FANTASY COMICS
TECHNIQUES D'ANNEXION DE CHAMPS CULTURELS
PAR UNE BANDE DESSINÉE / ÉTUDE DE CAS: SANDMAN

This video is the adaptation of a conference given on April 23, 2019 at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium, and organized by Fanny Geuzaine and the GEMCA, ECR & GRIT research groups. The images are a slight adaptation of the PowerPoint used during the conference.


Abstract: Neil Gaiman's Sandman is fraught with varied intertexts, from the DC Universe to the history of comics, visual arts and literature. Medieval epic poetry, Elisabethan theatre, myths and legends are among the numerous elements that contribute to building up this giant fantasy crossover. The way those intertexts are integrated into the work is distinctive. In a gesture of sweeping metafiction, Sandman characterizes Shakespeare or figures from religious myth as subjects to the protagonist, a metaphysical monarch reigning over dreams and stories. Thus, and by simultaneously depicting Shakespeare as some forerunner of modern-day fantasy, by making more explicit the links between DC characters and their Biblical models, Sandman annexes other cultural fields within the field of fantasy. The same strategy can be perceived in several graphic choices, like quoting the spatio-topical structure of Little Nemo while juxtaposing it with the contents of Jack Kirby's old Sandman, thus creating both an uncanny atmosphere and a historical panorama of how dreams have been depicted in comics. Finally, Dave McKean's avant-garde covers allow the series to show off from the get-go its subversive drive regarding comic book canons. Contemporary art is thus used as a tool to advance Sandman's all-encompassing fantasy agenda. The series therefore appears as sort of counterpart to "postmodern" experimental works that draw from popular genres and culture to use them as tools for the avant-garde's subversion of language and representation.


Youtube link of the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5FfEqCKAmg



MIRANDA


REVUE PLURIDISCIPLINAIRE DU MONDE ANGLOPHONE

MULTIDISCIPLINARY PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ON THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD


Issue 22


The spring 2021 issue of the journal Miranda, contains, in the section Reviews (edited by Candice Lemaire and Isabelle Keller-Privat), my review of two fascinating Alan Moore-focused books by Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman (and Miracleman) (devoted to the inextricable legal battles that have prevented the continuation of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman et al.'s comic book series Miracleman for almost three decades, and Mud and Starlight. The Alan Moore Interviews, 2008-2016, which is, as its subtitle suggests, a collection of the many interviews with Alan Moore carried out by Ó Méalóid over the years. 
 
The article is, like the rest of the issue, available online at the following address: https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/38271 
 
Here is one of the addresses where you can get Poisoned Chalice: https://www.lulu.com/shop/padraig-o-mealoid/poisoned-chalice-the-extremely-long-and-incredibly-complex-story-of-marvelman-and-miracleman/paperback/product-23858084.html?page=1&pageSize=4 
 
 
Here is one of the addresses where you can get Mud and Starlight: https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/p%C3%A1draig-%C3%B3-m%C3%A9al%C3%B3id-and-alan-moore/mud-and-starlight-interviews-with-alan-moore-2008-2016/paperback/product-6744gq.html?page=1&pageSize=4

MYTHE ET FABULATION DANS LA FICTION FANTASTIQUE ET MERVEILLEUSE DE NEIL GAIMAN
Academic essay (critical analysis of novels, short stories, comics and films written by Neil Gaiman mainly, but also of works by  Alan Moore, Shakespeare, Borges, Lovecraft, Philip José Farmer, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Roger Avary, and many others). Released in October 2018 and adapted from my doctoral thesis.

Back cover: Neil Gaiman’s fantasy works are often deemed postmodernist since they experiment with self-reflexivity and mix it with a supposedly antagonistic impulse towards popular fiction. Typical postmodernist works mostly emphasize their attacks against the fictional illusions of referentiality, character or plot. On the contrary, Gaiman’s works unapologetically remain within the bounds of fantasy, a genre in which imagination and storytelling are paramount–along with their related issues: characterization, plot, emotion and suspense. Thus, Gaiman’s fiction is not experimental fiction enhanced with elements of popular fiction, but actual popular fiction made self-reflexive. Thanks to that peculiar mood, studying Gaiman’s work is a very fruitful means of investigating the distinctive features of popular fiction, and its inherent emphasis on storytelling–or, as Henri Bergson called it, “fabulation.” Both Bergson and Frank McConnell focused on this notion which they saw as the essential link between ancient mythmaking and today’s fiction writing. Gaiman’s fiction mostly relies on such a dialectics between myth, popular fiction and storytelling or fabulation. His fantasy stories constantly rewrite ancient, religious myths, modern myths or the “myths” of popular fiction, and feature many fictional and historical writers, traditional storytellers, or Gaiman’s own personae, so that in paratext as well as in the heart of a narrative, in the quiet and supposedly reliable words of an introduction as surely as on the most striking comics panels, fiction is portrayed as myth, writers as mythical avatars of some archetypal storyteller, and storytelling as the one, quintessential human act.

Page of the book on the publisher's website:
CIRCULATIONS ENTRE LES ARTS
Interroger l'intersémioticité
This collective collection published online on December 4, 2016, and edited by Muriel Adrien, Marie Bouchet and Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud, contains my article "The collaborations of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean", adapted from a communication bearing the same title, and presented on January 29, 2009 at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, as part of the ARCA seminar (Atelier de Recherche à la Croisée des Arts) by Marie Bouchet.

The article deals with various works written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by the experimental artist Dave McKean, from modernist comics Violent Cases and Mr Punch to the fantasy comics series Sandman whose covers McKean designed, to children's books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls, and the film MirrorMask (screenplay by Gaiman, direction by McKean). The analysis focuses on the theme of mixtures between art forms, which is recurrent in these works, creating a mirror effect in relation to their form, since McKean systematically has a hybrid approach to visual arts, always mixing painting, computer graphics, photography, etc.

The article is, like the rest of the collection, available online, at this page:
STUDIES IN THE NOVEL,
Vol. 47, N°3
Special issue: the graphic novel
On February 3, 2012, the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès organized  a one-day conference entitled "Passages", and supervised by Amélie Dochy, Céline Rolland and Damien Alcade, during which I presented a conference entitled "Sandman, by Neil Gaiman: passage du temps, œuvre-passage (du comic book au roman graphique").

In the collective collection of articles pictured opposite (a special comics-focused issue of the American journal Studies in the Novel, edited by Timothy Boswell and Stephen E. Tabachnik and published in the fall of 2015), there is my article "Neil Gaiman's Sandman as a gateway from comic books to graphic novels", which is an adaptation and an English translation of the aforementioned lecture.

The article and the lecture explore how Sandman was a catalyst for the development of the concept of the graphic novel, both in aesthetic terms (that is, in terms borrowed from Mikhail Bakhtin by Andrés Romero-Jodár: a change of chronotope model in relation to comic books' serialization paradigm) and in terms of editorial practices (studied in the light Jean-Paul Gabilliet's work on the comics industry in his compendium Of Comics and Men).

Studies in the Novel issue page on Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/32409
 CALIBAN N°52

CALIBAN AND HIS TRANSMUTATIONS
Caliban et ses avatars
This collective collection of article was published in 2014 as the fiftieth anniversary issue of the journal Caliban. It was edited by Françoise Besson, Philippe Birgy, Roland Bouyssou, Jean-Louis Breteau, Jean-Paul Débax, Albert Poyet and Marcienne Rocard, and it is about the thousand reinventions of the character Caliban, and of Shakespeare's play The Tempest in general, in world culture. It contains my article: "Calibans for the 1990s and 2000s: Shakespeare and Fantasy in the Age of 'Professional Fan Fiction' and Integrative Fiction".

The article studies the rewrites of Caliban and The Tempest in various parodic works or various crossover works of literature and comics belonging to the genres of fantasy, fantasy and/or science fiction, and published in the 1990s and 2000s (specifically: Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics series, Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics series, Nigel A. Sellars's short story "The Confessions of Caliban", and the novels Caliban's Hour by Tad Williams and Iliad and Olympos by Dan Simmons).

Page of the book on the publisher's site:

My article (as well as the whole issue) can also be read online:

 SHOFAR
An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Jewish Studies
Vol. 29, N°2






&

VISUALIZING JEWISH NARRATIVE
Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels
My article "The 'Outsider': Neil Gaiman and the Old Testament" was first published in the winter 2011 issue of the American journal of Jewish studies Shofar, by Purdue University Press in Indiana. The editor of the issue was Derek Parker Royal.

The book Visualizing Jewish Narrative, published in June 2016 by Bloomsbury and also edited by Derek Parker Royal, contains a reprint of all the papers from the original Shofar issue, plus many other articles on the same themes (comics and Jewishness). My article is therefore also reprinted in it.

"The 'Outsider'" studies the radically different effects obtained through the references to the Old Testament in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and in Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament (a multi-authored collection of underground comix parodying the Old Testament, published by Knockabout Comics, and six stories of which were written by Gaiman).

The Shofar issue's page on Project MUSE:

The Visualizing Jewish Narrative book's page on its publisher's website:

The article is also available in an abridged version on the website of artist-interviewer Mia Funk, who published it online alongside her interview with Neil Gaiman:
STUDIES IN COMICS
Vol. 2, N°1
On the weekend of 28-29 May, 2010 the University of Northampton held an international three-day conference on Alan Moore, entitled Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore. This collection contains articles adapted from the various lectures delivered during this series of conferences. So it contains, among other things, my article "Neil Gaiman: Portrait of the Artist as a Disciple of Alan Moore", adapted from the lecture of the same name given in Northampton on 29 May, 2010. The collection was published in 2011, as an issue of the British journal Studies in Comics, and it was edited by Nathan Wiseman-Trowse and Mike Starr, who were also the organizers of the conference.

My article explores different facets of the influence exercised on Neil Gaiman by Alan Moore, particularly through the various continuations and expansions of Moore's ideas that Gaiman has engaged in throughout his career (with Miracleman, which he took over as script writer after Moore, with Sandman and Black Orchid, both of which draw much material from Swamp Thing, and with Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, which positions itself as a restropectively  complementary narrative to Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?).: 

The article (and the rest of the issue) can be bought and read from this address:
OTRANTE
ART ET LITTERATURE FANTASTIQUES
N°27-28
Forêts fantastiques
This double issue of the journal Otrante, published in the fall of 2010 and edited by Lambert Barthélémy, contains my second article "Forêts symboliques de la bande dessinée américaine contemporaine".

This article studies the links between Alan Moore's run for the DC Comics series Swamp Thing (1983-1987) and Neil Gaiman's DC limited series Black Orchid (1988-1989), and the way they jointly shape a symbolic treatment of forests, much different from the marvellous and 'elfic' topoi of Tolkien and his epigones' heroic fantasy novels, and also much different from the usual, Gothic treatment of forests in horror comics (from EC Comics on), that is, merely as a quintessential "frightful setting". Moore, through the changes he brought to the characterization of the classic DC horror/superhero comics protagonist Swamp Thing, contributed to the introduction of such aspects as spirituality and numinous, as well as ecological concerns, in this weird mix of horror and superhero fiction. The forest, in Moore's Swamp Thing has gradually become a metaphysical concept, of which physical forests are avatars. While commissioned to merely re-vamp an old and unsuccessful superheroine (Black Orchid), Gaiman has actually used the potential of DC continuity in order to expand the sylvan mythology roughed out by Moore. At the same time, Gaiman's miniseries has developed the symbolic value of the forest, notably through artist Dave McKean's graphic experiments.

Page of the book on the publisher's website:
MOUNTAINS FIGURED AND DISFIGURED IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD
This collection edited by Françoise Besson and published in March 2010 includes my first article, "Fantasy and Landscape: Mountain as Myth in Neil Gaiman's Stories", which contains analyses of  passages from novels, short stories and comics by Neil Gaiman revolving around mountainous settings, raging weather, and the notion of myth.

The article examines passages from the novels American Gods (2001) and Stardust (1997), from the short story "The Monarch of the Glen" (2004) and the Eternals comic (2006-2007). It discusses the use of the mountain motif, analyzing several occurrences of mountainous landscapes, the sublime/Gothic mood some of them help to create, and the way most of them are integrated into the intertextual and mythological systems that structure these stories.

The book's page on its publisher's website:
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