I was hired at UT Austin as a specialist of medieval literature and am up for tenure this year. Tenure and promotion committees like to see a coherent narrative when they scrutinize a researcher’s career, so in my case the unavoidable question has been raised I can’t tell you how many times, what is the connection between your research in medieval culture and your research in comics? My colleagues have tried to help by pointing out similarities between stained glass narrative and comics, the bayeux tapestry, manuscript illuminations, etc. A very astute colleague of mine suggested (rightly) that I am interested in questions of cultural legitimacy that cut across both fields. Friends and comics scholars have pointed out that comics have drawn on medieval story cycles and used medieval settings and themes since at least the 1930s. Some long-standing examples of comics medievalism include daily and Sunday strips like Prince Valiant, Hägar the Horrible, and the Wizard of Id, comic books like Camelot 3000, Knights of the Living Dead (Arthurian zombies!), and countless appropriations of medieval heroes and villains such as Robin Hood (including Green Arrow), Beowulf & Grendel, and King Arthur & Merlin. The Franco-Belgian tradition has its fair share of medieval-inspired comics as well that includes Asterix, Mélusine fée serpente, Sfar and Trondheim’s Donjon series, Les chemins de Mallefosse, and Bois Maury among (many) others.
But for all of the fascinating medieval themed comics out there, I am embarrassed to admit that I haven’t yet taken the time to write and reflect on comics medievalism. Fortunately, plenty of other people have. The International Congress on Medieval Studies held in Kalamazoo has hosted a “Comics Get Medieval” panel every year since 2006. Michael Torregrossa keeps a blog entitled The Medieval Comics Project in collaboration with Carl James Grindley, and Jason Tondro. (These three are also behind the “Comics Get Medieval” sessions). Tondro recently published a book entitled Superheroes of the Round Table: Comics Connections to Medieval and Renaissance Literature that looks tremendously interesting. And I’m sure there are plenty of other projects on comics medievalism out there that I’m not yet aware of.
My head spins with the possibilities when I try to imagine all the ways in which one might approach the question of comics medievalism. One might look at how the Middle Ages becomes a utopic terrain for fantasy and projection (erotic and otherwise) or at how a medieval setting enables certain artists to treat present political concerns with safe distance. One might also think about comics as a form of cultural production in which traces of medieval institutions and cultural forms (heroic masculinity, arming rituals, millennialism, magic, etc.) survive in the present. In medieval literature classes I find myself citing comics whenever I have to explain the complexities of story cycles such as the Arthurian cycle or the divergent branches of the Roman de Renard and Tristan et Yseut cycles where certain characters are treated so differently as to be villainous in one branch while being sympathetic in another, and so on. I cite the various story arcs in the Marvel and DC comics universes to explain how a readership is able to accept, and even enjoy, conflicting variants cohabitating within the same narrative universe. In what ways has the medieval figured in your comics reading experience?