Lee Bermejo's Batman: Noel retells Charles Dickens' iconic A Christmas Carol using characters and settings belonging to the DC universe. While the practices of writing a comic based on a work of literature or adapting Dickens' Christmas story aren't particularly new, that Bermejo chose this work and this comic should be noted.Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?
A Christmas Carol is the most famous work of a long forgotten genre. Christmas Crawlers were Gothic stories published around the holiday as a chilling and entertaining way to pass the season. They date back to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, a ghost story published on Christmas Eve 1764, and include the works of other prolific writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson.
Knowing this, does Bermejo's November adaptation qualify as a lost, 19th century literary genre simply because of its source material? Or is Batman: Noel a spectre of Christmas future?
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Scaring the Dickens Out of Batman: Victorian Literary Conventions in 21st Century Comics
The following is a proposal for a conference paper I'm working on. It hasn't been accepted yet, but I plan to submit to a couple of different places to look at the topic at varying levels of detail. Feedback, as always, is appreciated.
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2 comments:
This seems like a really interesting topic! Do you plan to discuss any other comics in addition to Batman: Noel? I'm sure there are quite a few in the character's history, and probably a number featuring other superheroes as well. If memory serves, even Spider-Man had a few.
At any rate, let us know which conference you'll be going to, if your proposal gets accepted. Perhaps I'll see you there!
Thanks!
I'll probably just stick with Noel since I want to basically do a close reading, but I could see expanding it to other comics in the future.
And I'll definitely brag should I get accepted :-)
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