Four-Colour Commentary

Steve Rogers, What a Guy!

I just had to post this, because it's so damned funny.

This was written and drawn in 1985. I'm stunned by the subtext, here.

"No time to listen to your prattle, little girl, important things are happening!"

"Gosh, you big hunk of a man, I'm nothing without you and way less important than the rest of your life!"

Nineteen Eighty-Five!

Rant

An Open Letter to Sci-Fi and Comic-Book Geeks Everywhere

I'd like to start by setting up my "subject position," as they say. I'm a straight man. I like women. I like how they look. I like how they move. As a straight man who grew up reading comics and consuming incredible amounts of fantasy that was largely visual (movies, TV, cartoons, more comics), I find the aesthetics of those genres appealing, often erotic. Women with pointy ears are hot. Four-colour costumes are super hot. I won't deny and I won't apologize for it. I bring this up to demonstrate to the straight dudes among you that I am one of you. I'm not a voice you can simply dismiss.

Here's the thing. The movies we watch, the television we blithely consume, and the comics we read are full of images of women that--setting aside objectification and dehumanization, the reduction of the female body down to parts to be ogled for our (always implicitly straight, male) pleasure--are simply anatomically impossible. These women don't exist. As long as we live, none of us will ever have a girlfriend, a wife, or a lover who looks like this because there are no such women on this planet Earth, and as much as we all hope and pray otherwise, we're unlikely to meet women anywhere else.

I'm tired of my entertainments, which are capable of amazing insights, powerful social commentary and philosophical discussion, presenting to me a version of the female body that is literally unattainable. This is not helping us. This is not making our lives better. It is merely ensuring that real women, the flesh-and-blood kind, will never measure up. Why, straight men of the world, do we not object to this? Scream at the tops our lungs that we'd like some vaguely real women to look at? The irony, my friends, is that once you have a chance to be with a real woman, one whose body is large enough to actually contain internal organs, one who does not perpetually crouch in an S-curve so that she can show off the T and the A simultaneously, one whose breasts do not present a serious balance problem, you just can't go back to the hyperbolic doodles that dominate our animated worlds, or the $5,000 push-up bras that ensure that every woman in Starfleet has uniform D-cups.

Real women are really hot, especially the ones who indulge our patently silly desires for pointy ears and four-colour spandex. So please, artists and filmmakers among you, take back your skeletal Amazonian warriors with anatomically improbable breasts and give us some women who actually look like women. Trust me. It'll be way more fun for all concerned.

The Crisis "Trilogy"

Crisis on Infinite Earths is a totally "inside" story that is utterly meaningless unless you're plugged into the whole DC universe as a phenomenon. Because of some odd writing choices and decades of DC buying other comic-book companies, there were several parallel Earths in the DCU. The continuity was extremely hard to follow, the back stories were full of contradictions, and that made them less approachable to new readers (and that's a mantra you'll hear over and over again in American comics since the late 70s). In an attempt to make things simpler, they took all of their various parallel Earths and squished them together into one big story that would, in theory, be easier to understand.

The irony, of course, is that it made things exponentially harder to understand because instead of making one thing out of many things, in the minds and the discourse of fans, they actually just created another thing on top of the pile. Before 1986, we talked about Earth-1 (Silver Age), Earth-2 (Golden Age), Earth-S (Shazam/Capt Marvel), Earth-X (Chartlon Comics), Earth-Prime (supposedly the world of the reader, but quickly just another superhero setting), and many, many others. After 1986, those Earths all basically remained in our consciousness, but then we also had Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis. Superman's history might have been one way in 1985, but by 1987, it was something else entirely, and there was no clear indication of what stories took precedent (and like a lot of sci-fi, fans took on the concept of "the canon" to talk about what "really" happened and what is no longer in the official history). What's quasi-metacomical (and therefore "merely" self-referential) about Crisis is that it's entirely based on wink-wink, nudge-nudge with the readers. The creators will declare, by virtue of artistic fiat and big glitzy mini-series, that history has changed. It's about the equivalent of a director rushing on stage during a performance and yelling, "You didn't see that! That didn't happen! We're going to back to top of Act I and try again." This works only if the audience agrees to it, and even then, you can't scrub their memories clean, so it works only in so far as (magic word!) they suspend their disbelief, once again. Crisis asked a lot of its readers, and there are some long-time fans who are still angry about it, so it didn't even totally "work," at that.

But then Crisis was followed up by two sequels, Zero Hour (1993) and Infinite Crisis (2006). Zero Hour took the premise that the first Crisis sent "shockwaves through reality" (or something like that), and that they created little fissures that needed to be fixed. There was a whole premise behind it with Hal Jordan/Green Lantern II trying to "remake the universe without pain or injustice," which is counter to American political discourses of freedom and rugged individualism, so of course he is the villain of the piece. The point is that Zero Hour asked for a very similar kind of willingness on the part of the reader. It tacitly admitted that the original Crisis didn't quite "work," in the sense that the story wasn't fixed yet, there was not yet a closed, definitive narrative in which all things were explained. Zero Hour attempted to fill the gaps that Crisis had opened up (is any of this sounding familiar? I hope it does, because this is the self-referential American comicbook).

However, once again, it didn't work. There were, inevitably and by definition, cracks in the story and both Crisis and Zero Hour served as mere reminders of those cracks (i.e., "patching the holes with corrosive materials"). Just last year, DC tried to do the whole thing again, partly under the narrative logic that if they did it a third time, it was now, magically, a trilogy! Infinite Crisis, conceived and executed as a blatant reference to the original Crisis, did it all again. Cracks in the narrative. Things don't make sense. A bunch of heroes battling it out. The difference was that the villains of this piece were less blatantly evil. They were working to find a perfect world, some combination of everything that came before that would actually be good and decent and true, and they're definition of "good and decent and true" is, quite explicitly, the Silver Age, which was dominated by the CCA, and therefore couldn't be anything other than "good and decent and true." As the story unfolds, what we see is a projection of the creators' struggle onto the characters. "Comics used to be fun and light. Now they're dark and angry. What the hell do we do? We can't go back to being children. That time has passed. But we hate where we live now, and we can't escape it."

I'll spare you all the cosmic explanations for how it all happens (for now), but the upshot is that at the end of this story, instead of resetting the continuity yet again, instead of trying to present a story whose holes had all been filled in, this narrative not only admits that it's "broken" (in the sense that things go unexplained) but didn't actually try to reset everything. Some changes were made, certainly, but for the first time, the characters remember the difference, and the bulk of "broken" elements of the story are allowed to stay, unchanged. The only way to fix, for example, the utterly bizarre history of the character Power Girl is to write her narrative brokenness into her history. For the first time, a character's canonical history is "She's all fucked up," and also for the first time, that's going to have to be good enough. Not because it's fully satisfying and answers all of our questions, but because it's all we get. It's all that's available. There's an admittance, no matter how tacit, that we don't always get what we want, and (perhaps I'm reaching now) that a truly mature reader/human just learns to live with that.

This haphazard trilogy moves from a blatant, if not successful, attempt to close off the narrative, through a tacit admittance that it didn't work the first time, finally to a narrative that all but openly admits that it didn't work and it actually can't work. That, to me, is the perfect model of the transition from self-referential comics to metacomics.

Retcon

is yet another strategy for finding a way to tell the "official" story, any story. It just happens to be a way that works through an implicit complicity with the listener. "We both know this is not how it actually happened, but we'll agree to pretend it did." Hegemonic self-reflexivity?

The Grey Area

This, right here, is exactly why I want to maintain a healthy grey area between the self-reflexive and the metacomcal. Sluggy Freelance, for all that it descends into soap opera on occasion, has wonderful moments like this one:

Is this a commentary on metacomical effects or is it a defense against them? Does the irony of the character's objection to "breaking the fourth wall" mean that she's repairing that wall or further destabilizing it? At this stage, I really don't know.

White Tiger

I've never read any of Tamora Pierce's fiction, which isn't a surprise because it's really not aimed at me, but she's now joined a very small group of women to have written a superhero comicbook, and that deserves a closer look.

(My apologies for the black-and-white sketch. I couldn't find a colour scan of this page.)

As you can see from the art, there's already been some victories, here. There's no plunging neckline and no inexplicably exposed belly or legs. A lot of noise gets made about superhero costumes on women, how they're little more than bikinis with boots and capes, how it's all just a bondage/fetish fantasy, etc. For the most part, these accusations are not inaccurate. One look at Huntress is all it takes to see what they mean:

So WT's costume is a victory, a very real victory in a medium that is three-quarters visual. The fact that she's in flat boots, and not high-heels, is another very real victory. I give it two years after Pierce is finished writing the character before her neckline is extended to her navel and she's mysteriously wearing high-heeled boots for no reason. My faith in the gender awareness of comicbook artists is not high. [1]

It's also clear, pretty quickly, that this character is written by a woman. Now, I'm not one of those who would say that only a woman can write a woman. I know of many male writers who can do that job. But there is a predominance of male writers who can't write women but do write women in comics, and because of that context, it is important that the feminine point of view is introduced into the medium and the genre of the superhero specifically. Its almost total absence thus far as lead to a boy's club mentality, especially at Marvel, which only further alienates women and makes the whole problem worse.

Pierce's rendition of Angela del Toro is consistent with what we've seen of her so far, a professional law-enforcement officer who's not entirely comfortable with putting on a costume and working outside the law (as well she shouldn't be!). Agent del Toro was introduced to Daredevil comics a few years ago as part of an FBI team staking out Matt Murdock in the hope of exposing him as the Daredevil, which they never did, and even though they were right, del Toro was essentially fired from the FBI because she though the whole sting was stupid, and Daredevil was a hero. Not a shocking position to take for a woman who was practically raised by other Marvel superheroes, Iron Fist, Power Man, and the original White Tiger, her uncle.

So we have the always charming story of a superhero finding her footing, literally and figuratively, but also of a woman who's trained and ready for the job. Not a bumbling noob, but also not an old hand. The subtle touches come in how Angela reacts to the attention paid to her. She certainly exchanges witty repartée with her villains, and it's often gendered or sexualised, but because she's an equally powerful participant in the fighting, that back-and-forth never has the tinges of rape or simply violence against women that it could. Even more telling, when she finally receives some popular attention for appearance, her reaction is somewhat bemused and embarrassed, but with more than a little pride. "Gosh, really? You want to take a picture of me?" She doesn't pose sexually for the cameras that finally capture her image, but she's clearly not horrified at the idea of being photographed. The reaction is genuinely feminine, and therefore human, but also not eroticised. She gives a cheerful thumbs up instead of the standard comicbook gag in this circumstance: half of her costume ripped off in a fight, and twisted around at an impossible angle that reveals both her T and her A at the same time.

It's not the best superhero story I've ever read, though it's compelling in its own right, but the very fact that a woman is writing it is clear from the first few pages. The fact that Angela's gender is not something 'extra' about her character is particularly important. She's not "a superhero who's also [gasp!] a woman!" Femininity just isn't an alien presence in this book, and that's important within a genre in which it usually is.

[1] It's important to point out that there's nothing inherently wrong with erotic depictions of women, even bondage/fetish fantasies. Sexuality and fetishes can be perfectly healthy, positive things. The problem here isn't the sexuality but the narrow scope of it, the objectification, and the superficiality. Women in comics are often just sex objects, and nominally heroic characters. They're designed, visually, merely for the sake of an aesthetic of beauty that emphasises weakness and passivity, unlike their male counterparts, who are presented as attractive because of their strength and proactiveness. My point is that it's silly to object to imagery because it's sexual or because it depicts a fetish. Too many voices of protest against sexism end up merely protesting against sex. We have to be more specific, do more work, to be clear about what is actually offensive or destructive, here.

Short Bus, a real "feel-good" film

This movie got a lot of attention because it's explicitly about sex and the sex in the film is not simulated, but there's more to the film than that. The director, John Cameron Mitchell, who also created and starred in Headwig and the Angry Inch, said in an interview (the location of which is totally lost to my memory), that the movie is supposed to be about sex, not about sex as a metaphor for something else, and if that's the point of the thing, then it would be really silly to try to simulate the sex that's in the film. The question that plagued the movie (and generated its buzz) was "Is the 'real' sex really necessary?" a question that presupposes that having 'real' (non-simulated) sex in a film is something to be avoided, by definition. I don't necessarily buy into that. I suspect that that presupposition has more to do with prudishness than anything else.

So once we let go of the knee-jerk need to not have 'real' sex in the film, the choice to not simulate it seems pretty self-explanatory. The many, many sex scenes in the movie would look damn silly (as well as being damn silly, as above) if they were constantly off-camera, covered by hands or legs, or constantly cut between faces, bodies, and backs in order to accommodate body doubles. I don't particularly want to see a man cum into his own mouth, or a three-way between three gay men, but to remove those visuals from the movie would betray the whole basis of the movie. Basically, it'd be pointless to make this film any other way.

But does it work as a movie? Well, yes and no. Many of the individual scenes work quite well, even in their context of the rest of the plot. They're funny, charming, often very sexy, and they give us an insight into these characters and their abilities to relate to their friends and lovers. And that "relating" is something that's always sexual, but not just sexual. Sex is not a metaphor in this film. It's treated as part-and-parcel to all kinds of relationships, married couples, life partners, friends, even intimate strangers.

However, the individual scenes don't add up very well, which is the fault of many a movie. In the end, literally the end of the film, there are a lot of threads left dangling and that lack of closure is basically covered by an overly-cheerful spectacle that makes it seem like everything has been resolved, when in fact, only two out of (by my count) five plot threads have been tied up, and the simplest ones at that. Sofia, notoriously played by the CBC's Sook Yin Lee (who is quite good!), is the real protagonist, a couple's councillor/sex therapist who's never had an orgasm. The climax of the film is her climaxing, and it's the result of a three-way that's somewhat foreshadowed, by pretty much a deux ex machina. There's no real explanation for why this sexual encounter is the one that puts her over the edge. She hasn't learned all that much through the course of the movie (except maybe that she actually likes women?). Nevertheless, she gets her orgasm, and it's a cinematically wonderful moment that you really have to see for yourself.

The other thread that's actually tied is the relationship between James and Jamie, a gay couple who open their relationship to a third, and might actually adopt him into the relationship. The only resolution, here, is that James learns to accept that Jamie loves him after an attempt at suicide, and letting another man penetrate him. In context, that's a lot less tacky than it sounds, but it's, again, not particularly well explained. James was a male prostitute, and bears more scars from that than he admits, and for the majority of the film can't let anyone "in," either literally or metaphorically, but why he can let someone "in" all of the sudden, and why that implicitly solves all their problems is another question.

But Severin, the professional dom who can't have an actual friendship, is left sitting in a chair with no resolution. Sook Yin's husband is still kind of a dick, and we really don't know if she's leaving him in favour of exploring her new sexuality, or if she's going to go back to him now that she's had her orgasm, or what. And the side-characters in Jamie and James' relationships, in the tradition of Renaissance comedies, seem to conveniently fall in love with each other. All of those threads are left dangling while a marching band sings "We all get ours in the end..." Well, not even the members of the cast have "gotten theirs," so how am I, a member of the audience, supposed to buy into this feel-good film?

Don't get me wrong. There's some really wonderful stuff in here. Some of the scenes in the sex club that provides the movie's title, "Short Bus," are wonderful. The finally-out, former mayor of New York is fascinating, and the club itself does seem to be a welcoming atmosphere of sexual exploration and expression. It seems to be open to gay, straight, queer, and kinky alike with no prejudice against anyone, and no assumption of sophistication on the part of those who aren't straight and/or monogamous. Despite all real-world logic, the club might even allow single, straight men in (!), and there doesn't seem to be a cover charge, which is just mind-boggling considering how much a closet in a basement next to a boiler-room costs in Manhattan. Yes, it's a ridiculous fantasy, but it's a positive fantasy. I, more than most, have no objection to that.

But the movie itself is incoherent in the most literal sense. It just doesn't stick together, which is sad, really, because a genuinely popular American movie that looks sex right in the face (or the ass, or the pussy, or the cock, or...) is something that that culture (and this one!) could really use. The general tenor of erotophobia in Anglo-American culture is unhealthy. It indirectly suborns homophobia, sexism, and a whole host of other social ills. I can only hope that this film is the Model-T of the genre, and that it will eventually lead to a Volvo or even just a Chevy. Hope schwings eternal.

Section II: Chapter Breakdown, Conclusion

Miles To Go Before We Sleep

The conclusion will consist of three discussions. First, there will be a brief overview of post-Revisionist metacomical techniques, which do not all go as far as collapsing fiction and reality, but do use those metacomical techniques to actively comment on the state of American comics today. Very few contemporary comics can get away with not referencing at least the possibility of that collapse, in some way, as we can see in the gradual shift towards metacomical implications in Crisis On Infinite Earths and its sequels. Second, the Conclusion will, of course, summarise the high points of the dissertation, which consists of a general thesis, already stated above, and several sub-theses, (1) pre-Revisionist comics do contain self-reflexivity, but they do not commit to active commentaries on comics, and they either ignore or actively attempt to dispel any potential breaches they might create between reality and fiction; (2) Moore, Gaiman, and Ellis all write structural metafictions that directly address the act of storytelling itself, in mythological, psychological, and journalistic terms; (3) Moore, Gaiman, and Ellis's Revisionist metacomics actively suspend the audience's belief, rather than its disbelief, counter to traditional modes of high-fantasy storytelling; (4) analogue characters and retcon are the two major devices of Revisionist metacomics, and they are used within the Revisionist movement to create new narratives/characters that fit a new set of audience expectations.

Finally, the Conclusion will name and describe the limitations of the dissertation, the problems and issues that the dissertation lacks space or scope to address. Many of those issues are located in a kind of analysis that would regard comics as a culture, one that contains both audience and creators, and the industry that produces them in America. A cultural studies analysis of this relationship would be the most appropriate, though such a study must not lose sight of the primary material, and indeed would do well to locate itself within analysis of the primary material, since it is the only common factor to all aspects of comics as a culture; indeed, it is how we define comics as a culture, so divorcing it from the culture would be simply illogical. Future studies will need to take on the intersection of metacomics, culture, and industry because the metacomics themselves refer to the culture and the industry as much as they refer to the act of storytelling.

Section II: Chapter Breakdown, Chapter 4

Retcons and Analogues

Chapter 4 examines a collection of examples of the two major metacomical techniques, retroactive continuity ('retcon'), and analogue characters. Retcon, as I have already defined it (under Chapter 1) is a pre-Revisionist device that is also used extensively in Revisionist metacomics. Revisionist work quite literally revises a character, a narrative, or a set of genre expectations, therefore retcon, changing events that have already happened, is an extremely convenient narrative tool; however, it is not an inherently Revisionist tool, as I have already noted. Retcon can be used to preserve the integrity of the fictional space just as much as it can be used to question or even destroy that integrity. Metacomics tend to use it to do the latter, but they also often point out when it has been used previously to do the former. The first section of Chapter 4 will trace the gradual shift in retcon techniques from early memory/amnesia devices in Moore’s Marvelman, Batman: The Killing Joke, and Saga of the Swamp Thing, through to ‘cosmic’ retcons that actually change history or invest incidental imagery with mythic significance, as is particularly strong in Gaiman's retellings of superhero stories, like Sandman: Mystery Theatre, The Books of Magic: The Prequel, 1602, and The Eternals. Special attention must also go here to Planetary for constructing an entirely new history out of existing literary narratives, a device akin to retcon but also to analoguing.[1]

Analogues are very clearly defined in Wolf-Meyer’s otherwise problematic paper "The World Ozymandias Made." He calls them 'clones,' but he nevertheless identifies exactly the facet that makes analogues work:

"Clones" are characters that [sic] resemble other established superheroes, both in costuming and abilities, […] The Clones have their own lives, their own continuity, and their own costumes […], but in their presence they make reference to the original[s …]. This process of cloning allows the authors to partake of a particular aspect of the discourse of superhero comics, providing their readers with familiar iconography… (Wolf-Meyer 504)

Though the idea of literary analogues is not new, the word itself is significant and bears a closer look. Wolf-Meyer's definition concentrates on similarity, which is not surprising because he calls the phenomenon 'cloning,' a word that implies identical copies. Ellis's brief definition (quoted above) is similar, in that it draws attention to the pre-existing emotional relationship between audiences and characters, emotions that the analogue capitalises on from its position between the original[2] and the audience; however, the relationship between the analogue and the original is not just one of similarity. If it were, then the analogues would be mere copies, allegorical rather than analogous. Supreme is a commentary on Superman precisely because he acts differently. If he displayed no different behaviour, he would be a mere copy. Metacomics also use analogues as an extremely efficient way to create an immediate relationship with the audience; therefore, when those characters enact commentaries on their originals, the commentaries are more powerful by virtue of the illusion of a pre-existing relationship. This device requires a dual reading. The audience must know the analogue as both an individual character and as a gesture toward the character(s) to which it is analogous; the audience must perceive the analogue as both located in its internally consistent narrative and as a signifier of another narrative, or even an entire literary tradition. Logically, analogue characters cannot be both at once, but by the logic of metacomics, they must be read as both in order to make coherent sense. Analogues, to borrow Mitchell's term, are multistable characters.

Gaiman rarely employs analogues, and instead, when given the chance, makes side-long references to comicbook continuity, as in Dream’s story in Sandman: Endless Nights, which uses the back story of the Green Lantern Corps to flesh out a key moment in Dream’s relationship with his sibling, Desire. These characters are not analogues, however, so Gaiman will feature little in this chapter. The second section of Chapter 4 will, therefore, focus on Moore’s shifts from analogue characters to direct intertextual or historical references and back, and Ellis’s seemingly reluctant but complex use of analogues to create a fictional space that encompasses all the fictional spaces of 20th-century fantasy and science fiction. Moore employs analogues frequently, but seemingly out of necessity. For Watchmen, he and Dave Gibbons are forced, through circumstances that would take too long to explain in this document, to create a cast patterned on the Charlton Comics superheroes, an unexpected necessity that nevertheless grants them the power of the analogue: emotional resonance coupled with complete freedom to alter the characters’ back stories and irrevocably alter them by the end of the story, which is a freedom that most comics creators do not have when working with corporate-owned characters. On the other hand, for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls (with Melinda Gebbie), as well as the pseudo-historical From Hell (with Eddie Campbell), Moore uses the actual characters and historical figures, evidently because they are all in the public domain. When Moore returns to superhero comics in the mid-90s, however, he returns to analogues, as in 1963 (with Rick Veitch), Supreme (with Jon Bennet, et al), and Judgement Day (with Rob Liefeld). Promethea is Moore’s most powerful recent series, but its title character is only a Wonder Woman analogue on the most superficial level, so it will not figure prominently in this chapter.

Ellis does not seem to like using analogues, if his comments from Bad Signal can be taken as genuine, but instead employs them out of convenience; they create an immediate relationship between audience and text, as we have already seen, but he, like Moore and Gibbons, makes virtue of necessity in Planetary (with John Cassaday), which amalgamates pulp magazines (crime, detective, the pulp supermen), early 20th-century science fiction, Asian cinema (monster, wuxia, hard-boiled), superhero comics, and some historical figures (e.g., Thomas Edison as a pulp superman). Planetary is a complex of analogues, all of which bring entire literary and/or visual styles with them, a mixture that is symbolised by ‘The Snowflake’ (Planetary 1.17) the tangible structure of Planetary’s reality (and briefly, a McGuffin),

and ‘The Bleed’ (Planetary 6.12.3), the space between dimensions in the shared Wildstorm universe.

The former implies complex structure, but is drawn as a if it were half-melted, whereas the latter visually embraces the textual metaphor of fluids "bleeding" into each other, and these visual signifiers play directly into the most extreme form of metacomics, the erosion and eventual destruction of the barrier between fiction and reality.

Section II: Chapter Breakdown, Chapter 3

The Unwilling Suspension of Belief

Chapter 3's focus is on Waugh's semiotic metafictions and on the narrative equivalent of Mitchell's multistable images. Between these two ideas—metafictional addresses to the most basic problems of signification, and representations that insist on being two things—we find the aforementioned concept of the unwilling suspension of belief. The moment that art, ostensibly a collection of signifiers that has the capacity to inspire an intellectual and/or emotional reaction, starts to talk about signification itself, the audience is forced to set aside its habitual suspension of disbelief and look at the object anew, as a construct. Similarly, an artistic representation that refuses to occupy just one state, as it should by all real-world logic, forces the audience to acknowledge that the medium—fiction, pictures, or something else—does not obey real-world logic. Once again, the habitual suspension of disbelief, in which state the audience accepts the art's depictions as "real," must be set aside in favour of regarding the art as a construct. As Waugh puts it, “The effect of [metafiction], instead of reinforcing our sense of a continuous reality, is to split it open, to expose the levels of illusion. We are forced to recall that our ‘real’ world can never be the ‘real’ world of the novel” (33). The metacomics with which this chapter is concerned direct the audience’s attention back at the disbelief that that audience has left suspended in mid-air. They require that the audience embraces its belief, no matter how unwillingly, in order to make sense of the narrative.

Promethea constantly reminds the audience that it is reading and looking at a comicbook. The series employs narrative, ideological, and visual cues; in Promethea’s cosmology, for example, the closer one gets to perceiving the ‘true’ shape of the universe, in spiritual and metaphysical terms, the more the art becomes photographic, until half an issue consists of photo novella panels (Promethea 7.12-13). During the ‘end of the world’ arc, at the end of the series, confused perceptions manifest as collage (Promethea 28.1.1):

While burgeoning enlightenment reveals the construct of the two-dimensional, comicbook page (Promethea 28.10-11).

Though sometimes expressed in Waugh's structural terms, Promethea constantly discusses how signification, representation, and language function within Moore's very language-oriented, epistemological system, which he simply calls 'magic.'

Gaiman and Ellis feature less prominently in this chapter, because their metacomical commentaries tend towards the structural rather than the semiotic. However, the central paradox of Sandman is the nature of the Endless, themselves. Most coherently described as "ideas cloaked in a semblance of flesh" (Seasons of Mist 22.2), they insist on being regarded as both/and, walking concepts and fully-formed (if fictional) characters. To know Dream, the protagonist, the audience employs its willing suspension of disbelief, but in that process, it learns that he is a construct, a representation, and thus is forced to unwillingly suspend belief, as well. In knowing the character as a construct, the audience paradoxically develops an emotional tie to him as a character, which requires rapid, almost constant, shifts from suspending disbelief to suspending belief.

Ellis and Cassaday's Planetary, though also mostly a structural metacomic, posits the creation of the Wildstorm multiverse (the setting of the book) as the result of a later event within that multiverse, which is a paradox that can exist within narrative logic, but not chronological or spatial logic. Science-fiction audiences are not unaccustomed to accepting these kinds of paradoxes, though, so suspension of belief might not be inspired by this plot device, but the specifics details reveal a layer of commentary "at the level of the sign," as it were. The multiverse is brought into existence as a result of turning on a computer, or "Mechanical Brain" (Planetary 1.16.3), that operates in 196,833 states, rather than the simple two-state computers of the real world ('1' or '0'). In this moment, a computer code, a language, speaks the universe into being. This technofetishistic creation myth of the Wildstorm universe goes a long way towards justifying a running plot device, the so-called "Century Babies," a group of superhuman individuals, all born on January 1st, 1900, and who seem to have predestined roles in the larger Wildstorm narrative. The Electronic Brain is more of a fictional/magical device than a scientific one. It runs on a poetic notion of doubling and mirroring, rather than a hard-scientific principle. It should be remembered, here, that Ellis is no technophobe. If books like The Ministry of Space and Orbiter are any indication, he is quite well informed of the basics of science and electronics. The Electronic Brain does not run on those principles, and therefore it creates a multiverse that runs on associations and relationships, which are magical or narrative ideas. It is a synecdoche for the Wildstorm multiverse.

Section II: Chapter Breakdown, Chapter 2

Stories About Stories

Waugh's structural metafiction, in which metafictive gestures happen at the level of plot, character, genre, and other narrative details, is perhaps the simplest kind, but if that is so, it is also the most direct, most clear, and most efficient kind. Chapter 2 focuses on this form of metacomics, the one that comments quite directly on the process of storytelling. Promethea, as has already been mentioned, begins with a term paper about its title character and almost pedantically lectures on the nature of stories and language using the device of Sophie/Promethea's journey through Moore's construction of the Kabalistic 'World Tree.' The commentary is so blatant, here, that characters often give up the pretence of talking to each other and simply address the audience directly, as in the Tarot-deck issue (#11), and the final issues (#31-2). Promethea's direct addresses, however, are often about what Waugh identifies as "the level of the sign," which is why Promethea is also a focus of Chapter 3. Moore's other structural metacomic is Supreme, which constructs a cosmology and a metaphysics for its characters based on the industry practises of American comics, specifically the rotation of writers and artists who radically change characters when they take over titles. Gaiman's Sandman is quite explicitly a story about stories, as is established early during Dream's storytelling duel to retrieve his helm (in Preludes and Nocturnes), and continues through to the final issue, a domestic view of Shakespeare writing ostensibly his final play, The Tempest. The series makes constant reference to storytelling as an act of pure imagination, often using dreaming as a symbol. Sandman's storytelling does not follow the same metaphysical rules as Promethea's, and in fact gradually demonstrates, through Dream's obsessive dedication to his own, self-imposed code of conduct, that the only structure to storytelling is that which we impose upon it.

Finally, Transmetropolitan has probably the least semiotic and the most structural commentary on storytelling, focusing as it does on media and journalism, and a search for an always implicitly objective "Truth." The narrative is a study in how media lies to us, and how politicians use that media to gain power over the street-level citizen, ironically called "The New Scum" by the protagonist, Spider Jerusalem. It is a story about how to tell stories truthfully and how to tell them manipulatively, and what the difference is. There are very real logical inconsistencies in this implicit argument behind the text, of course. Spider's style of journalism is loosely modelled after Hunter S. Thompson's 'gonzo' technique, which involves first-person accounts in explicitly subjective terms. Both Transmetropolitan and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '73 contain gonzo reportage of an American presidential election. Transmetropolitan takes up the basic problem of communicating something akin to objective truth through subjective accounts, though it does not always coherently address that problem.

Section II: Chapter Breakdown, Chapter 1

Self-Relfexivity Before the British Invasion

Chapter 1 will recount the history of self-referential and metafictional techniques in American comics with special attention to the superhero genre. The general thesis of the chapter is that while there are self-reflexive comics in the pre-Revisionist period, what is referred to as the Silver Age, they generally ignore the breaches they create between fiction and reality, and often actively attempt to repair the breaches. The metacomics that appear in the mid-80s do the opposite; they create those breaches and/or emphatically point them out. The common factor between self-reflexive comics and metacomics is that they both become more and more concerned with addressing the gaps in narrative continuity that develop over the decades in which the same characters are written and over-written by successive generations of artists.[1] Before the 80s, comics largely acted to fill those gaps, but the material they used metaphorically corroded the surroundings and created even larger gaps to be filled with more and more corrosive material. After the 80s, metacomics become popular as an alternative strategy. Instead of filling in the gaps, metacomics celebrate them; admitting that the books are full of holes means that the holes can stay. There are examples of comics that perform, if not metacomical moves, at the very least, extremely Revisionist moves, such as Marvel’s aforementioned Squadron Supreme, but they are rare, whereas since the mid-80s, Revisionist and metacomical techniques litter mainstream American comicbooks. The study will focus on a pair of bridging texts, between the self-referential and the metacomical, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, and the aforementioned Crisis On Infinite Earths, as well as its sequels, Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis. Space does not permit a detailed analysis, but the general trend over the course of the late Silver Age is to move closer and closer to metacomics. Chapter 1 will trace that trend.

[6] The verbs here, ‘to write’ and ‘to overwrite’ do not include the pictorial. Though I have not settled on a pictorial equivalent yet, the concept of the palimpsest might suffice, depending on its theoretical context.

Section II: Chapter Breakdown, Introduction

The intro...

Introduction: Pictures, Words, and Ideas
The study will consist of four chapters, with a short Introduction and a brief Conclusion. The Introduction will present the thesis of the study. Before the Revisionist movement, mainstream American comics that employ self-referential gestures rarely dwell on the deeper implications of breaching the barrier between fiction and reality. From within the Revisionist movement, Moore, Gaiman, and Ellis write metacomics, a style that employs self-referential gestures, but also mounts active commentaries on American comics themselves, their genres and narrative tropes, and in extreme cases, on problems of perception and representation. It will then briefly rehearse Waugh and Mitchell’s constructions of metafiction and metapictures. The Introduction will also rehearse Eisenstein's and McCloud's theories—montage and closure, respectively—in order to fill out the formal-analytical underpinnings of the study. Though individual comics will, and always do, call for individual approaches, Eisenstein and McCloud form the basis of a general theory of the visual narrative of the comics page, which is that comics consist of a series of images that viewers combine in their minds in order to construct chronology and narrative. Though located in what I have identified as the 'sequential school' of formal comics criticism, Eisenstein's theory of dialectical montage can easily encompass the combination of pictures and words, as well.

The Introduction will also explain several principles of criticism that the study will follow; these principles are based on my own reading of academic criticism of popular entertainment. The most fundamental of them is that the primary material comes first. This study is not an attempt to demonstrate a theoretical perspective, but an analysis of a certain group of comics that all employ metafictional and/or self-referential techniques; thus they call for the use of theories of metafiction and metapictures. This concept reveals the second principle, that the critic’s choice of theory/methodology must be derived from the text. We must pick the best tools for the job, and never assume that our tools are universally applicable. Part of engaging with theory is demonstrating why a particular theory is appropriate in a particular case. This study will analyse only what the primary material does, its content and context, not what it supposedly fails to do. It will not, to be clear, ignore pertinent absences, but it will always demonstrate the presence of those absences rather than insisting on what a book or a series ought to have done according to an externally imposed ideological rubric. The study will not treat critical categories as impermeable or fixed. In fact, formal categories such as metacomics and self-referentiality; genres like fantasy, science fiction, or the superhero story; or abstract concepts like form, content, or even medium, will all be treated as not just permeable and fluid, but without demonstrable boundaries or borders. We reify these categories for the sake of discussion only. This is not to say that there is no difference, here, between one kind of comicbook and the next, but that that difference is more usefully analysed through comparison and analogy than through ostensibly objective categorisation.

Lastly, the Introduction will run through a few explanations of how the study as a whole uses certain pertinent bits of terminology. Here, I will explain why I use the word 'comics' rather than one of the many alternative names for the medium; why I reserve the word 'text' for actual lexical characters; and the subtle valences of the verbs 'to read' and 'to view' in reference to an art form that carries narrative mostly through its pictorial representation. These terms are not fixed, of course. They may, and probably will, develop over the course of the study, but when those shifts occur, the new valences will be noted, as in the Introduction itself.

Section I: Conceptual Construction, Literature Review

A bunch of book titles (you can skip this part, it's okay)...

Literature Review

The secondary material for the study breaks down into three general groups: direct critique, historical survey, and formal methodology. Direct critiques of the primary materials are not abundant, but Moore and Gaiman have received some critical attention. Geoff Klock's How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (2002) analyses the position of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as transition points between the late Silver Age of American superheroes and the contemporary era. Klock's book uses a combination of psychoanalytic criticism and Harold Bloom's theories. The text also touches on Ellis's The Authority and Planetary. There are several books on Moore as an auteur, such as Lance Parkin's Alan Moore (2001), and Smoky Man and Gary Millidge's Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman (2003). Books on Sandman are often auteur studies as well, for example, Hy Bender's The “Sandman” Companion (2000), but also concentrate on Gaiman's penchant for collaboration in Sandman. Joseph McCabe's Hanging Out with the Dream King (2004) is a collection of interviews with every artist who worked on the title, which is a long list. Individual papers have been written about both Moore and Gaiman's comics since the mid-90s. The Sandman Papers (Joe Sanders, ed., 2006) anthologises a dozen papers on Sandman and related comics. Though academic criticism of Warren Ellis's work barely exists, there are a great number of fan-based and non-academic commentaries on-line, partly because Ellis himself has a remarkably large web-based presence, as I have already noted.

Many short critiques, such as Matthew Wolf-Meyer's “The World Ozymandias Made” and Bernard and Carter's “Alan Moore and the Graphic Novel,” suffer from an interesting methodological inversion in which the primary material is, metaphorically, demoted to secondary, while a particular critical theory is, by the same action, promoted to the primary. The comicbook is then judged by how well it recapitulates the theory, usually without any explanation as to why we ought to expect it to do so at all. In short, the primary material is used to demonstrate the accuracy of the theory, but without engaging with the theory or the primary material in any appreciable depth. This study will not fall into that pattern, though the pattern itself is an interesting one, specifically within the small world of academic critiques of popular entertainment.

The art history of comics, the examination of its various styles, arranged chronologically and placed in historical context, mostly takes the form of broad survey texts like Reinhold Reitberger and Wolfgang Fuchs's Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium (1972), a survey of American comics; Jim Steranko's The Steranko History of Comics (1972), an artist's history of the pulps and superhero comics; David Kunzle's The Early Comic Strip: 1450 to 1825 and The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century (both published in 1973), a pre-20th-century history of European comics; Roger Sabin's Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (1996), a survey of late-19th-century comics through to just before the 21st; Matthew Puzts Jr.'s Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (1999) as well as Bradford W. Wright's Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (2001), both of which are cultural studies approaches to the intersection of comics and the communities that form around them; Patrick Rosenkranz's Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 (2003); and Lillian Robinson's Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes (2004), a feminist history of the superhero.

These books are characterised mostly by scope, and tend towards implicitly comprehensive studies that start in the late-19th century in America, and finish in the present, though not uniformly so. Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium (above) and The Art of the Funnies (below) are two out of the many books responsible for spreading the historical fallacy that comics were invented in American newspapers in the 1890s, and Kunzle's twin volumes systematically demonstrate just how fallacious that claim is. Others, however, commit to surveys of a genre or style, like the Underground, or have a political/theoretical approach, such as Robinson's study of female superheroes from a feminist perspective. These histories, often written by extremely knowledgeable non-academics, are important as parts of the larger project to construct the art history of comics, but for this study's purposes, they will be used as tools to help contextualise a given book or series in that history. Sabin's book is particularly useful in regard to the Revisionist movement because it discusses the relationships between the mainstream and the Underground/Alternative comix that, arguably, lead to Revisionism.

Formal analysis of comics has two basic approaches, the pictures/words school, and the sequential school. The first school includes Mitchell's Picture Theory and its concept of the imagetext; R.C. Harvey's The Art of the Funnies (1994) and The Art of the Comic Book (1996); Robin Varnum and Christina Gibbons' The Language of Comics: Word and Image (2002); and David Carrier's The Aesthetics of Comics (2000). These books, in whole or in part, concentrate on comics as a hybrid medium, pointing out the aesthetics of lettering and the textuality of pictures. They characterise the relationship of pictures and words as one of harmony, tension, or both. Mitchell’s ideas of the ‘imagetext,’ the ‘image-text’ and the ‘image/text’ attempt to encompass all the possible relationships between word and image, for example, though his book is by no means limited to the study of comics. The sequential art school consists mostly of Will Eisner's Comics & Sequential Art (1985) and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (1996), as well as Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1995) and Making Comics (2006).[1] McCloud’s work is, of course, avowedly derivative of Eisner’s. It is also, somewhat counter intuitively, very conceptually similar to Sergei Eisenstein's theories of intellectual montage, as found in Film Form and Film Sense (1957). McCloud's concept of closure is very similar to the dialectical underpinnings of Eisenstein's theories, which claim that two signifiers, usually images but potentially other sensory elements like sounds, combine inside the viewer's mind to give rise to a third concept. This basic structure is, of course, dialectic. The thesis and antithesis are sensory elements, and the synthesis is the third concept. McCloud focuses on chronological/narrative kinds of "closure" in his discussions of panel transition, while Eisenstein is much more concerned with non-narrative, abstract forms of "montage," but the idea is basically the same.

[1] Reinventing Comics, though ostensibly about the artistic possibilities of digital comics, contains relatively little formal analysis, though a great deal of (not particularly convincing) analysis of the American comics industry.

Section I: Conceptual Construction, Theory

And now the theory...

Metafiction and the Metapictures

The project theorises metacomics in terms of two models of meta-level representation, one textual and the other pictorial. Patricia Waugh's Metafiction and W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory rehearse parallel definitions of metafiction and metapictures, respectively. Both of their models also contain sub-types that roughly parallel each other. They both define the "meta" as a paradox in which the art (text or image) collapses the difference between the representation and that which it represents, and thus, in many cases but not all, demonstrates that the systems of perception that the audience employs to understand the art are the very same systems that it uses to understand reality. It must be stressed that though this is the abstract definition of meta-level representation, not every text performs precisely this move. Many gesture toward it but never quite force the collapse. Many assume the collapse has already taken place, and therefore do not bother undertaking it.

Waugh describes metafiction as “the construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion” (6), which is often achieved by granting the characters, the narrator(s), and/or the reader “the same ontological status” (33); thus reality and fiction collapse into each other, and the separation between them, rarely acknowledged but almost universally assumed, disappears. In this collapse is the opportunity, not always taken, to demonstrate that the tools we use to understand fiction are precisely the same tools that we use to understand reality. Waugh describes "two poles of metafiction: one that finally accepts a substantial real world whose significance is not entirely composed of relationships within language; and one that suggests there can never be an escape from the prisonhouse of language and either delights or despairs in this" (53). The first she calls structural, and the second she places "at the level of the sign," therefore, I will call it semiotic. Structural metafiction involves "the undermining of convention [...] using a specific previous text or system for its base" (53). Roughly speaking, structural metafiction happens at the level of narrative (plot, character, genre, etc.). Transmetropolitan, with a plot revolving around the media constructions of an American presidential election, and Moore and O'Neil's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which constructs a dysfunctional superhero team out of Victorian horror and adventure characters, are structural metafictions in Waugh's terms. Semiotic metafictions are about signs, the mechanics of representation, and language itself. Promethea, Gaiman et al.'s Sandman, and Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary all spend significant amounts of time in fantastic settings that represent imagination, representation, and language—The Immateria in Promethea, The Dreaming in Sandman, and The Snowflake in Planetary—and thus are continuously preoccupied with signification. In Waugh's terms, we can gauge metacomics on two closely-related axes. The first is the degree to which they allow self-reference to become active commentary, at the extreme end of which fiction collapses into reality, and the second is the degree to which they employ either structural or semiotic metafictional techniques.

Mitchell’s construction of the metapicture is almost exactly the same as Waugh's construction of metafiction; it indicates or acknowledges itself as a picture, "rather than effacing itself in the service of transparent representation of something else" (48). One of the most famous examples of this kind of metapicture is René Magritte's "The Treason of Images," for example, which insists by negation that it is a drawing and not a transparent window into real life. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," as it were.

All of Mitchell's examples are similarly blatant. They are pictures that depict or allude to the act of drawing. They "function as reflections on the basic nature of pictures [… They] show themselves in order to know themselves: they stage the 'self-knowledge' of pictures" (48). Metafiction and metapictures both put an examination of their own formal structures on display. Pictures actually resemble that which they represent, unlike text[1]; therefore, displaying themselves as constructions is ironically easier than in metafiction. Pictures can literally show the viewer that they are two-dimensional tricks of the eye that merely resemble three-dimensional reality, as in M.C. Escher's illustrations for example. Also, the impact on the viewer is potentially much greater than in text because the very same intuitive viewing process that makes viewers think of pictures as "transparent representations of something else" are the ones that metapictures employ to force them to realise otherwise. This kind of metapicture is the visual parallel to Waugh's structural metafiction. Though they both have potentially far-reaching implications, they both happen at the most literal level of representation, which in fiction is narrative details, like plot and character, and in pictures is the actual figures that the pictures resemble.

Mitchell's sub-type, which roughly but not perfectly parallels Waugh's semiotic metafiction, is the dialectical or multistable image, which appears to be one of two different images depending on how the viewer looks at it; he or she literally decides which way to look at the image at any given moment. The most commonly-known example of a multistable image is "The Devil's Fork," which appears to be either two- or three-pronged, and is in fact both at once, even though it logically cannot be both at once.

Though they "are not metapictures in [a] formally explicit way," meaning that they do not depict the act of drawing, they do achieve the metapictorial effect by displaying "the phenomenon of 'nesting,' presenting one image concealed inside another image, [… and thus] they tend to make the boundary between first- and second-order representation ambiguous” (49). Multistable images, like Mitchell's "formally explicit" metapictures, force viewers to acknowledge that pictures are not direct reflections of reality but two-dimensional figures that create the false appearance of three-dimensional reality.

The multistable image parallels Waugh's notion of the the semiotic metafiction, which collapses reality and fiction at the level of sign. The text cannot be just reality, nor can it be just fiction; it formally implicates both reality and fiction in its narrative. The picture cannot be just one shape or just another; the fork is clearly both two- and three-pronged. And yet neither the fiction nor the picture are allowed to be both, within the confines of Enlightenment logic. At their most extreme, metafiction and metapictures do not just reveal problems in our mechanisms of reading and viewing, but in our basic notion of the rational. They can potentially reveal that logic is, itself, yet another system of perception and representation, like fiction and pictures. The inverse principle, here, is that our basic enjoyment of metafiction and metapictures comes from being presented with a perfectly coherent representation that, nevertheless, does not follow the rules of logic. Like jokes, meta-level representations count on the human tendency to react with laughter and amusement to that which is irrational, provided that it is sufficiently witty. Thus, instead of the willing suspension of disbelief, on which both fiction and pictures rely, metafiction and metapictures rely on the unwilling suspension of belief. They all but require the audience to counter-act it habitual suspension of disbelief in favour of embracing that disbelief and acknowledging that the art is a construct, an awareness that can and often does lead to the conclusion that reality is constructed out of perceptions.

[1] That is to say, unlike phonetic, alphabetical, Western text. Asian characters are largely pictographic, and therefore the stark divide between image and text does not exist in those cultures.

Section I: Conceptual Construction, Thesis

First, the thesis...

This project examines the comics of three British writers—Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis―who work in the American comic-book industry. The majority of their collected works are metafictions, or more properly metacomics, that comment on abstract problems of representation and/or the generic expectations of American mainstream comics, which in large part means the superhero tradition. Though a small portion of their collected work is not metacomical[1], the majority is; Moore, Gaiman, and Ellis tend strongly to employ four specific narrative devices: stories about storytelling (Waugh's structural metafiction), the unwilling suspension of belief (Waugh's semiotic metafiction and the narrative equivalent of Mitchell's multistable images), retroactive continuity (or 'retcon'), and analoguing (the character equivalent of multistable images). Metacomical techniques are part of a larger movement in American comics commonly called Revisionism, which started in the mid-80s and continues to this day. Other Revisionist creators include Frank Miller, Grant Morrison, James Robinson, Garth Ennis, J. Michael Straczinski, Brian Michael Bendis, Kurt Busiek, David Mack, Brian K. Vaughn, and Alex Ross. Revisionist comics either introduce elements of realism[2] to the high-fantastical genres of mainstream American comics and/or comment on the 'lack' of realism in previous comics of the Silver Age; doing either of these things (usually both) often requires that the comics in question highlight the novelty of employing realism in comics at all, which often involves self-reflexive gestures.

For the purposes of this study, 'metacomics' and 'self-reflexive comics' are closely-related but theoretically different things. Self-reflexive comics admit to their own nature as constructs by breaking the fourth wall, referencing their own generic or formal conventions, or staging meetings between fictional characters and their real-world creators. These narrative acts usually create a breach in the division between fiction and reality. Self-reflexive comics do not, however, stage an actual commentary on comics, their narrative practises, their dominant genres, their formal nature, etc. They usually either ignore or attempt to repair any breaches they create. Metacomics, on the other hand, call attention to the breaches, and instead of repairing them, celebrate them. Such breaches are often necessary elements of the narrative, as is the case in Moore and Williams' Promethea, and Ellis and Robertson's Planetary, for example. In extreme cases, metacomics encourage the total collapse of fiction into reality, rendering the division between them non-existent. The difference between self-reflexive comics and metacomics is clear in theory, and in extreme examples is almost as equally clear. Wolfman and Perez' Crisis on Infinite Earths employs self-reflexive and intertextual gestures, but attempts no commentary on its genre. Promethea, on the other hand, begins with an explicit commentary, a college student's term paper, on the presence of fictional heroes in Western culture. There are, of course, many examples that defy clear categorisation. Gruenwald and Hall's Squadron Supreme, a Marvel series from the late Silver Age, might qualify as a metacomic if we deem it to be a commentary on superheroic ethics rather than an apologia for them, or, indeed, if we deem that apologia to be a kind of commentary. Morrison and Truog's Animal Man, a DC series that is definitely of the Revisionist style, might be self-referential if we find the commentary to be trite or superficial, as the writer's projection of himself in the narrative actually claims in his final issue[3] (Animal Man #26). This study focuses on how the comics in question use self-referential techniques, and/or the degree to which they take part in the active commentary of the metacomic.

These three writers create metacomics for very different stated reasons, sometimes in pursuit of a particular kind of realism, but more often for the sake of something more like expressionism, the projection of mental states or ideological concepts outwards onto the world of the fiction, the mise-en-scène, or the politics of the setting. Moore's late-90s work, for example, is a narrative explication of his theory of writing, which is based on his research into magic as a religious practice. Primarily Promethea, but also Tom Strong and to some degree From Hell, present this system as a combination of Aleister Crowley's 'magick,' the Kabala, and the Tarot, all of which add up to a construction of reality that is based entirely on perception and in which perception is a function of "language," which the series defines in terms that parallel a semiotic sense of a sign system. Metafiction is the logical outgrowth of this construction. Gaiman's metafiction in Sandman arises out of a practical desire to create a story in which he could write with as much variety as possible, thus he creates a protagonist who is an allegorical figure of storytelling itself, and the series is structured as a larger narrative that can contain many stories. Sandman is almost inevitably a story about stories. Ellis's motivations are perhaps the least easy to determine because he has the greatest amount of expository writing in circulation, and therefore has constructed the greatest number of possible explanations. At his most fanciful, he describes writing as "beaming Sex Rays across the world […] From my chair" (Bad Signal 2003), but in a more straightforward tone, he says that "the truth of any current superhero 'hit' is that they're about the audience’s relationship with old characters. So how do you replicate that without resorting to a bunch of analogue characters (again)?" (Bad Signal 2005). As this quotation implies, Ellis has used metafictional techniques in the past (analogue characters in Stormwatch, The Authority, and Planetary, commentary on reality as a construct of language and media in Transmetropolitan, etc.), and he does so as a way to create an instant relationship between reader and story. However, the specific motivations of the creators, as illuminating as they occasionally are, are not central to this research, which is rather a formal study of how their metacomics work, what they do, not what their authors meant them to do.

There is, as yet, very little academic work on metacomics. There are a few articles that address the subject, such as Mark Bernard and James Bucky Carter’s “Alan Moore and the Graphic Novel: Confronting the Fourth Dimension” (ImageTexT 1.2, Winter 2004). There are also short references to it in survey texts, like Matthew Puzts’ Comic Book Culture, which briefly treats John Byrne’s She-Hulk and the aforementioned Animal Man. On the other hand, there is a great deal of commentary on metacomics that is written by fans and non-academic critics, and it is usually published on the Web. A Google search for the relevant terms ("metafiction" and "comics") reveals ten pages of hits, and it is only that few because Google is programmed to limit searches to ten pages at a time. The first four titles are: a Wikipedia entry on Moore and Gibbon’s Watchmen; "'The World's Greatest Comic Magazine' (Part 4): What is the Impossible Man?, or Mighty Marvel Metafiction in Fantastic Four #176” (Double Articulation); "Metafiction in comics" (It’s All One Thing); and "'Boston Legal' vs. 'She-Hulk': Heritage and Metafiction on Trial" (Silver Bullet Comics). In light of an almost total lack of academic attention and a wealth of non-academic attention, it would seem imperative that someone from the academy addresses the topic.

[1] This word implies comedy, but is, in this context, meant to specifically denote metafictional and metapictorial representation in the comics medium. As an adjective, it is the wrong tool for a delicate job, but it is all we have.

[2] What kinds of realism they introduce―psychological, material, political, etc.―are another set of questions entirely, and whether they introduce realism or, in fact, a covert kind of expressionism is another significant question.

[3] The title continued after Morrison left, and the radical changes he made to it were simply ignored. Whether that constitutes a dismissal of Morrison's work or an embrace of the retcon is a difficult question to answer.

My Dissertation

I've just finished writing a 25-page proposal for my dissertation, and I thought, since some of you might be wondering where in the Hell I've been, I'd show you what I've been writing instead of blog entries. For the nerds among you...

What am I saying? You're all nerd. That's why you're reading this. Gods love ya.