![]() ![]() 1-18.Ģ Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image Music Text (1977), 6.ģ Grant Morrison, The Invisibles Omnibus (New York: DC Comics, 2012).Ĥ -, Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery – the Deluxe Edition (New York: DC Comics, 2012).ĥ -, Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (London: Vintage Books, 2012). At DisinfoCon in 1999, Morrison said that much of the content in The Invisibles was information given to them by aliens that abducted them in Kathmandu, who told them to spread this information to the world via a comic book. by Mark Currie (Essex: Longman Group Limited, 1995), pp. Referencesġ Mark Currie, ‘Introduction’, in Metafiction, ed. In doing do, he has lost the magical/imaginative side of existence and is left in a nihilistic and suicidal void.įlex, then, is both a critique of and paean to the world of comics and their importance to the author and the readers is hammered home through the use of metafiction.įar from being an invisible actor in the work, metafiction such as this reveals the author to be engaged in exploring the boundaries between fiction and criticism, fact and fiction. Grown-up Wally might just find himself in such a dark place since he, like many childhood comic fans, abandoned them as immature. In Flex, Morrison not only parodies this era but engages in a critical appraisal of it, as well as superhero comics in general, by relating them to the dissolution Wally experiences. The sex and violence that marked the era were still forms of escapism. As a kid, he thought those ban-the-bomb ‘zines were comics, but in reality, comics were escapist – they didn’t reflect the harsh reality of growing up during the Cold War.Įven in the so-called ‘Dark Age’ of the medium, superhero comics weren’t so much engaging in a critical analysis of reality or reflecting the world in which the were created. 5 Wally acts as a vehicle for Morrison to reveal something of himself, but also to deliver a critique of comics, and of the superhero genre. Morrison talks at length about these ‘zines in his later autobiography Supergods. ![]() 1Ĭredit: Quitely, Tom McCraw (colourist) and Ellie de Ville (letterer) In Flex Mentallo Grant Morrison “dramatises the boundary between fiction and criticism” by producing a work that is at once semi-autobiographical and a critique of the superhero genre. 2 Metafiction, however, shows the authors’ hand by engaging in a kind of self-referential critique that can take a number of forms. Mark Currie defines metafiction as narratives that are “somehow about fiction itself”, using “self-consciousness, self-awareness, self-knowledge ironic self-distance.” 1 Most postmodern literary theory puts distance between the author and criticism of the work 1, or as Roland Barthes describes it: “the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent”. MARK CURRIE ARGUES THAT METAFICTION IS “A BORDERLINE DISCOURSE, A KIND OF WRITING WHICH PLACES ITSELF ON THE BORDER BETWEEN FICTION AND CRITICISM, WHICH TAKES THE BORDER AS ITS SUBJECT”.
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