Comic Books and The New Literature
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Bloom’s rundown of the Western Canon (Appendix B, The Aristocratic Age,) while
important novelists such as Donatien Alphonse de Sade, Emilia Pardo Bazan, and Luis
Martin Santos are omitted.
^ Postmodern Critical Theory as defined in two occasions by one of his most fervent
promoters, Jonathan Culler, is “( • • • ) an unbounded corpus of writing about everything
under the sun ( . . . ) ” (“Literary Theory” in the Introduction to Scholarship in Modern
Languages and Literatures, 203 and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, 3). In
practice. Critical Theory consists mainly in raiding neighboring fields such as
philosophy, psychoanalysis, or anthropology to serve ideological agendas and the alleged
original corpus of study—namely “literature”—is only considered as long as it serves the
theoretical purpose.
I use The Adventures o f Tintin as a generic title; each of Tintin’s adventure bears its
own title.
** I am referring in particular to Las Moradas, which is considered to be Teresa of
Avila’s masterpiece; her alleged autobiography, Vida de la santa (Life o f the Saint), could
indeed be considered more “literary” for it presents a character, Teresa de Avila herself,
and suggests, although very faintly, some kind of narrative conflict that opposes the
narrative voice to reality. However, the intentionality of any work by Teresa of Avila is
not artistic but didactic for it aims to edify rather than to provoke the aesthetic
defamiliarization that we generally associate with any work of art, and reading Vida de la
Santa as a fictitious narration would be grossly missing the point: in strict generic terms,
only her poetic production belongs to a possible literary corpus. Ironically, Teresa of
Avila herself was turned into a real literary character in 1980 by French comic book
author, Claire Bretecher in La Vie passionnee de Therese d ’A vila’, needless to say,
Bretecher’s humorous and irreverent treatment of the character has little to do with the
content of the original Vida de la Santa, for in order to become literature, Teresa of
Avila’s text had to disappear and the historical persona had to give way to a fictional
character.
In Europe, the notion of “comic books for adults” does not imply the representation of
graphic sex and/or ultra violence as it usually does in the United States. Marcel Gotlib’s
La Rubrique-a-braque (Date) or Floc’h’s and Riviere’s Le Rendez-vous de S evenoaks
(Date) do not include explicit sexual representations nor depictions of ultra-violence;
however, they do feature artistic and literary references which are unlikely to be caught
by a child or a teenager.
There exists a variety of comic books in a multitude of genres, and to equate
superheroes with an entire medium would imply an unacceptable reduction of our corpus;
however, as we attempt to describe general tendencies, we must naturally synthesize the
available data: in terms of sheer statistics and common perception, the medium of the
comic book is widely dominated by the genre of superheroes.
Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton both belong to what is known as the “underground
comic” movement.
The film Hancock presents a similar dilemma, although in a much more diluted manner
since there the super hero can make amends and change his ways, an alternative that is
excluded from the beginning of The Boys: superheroes are just essentially and
irremediably rotten.
The mini-series Herogasm (“from the pages of The Boys”) is entirely devoted to the
yearly celebration organized exclusively for superheroes by the Vough-American
Corporation in a secluded location, during which they indulge in drug binges and sexual
fantasies with expensive call girls and boys.