Drawing the Past, Volume 2

Comics and the Historical Imagination in the World

Dorian L. Alexander, Michael Goodrum, Philip Smith, Dorian L. Alexander, Michael Goodrum, Philip Smith

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496837233
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di fumetti e graphic novel

Contributions by Dorian L. Alexander, Chris Bishop, David Budgen, Lewis Call, Lillian Céspedes González, Dominic Davies, Sean Eedy, Adam Fotos, Michael Goodrum, Simon Gough, David Hitchcock, Robert Hutton, Iain A. MacInnes, Ma?gorzata Olsza, Philip Smith, Edward Still, and Jing Zhang In Drawing the Past, Volume 2: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the World, contributors seek to examine the many ways in which history worldwide has been explored and (re)represented through comics and how history is a complex construction of imagination, reality, and manipulation. Through a close analysis of such works as V for Vendetta, Maus, and Persepolis, this volume contends that comics are a form of mediation between sources (both primary and secondary) and the reader. Historical comics are not drawn from memory but offer a nonliteral interpretation of an object (re)constructed in the creator's mind. Indeed, when it comes to history, stretching the limits of the imagination only serves to aid in our understanding of the past and, through that understanding, shape ourselves and our futures. This volume, the second in a two-volume series, is divided into three sections: History and Form, Historical Trauma, and Mythic Histories. The first section considers the relationship between history and the comic book form. The second section engages academic scholarship on comics that has recurring interest in the representation of war and trauma. The final section looks at mythic histories that consciously play with events that did not occur but nonetheless inflect our understanding of history. Contributors to the volume also explore questions of diversity and relationality, addressing differences between nations and the cultural, historical, and economic threads that bind them together, however loosely, and however much those bonds might chafe.Together, both volumes bring together a range of different approaches to diverse material and feature remarkable scholars from all over the world.

MYTHIC HISTORIES

CHAPTER TEN

“ROGUES, DEVILRY, AND STRANGE WONDERS”

Re-presenting Early Modernity in Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602

DAVID HITCHCOCK

“All things change, and we change with them.” Thus reads the battered wooden sign outside of Master Carolus Javier’s “Select College for the Sons of Gentlefolk” in a shimmering fiction of early seventeenth-century England from Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert. Marvel 1602 was first released in 2003 to a mixed reception from comics fans, and it remains the only stand-alone alternative history series in the Marvel universe that actively embedded all of its characters into the political, theological, and emotional context of “early modernity,” a period conventionally described as beginning with the invention of the printing press and ending with the French and American Revolutions. That Gaiman chose the year 1602 to frame his fiction is intriguing for several reasons; in his later comments, Gaiman makes clear his desire to negate a certain trajectory of recent modernity by removing it entirely from his story: September 11, 2001 happened, and Gaiman “suddenly knew what I didn’t want. No planes. No skyscrapers. No bombs. No guns.” Gaiman and Kubert envisioned a comic that was “part of a world a-borning,” a Marvel universe that had its own reasons for existing as it did.¹ In his script Gaiman aimed to return to the fictional beginnings of America, to Roanoke and Elizabethan colonialism, to encounters with indigeneity, to the context of wars over Reformation and to signs of the Last Days of Judgment, and to remake these into another beginning for what it meant to be “American.”

To accomplish this erasure of mutant modernity as we might know it, Marvel 1602 bends historical time and asks counterfactually what would change if the Roanoke colony survived its first harsh wintering (thanks to a time-traveling Captain America); if the full might of a Jesuit Inquisition was willing to scheme to mutual advantage with a Protestant, albeit Episcopal, Scottish king; and if millenarian sentiment peaked not during or after the English Civil War but well before it, on account of catastrophic weather.² Marvel 1602 re-presents a vision of early modern British history to a very particular modern audience to both critique the foundational myths of British settler colonialism in America and invoke the essential “strangeness”—the wonder—inherent in both history and the worlds of comics. I focus on three cultural totems the series plays with: strange wonders, the very marvels of early modernity themselves, each one an invitation to see both the hand of God and the order of nature at work in human affairs; roguery, or social deviance, best typified by Matthew Murdoch and Natasha Romanov; and devilry and magic, exemplified by the conflict between the X-Men “witchbreed” and the Inquisition. These themes bring the whole comic series together and arguably give it its early modern “flavor.” In each case Marvel 1602 will be placed in dialogue with historical evidence of these three themes; including representations in polemic, plays, music, and other forms of cultural output that the series assuredly drew on, whether the authors intended to or not. We begin with a short plot introduction to the series and with the main theoretical and historiographical points of intersection between it and early modern history, particularly the robust extant scholarship on the role of monsters and of strangeness in the early modern imaginary.³ We then turn to examples of how 1602 represents such social and theological strangeness in a way that modern audiences can comfortably intuit, and we conclude with the implications for the role that early modernity plays in our modern senses of the marvelous and the strange.

PART I: “IN WHICH WE ARE INTRODUCED TO CERTAIN OF OUR PLAYERS”

It is 1602 and Queen Elizabeth is dying. Her advisers, intelligencer Nicholas Fury and occultist Stephen Strange, inform her that a strange Templar artifact in Jerusalem has been offered to the realm for safekeeping, and that signs and portents suggest the world may be in existential danger. The Queen accepts these revelations phlegmatically, and Fury dispatches the rogue operative Matthew Murdoch to bring the relic safely to England. We learn that Inquisitors are burning “witchbreeds,” or mutants, and are introduced to the converso Jew who leads them, Magneto, and to his rival Carlos Javier, prophet, tutor, and man of the cloth. The third strand of the series plot is introduced when we meet the child Virginia Dare and her whitewashed “indigenous” protector Rojhaz, who is later revealed to be Captain America from a dystopian future, suffering from rather selective amnesia.⁴ Dare has traveled to the court of Queen Elizabeth to petition assistance for the struggling colony of Roanoke, beset by terrible storms, wild beasts, and other New World dangers. Finally, we learn that the alchemist Victor von Doom secretly schemes to assassinate Elizabeth, and that he holds a band of legendary explorers (the Fantastic Four) imprisoned in his mountain fortress. The Scottish king James VI, in league with the Inquisition, waits eagerly in the wings for his second crown and aims to hasten its acquisition. Beyond the political and religious conflicts suggested by this dramatis personae, the plot is propelled forward by existential danger to all of this alternate reality. Cataclysmic storms will rend the world asunder unless Stephen Strange can somehow prevent it, and he learns that the origins of this cosmic disaster lie in the New World, and that this danger is inexplicably tied to Virginia Dare. The comic’s rising action revolves around the very mixed successes of the Elizabethan loyalists and their eventual escape to freedom in America, and the denouement posits that all of existence, and hard-won freedom from tyranny, are saved only by removing this story, or timeline, entirely from “history”; in effect hermetically sealing away its wonders and characters. Oh, and by sending a rather groggy Steve Rogers forward through time to our modern security state dystopia.

Like many of Gaiman’s writings previously and since, Marvel 1602 is heavily informed by mythology and history. As a comic, 1602 owes much of its format and conventions to the early modern period. In The Origins of Comics, Thierry Smolderen argues that we should trace the beginnings of modern polygraphic imagery to William Hogarth (1697–1745), the famous painter and engraver. Hogarth in effect created the “visual novel” with his enormously popular plate engraving series, such as Industry and Idleness and A Harlot’s Progress, work “which must be regarded as a genuine novel in pictures.”⁵ Hogarth himself looked backward to earlier sophisticated marriages of picture and text for his inspiration, and an intriguing connection between his work and the “Venetian picture stories” that inspired him was their mutual focus on “low” subjects: rogues, laborers, prostitutes, and other generally impoverished people demonstrably lacking in virtue.⁶ Inspiration for the form of comics goes back even further, to enormously popular hybrid texts such as the ars moriendi (fig. 10.1) or “art of dying” in late medieval Europe, a series of printed images with text, which came in two forms, of which the longer was divided into five “moments” necessary to a good death: “recommendations concerning the art of dying, the questions to be asked of them, the prayers they should say, the proper behaviour of those close to the man or woman dying, and the prayers that they should say.”⁷

Roger Chartier explains how enormously popular the ars were, that variations on these paneled visual advice booklets accounted for 15 percent of all surviving woodblock books, and how the ars proved influential for later devotional literature such as emblem books and books of hours.⁸ The precursors to comics were thus themselves enormously popular. More importantly, Marvel 1602 partakes in a mode of hybrid reading and visual interpretation that was itself early modern, and its creators acknowledged these debts in part by making heavy use of early modern imagery for artistic direction and inspiration.⁹

As a visual novel, 1602 also relies on early modern innovations in narrative fiction, and indeed on the early modern invention of the novel form itself. Mikhail Bakhtin famously argued that comedic inversion and social critique, so-called low humor, was essential to the creation of the novel as a literary form, based in no small part on the pioneering Essais of Michel de Montaigne, and the monstrous and comedic fictions of François Rabelais.¹⁰ Bakhtinian theory has led to the rich field of adaptation studies, and to the idea that no single text exists without countless simultaneous interpretations of that text across time, form, language, and convention, what theorists today call “interdeterminism.”¹¹ This notion posits that “all texts, even those written four hundred years ago, are constantly in dialogue with other texts … [e.g.,] that West Side Story can have an effect on the meaning of Romeo and Juliet, at least for the person who has experienced both.”¹² Adaptation was also a quintessentially early modern writing technique, in which authors freely borrowed inspiration, anecdote, plot, art, and even transpositions of language from other texts without direct attribution. Direct imitation was the finest form of literary flattery. These influences were also felt beyond the page. Laurence Grove highlights how “the early modern period also mixed text and image beyond the page or even the decorative arts. The locations used for sermons, funeral orations or political discourses could be decorated with banner images or wall paintings to which the speaker would refer specifically, thereby creating an amalgam of the visual decoration and the text as pronounced. Processions and entrees royales could use costume and decorated floats, sometimes adorned with inscriptions, so as to create a mixture of direct visual effect and wider literary attraction by association with texts that would be known to the audience.”¹³ Critics today would describe elaborate rituals like royal ceremonial entries and progresses as “transmedia” events that both occurred and were propagated across multiple forms and genres, and which prompted multiple forms of immersion (physical, imaginative, and sensual).¹⁴ As a “hybrid” form, graphic novels deliberately engender a similar layering of immersive prompts.

Figure 10.1 “Bedside Temptation” in Ars Moriendi: The Art of Dying (March 22, 1503) Credit: Wellcome Collection (Shelfmark: 61997/A), note the elaborate paneling outlining the image.

Suffice it to say, then, that as a comic about a fictional early modernity, Marvel 1602 swims in familiar waters, in terms of its inspiration, form, and precedents. The fact that it is a comic quite l...