What Comics Can Say about Lyric, or, Reading with Gwenpool

Abstract:The study of lyric poetry—how it works, what it does, and how to define it-- benefits from close comparison to the theory and practice of reading comics. Comics and lyric poems, as a medium and as a genre, share with each other features that they do not share with other genres and media: these features may prove basic to the phenomenology of reading either, especially when creators notice and use them. Both comics and lyric poems rely on breaks between units—line breaks and panel borders—which can be regular or irregular, and which guide a reader’s experience. Both connect semantics to something else: voice and sound, for lyric poetry, visuals in the case of comics. Both invoke complex, sometimes contradictory, reader-controlled relations to the passage of time. And both display an unusual capacity for reader involvement and reader identification, through face and figure in comics, through voice and fictions of voice in lyric. These parallels can help us read canonical lyric, such as a stanzaic elegy by Wilfred Owen: they suggest that credible fictions of persons remain at the root of lyric experience. Those fictions seem more powerful, and friendlier, seen in particular comics that focus on friendly, willing or eager readers, and in particular in the superhero comics series Gwenpool Strikes Back, by Leah WIlliams, David Baldéon and collaborators. Williams and Baldéon’s lighthearted, self-conscious treatment of their Marvel Comics heroine points to the seriousness with which readers and listeners require fictions of belonging, an experience of seeming present and feeling heard, in order to take part in these foundational literary kinds.