very familiar with the prevalent conventions, schemata, and prototypes, particularly those of the superhero genre. In fact, they know the genre(s) so well that character prototypes can be evoked by shorthand. It is not always necessary to spell out every causally relevant detail to ensure safe fabula construction. If a comics creator feels particularly daring, he or she may even elide entire conventional sequences from the syuzhet presentation, and safely rely on the readers to fill in the gaps. However, this occasionally fragmentary style is only made possible by the dominance of the system of causality. Readers prize causal convergence above all else, and the construction of a clear-cut fabula is essential to their enjoyment of a story. In fact, it is assumed that readers will be upset if causal continuity is broken. The mode of practice therefore only toys with a defective or ambiguous causal chain from time to time, but is always quick to reassure its audience by picking up the pieces and bringing about convergence in the end. The mode of practice reader largely rejects changes to generic formulas and extrinsic norms, too. Instead, he or she finds pleasure in the somewhat predictable nature of mainstream comics. This is probably why the superhero genre remains relatively stable in the 1970s and 1980s. Within this comparatively static system, though, a certain amount of ultimately conformist experimentation is valued highly. Readers enjoy seeing some of their expectations frustrated, e.g., when the true focus of a temporal gap is suppressed—as long as extrinsic norms are fulfilled in the end. Comics creators who are especially skillful at adhering to extrinsic norms in surprising ways are often rewarded with an auteur status. The reader is only willing to accept new conventions and schemata as well as morally ambivalent protagonists if he or she is already familiar with them from other media, e.g., the cinema or television. Typically, though, readers prefer characters that adhere to conventional superhero and supervillain schemata, which mostly demand an antagonism on clearly delineated moral grounds. The reader also expects the narration to produce all the information necessary to deduce at least part of the outcome of the story during the exposition. And since the imagined audience does not always read their comic books attentively, they would rather that the narration spell out all causally significant details at least twice. Exceptions to this rule are permissible, but only if a missing causal link can be easily reconstructed and does not result in an ambiguous causal chain. In fact, the mainstream

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comics reader expects the whole of the syuzhet presentation to fully be in the service of the system of causality and aesthetic pleasure. Foregrounded spatiality is only allowed under specific, conventionalized circumstances. In general, the audience frowns upon a diagrammatic miseen-page style, since it disrupts the formation of a linear fabula. However, self-reflexive mise-en-page is occasionally acceptable if it is aesthetically pleasing and not overly unsettling. The reader equally rejects any overly noisy or overdetermined mise-en-page unless it is clearly motivated, e.g., on psychological grounds. Instead, he or she demands that the story information be presented in easily digestible chunks. Finally, mainstream comics readers are invested in the mode of practice to such an extent that they are not only interested in experiencing an exciting story. They also want to read up on the history of the U.S. comics mainstream and its large, backstory-heavy storyworlds, and accumulate a large body of knowledge and trivia. This knowledge is necessary to participate in fandom; some readers may even foster ambitions to create comics themselves. Their enthusiasm for the material and intellectual circumstances of production also includes some light analysis of the mainstream’s poetics. In fact, our ideal reader is very interested in seeing narrational devices and conventions foregrounded, at least occasionally. However, the audience mostly does not want to reflect upon narrational mechanics on ideological, philosophical, or moral terms. By contrast, this is how Alan Moore characterizes the relationship between the reader and his stories in the 1985 essay Writing for Comics: As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alleys of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bat and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page. Believe me, they’ll thank you for it [Moore “Writing for Comics”: 16/17].

It is possible to see the tension between the mode of practice’s conservative storytelling and the new wave style described here. In a first step, the new wave narration offers the reader generic cues, establishes a seemingly conventional storyworld, and transports the reader with all the highly effective tools that the classical, causality-driven style has at its disposal—only to pull the rug from underneath the audience’s feet later by frustrating expectations, delaying generic fulfillment and foregrounding its operations as well as the necessity of interpretation.

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Importantly, in Moore’s conception, the reader finds this strategy ultimately pleasurable—“believe me, they’ll thank you for it.” In other words, Moore—and by extension, the creators of the British Invasion— imagine a reader who enjoys the conflict between the mode of practice and a more self-reflexive, challenging style, even if this clash of narrational modes requires a momentarily taxing reading process. If anything, the British Invasion and new wave reader enjoys intrinsic norms, that is, the constant introduction of new devices that may go counter extrinsic norms. He or she is keen to learn how to read their serial of choice anew practically with each new chapter. Readers also derive pleasure from operational aesthetics, marveling at the foregrounded intricacies and clever construction of the new wave’s narratives. At the same time, this conceptual readership does not fully reject the mode of practice. In fact, new wave readers bring considerable knowledge of the U.S. comics mainstream and its history to the table, for this is the only way to fully enjoy most of the works of the British Invasion. Instead of entirely rejecting their past reading materials, new wave readers cherish the British Invasion for its ability to make them consider their prior experience of the mode of practice from new vantage points. The followers of the British Invasion creators are also able to stomach ambiguity, be it in the form of a protagonist who is presented without any depth cues that would make their actions predictable, or of an historical gap that is never closed. In fact, they relish the opportunities for appropriation that the new wave’s fragmentary and morally probing style affords. They also appreciate the challenge to fabula construction and appropriation that the complex temporality of the new wave style typically poses. They consider the mode of practice’s penchant for redundancy largely patronizing, and desire more demanding reading materials that force them to pay close attention. At the same time, new wave readers sometimes need at least a modicum of compliance with genre conventions and extrinsic norms; they do not want to fully relinquish the pleasures of seeing conventions fulfilled and extrinsic norms obeyed. However, they will tolerate it if generic patterns are considerably delayed, and try to incorporate the delay into their interpretations. They are also willing to reflect upon their own enjoyment of generic compliance. This is why they do not take issue with the network and nexus narratives’ characteristic concealment and delay of causal connections and convergence. Rather, they relish these narrative models’ relative unpredictability as well as their potential for appropriations. A dearth of fabula cues in favor of operational and appropriative prompts does not deter them.

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British Invasion readers are also fascinated by unconventional miseen-page strategies. They do not consider overdetermination and foregrounded spatiality undesirable breaches of the mode of practice’s miseen-page principles; instead, they recognize mise-en-page as another factor adding to and posing challenges to their individual interpretation(s) of the work. To fully take in the wealth of information that the typical new wave mise-en-page offers, they are willing to read a comic book multiple times. They know that such re-readings will be rewarded with hitherto undiscovered narrative layers and copious intertextual references that may be incorporated into their personal process of meaning-making. Finally, the new wave audience is not just eager to interpret their reading material on abstract terms. It also avidly follows the discourses surrounding the mainstream comics industry, actively seeking out orienting paratexts that may aid interpretation and other cultural artifacts referred to by way of intertextual references. They consider the construction of an inferred author function an essential part of their reading process. The cultural distinction provided by auteurs and their works is highly appealing to them, as is the broad canvas of ideological, philosophical, historiographic, and moral appropriations that the new wave style affords them. In addition, a considerable portion of the readership is not just interested in the stories themselves—they want to participate in the discourses surrounding the mainstream comics industry, discuss their auteurist theories with other readers, and thus help shape—and be shaped by—comics culture. It is nevertheless important not to consider the British Invasion’s fiction of the reader a complete rupture with the mode of practice—even if the considerable differences between the two models suggests compelling reasons to do so. In many ways, the British Invasion’s implicit concept of the reader builds upon tendencies already present in the mode of practice. We could even go so far as to insist that the New Wave style is fundamentally incomplete and unable to sustain a narrative on its own—in the end, it always requires the mode of practice, seeing that it constantly oscillates between the subversion of extrinsic norms and their fulfillment. Outside these fundamental narrational concerns, we would do just as well to affirm continuities with instead of divergences from mainstream practices. The British Invasions’ insistence on readerly participation in comics culture as well as the accumulation of a body of knowledge about the industry, its storyworlds, characters, and creators were central to the U.S. comics mainstream long before 1980s, for example. The British creators’ reformulation of the ideal reader must also be seen as a radicalization of two other tendencies already virulent in the

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mode of practice: the reorientation towards the direct market, with its older, more mature, and more demanding audience; and the surge in cultural prestige bestowed upon comics culture in general during the 1980s and early 1990s, which saw publishers struggling to create certain niche imprints that targeted an adult, or at least late adolescent, audience. The mode of practice permitted these changes to the concept of the reader only under specific circumstances, confining the British Invasion style largely to dedicated imprints like Vertigo. The publishers likely allowed for these changes because their prior business model was undergoing a crisis in the 1980s. The experiment with auteurism and a reconceptualized view of the comics audience must be considered just one more attempt to regain their readership, perhaps equal in importance to the vapid, sensationalist aesthetics of the Image Comics generation of artists like Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld and the ultimately disastrous speculator bubble of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Admittedly, the British Invasion style proved a more sustainable economic model. Even if many of the comics themselves failed to gain bestseller status, quite a few of them at least accumulated cultural cachet for their publishers. From the point of view of the British Invasion creators, roughly at the turn of the century, this was how the U.S. comics mainstream might have evolved from here: the mode of practice would absorb more and more of the challenging narrational models proposed by the British Invasion creators, and by other mavericks such as Frank Miller, Joe Casey or Kurt Busiek. Eventually, the manic experimentation, challenging poetics, and auteurism of the fringes would become indistinguishable from mainstream practice. In short, the periphery would take over the center. This is the utopia spelt out in orienting paratexts such as Warren Ellis’s Come in Alone. None of this came to pass. Around the turn of the century, the U.S. comics mainstream started to recover from its crisis, but not in the way the British creators had expected it would. Beginning roughly with the success of Bryan Singer’s film adaptation of Marvel’s X-Men serials (2000), the global entertainment industries came to see the U.S. comics mainstream as an enormous depository of intellectual property only waiting to be exploited on the many channels of the rapidly converging media landscape. Marvel and DC Comics eventually became intellectual property farms for their parent companies—Disney and Warner Brothers, respectively. Telling name changes reflect these upheavals. DC Comics became DC Entertainment, for example, underlining the company’s new plurimedial business model. Marvel Comics, now Marvel Entertainment, even founded their own film studio. This fundamental transformation of the

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comics mainstream culminated in the symbolic move of the DC offices away from their traditional New York headquarters to California, where they set up shop in close proximity to Warner Brothers facilities in 2015 (cf. MacDonald “End of the ‘Big Two’ Era”). Within just a few years, the auteurist model propagated by the British Invasion thus lost its standing, as intellectual properties—that is, corporately owned characters such as Spider-Man, the X-Men, or Batman—regained the upper hand. The conservative narrational strategies of the mode of practice reasserted their dominance over the market, only slightly tempered and changed by the maverick works of the 1980s and 1990s. As their cultural niche had practically been obliterated, many of the British Invasion writers and artists either departed the comics industry, choosing to write novels or screenplays instead, or sought refuge with smaller publishers. Is the British Invasion over then? The pronouncement that the patient is dead is indeed tempting, especially since it would allow us to tie up this study quite neatly. But the cultural evidence, as always, resists such clearcut emplotment. Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison may have all but quit mainstream U.S. comics (for the time being at least, and with occasional resurgences), but they were followed in the industry by British creators like Mike Carey, Simon Spurrier, Paul Cornell, Kieron Gillen, Si Spencer, PJ Holden, and quite a few others. The maverick attitude and the complex poetics of the British Invasion have also been appropriated by U.S. comics creators like Matt Fraction, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Jonathan Hickman, once more proving that narrational strategies are in no way essentially tied to any concept of national identity. But it is equally true that many of these writers and artists have found it much more difficult to establish star personas comparable to those of their forerunners, and have had to fight against a mode of practice that is much more adamant about its extrinsic norms than it was before the turn of the century. For the most part, these successors to the British Invasion are producing fine, entertaining work, but they are rarely allowed to transgress against the norm to the extent that Moore, Morrison, and Ellis did. When they are permitted to produce work for niche imprints like Vertigo, they hardly ever develop new narrative models, and their impact on the practices of the U.S. mainstream is less pronounced. On the other hand, the poetics of the British Invasion live on in decidedly more abstract ways, not at all beholden to concepts of individual authorship, national identity, or the loose movement’s original medium. The film and television industry, in adapting the comics’ publishers intellectual property for the big screen, has only begun to catch up on the

246

Conclusions

British Invasion, be it in ostentatiously reverent adaptations of titles such as Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (dir. James McTeigue, 2005) and Watchmen (dir. Zack Snyder, 2009), or in blockbuster films such as Iron Man 3 (dir. Shane Black, 2013) or The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2008), which explicitly reference British Invasion works and appropriate their narrative techniques. Television shows like Heroes (2006–2010) or the BBC’s reboot of Doctor Who (2005–) often rely on narrative devices that, though they may not have found their way onto the screen in a direct line, immediately recall many of the comics serials from the 1980s and 1990s that we have considered in this study—and countless others besides. In other words, the new wave style, stripped of all performances of British identity, has been absorbed into contemporary popular culture. Its complex poetics now transport and challenge audiences on television and in the cinema, on computer screens and the comic book page, if often in a less evocative and subversive fashion. In this sense, this study hopes to have achieved more than the analysis of a somewhat isolated cultural phenomenon: to understand the British Invasion is to understand where considerable parts of contemporary popular culture appropriated many of their narrative strategies and ideas. This intimate relationship between the U.S. comics mainstream circa 1980–2000 and present-day popular culture is important to fully appreciate many contemporary popular forms, some of which command a transnational audience of millions. This outline of the foundations of the British Invasion’s poetics can only be a first step in the exploration of the movement’s many afterlives.

APPENDIX

Interpretation of the Questionnaire Unbiased Sample: American Mainstream Comics of the 1970s and 1980s 1. Fabula / Syuzhet Relations Dosage of Information / Communicativeness The syuzhet’s distribution of fabula information… advances at a steady, reliable rate

9 / 50

18%

is at times suppressive

41 / 50

82%

is mostly highly suppressive

0 / 50

0%

If there is any suppression of information, it is motivated in terms of… genre

41 / 50

82%

Composition

41 / 50

82%

Realism

2 / 50

4%

art/self-reflexivity/ metafiction

3 / 50

6%

Gapping Does the syuzhet leave gaps? Yes 36 / 50 72 % No 14 / 50 28 % These gaps are predominantly either / or… temporary 34 / 36 94 % permanent 2 / 36 6% diffused 0 / 36 0% focused 36 / 36 100 % flaunted 34 / 36 94 % suppressed 2 / 36 6%

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248

Appendix

Delay Delay is motivated in terms of… Composition 49 / 50 98 % genre 50 / 50 100 % realism 4 / 50 8 % art / self-reflexivity / metafiction 2 / 50 4 % How much of the syuzhet duration is taken up by delay (approximately?) How much of the fabula duration is taken up by delay (approximately?)

84 % (average) 96 % (average)

Exposition The expository material is either / or… concentrated 39 / 50 78 % distributed

11 / 50

22 %

preliminary

13 / 50

26 %

37 / 50

74 %

delayed

Range and Depth of Knowledge The narration is omniscient 0% 0 / 50

restricted 0 / 50

Depth of narration We partake in the character’s/s’ innermost thoughts and emotions constantly 0 / 50 0%

0%

intermittently either/or 50 / 50

100 %

We are sometimes The narration stays given glimpses of the entirely on the outside character’s/s’ inner lives 50 / 50 0 / 50

100 %

0%

Redundancy To what extent does the narration make use of redundancy? Constantly

Some important pieces of information are not reiterated

Many pieces of important information are not reiterated

The narration does not make use of redundancy at all

49 / 50

1 / 50

0 / 50

0 / 50

98 %

2%

0%

0%

Interpretation of the Questionnaire

249

Self-Consciousness/Metafiction Does the narration make Yes 22 / 50 44% No 28 / 50 56 % use of metafictional devices and/or address the reader(s) directly? The narration’s uses of metafiction are motivated in terms of… House style Genre Art

17 / 22 20 / 22 9 / 22

77 % 90 % 40 %

2. Representation of Time Duration Can the overall fabula duration Yes 50 / 50 100 % be easily deduced from the syuzhet?

No 0 / 50

0%

How much of the fabula 5.5 % (average) duration is represented in the syuzhet, approximately? How does the narration limit duration, if at all? Deadline(s) 30 / 50 60 %

Flashbacks Does the syuzhet make use of flashbacks?

Number of flashbacks The flashbacks are predominantly

How much of the syuzhet is told in flashbacks (approximately)?

Yes 49 / 50

3.6 (average) recounted

98 %

No 1 / 50

reenacted

27 / 49 2 / 49 55 % 4% 13 % (average)

2%

both 21 / 49 42 %

250

Appendix

Flashforwards Does the syuzhet make Yes 48 96 % use of flashforwards? Number of flashforwards 1 (average) The flashforwards are narrated enacted predominantly 1 / 48 0 / 48 2% 0% How much of the syuzhet 5.5 % (average) is told in flashforwards (approximately)?

No 2

4%

Both 47 / 48 98 %

Temporal Order Is the syuzhet presented in chronological fabula order?

Yes 50 100 % No 0 0 %

3. Narrational Systems Space, Time and Causality Which of the three narrative systems of time, space and causality is dominant? Time 0 Space 0 Causality 50 0% 0% 100 % Are there any fluctuations in this pattern of dominance? Yes 22 44 % No 28 56 % If so, which system comes to the fore instead? Time 0 0% Space 22 / 22 100 % Causality 0 0 % How is this shift motivated? Composition 15 / 22 68 % Genre Realism Art / self-reflexivity

18 / 22 2 / 22 10 / 22

81 % 9% 45 %

Aesthetic pleasure Artistic competition/ distinction

15 / 22 7 / 22

68 % 31 %

Interpretation of the Questionnaire

251

Causality Are the syuzhet/fabula events causally connected? Yes Yes, with some exceptions Yes, but with some major instances of rupture Hardly any causal connections can be found Causality is… predominantly character-centered

50 0 0 0

100 % 0% 0% 0%

39

78 %

character-centered, but with some events being motivated on a non-individual basis (e.g., natural forces, society as a larger system) mainly originates on a non-individual basis

11

22 %

0

0%

4. Characters Are characters unified and completely accessible in their psychology and decision-making? Yes 32 Largely yes, 18 No, the 0 but there are protagonists some often act and ambivalent think in ways traits and that are difficult actions. to understand and highly ambivalent. 64 % 36 % 0% If the characters show some ambivalence, how is it motivated? 17 / 18 94 % Genre 6 / 18 33 % Realism 10 / 18 55 % Composition Do the protagonists have clearly defined goals for the majority of the narrative? Yes 50 100 % No 0 100 %

252

Appendix

5. Dramaturgy/Composition and Seriality How many different plots can be identified? 3 (average) Is there a recognizable hierarchy of story lines? One or two plots are 49 (98 %) All plots are roughly equivalent 1 (2 %) dominant in importance Is there a love plot / Yes 31 62 % No 19 38 % multiple love plots? Is the resolution of Yes 39 78 % No 11 22 % the main plot line (if any) tied to the action of the other plots and/or vice versa? Is there overall closure? Yes 2 No 8 Only partial 40 4% 16 % 80 % How many plots are 2 (average) serial, i.e., left unresolved at the end of the issue (if any)? Type of Seriality Finite narrative 0 0% Anthology series 0 0% Episodic series 50 100 % Serial narrative 47 94 % Sequences and Scenes Number of dramaturgically differentiated sequences 3.48 (average) In the majority of scenes, are Yes, namely 1 causal No 0 any causal lines of action line(s). (average) closed off? If so, how many? In the majority of scenes, are Yes, namely 1 causal any new causal lines opened? line(s). (average) If so, how many? Does the narration make use Yes of a cliffhanger at the end of the issue?

25

50 %

0% No 0

0% No 25

50 %

Interpretation of the Questionnaire

253

6. Découpage and Mise-en-Page Total number of panels in the issue Total number of story pages in the issue Average number of panels per page Are panel sizes varied Yes 50 throughout the issue?

100 % No

Are panel sizes varied Yes, on on individual pages? every page

4

Does the issue make use of splash pages? If so, please give the numbers.

8% No

121 (average) 21.8 (average) 5.5 (total average) 0

Yes, on 46 some pages or just on one page

Yes, 4 namely 1.5 (total average) 92 % Which shot sizes are favored? Give numbers. Long shot 66.18 (average) Plan américain 12.98 (average) Medium shot 27.42 (average) Close-up 14.76 (average)

0% No. 0

92 % 8%

0%

How often does the narration make use of panels containing more than ten salient points of narrative information? The following count as relevant points: indications of time; indications of space; human actions; dialogue (one speech bubble=one piece of information); foregrounded material objects that are relevant to the progression of the plot and/or serve to characterize the protagonists. 0.44 time(s) (average) Does the narration mix scenes on a given page, i.e., end one scene and begin a new one on the same page? 46 / 50 Yes, namely on 4.3 pages. (average)

92 %

No; scenes usually 4 / 50 end with the last panel of a given page. 8%

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Chapter Notes Introduction

sales in America was not quite as dramatic from an American perspective as British fans were led to believe” (Sabin “Adult Comics”: 175) and rightly points out that American artists such as Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz and Art Spiegelman were at least equally important in bringing about changes in the American comics landscape of the 1980s (ibid.). 3. Granted, a certain amount of conscious selection is impossible to avoid. First, a larger corpus of comics was chosen from which to gather the works of the Unbiased Sample. To do so, some volumes from Marvel’s Essentials and DC Comics’s Showcase Presents series were compiled. These phonebook-sized collections reprint older serials in chronological order, albeit in black and white (most of the series in the UnS were originally published in color). Despite their impressive monikers, they only rarely contain stories that are considered classics by fans or academics. Subsequently, installments were randomly selected from these volumes. For this reason, the UnS hardly contains any installments that have been considered noteworthy in the past. A few minor classics have snuck in, such as some issues of Frank Miller’s initial run on Daredevil or Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s X-Men. This should not be considered problematic. On the contrary, these stories often furnish examples of the elasticity of the mode of practice—they demonstrate the very outer boundaries of innovation at the time. For a fully rounded characterization of the mode of practice, these auteurist examples thus proved indispensable. 4. Following Herman, storyworlds are “the worlds evoked by narratives” (Herman “The Basic Elements of Narrative”: 105). They are “global mental representations enabling interpreters to frame inferences about the situations, characters, and occurrences

1. Each of the following chapters features more in-depth historical and theoretical surveys. The version of the standard account provided here is, of course, slightly idealized; no single instantiation will contain all the elements cited. Important features of the standard account of the British Invasion can be found in Karen Berger’s introduction to the Vertigo Encyclopedia (2008), the Alan Moore “Tales from the Crypt” interview, Gary Spencer Millidge’s Alan Moore: Storyteller (2011), and the Moore interview “Watchmania” from George Khoury’s The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore (2008). 2. See Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (eds. Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer and Shane Denson, 2013) for an illuminating example of transnational comics studies. 3. For an example, see Di Liddo “Comics as Performance” (2009). 4. It is only possible to briefly touch upon the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences here. For more enlightening commentary, see Plotkin “The Imagined World Made Real” (2002) and Slingerland “What Science Offers the Humanities” (2008) as well as Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal (2012), the essay collection Evolution, Literature & Film (eds. Brian Boyd, Joseph Caroll and Jonathan Gottschall, 2010), and The Literary Animal (eds. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, 2005).

Chapter 1 1. For examples, see Murray “Signals” (31– 45), Morrison “Supergods” (188) and Kukkonen and Müller-Wood “British Perspectives” as well as Little “British Invasion” (140–52). 2. Sabin’s view is the exception: he notes that “the impact of British creators on direct

255

256

Notes—Chapter 2

either explicitly mentioned in or implied by a narrative text or discourse” (Herman “The Basic Elements of Narrative”: 106). The construction of such storyworlds, in other words, is an essential part of the process of narration, contributing to the process of hypothesis testing and prompting the audience to “inhabit a world in which, besides happening and existing, things matter, agitate, exalt, repulse, provide grounds for laughter and grief, and so on” (Herman “The Basic Elements of Narrative”: 119). 5. For different accounts of this fan periodization, see for example Jenkins, “Multiplicity,” Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men (2010) and Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (2006) as well as Coogan’s Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (2006). 6. Another influential attempt at defining the genre on essential terms can be found in Reynolds’ Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (1992). 7. This study uses the terms analepsis and prolepsis as synonyms for flashback and flashforward, respectively. The terms were given their most influential definition by Gérard Genette in Narrative Discourse (1972). He considers as proleptic “any narrative maneuver that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later,” while an analepsis is “any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment” (Genette “Narrative Discourse”: 40). The formalist apparatus is very helpful in specifying these temporal structures in terms of fabula/syuzhet relations. 8. The term designates a single page or double page that contains only a single, large panel, usually geared for maximum emotional effect. Sometimes, pages or diptychs that present multiple small panels and one larger panel are also referred to as splash pages or splashes. 9. Howe’s Marvel Comics is the best account of the publisher’s history and practices (2012). Levitz’s 75 Years of DC Comics (2010) gives a solid if biased overview of the history of Marvel’s most important competitor (Levitz was editor in chief at DC Comics for seven years; his monograph, officially sanctioned by the publisher, is about as controversial as is to be expected under the circumstances). 10. This is not to say at all that captions and thought balloons will not provide physical action cues. On the contrary, they are an important tool in the mode of comic book practice’s redundancy strategies. For more on this, see the following section on redundancy.

11. Comics writer Stan Lee gives an account of this chain of production in Stan Lee’s How to Draw Comics (2011) (188–209). 12. For more on fandom in general, see Jenkins “Fans.” For an in-depth exploration of comics fandom, see Wright “Comic Book Nation” and Pustz “Comic Book Culture.” 13. For an account of the emergence of the Marvel universe, see Howe “Marvel Comics” (2012). 14. Some critics have noted the comics medium’s highly specific relationship between the system of space and the system of time. For pertinent examples, see Atkinson “Time of Heroes” (2012), Gardner “Projections” (2012), Hatfield “Alternative Comics” (2005), Groensteen The System of Comics (2007), Kukkonen “Neue Perspektiven” (2008) and Chute “Graphic Women” (2010). 15. An analysis of gender representations is not our focus here, but it is likely that a female protagonist in a Western—Billy the Kid, at that—would have been considered unsuitable for serialization in the mode of practice as we have defined it historically. The conclusion one might draw is that in the early 1970s, gender stereotyping in mainstream comics dictates that a Western story must irrevocably cease—or at least cease to be a Western—as soon as the protagonist can no longer be identified as male. 16. By auteur status, this study understands the cultural prestige bestowed upon a comics creator like Kirby, whose work comes to be seen by the public as an expression of its author’s personal concerns and stylistic preferences. Auteurism also typically encompasses an immediately recognizable, individual style. The term is employed here in analogy to its use by the film critics and directors of the French New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, who popularized the notion with regard to directors like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean Renoir. 17. Unless otherwise indicated, the definition of the shot sizes is paraphrased from Bordwell and Thompson “Film Art”: 212/ 13.

Chapter 2 1. For more on this campaign against horror comics, see Barker “A Haunt of Fears” (1984). 2. It is true that some of the early Dredd stories still feature thought bubbles, and that they even show up in some of the later episodes, but they are mostly used in the service of redundancy and exposition, not to

Notes—Chapter 3 provide character insights. Approximately after the first 50 episodes, they disappear almost entirely. 3. For two accounts of this highly complicated history, see Khoury “Kimota!” (2001) as well as Ó Méalóid’s authoritative series of articles entitled “Poisoned Chalice.” 4. In recent years, critics have come to regard melodrama as so pervasive as to speak of a melodramatic mode (for examples, see Williams “Melodrama Revisited” and Brooks “The Melodramatic Imagination”). It is considered the defining genre of 19th-century American and British theatre; at the same time, Williams claims that it is “the norm, rather than the exception, of American cinema” (16). Mittell also affirms that “[m]ost complex television dramas that proliferate in primetime today are serial melodramas” (Mittell “Complex TV” ch. 7). In view of this immense plurality, it is unlikely that melodrama can be considered anything else but a transnational phenomenon. 5. For accounts of developments in the United States, see Balzer and Wiesing “Outcault” (2010) as well as Gabilliet “Of Comics and Men” (2010) and Harvey “Children of the Yellow Kid” (1999). British comics history is summed up in Chapman “British Comics” (2012) and Gravett and Stanbury “Great British Comics” (2006). 6. For further information on DC Thomson properties such as The Dandy and Beano, see Chapman “British Comics”: 33. 7. None of this is to say that the British Invasion started with one book. The purpose of the larger chapter has been to show how the British Invasion is predicated on many different factors; it is impossible to pick a single book as the definitive starting point. This study chooses Marvelman for analysis since it brings many important features to the table, not because it is “the” inaugurating series of the movement. 8. This prologue was not originally published at the beginning of the series, but in Marvelman Special No. 1 (May 1984). The U.S. version thus reshuffles the original order of publication considerably (cf. Ó Méalóid “Poisoned Chalice 9”). 9. This timeframe is later narrowed down to 1963–1981, its starting point prompting associations with the publication of the original series’ final issue (cf. Moore and Leach “Dream”: 28). 10. These conclusions were even more difficult to draw when Marvelman was first published—in black and white. The colors were added later by American publisher Eclipse.

257

Chapter 3 1. It is worth repeating that British writers and artists had crossed borders to the American mode of practice previously: Chris Claremont, who famously reinvented Marvel Comics’ X-Men titles starting in the late 1970s, was born in Britain, for example. But these border-crossers had not staked their career on performing their alterity in the comics themselves and in paratexts; small wonder that they and their work were not perceived as British. 2. For further information on the undergrounds, see Sabin “Adult Comics” (1993) as well as Rosenkranz “Rebel Visions” (2008), Skinn “Comix” (2004), and Hatfield “Alternative Comics” (2005). 3. This is the second version of the Swamp Thing’s origin story; for a reprint, see Wein, Wrightson, et al. “Roots of the Swamp Thing” (2009). In the initial formulation from 1971, the conflict that brings about the human protagonist’s death is the result of a love triangle, and the scientific background is not spelt out in as much detail. The story is also reprinted in Wein, Wrightson et al. “Roots of the Swamp Thing.” 4. Darius, one of the proponents of the revisionist theory, admits in an essay about Watchmen that the term is problematic in that it is “nearly impossible to define” (Darius “Varieties”: 100). He associates revisionism with the attempt to make “the super-hero more artistically sophisticated and mature, which often meant injecting new levels of realism” (ibid.). These are certainly dominant interpretations of many of the British Invasion works; they are also very much in line with numerous orienting paratexts. However, the notion that Watchmen “places the super-hero in an utterly realistic world” in order to “show what might happen if he had to reckon with such an unfriendly environment” (Darius “Varieties”: 102) is doubtful from the point of view of poetics. Watchmen, too, adheres to entirely artificial generic conventions, and much like Marvelman employs strategies like fluctuating norms for physicality to produce reality effects. 5. For a more detailed look at doubling and Doppelgängers in Moore’s work, see this author’s essay in Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition (2013). 6. It is of some interest that the very concept of “monstrosity” in this context would be defined as unpredictability in narrational terms; the refusal to adhere to the mode of practice’s extrinsic norms for protagonists.

258

Notes—Chapter 4

Chapter 4 1. Many of these essays are collected in Come in Alone (2001), Bad Signal (2003), Bad Signal 2 (2003), Bad World (2003), Shivering Sands (2009), and Do Anything: Thoughts on Comics and Things (2010). 2. This is only a difference of degree, of course. Prior to the emergence of the Internet, the mainstream comics world published orienting paratexts in magazines and journals, for example. However, the advent of the

net greatly facilitated authorial performances. The Internet demolished economic barriers for publishing, established a medium of communication between the audience and comics creators, especially on online message boards, and afforded much greater timeliness to creators keen on publishing paratexts. Many of the essays collected in Ellis’s Come in Alone comment on mainstream comics events and news, often mere hours or days after the fact.

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Index 103, 111–113, 116–118, 123, 125, 127, 135, 140 Beano 100, 139, 257 The Beatles 11, 140 Beckum, Chuck 98, 135 Berger, Karen 157, 200, 202, 255 Bissette, Steve 1, 158–159, 164, 171–178, 180–181 The Black Panther 78, 85 Blast! 202 Blood, Jason (character) 174–176 Blue (character) 131, 169 Bolland, Brian 2, 11, 125–126, 157, 201 Bordwell, David 5–6, 8, 13–20, 24–35, 38, 43–45, 48–50, 55–56, 59, 66–67, 71, 75– 79, 81–82, 84–85, 87, 108–110, 119, 130– 131, 140, 155, 169–170, 204, 256 bottom-up processes 18, 109 Brass, Axel (character) 216 the Bronze Age 22, 235 Buckingham, Mark 137, 198 Buckler, Rich 52–54, 73, 89 Budiansky, Bob 26, 69 Busiek, Kurt 199, 215, 244 Byrne, John 39, 57, 76, 84, 86, 255

accommodation 88–90, 223 Action 103–105, 109, 116–119, 123, 125, 140 agency 12, 30–31, 47, 63, 73, 81, 90, 96, 104, 127–128, 132, 134, 149, 178–180, 184–186, 188–189, 195–196, 208, 215, 219–220, 222, 225–226, 235, 237 All-Star Squadron 28, 52–53, 72–73, 89 allegiance (as a category of audiencecharacter relationships) 107, 120–123, 125, 140, 142, 150, 154, 175, 187, 208, 218, 237, Allfather D’Aronique (character) 207–208 Ally Sloper 139 alternative comics 159, 161, 163, 165, 197, 202, 257 Altman, Robert 29 The Amazing Spider-Man 27, 30–31, 40, 56, 59 “The Anatomy Lesson” 164, 179 Animal Man 201–202 Anderson, Brent 199 anthology series 74, 77, 94, 98, 99–105, 112, 116–117, 135–136, 202, 252 Aparo, Jim 32–33, 61–62, 79–80 appropriation 6–10, 28, 109–110, 112, 120, 125–126, 134, 141, 147, 150, 156, 167–168, 170, 176, 179–180, 183, 191, 193, 196, 205, 208, 210, 215, 221, 224, 226, 235, 237, 239, 242–243 Astro City 199, 215 auteur 78, 93, 162–163, 168, 197–198, 203, 240, 243–245, 255–256 The Authority 201 authorship 2, 6, 9, 104, 118, 135, 140, 157, 159, 161–162, 198, 239, 245 autobiography 163, 228, 235–236, 238

Cable, Abby 171, 175–176, 178–179 Cable, Matt 171, 176–177 canonical narration 5–6, 9, 17, 138 Captain Marvel 139 Captain Metropolis (character) 186–187 Carey, Mike 11, 198, 245 Casey, Joe 244 Cassaday, John 201, 204, 213–227, 237 Cassidy, Proinsias (character) 205–213 causality 14, 19, 21–22, 29, 50, 52, 55–58, 65, 67, 73–74, 79–80, 132, 138, 170, 174– 177, 189, 196–197, 205, 210, 228, 233– 235, 240–241, 250–251 Charley’s War 9, 94–98, 101, 107, 110, 112, 119, 127–135, 139–140, 142, 156, 166, 168–169 Charlton 182 Claremont, Chris 39, 57, 76, 84, 86, 255, 257

Baikie, Jim 136 The Ballad of Halo Jones 136 Barr, Dan 32–33, 51–52, 61–62, 79–80, 89– 90 Batman 22–23, 32, 33–35, 51– 52, 61–62, 79, 90, 184, 217, 245 Battle Picture Weekly 94, 96, 98, 100–101,

269

270

Index

Clarke, Arthur C. 225 class 103, 117, 127, 134–136, 139 closure 34, 36, 56–57, 68, 73–77, 106, 177, 208, 230, 233, 252 Coburn, James 113 cognitivism 6, 8–9, 16, 18, 68, 83, 91, 96, 230, 239 Collins, Joe 118 Colquhoun, Joe 94–96, 127–135 Come In Alone 214, 244, 258 The Comedian (character) 184, 187–188, 191–192, 195–196 The Comics Code Authority 166, 197 comix 102, 257 communicativeness 29–36, 247 comprehension 5–8, 15, 83, 91, 108–112, 145 constructivism 8, 16–17, 19 continuity 46, 58, 65–67, 145, 151, 233, 240 Corbucci, Sergio 29 Cornell, Paul 11, 245 corpus 5–6, 8–9, 14–16, 22, 25–27, 36, 38, 49, 52, 57, 72–75, 77–78, 88, 91, 255 Corrigan, Jim (character) 178 cover page 43, 56, 64, 116–117, 124, 160, 165, 203, 214, 235 creator ownership 105, 136, 162, 203 Creators’ Bill of Rights 162 The Crimebusters (characters) 186–187 Crisis 202 Custer, Jesse (character) 205–213 Daredevil 59, 63, 78, 255 The Dark Age 22, 235 Davis, Alan 98, 105, 135–155 Day, Dan 51 DC Comics 1, 13–14, 28, 43, 45–46, 57, 71– 72, 97–98, 137, 157–159, 163–165, 168, 174, 182, 197–198, 201–204, 216, 244, 255–256 DC Comics Presents Superman Team-Up 41–44, 48, 50, 85, 87–88 DC Thomson 98–100, 161, 257 Deadline 202 deadline (concept) 56–57, 106, 122, 131, 249 DeCo nnick, Kelly Sue 245 deconstruction 6, 10, 168, 218 DeFalco, Tom 59 deferred agency 178, 215, 220, 222, 225– 226, 237 Delano, Jamie 11, 201 delay 22, 29, 34, 36, 38–41, 44–45, 47, 50, 74, 122, 154, 169–177, 181, 184–185, 187– 190, 197, 206–207, 215, 222–225, 227, 241–242, 248 DeMatteis, John Marc 26, 69 The Demon (character) 174 depth 47, 48–52, 107, 113–116, 119, 152, 156, 166, 179–181, 188, 209, 242, 248

dete ctive story 25, 32–33, 79, 125, 167, 184–185, 188–190, 217, 227, 232, 234 Dillin, Dick 41–42, 44, 46–51, 85 Dillon, Steve 2, 9, 105, 201, 204–213, 236– 237 Dilthey, Wilhelm 7 Direct Market 160–161, 166, 197, 203–204, 244 Ditko, Steve 188 Django 29 Doc Savage (character) 23, 75, 216 Dr. Manhattan (character) 182, 185, 189– 190, 194–196 Doom Patrol 201, 227 Dreiberg, Dan (character) 184–189, 193–194 Eastwood, Clint 29, 114 Elektra (character) 63 Ellis, Warren 2–3, 9, 11, 98, 201–202, 204, 213–228, 236–237, 244–245, 258 empiricism 5, 7–8 Ennis, Garth 2, 9, 11, 201–202, 204–213, 236–237 episodic serial 74–75, 77, 143 Etrigan (character) see The Demon “Exiles” 180 exposition 25, 30, 32–33, 35–36, 39, 41–50, 64, 71, 74, 77–78, 119, 124–125, 132–134, 142, 147, 169–170, 175–176, 240, 248, 255 Ezquerra, Carlos 111–115 Fables 198 The Fact (character) 227–232, 234 fandom 5, 22, 58–60, 63–64, 102, 106–107, 109, 157, 164, 197, 201, 241, 255–256 The Fantastic Four (characters) 217- 218 Finley-Day, Gerry 102 Firestorm (character) 171 The First World War 112, 127–135 A Fistful of Dollars 29, 113 flashback 22, 32–33, 50, 55–65, 130, 151, 153, 167, 175, 185, 189, 207, 210–211, 232, 235, 237, 249, 256 flashforward 43, 49, 55–65, 250, 256 Fleetway 202 Flex Mentallo 9, 204, 226–236, 238 Floronic Man 171–173 (character) Flynn, Robert 118 For a Few Dollars More 113 foregrounding 35, 69, 71, 78–79, 90, 113, 115, 130, 144, 151, 153, 156, 167, 170, 184, 197, 208–209, 212, 223–224, 226, 238– 239, 241 Fraction, Matt 245 Frankie (character) 207 frontality 86, 88, 181 fruitful moment 67 Gaiman, Neil 2, 11, 137, 198, 201, 203–204 Galactus (character) 225

Index gapping 8, 19–20, 35–38, 60–62, 74, 107, 142, 147–151, 170, 153, 161, 184–185, 187– 188, 197, 201, 210–212, 215–220, 231, 236–238, 240, 242, 247 gender 100, 147, 183, 205, 212, 224, 256 Genette, Gérard 229, 256 genre 1–2, 6, 11–14, 22–26, 28, 32, 36, 38– 39, 47, 63, 71–74, 78, 93–94, 97, 100, 102–103, 106, 111, 113–115, 121–123, 134, 136–137, 140–142, 148, 154–155, 161, 166, 168, 171–172, 175, 182–185, 187, 189, 196, 202, 206, 210, 213–215, 220, 223, 228, 240, 242, 247–251, 256–257 Gibbons, Dave 1, 6, 102, 158, 166, 182–196, 201, 235 Godzilla 214, 219, 221–222 The Golden Age 22–24, 235 Gosnell, Kelvin 102, 118 Grant, Alan 11, 116, 118 Green Arrow (character) 171–172 Greene, Jacob (character) 225 Grell, Mike 22, 65, 90 Gross, Peter 198 “Gun Club“ 223–225 Hebden, Alan 111–116 Hellblazer 198, 201 Herr Starr 206–211 Herring, Charles 118 Hickman, Jonathan 245 historiography 1, 97, 127, 134, 143, 183, 238 Hitch, Bryan 201 Holland, Alec (character) 164 hypothesis testing 18, 27, 44–46, 56, 63, 66, 113–114, 123, 127, 145, 149, 152, 164, 171–172, 175, 177, 186, 189, 211–212, 217, 228, 231–233, 237, 256 Image Comics 168, 203, 244 IPC 98–102, 104–106, 110–111, 115–116, 118, 120, 135–137, 142, 161 Jenkins, Henry 5, 23–25, 58, 60–61, 72, 256 Jonah Hex 29, 34–36, 38, 165 Judge Dredd 98, 116–127, 135, 140–142 Juspeczyk, Laurie (character) 184, 187–189, 195 Juspeczyk, Sally (character) 192 Kirby, Jack 78, 84–85, 162, 256 L. Miller & Son 139 Laocoon 67–69 Lawrence, Don 143 Leach, Garry 98, 105, 135–154, 257 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 73 Leather, William (character) 217–219, 225 Lee, Stan 27, 162, 256 Leonardi, Rick 30–31, 78 Leone, Sergio 29, 113

271

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 67–68 Levitz, Paul 41–44, 46–51, 87, 256 Lloyd, David 105, 137, 140–141, 158 “Loving the Alien” 182 Lowder, Chris 118 Major Eazy 98, 111–116, 118, 127, 141–142, 156 Marvel 13–14, 27, 46–47, 57, 59–61, 71–72, 97, 105, 120, 137, 140, 160–163, 165, 168, 201, 203, 216–218, 225, 244, 255–256 Marvelman/Miracleman 1, 9, 98, 105, 135– 156, 158, 166–167, 210, 257 Mason, Hollis (character) 186, 193, 195 McFarlane, Todd 244 McKenzie, Roger 55, 78 McMahon, Mike 116–126 medium shot 33, 61, 66, 84–86, 91, 178, 195, 253 metafiction 20, 33–34, 38–39, 41, 43, 47, 70–74, 97, 141, 228, 230, 247–249 metalepsis 227–236, 238 Millar, Mark 201 Miller, Frank 3, 54–55, 63, 78, 141, 161, 202, 215, 235, 244, 255 Milligan, Peter 2, 11, 198, 201 Mills, Pat 9, 11, 94–96, 101–104, 116–135, 140, 155, 237 The Minutemen 185–186 mise-en-page 30, 43, 66–68, 77, 80–93, 95, 97, 100, 108, 128, 134, 138, 142, 145, 147, 153, 167, 183–184, 188, 190, 194–197, 211, 222, 226–227, 232, 236–238, 241, 243, 253 Mishima, Yukio 221 Mittell, Jason 9, 74–75, 97, 104, 106–107, 110, 119, 141, 156, 257 mode of practice (definition) 11–93 Moore, Alan 1–3, 6, 9, 11, 73, 98, 100, 102, 105, 135–202, 204–207, 213, 227, 235, 236–237, 241–242, 245–24 6, 255, 257 Moore, Steve 105 Morrison, Grant 2–3, 9, 11–13, 98, 157, 163, 201–204, 213, 226–236, 238, 245, 255 narrational systems (definitions) 55–70 Narrative Discourse 229, 256 neoformalism 5, 16 network narrative 130–131, 167, 169–171, 174, 182–198 The New Teen Titans 27, 36, 64, 91–92 new wave 2, 5–6, 9–10, 94–159, 163–164, 166–168, 173, 179, 182, 185, 197–200, 204–206, 210–213, 216, 226–227, 236– 238, 241–243, 246 nexus narrative 131, 166–182, 198, 205– 209, 215, 219–222, 226, 236–237, 242 Nite-Owl (character) 182, 184, 186, 193 O’Hare, Tulip (character) 208, 212 “The Old Bastard’s Manifesto” 213–214

272

Index

O’Neil, Denny 27, 40–41, 54–56, 59 O’Neill, Kevin 73 operational aesthetic 110–111, 114, 123, 198, 205, 242 origin story 37, 63–64, 154, 164–165, 171, 211, 257 overdetermination 54, 61, 65–67, 80, 91, 108, 111, 132, 142, 150, 154, 156, 167, 183– 184, 188, 196–197, 226–227, 235–236, 238, 241, 243 Ozymandias (character) 183–184, 187, 194– 195 paratext 4, 116, 141–142, 157, 163, 167, 214, 228, 236, 243–244, 257–2 58 Parker, Peter (character) 27, 40, 78–79 Parkhouse, Steve 105 participatory culture 5, 60, 71, 164 pastiche 143, 145, 235 pattern delay 144, 171–173, 181, 184, 187, 189, 206, 215 pattern elimination 171–172, 174, 177, 184, 187, 206 Peckinpah, Sam 29 Penn, Arthur 29 Pérez, George 27, 36–37, 64, 91–93 Planetary 201, 204, 213–227, 237–238 poetics (definition) 5–10, 13–17 “Pog” 180 Preacher 9, 201, 204–213, 236–237 primacy effect 45–47, 127, 138 prototype 6, 18–19, 22–29, 32, 43, 45–46, 113, 127, 148–149, 152, 165, 171–174, 178– 179, 181–182, 184, 186–188, 208, 211–212, 217–219, 236–240 the Punk movement 121–122, 157 Quitely, Frank 9, 204, 226–236, 238 reconstructionism 215 redundancy 40, 50, 52–55, 60, 65, 97, 136, 178, 188, 223, 242, 248, 256 retcon 63 revamp 12, 63 revisionary superhero narrative 24, 71, 168, 187, 201, 206, 215, 218, 257 Robertson, Darick 201 The Rolling Stones 11, 140 Romita, John, Jr. 27, 40–41 Rorschach (character) 167, 182, 184–185, 188–190, 192–193, 195, 219 Roy of the Rovers 100 Saga of the Swamp Thing 1, 9, 158–159, 164–182, 197–200, 202, 206–207, 220 Sage, Wally (character) 227–228, 232–233, 235 The Saint of Killers (character) 208 sales figures 165, 203 The Sandman 198, 201–204

schema 6, 18–19, 23–28, 32, 37, 45, 47, 64, 66, 72–74, 109, 112, 171–172, 174, 178– 179, 181, 188, 220, 237–240 Scorcher 100 the Second World War 23–24, 28, 72, 74, 94, 103, 216, 219 self-reflexivity 1, 41–43, 55, 58, 64, 72, 111– 112, 193, 209, 228, 235, 241–242, 247– 248, 250 seriality 4, 34, 74–80, 106–107, 126, 136, 161, 252 Seuling, Phil 160 Shade, the Changing Man 198, 201–202 Shklovsky, Victor 16 Shuster, Joe 43 Siegel, Jerry 43 the Silver Age 22, 24, 235 Singer, Bryan 244 Skinn, Dez 98, 102, 105, 136, 257 Skizz 136 Snow, Elijah (character) 216–219, 225–226, 237 spatiality 65–71, 81, 88, 90, 97, 128–129, 167, 188, 193, 195–196, 209, 216, 232, 236, 238, 241, 243 Spiegelman, Art 203, 255 splash page 26, 41, 43, 70, 81, 83, 100, 143, 207, 211, 253, 256 Spurrier, Simon 11, 245 Starlin, Jim 72 storyworld 21–22, 40, 44, 46, 52, 59–60, 70–72, 74–75, 107, 110, 130–132, 141, 154, 167, 169, 171, 174, 180, 184–185, 191, 193, 195, 214, 216–218, 227–234, 236–238, 241, 243, 255–256 superhero 1–2, 6, 11–14, 18–19, 22–29, 36– 40, 43, 45–47, 52, 52, 57, 60, 63–65, 71– 73, 77–78, 80, 98, 100–101, 106, 137–141, 143–144, 147–149, 151–156, 158, 163, 168, 171–174, 180, 182–189, 191, 194, 196, 202, 213–216, 218–220, 227–228, 231, 234– 236, 240, 256 Superman (character ) 18, 22, 24, 41–51, 85– 88, 148, 171, 173, 214 suppression 30, 32–35, 45, 61, 111, 171, 174, 176, 207, 247 syuzhet 19–22, 25, 29, 32–33, 35, 38–40, 43–49, 51–52, 55–56, 59–61, 63–64, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 77, 82–85, 91, 110, 112, 116, 130, 133, 150, 156, 168, 171, 173, 175, 177, 180, 188–192, 194–196, 205, 207–211, 217, 221–222, 224, 226–230, 232–234, 236–241, 247–251, 256 Talbot, Bryan 11, 102 Tales of the Blac k Freighter 190–191, 193, 195 Thatcher, Margaret 12, 105, 121, 124, 163 Thomas, Roy 28, 53, 72, 89 Thompson, Kristin 5, 14–17, 21, 25–27, 43, 45, 55–56, 67, 84–85, 87, 256

Index top-down processes 18, 109 transmedia 9, 16 transnational 3, 137–141, 158, 202, 246, 255, 257 2000AD 100–106, 116–117, 121, 124–125, 159 Tynianov, Yuri 16 unbiased sample 15, 17- 93, 97, 247, 255, 259–261 The Unwritten 198 V for Vendetta 1, 137, 141, 158, 200, 246 Veitch, Rick 158, 181 Vertigo 198–204, 206, 211, 227, 244–245, 255

273

Wagner, Jakita (character) 217 Wagner, John 101, 103–104, 112, 116–126, 140, 155, 237 Warlock 38, 72 The Warlord 38, 70, 90, 21 Warrior 98, 102–103, 105–106, 136–137, 157, 159, 161, 202 Watchmen 1–2, 6, 9, 102, 158, 166–168, 170, 182–197, 199–202, 206, 210, 215, 219, 226–227, 235, 246, 257 Wayne, John 27, 205–206, 212 Wein, Len 157–159, 163, 257 Western 23, 28–29, 35, 38, 84, 101, 104, 113–114, 141, 165, 206, 220, 256 The Wild Bunch 29 Willingham, Bill 198