I have already chosen three writers, as you all know by now, but the question remains, why those three? The answer to that involves a few layers of categorisation. First and foremost, I have, for several years now, been fascinated by entertainment that exists on the fringes of the mainstream and seems to be saying fairly radical things, relative to the rest of the mainstream. It's as if it snuck in when nobody was looking.
My entry on Lex Luthor in Superman Returns is an example of that kind of message; hidden in a mainstream and coded 'villainous,' it nevertheless is a matter-of-fact assertion, in a Superman movie, that America is, indeed, an empire of a kind. (For more of that discussion, check out this thread on Girl Wonder. In that thread, jen provided a link to Lex's actual lines from the film.)
My chosen focus is, then, subversion from within the mainstream, and Fiske's theory of producerly art is quite useful in that regard. He argues, as I've already said, that through excess mass culture (in Adorno's sense of the phrase, that which is produced by industry with the goal of making money and spreading the ideology of consumption) turns into popular culture (that which reflects the sentiments and beliefs of the populace, and is "shot through with contradiction") by virtue of 'deliberate misreadings' that are possible only because there are simply so many free-floating signifiers that audiences can make almost anything of them. (NB: Fiske is highly invested in intentionality, here, and I haven't yet decided how to deal with that. I am not particularly concerned with intent, most of the time, but I'm starting to think I should be.)
Fiske's model of excess isn't quite what I'm talking about, though. In his model, an individual narrative or body of work is so 'excessive' that it allows for a wide range of readings. In my project, the assumption of mainstream values in American comics is used, quite deliberately by all indications, as a way to sneak subversive messages in. The writers I study (Moore, Gaiman, and Ellis) hide their subversion in the excesses of the comic book industry as a whole and its primary genres, superhero stories, fantasy, and science fiction.
Posted by orion at August 8, 2006 2:59 PM