Disrupting the Frame(s): Ruptures in Science-Fiction/Fantasy Comics

 The joint annual conference of the Science Fiction Research Association (which usually holds its events in the United States) and the German Gesellschaft für Fantastickforschung (that is, the Society for the research on the fantastic) took place in Dresden from August 15 to 19, 2023. As usual, it was a large-sized event, with up to eight parallel sessions and more than a hundred presenters. Intermediality/Transmediality are an important aspect of science-fiction and fantastic studies, as the sfnal imagination is vehiculated by printed literature but also movies, tv series, illustrations, toys and, as we all know, comics. No wonder that the ICLA Research Committee on Graphic Literature and Comics Studies submitted a proposal for a panel devoted to SFF comics, called “Disrupting the Frame”, which was promptly accepted by the organizers of the conference.

The panel was chaired by Lisa DeTora (Hofstra University) and Umberto Rossi (Sapienza University of Rome), and featured seven presentations. Lisa opened the first session, on August 16, with her paper “Rupturing the frame: Nonbinary Identification in Two Speculative Graphic Narratives”, which read Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam (2018) and Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Girl from the Sea (2021), as comics that attempt to disrupt dominant and stereotyped cis-gendered heteronormative romantic narratives as well as certain genre conventions of SF and fantasy.

Davide Carnevale (Sapienza University of Rome) presented his paper “Fantastic Language and Layout Disruption In Dino Battaglia’s Adaptations”, dealing with the Italian master’s comics based on Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, achieving a full-fledged deconstruction of the sequentiality on which the spatial and temporal order within the comic normally rests.

Tiziano De Marino (Sapienza University of Rome) dealt with Alan Moore’s most unconventional graphic narrative, which is not an easy task, in his presentation “The Fall of Civilisation: Wellsianism in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”. He demonstrated that Moore’s League testifies an intertextual devotion towards Wellsian novums which have long influenced all SF imagination, but also bears the mark of Wells’s primary intellectual concerns: the rise and fall of empires, the disruptive force of supreme authority, and the possible subversion of the same body politic.

The first session of our panel ended with “The Life Aquatic in Low: Ecological Disruption as Political Allegory”, by Michael Larson (Keio University), focusing how on the drastic environmental and social disruption of Low, and the text’s depiction of the Anthropocene or post-human, draws an equivalence between the end of American hegemony and the end of the world; so that the text seems to suggest the loss of a Western sense of futurity. Such a framework does not necessarily cast Low as reactionary—rather, this formulation puts it in context with the sense of fatalism permeating our politics and culture.

Due to some technical problem at the beginning of the session, and the need to accommodate four presentations in a 90’ slot, we did not have time to have a discussion at the end of the first session, but since the second was to take place right after the first, with the coffee break in between, we told attendees that the Q&A would take place at the end of the second session. Unfortunately, not all those who had attended the first four presentations could take part in the second session, which deprived us—alas!—of the precious reactions of part of the audience.

The second session began on time, with Umberto’s presentation “Nothing is Real: Ontological Disruption in Morrison and Burnham's Nameless”. This comic is complicated by ontological uncertainty, caused by the interaction of (at least) two levels of reality, which disrupts reading protocols shared by the authors and the reader, but Mikkonen & Braithwaite’s concept of figural solidarity may explain how readers manage to navigate this highly sophisticated graphic narrative.

Stefan Soler (Stanford University) presented on “El Eternauta or the Modern Odysseus: Between Tourists and Vagabonds”, analyzes all the different versions of El Eternauta to examine the ways in which Victor Oesterheld recreated his time-travelling character as a reaction to contemporary political events. Stefan allowed us to see how tourists and vagabonds portray the global and local disruptions produced by major historical and political events, such as the Cold War or the different dictatorships that took place in Argentina and Latin America.

Due to a canceled flight, the last presenter, Stefan Buchenberger (Kanagawa University) could not be with us, but the text of his presentation was read by Lisa while Umberto dealt with the PowerPoint frames that came with it. Stefan’s presentation dealt with Kieron Gillen’s ongoing series Über (2013- 2018), set in an alternate reality in which Nazi Germany discovers a method to create superhumans who turn the tide of the war shortly before it did end in actual history. This presentation showed how Gillen mixes both superheroes and historical figures to create a dystopian alternate reality that depicts one of the greatest disruptions in the history of humankind: war, in all its horror and brutality.

All in all, this was a rich panel with stimulating presentations that elicited interesting comments and questions from the audience. We hope its presentations will be included in the edited collection of essays on global SF comics to be published in the World Science Fiction Studies series by Peter Lang, an ongoing long-term project of our Research Committee.