Misdirection, Displacement and the Nisse in Hilda and the Black Hound

Luke Pearson’s comic for children, Hilda and the Black Hound (2017), introduces characters who live at the margins of society and who respond to those marginalising forces not with outright resistance but with what Monalesia Earle has called ‘misdirection’. As the characters move around and through the gutters of the comics page, they similarly slip between and around the authority that stands in their way. Literary theories related to formalism, children’s literature and the Gothic illuminate how the movement on the page hints at a form of disobedience.