This book foregrounds the figure of the perpetrator in a selection of British, American, and Canadian comics and explores questions related to remembrance, justice, and historical debt. Its primary focus is on works that deliberately estrange the figure of the perpetrator—through fantasy, absurdism, formal ambiguity, or provocative rewriting—and thus allow readers to engage anew with the history of genocide, mass murder, and sexual violence. This book is particularly interested in the ethical space such an engagement calls into being: in its ability to allow us to ponder the privilege many of us now enjoy, the gross historical injustices that have secured it, and the debt we owe to people long dead.
Author(s): Dragoș Manea
Series: Palgrave Studies In Comics And Graphic Novels
Edition: 1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 215
Tags: Comics Studies; Popular Culture; Memory Studies
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Perpetration, Estrangement, and Historical Debt
Implicatedness and the Ethics of Discomfort
The Marketable Perpetrator
Chapter Overview
References
Chapter 2: “Nothing was spared”: Monstrosity and the Sympathetic Perpetrator in Manifest Destiny (Chris Dingess and Matthew Roberts, 2013–)
References
Chapter 3: “Divine the future, but beware of ghosts”: Romanticism, Satire, and Perpetration in The New Adventures of Hitler (Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, 1989)
References
Chapter 4: “May they never get their hands on a monster like that”: Perpetration and Moral Ambiguity in Kieron Gillen’s Über (2013–)
References
Chapter 5: Who are you crying for?: Perpetration and Punishment in Nina Bunjevac’s Bezimena (2019)
References
Chapter 6: “Unable to protect anyone”: Terrorism, Salvation, and Cultural Intelligibility in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints (2013)
Cultural Memory, Intelligibility, and Narrative Ethics
Perpetration, Boxer Ideology, and the YA Love Plot
References
Chapter 7: Conclusion
References
Index
