ARTIFICE

Abstract

This paper will explore some of the connections between comics and the gothic tradition. It will identify tropes of the literary gothic and discuss the ways in which these can be identified in comics narratology. It begins by briefly establishing the relevance of the gothic tradition to contemporary British and American comics, focusing on tropes such as recycling, absorption, and the problematisation of narrative identity and diegetic borders. It demonstrates the presence of these narratological strategies in examples taken from pre-Code American horror comics and the 1970s British girls’ comic Misty. The second half of this paper then argues that many points of comics narratology can be rearticulated using gothic literary theory. These include the depiction of time as space, the mobility of visual and verbal perspective, and the active role of the comics reader. The remainder of the paper focuses on comics’ reliance on an excess of perspective in the creation and articulation of their storyworlds. Using the theories of Charles Hatfield, Thierry Groensteen, Gerard Genette and Wolfgang Iser, this paper identifies four main areas of narratological excess in comics:  A supportive or subversive relationship between panel contents  An excess of style (color, line, emanata, effects)  An excess of perspective (embodied or disembodied)  Multiple or hidden levels of diegesis The paper concludes by defining these processes as examples of gothic excess, as they foreground the question of authenticity, problematise narrative identity, and interrogate diegetic boundaries.