Join us for the first in a series of close studies of popular culture viewed through an academic lens, showcasing just how deep and diverse these texts, often unfairly dismissed as simple kid’s stuff, can be when it comes to the serious issues of today.
I whole-heartedly believe that comics, movies, and television shows are imbued with all the power and meaning of the classic works we read in university classrooms—and as such, deserve to be written about critically, and linked to the pillars of literary theory. In this new series, a collection of academic close-studies of popular culture, I…
In this week’s installment of Chasing at Shadows, we’ll address the characters of Wonder Woman and Harley Quinn: their hidden similarities, their stark differences, and the importance of their influence on what it means to be a well-rounded, well-written female character in comics.
The comic book as a storytelling medium is a remarkable and unique creature. Comic book icons have a flexibility and a capacity for redirection. Characters with solid decades-long histories and worldwide popularity, paradoxically, do not achieve it through a rigid retelling of the same stories, but through their endless ability to adapt their meaning. Well-known…
Comics, as a genre, are deeply rooted in history and pop culture. In order to understand any part of modern comic books (or graphic novels) one must first understand the history behind them. The two works I will focus on in this essay are Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a story of remarkably normal superheroes, and, to…
Authorship in comics is a tricky business. Superheroes and the trajectory of their identities, more often than not, take on lives of their own. The legendary ones are written by slews of authors and drawn by dozens of different artists. At peak popularity, they go on to live in video games, movies, TV shows, and…
We owe one of the greatest sea changes in comic book history to the “British Invasion” of the 1980s and ’90s, from the likes of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Watchmen and The Sandman ushered in a new era of comics as a legitimate storytelling medium, not just a shallow arena for tights-clad muscle men…
In this instance, we’ll explore how Gaiman revitalizes the roles of women and trans/queer characters (a segment of the comic book population which has been trampled by sexist expectations in the comic book medium previously). We will also explore how he resuscitates the roles of family identity (an age-old and worn-out theme in the hands…
