Computing Literary Surplus Value: Alan Moore and the Density of the Comic Book as Graphic Novel

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Alexander Dunst ◽  
Rita Hartel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Specific Element ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Textual Content ◽  
Alan Moore

Abstract The term graphic novel has increasingly functioned as a catalyst for understanding comic books as an emergent literary genre. This article focuses on one specific element within this historical process: the claim, made by artists such as Alan Moore, that graphic novels are characterized by greater formal complexity, or density, than serial comics. These claims are evaluated by combining computational text and image recognition of a corpus of 131 graphic narratives with sociological metadata on production and circulation. The results show that Moore’s own book-length comics, in particular Watchmen and V for Vendetta, rank among the densest graphic narratives in the sample in both their visual and textual content. Graphic memoirs, in contrast, only show an increase in textual complexity. With Pierre Bourdieu, the article understands complexity as a social and aesthetic strategy that aims at increasing the cultural capital of comics creators. At the same time, the article contextualizes computational results against the background of a changing marketplace for comics, in particular the decline of serial comics, the shift towards digital printing, and increased access to book distribution. This analysis shows that graphic narratives pursue both literary and popular aesthetic strategies, challenging Bourdieu’s account of a clear opposition between profit and prestige in cultural production.

scholarly journals (Anti)Fascism and Superhero Comics: An Anthropological Examination of Innovativeness in Comic Books as Exemplified by "V for Vendetta"

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miloš Zarić
Keyword(s):  
Comic Books ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Semiotic Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Semantic Dimension ◽  
Alan Moore ◽  
The Way ◽  
V For Vendetta

The paper analyzes the V for Vendetta comic books, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. These volumes are graphic novels whose characteristics place them in the literary genre of the critical dystopia, but they have also been associated with the genre of the superhero comic, which, according to a number of authors including Alan Moore, is inextricably linked to the ideology and practice of the political right, which in its extreme form assumes the form of fascism. The way that fascism is treated in that work, as well as in two other comics discussed in the paper (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns), is linked to the way in which the process of creativity/innovativeness functioned in the context of the revision/deconstruction of the superhero comic book genre in the 1980s, both on the collective (intra-genre) and the individual level, on the level of the thought structure of the British writer Alan Moore. Using the structural-semiotic model of analysis, the paper seeks to fathom the logic of this deconstruction procedure "broken down" into the three comic books discussed in the paper, with particular emphasis on the analysis of V for Vendetta, with the aim of establishing its "hidden", connotative semantic dimension. The study adopts a modern view of the comic book according to which the essence of this medium, which distinguishes it from other narrative and graphic forms of expression as well as from film, can be recognized in the specific, sequential way of combining its visual and narrative components, thus generating meanings whose interpretation depends on the intention of the author but also on the view of the reader.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine J. Golden
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Canonical Texts ◽  
Illustrated Book

The conclusion looks forward from the Victorian illustrated book to the “graphic classics,” a form of modern popular culture that is arguably the heir of the Victorian illustrated book. Canonical texts adapted into graphic novel format are inheritors of the aesthetic conventions of caricature and realism, reshaped in a hyper-modern form to appeal to twenty-first-century readers. The chapter explores parallels between the serial and the comic book. It surveys graphic novel adaptations of nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels (e.g. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and original Victorian-themed graphic novels (e.g. Batman Noël). The conclusion focuses on two important Victorian illustrated books—Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865)—to demonstrate how graphic novel adaptation is reviving a genre that a century before recognized pictures play a central role in plot and character development. This chapter foregrounds author-illustrator Will Eisner, the father of the graphic novel and author-illustrator of Fagin the Jew (2003), for his direct challenge to a religious and ethnic stereotype that Dickens and Cruikshank develop in Oliver Twist and Du Maurier carries into Trilby.

Graphic Novels as Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Philosophical Argument ◽  
Essex County ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Alan Moore

In a follow-up to Comics as Philosophy, this book addresses two questions: which philosophical insights, concepts, and tools can shed light on the graphic novel? And how can the graphic novel cast light on the concerns of philosophy? Each chapter ponders a well-known graphic novel to illuminate ways in which philosophy can untangle particular combinations of image and written word for deeper understanding. The chapters examine notable graphic novels within the framework posited by these two questions. One chapter discusses how a philosopher discovered that the panels in Jeff Lemire's Essex County do not just replicate a philosophical argument, but they actually give evidence to an argument that could not have existed otherwise. Another chapter reveals how Chris Ware's manipulation of the medium demonstrates an important sense of time and experience. Still another describes why Maus tends to be more profound than later works that address the Holocaust because of, not in spite of, the fact that the characters are cartoon animals rather than human. Other works contemplated include Will Eisner's A Contract with God, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. Mainly, each author, graphic novelist, and artist are all doing the same thing: trying to tell us how the world is—at least from their point of view.

Time in the Gutter: Temporal Structures in Watchmen

KronoScope ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 51-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barnes
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Nuclear Accident ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Sequential Art ◽  
Time Magazine ◽  
Personal Nature ◽  
Temporal Consciousness ◽  
Temporal Structures ◽  
Alan Moore

AbstractIn 1986 writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons produced a graphic novel called Watchmen. In 2005 Time Magazine produced a list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. To many surprised readers a comic book was among the top ten. It was Watchmen. The story of former crime-fighters brought out of retirement to solve a world destroying mystery is told with a ruthless realism. The style is cinematic with repeating motifs, flashbacks and overlapping subplots. One of the characters in Watchmen, Jon Osterman, as a result of a nuclear accident, receives typical superhuman powers; more importantly to the character he begins to live in a quantum consciousness in which events occur simultaneously rather than sequentially. In chapter four of Watchmen, Moore and Gibbons brilliantly use the sequential art medium to express the subjective and personal nature of that consciousness. This paper will explicate and analyze the way they simulate Jon Osterman's non-temporal consciousness.

scholarly journals Social Criticism through Humour in the Digital Age

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128
Author(s):  
Javier Muñoz-Basols ◽  
Marina Massaguer Comes
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Narrative Frame

Numerous authors of comics and graphic novels have used the economic crisis in the Iberian Peninsula as a narrative frame for social criticism. Prominent amongst them is the Catalan cartoonist Aleix Saló, who burst onto the comics scene with his animated YouTube video Españistán, a book trailer for his graphic novel Españistán: Este país se va a la mierda [Españistán: This country is going to hell] (2011). This article shows how Saló offers a humorous and didactic portrait of the devastating effects of the economic crisis: he does this through multimodality (using specific shapes, colours, fonts and components of orality) and through creating ‘multimodal extensions’, intertextual relations between published books and book trailers. This analysis presents a case study of the multimodal techniques that authors use to shape and develop their work in the context of the powerful relationship between text and image in the digital age.

Dissecting Graphic Fiction: A Study of the Hybrid Form of the 21st Century

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-256
Author(s):  
Dr M. S. Xavier Pradheep Singh
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Cave Paintings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
Meaningful Interaction

“Comic art does possess the potential for the most serious and sophisticated literary and artistic expression, and we can only hope that future artists will bring the art form to full fruition” (176), prophesied Lawrence Abbott in 1986. It became true when Graphic Fiction emerged as a hybrid genre and entered into the academia. It is a meaningful interaction of words, image panels, and typography. They have a long history dating back to cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Though there are “more genetic similarities between the comic book and the graphic novel” (Sardesai 28), Graphic Novel has a unique approach to plot, narration, and theme. This new genre combines visual and verbal rhetoric and thus offers a hybrid form of reading. The use of blank spaces between image panels provides “imaginative interactivity” (Tabachnick 25), as the reader tends to fill in these blanks, imagining a good deal of action. Text boxes, speech bubbles, and thought bubbles streamline the narration and create a sense of interactivity in a reader. This paper records the history of Graphic Novel and makes an anatomy of it. It also enlists recent Graphic novels and major techniques employed in them.

scholarly journals Social Criticism through Humour in the Digital Age

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Muñoz-Basols ◽  
Marina Massaguer Comes
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Narrative Frame

Numerous authors of comics and graphic novels have used the economic crisis in the Iberian Peninsula as a narrative frame for social criticism. Prominent amongst them is the Catalan cartoonist Aleix Saló, who burst onto the comics scene with his animated YouTube video Españistán, a book trailer for his graphic novel Españistán: Este país se va a la mierda [Españistán: This country is going to hell] (2011). This article shows how Saló offers a humorous and didactic portrait of the devastating effects of the economic crisis: he does this through multimodality (using specific shapes, colours, fonts and components of orality) and through creating ‘multimodal extensions’, intertextual relations between published books and book trailers. This analysis presents a case study of the multimodal techniques that authors use to shape and develop their work in the context of the powerful relationship between text and image in the digital age.

scholarly journals Social Criticism through Humour in the Digital Age

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128
Author(s):  
Javier Muñoz-Basols ◽  
Marina Massaguer Comes
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Narrative Frame

Numerous authors of comics and graphic novels have used the economic crisis in the Iberian Peninsula as a narrative frame for social criticism. Prominent amongst them is the Catalan cartoonist Aleix Saló, who burst onto the comics scene with his animated YouTube video Españistán, a book trailer for his graphic novel Españistán: Este país se va a la mierda [Españistán: This country is going to hell] (2011). This article shows how Saló offers a humorous and didactic portrait of the devastating effects of the economic crisis: he does this through multimodality (using specific shapes, colours, fonts and components of orality) and through creating ‘multimodal extensions’, intertextual relations between published books and book trailers. This analysis presents a case study of the multimodal techniques that authors use to shape and develop their work in the context of the powerful relationship between text and image in the digital age.

scholarly journals Breaking the Contract between God and the Visual-Literary Fusion: Illuminated Manuscripts, William Blake and the Graphic Novel

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-152
Author(s):  
Andreea Paris-Popa
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Novels ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Book Of Kells ◽  
Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Alan Moore

Abstract This essay follows three different stages of the fusion of images and words in the tradition of the book. More specifically, it tackles the transformation undergone by the initially religious combination of visual figures and scriptural texts, exemplified by medieval illuminated manuscripts into the spiritual, non-dogmatic, illuminated books printed and painted by poet-prophet William Blake in a manner that combines mysticism and literature. Eventually, the analysis reaches the secularized genre of the graphic novel that renounces the metaphysical element embedded in the intertwining of the two media. If ninth-century manuscripts such as the Book of Kells were employed solely for divinely inspired renditions of religious texts, William Blake’s late eighteenthcentury illuminated books moved towards an individual, personal literature conveyed via unique pieces of art that asserted the importance of individuality in the process of creation. The modern rendition of the image-text illumination can be said to take the form of the graphic novel with writers such as Will Eisner and Alan Moore overtly expressing their indebtedness to the above-mentioned tradition by paying homage to William Blake in the pages of their graphic novels. However, the fully printed form of this twentieth-century literary genre, along with its separation from the intrinsic spirituality of the visual-literary fusion in order to meet the demands of a disenchanted era, necessarily reconceptualize the notion of illumination.

Text and Image in Translation

CLEaR ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-51
Author(s):  
Milena Yablonsky
Keyword(s):  
Comic Books ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
The Status ◽  
Alan Moore

Abstract The primary objective of the following paper is the analysis of selected issues related to the translation of comic books. The paper aims at investigating the relationships between the text and the image and their implications in the process of translation. It reflects on the status of the translation of comics/graphic novels - a still largely unexploited area within Translation Studies and briefly presents a definition and specificity of the genre. Moreover, it discusses Jakobson’s (1971) tripartite distinction into interlinguistic, intralinguistic and intersemiotic translation. The paper concludes with the analysis of certain issues associated with the Polish translation of V like Vendetta by Alan Moore, a text that is copious with intertextual and cultural references.

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