Comics Codes and Parameters for Villain Construction in Sequential Art

Author(s):  
Robert G. Weiner

There are many types of villains in society and popular culture. There is the villain that is pure evil. There is the villain that is motivated by revenge. There is also at times the hero turned villain. However, one of the most interesting villains is the villain that is a catalyst for political or social change, a necessary evil. This type of villain has a certain brutal honesty of character. They recognize that through their actions, no matter the cost to morality or humanity, that society may become a better place. In many ways they could be a misguided hero. The best example of this is the Kingpin. He is the pinnacle of the villain who understands his role as an agent of change, a villain who believes the ends justify the means, which in a sense makes him good.

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Mullin

Abstract This essay argues that the complex political resonances of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) can be further elucidated through closer critical attention to one of its more marginal characters, the shop-girl Millicent Henning. Ebullient, assertive, and, for many early reviewers, the novel's sole redeeming feature, Millicent supplies the novel with far more than local color. Instead, James seizes on a sexual persona already well established within literary naturalism and popular culture alike to explore a rival mode of insurrection to that more obviously offered elsewhere. While the modes of revolution contemplated by Hyacinth Robinson and his comrades in the Sun and Moon public house are revealed to be anachronistic and ineffectual, Millicent's canny manipulation of her sexuality supplies her with an alternative, effective, and unmistakably modern mode of transformation. The novel's portrait of ““revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort”” is thus set against Millicent's brand of quotidian yet inexorable social change.


Author(s):  
Mirza Sangin Beg

The second part of the translation has three segments. The first is dedicated to the history of Delhi from the time of the Mahabharat to the periods of Anangpal Tomar to the Mughal Emperor Humayun as also Sher Shah, the Afghan ruler. In the second and third segments Mirza Sangin Beg adroitly navigates between twin centres of power in the city. He writes about Qila Mubarak, or the Red Fort, and gives an account of the several buildings inside it and the cost of construction of the same. He ambles into the precincts and mentions the buildings constructed by Shahjahan and other rulers, associating them with some specific inmates of the fort and the functions performed within them. When the author takes a walk in the city of Shahjahanabad, he writes of numerous residents, habitations of rich, poor, and ordinary people, their mansions and localities, general and specialized bazars, the in different skills practised areas, places of worship and revelry, processions exemplifying popular culture and local traditions, and institutions that had a resonance in other cultures. The Berlin manuscript gives generous details of the officials of the English East India Company, both native and foreign, their professions, and work spaces. Mirza Sangin Beg addresses the issue of qaum most unselfconsciously and amorphously.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabina Mihelj ◽  
James Stanyer

Debates about the role of media and communication in social change are central to our discipline, yet advances in this field are hampered by disciplinary fragmentation, a lack of shared conceptual language and limited understanding of long-term shifts in the field. To address this, we first develop a typology that distinguishes between approaches that foreground the role of media and communication as an agent of change, and approaches that treat media and communication as an environment for change. We then use this typology to identify key trends in the field since 1951, including the sharp downturn in work focusing on economic aspects of change after 1985, the decline of grand narratives of social change since 2000 and the parallel return to media effects. We conclude by outlining the key traits of a processual approach to social change, which has the capacity to offer the basis for shared language in the field. This language can enable us to think of media, communication and social change across its varied temporal and social planes, and link together the processes involved in the reproduction of status quo with fundamental changes to social order.


1975 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 568
Author(s):  
Henry Etzkowitz ◽  
R. Serge Denisoff ◽  
Richard A. Peterson

Author(s):  
Najla Mouchrek ◽  
Lia Krucken

The paper analyzes the role of Design as an agent of social transformation in face of complex challenges. Intentionally embracing reality’s complexity and centering on human values, the Design approach is suited to develop alternative perspectives and radically different strategies for change. The paper explores Design teaching focusing on social change and transition to sustainability, presenting three initiatives and reflecting about methods and impacts of the application of Design for transition. The analysis points to the need of a critical vision in Design research and teaching and the importance to systematize and teach methods and tools to support the interplay among diverse social actors.


Author(s):  
David McDonald

This chapter addresses the paradox that, despite its prevalence in national and global cultures, sport fails to receive due attention from historians interested in the problem of “modernity.” Yet, the history of sport’s rise to its current place in popular culture, combined with its boundedness as phenomenon, serves as a powerful lens on the intersecting processes that historians have identified as the hallmarks of this modernity—economic transformation, urbanization, the invention of “traditions,” and the construction of coexisting and disparate identities, not to mention broader vectors of social change encompassed in the parallel projects of domestic amelioration and the colonial “civilizing mission,” along with their nationalist and globalist or neoimperial successors. The chapter offers a broad overview in the career of sport as reflections of modernizing processes that have long interested historians while suggesting that sport’s history also complicates many of these historical perspectives.


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