The Comic Spirit: Critical Essays on Comic Literature and Film
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A Study of the Novels, London: England, —, Princeton, New Jersey: Gordon and Breach, Schocken, Polhemus, Robert, Comic Faith: Duke University Press, Princeton University Press, Please contact the author for suggestions or further informations: You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email.
Notify me of new posts via email. Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Year One and Batman: The Long Halloween —and thus giving back some sort of linear temporality to the fictional universe of this character. On the other hand, it replaced the sequence of unrelated stories that formed the previous Batman series with a three-chapter epic. First of all, it presents the story of a large number of characters, not focusing on any of them in particular.
Secondly, it gives a specific space to each character, in particular through the constant use of flashbacks that dramatically interrupts the action-driven structure of conventional superhero fiction.
*An Essay on Comedy, by George Meredith
While staying loyal to and actually increasing the proliferating narratives that characterise this genre, the multiplication of the temporal dimensions calls into question the plain annihilation of time in a dreamlike dimension: This is not simply a thematic issue or something concerning the lack of a conventional happy ending of every other superhero fiction—which, however, is actually necessary for structural i.
The fact that a comics artist, and not a secondary one, turns into a director, is of course already meaningful in itself.
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- Tincture, An Apocalyptic Proposition.
- Total Quality Management: Proceedings of the first world congress.
Despite the consensual dismissal of the film by most critics, The Spirit is arguably one the most sophisticated comic book films ever made. In this film, Miller succeeds in delivering a highly hybrid text, which is neither pure live action nor animation. Moreover, even if The Spirit presents a weak narrative that makes it a sort of urban elegy instead of the usual superhero epic, it also perfectly renders the ambivalence of the genre, that is to say its contradictory status between the desire for myth and the awareness of its impossibility.
Therefore, if the plot of the movie is nothing but the skeleton of the basic superhero story the-good-guy-defeating-the-villain-who-wants-to-control-the-world-plot , its mise en scene is arguably one of the most elaborate and sincere tributes to the language and imagination of comics to be found in cinema. The weak narrative structure of the film is thus at once a commentary of the superhero genre and, somehow, its only possible honest form of existence today.
The two films discussed here are in any case inextricably tied to the evolution of the latter and perfectly fit in the account of American comics history I have rapidly sketched. The graphic novels they are based on, the Sin City series Dark Horse, and Dark Horse, , were indeed the two principal non-superhero comics created by Frank Miller during the s, and the only comic works he released as a writer-artist in this period.
Having been one of the most influential authors of superhero comics during the s, this is of course extremely meaningful. As far as the construction of the narrative is concerned, it is sufficient to remark that in these creations Miller abandoned not only the superhero genre but also its typical serial structure.
According to Eco, in fact, what Superman Golden Age stories aimed to elude was exactly the issue of death, and especially its negative consequences on the possibility of endlessly exploiting the same characters. Therefore, from the apparently nihilist yet still heroic figures of Sin City to the programmatic death wish of the Spartan martyrs, Miller overtly rejects the most important assumption of the superhero genre, looking for alternatives to the exhilaration and euphoria implied by the multiplicity of its classical and contemporary serial narratives.
From a narrative standpoint, the key element is obviously the juxtapositions of three almost unrelated episodes, two of which end with the death of their protagonist.
Origins and definitions
The unprecedented visual technique displayed by the film, of course, adds to this result, breaking with the naturalism of Hollywood conventional cinema. Quintessential cartoonish neo-noir, Sin City confirms many of the previous considerations on the peculiar ability of post-classical cinema to include all possible variations around traditional genres.
Of course, this digital epic blockbuster about soldiers sacrificing themselves for the freedom of Greece superficially has much in common with the basic features of other superhuman adventures; however, it is precisely on the structural impossibility to transform them into serial heroes—at least in the peculiar sense in which superhero comics have used serialisation—that one should focus. By choosing an event whose crucial aspect is that all the heroes are known to die, Miller was in the first place looking for something that was clashing not only with the thematic value of the necessary happy ending of superhero stories but, more radically, with its formal structure.
Even if the director chose to add some events that were absent from the original text to give a more articulate narrative to the film, it is evident that its core is in it visual style and in the very long action sequences. Unlike most of superhero films, which try to maintain a certain balance between narrative and spectacle, here the equilibrium is constantly broken.
An Essay on Comedy
As we have said, this is because the basic principle of superhero narratives lies in their serialisation. As a new episode of a long-running series, i. Only if we pay attention to the complex connections between the single movie and its background can we really grasp how it works in a different way from conventional book-to-film adaptations, i. The variations that each of these films proposes in relation to the disputable canon of the original comics or previous adaptations are entirely part of their narrative—as well as of their commercial strategies.
The other series mentioned are also built on the recently acquired popularity of their heroes: Therefore, it is only thanks to the establishment of these film franchises that the creation of a whole cinematic version of their universe has become possible.
Mixing Visual Media in Comics
In fact, these films rely on a rewriting or subversion of the conventions of the genre that confirms the ability of both superhero fiction and post-classical cinema to develop sophisticated serial narratives, allowing almost infinite variations around their core features. Far from being purely contingent and based simply on the development of digital technologies, its success reveals crucial traits of contemporary cinema. At least as far as mainstream films are concerned, it is very likely that their influence will remain strong for many years to come.
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If Orlando () has typically been read as the literary consequence of. Woolf's call for of the Comic Spirit in "Friendships Gallery" is a harbinger of the revi- sionary spirit that runs through Virginia Woolf's early essays and prose fiction and into junction with Sally Potter's film Orlando (), the earlier Harcourt edition. Universe have regularly topped the box office charts, fans and critics alike mig. Yet adaptations of comics have been an integral part of American cinema from its Movie Comics is the first book to study the long history of both comics-to-film The Spirit, Dick Tracy, Fearless Fosdick, Flash Gordon, Terry and the Pirates.
University of Minnesota Press, Miller, Frank, and Varley, Lynn. Dark Horse Comics, Klaus Janson, Lynn Varley. The Dark Knight Returns. Moore, Alan, and Bolland, Brian. Morrison, Grant, and McKean, Dave. The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero.
Mixing Visual Media in Comics
The Man Who Falls. New York, DC Comics, Storytelling in Film and Television. Harvard University Press, The Amazing Transforming Superhero!: Twentieth Century Fox, Film, Comics, and the Problem of Adaptation," available at the following address: Contents - Next document.
Film Adaptations, New Interactions. Outline Comic-book superheroes and the paradoxes of serialisation. Comics Narrative and Contemporary Hollywood. Post-classical adaptations of superhero comics. Golden Age superheroes and post classical series. Watchmen and the Spirit: Full text PDF Send by e-mail.
How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. The Aristotelian tradition from which the Tractatus derives probably provided a fourth, the churl, or boor. Eisner specifies that in comics, writing and image-making "are irrevocably interwoven" Comics , an assertion echoed by Harvey, who sees comics as "a blending of visual and verbal content" "Comedy at the Juncture" 76 or, more specifically, the "static blending of word and picture for narrative purpose" The Art of the Comic Book 3. Harvard University Press, At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context. This site uses cookies.
Comic-book superheroes and the paradoxes of serialisation 4 As Umberto Eco first remarked, the essential feature of classical superhero comics is to be found in their serial structure. Comics Narrative and Contemporary Hollywood 12 Debates about the role of narrative in contemporary Hollywood cinema revolve around the question of whether the classical structures of the studio era ca.
Post-classical adaptations of superhero comics 20 Since both superhero comics and contemporary Hollywood cinema are focused on the reworking and reactivation of classical narrative structures in innovative ways, it is no surprise that film adaptations also do the same. Golden Age superheroes and post classical series 22 The first contemporary adaptations of superhero comics and the very first high budget ones in Hollywood history were the Superman and Batman movies produced between and Dark Knight Rises, The. Plab B Entertainment, Andy and Larry Wachowski.
Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez. Notes 1 See http: Drama as philosophical endgame?