Adventure and Superheroes
This chapter begins with one of the earliest consecutive comics adventure stories to be published, namely Hugo Pratt’s La Ballade de la mersalée.Analyses of Dave McKean and Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum and Neil Gaiman’sSandman: Preludes and Nocturnes then explore how conventions of the typical superhero adventure that have characterized American comics since the 1930s are overturned. The analysis of Edmond Baudoin’sLe Voyage, where the adventures develop in the interlinked internal and external worlds of the protagonist, highlights the scope of meaning harbored in abstract imagery. Since, like Voyage, the adventures in Sandman and Arkhamunfold on more psychological than physical terms, the analyses of the last three comics illustrate the inclination towards more complex subject matter in more comics since the 1980s.