The Four Horseman of the Late Capitalist Apocalypse
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University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Art & Art History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 7-1-2015 "The ourF Horseman of the Late Capitalist Apocalypse": U.S. Comic Books, Ideology, and Trauma in Post-9/11 Society Kathryn Manis Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/arth_etds Recommended Citation Manis, Kathryn. ""The ourF Horseman of the Late Capitalist Apocalypse": U.S. Comic Books, Ideology, and Trauma in Post-9/11 Society." (2015). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/arth_etds/31 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Art & Art History ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Kathryn Manis Candidate Art and Art History Department This thesis is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Thesis Committee: Dr. Kirsten Buick , Chairperson Dr. Ray Hernandez-Duran Dr. Daniel Worden Dr. Tim Van Ginkel ii “THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE LATE CAPITALIST APOCALYPSE:” U.S COMIC BOOKS, IDEOLOGY, AND TRAUMA IN POST 9/11 SOCIETY by KATHRYN MANIS B.A. ART HISTORY B.A. ENGLISH THESIS Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Art History The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July 2015 iii Dedication For my beautiful, strong, brilliant, crazy, and incredibly lovable younger siblings, who inspire me every single day. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Kirsten Buick, my advisor and chair, for all of the support and encouragement she has given me over the course of my studies. Without Dr. Buick’s constant and unfailing belief in me, this thesis never would have come to fruition. Her frank and rigorous scholarship, inspiring teaching, and passionate support and care for her students continue to serve as examples of the type of person and scholar I hope to be. I am also deeply grateful to Dr. Ray Hernandez-Duran, Dr. Daniel Worden, and Dr. Tim Van Ginkel for their invaluable feedback, advice, and patience, as teachers as well as members of my thesis committee. Without this amazing group of scholars, the final version of this thesis would not have been the document about which I am so excited and proud. To Mariah Carrillo for the late night conversations which inspired many of the best parts of this thesis and for reading drafts and listening to preliminary presentations. To my best friend, Paul for endlessly humoring my obsession with apocalypse, encouraging my comic book fanaticism, and administering perfectly timed hugs. And to my fellow graduate students in the Department of Art and Art History for the comradery and friendship that helped make this experience so memorable. v “The Four Horsemen of the Late Capitalist Apocalypse:” U.S. Comic Books, Ideology, and Trauma in Post-9/11 Society by Kathryn Manis B.A., Appalachian State University, 2012 M.A., University of New Mexico, 2015 ABSTRACT In the contemporary United States apocalypse, dystopia, and catastrophe are commonplace. Indeed, both the increasing presence of fictional apocalypse in art and popular culture and the tone of apocalypticism in U.S. political, environmental, and social rhetorics, have been noted by writers and thinkers from a wide range of fields. Scholars of neoliberalism in particular have traced this popularity to the economic and political realities of late-capitalism and the ideological contradictions embedded in the evolution of capitalism to its current, immersive iteration. What has gone undiscussed, however, is the relationship of this anxious preoccupation to a prevailing, national condition; a condition that responds to the traumatic reality of existence under “American” neoliberalism. Using the framework of the apocalyptic riders and the medium of contemporary comics, this thesis demonstrates the legacy of sacred apocalypse in contemporary versions and explicates the ways in which neoliberal economic and political policy have led us back around to apocalyptic ground zero. vi Table of Contents List of figures………………………………………………………………………........vii Chapter 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 2. Literature Review……………………………………………………….....12 Chapter 3. Pestilence, or, “the consequences of biogenetic revolution”…………….17 Chapter 4. War, or, “the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions”…….44 Chapter 5. Famine, or, “imbalances within the system itself”……………………….67 Chapter 6. Death, or, “ecological crisis”………………………………………………92 Chapter 7. Conclusion………………………………………………………………...110 Figures………………………………………………………………………………….115 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...123 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. ………………........114 Figure 2. Ben Templesmith, from Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse (Vol. 2)……..……114 Figure 3. Pia Guerra and Brian K. Vaughan, From Y The Last Man (Vol. 1)………….114 Figure 4. Pia Guerra. Cover Art. Y The Last Man (Vol. 1, no. 11)……..………………114 Figure 5. Pia Guerra. Cover Art. Y The Last Man (Vol. 1, no. 1)………………………115 Figure 6. Pia Guerra. From Y The Last Man (Vol. 4, no. 19)..........................................115 Figure 7. Riccardo Burchielli, Brian Wood. Cover Art. DMZ (Vol. 1, no. 1)………….115 Figure 8. Riccardo Burchielli, Brian Wood. From DMZ (Vol. 1, no. 1)……………….116 Figure 9. Riccardo Burchielli, Brian Wood. From DMZ (Vol. 5, no. 3)……………….116 Figure 10. Riccardo Burchielli, Brian Wood. Cover Art. From DMZ (Vol. 5, no. 5)….117 Figure 11. Riccardo Burchielli, Brian Wood. Cover Art. From DMZ (Vol. 5, no. 6)….117 Figure 12. Marcos Martin, Brian K. Vaughan, and Munsta Vicente. From The Private Eye (No. 1)……………………………………………………………………………...117 Figure 13. Marcos Martin, Brian K. Vaughan, and Munsta Vicente. From The Private Eye (No. 1)……………………………………………………………………………...118 Figure 14. Marcos Martin, Brian K. Vaughan, and Munsta Vicente. From The Private Eye (No. 1)……………………………………………………………………………...118 Figure 15. Marcos Martin, Brian K. Vaughan, and Munsta Vicente. From The Private Eye (No. 8)……………………………………………………………………………...119 Figure 16. Captain Callum Israel. Brian Wood, Gary Brown, Dave Stewart. From, “Black Pacific,” The Massive, (Vol. 1)…………………………………………………119 viii Figure 17. Brian Wood, Kristian Donaldson, and Dave Stewart. From, “Landfall,” The Massive (Vol. 1)………………………………………………………………………...120 Figure 18. The Massive. Brian Wood, Gary Brown, and Jordan Bellaire. From, “Ragnarok,” The Massive (Vol. 5)……………...............................................................121 1 Chapter 1. Introduction In the 21st century the post-apocalyptic scenario is particularly compelling.1 This palpable narrative proliferates in literary, visual, and popular culture in the U.S, appearing in the work of authors like Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy and Max Brooks, comics, film, and television programs like The Walking Dead and Zombie Land and in the oeuvre of environmentally concerned visual artists like Chris Jordan and Agnes Denes. The increasing popularity of these works demonstrates that the end of the world as we know it is an unquestionably salient topic. Scholars of culture and neoliberalism2 have noted the complex economic, social, and political conditions, particularly in the U.S., which make it nearly impossible to imagine a structural alternative to contemporaneity. Nicholas Mierzoff describes this condition as an order of seeing, which he calls “immersion,” that has no outside but is instead, “constituted by the cosmographic circulation between nature and culture, the West and its Empire.”3 This perceived lack of “outside,” it can be argued, is a primary source for the popular obsession with apocalypse and dystopia. Though James Berger considered post-apocalyptic representation as a site of hope in 1999, describing the impetus for this mode as a recognition of, “formative catastrophes and their symptoms,” 1 And by post-apocalypse I am here referring to a structural and institutional upheaval or change from a contrasting present, fictional or real. 2 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, Translated by Michel Senellart, (New York: Picador, 2008); Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, (London: Verso, 1993); Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, (Winchester, Washington: Zero Books, 2009); Walter Benn Michaels, “The Beauty of a Social Problem e.g. unemployment,” Twentieth Century Literature, 57, no. 3 (2011) to list just a few. 3 Nicholas Mirzeoff, “The Sea and the Land: Biopower and Visuality from Slavery to Katrina,” Culture, Theory, and Critique, 50, no. 2-3 (2009): 289-305. 2 and the, “ideological sutures that hide the damages and repetitions,”4 the post-911 version is dramatically less hopeful. Berger’s estimation of apocalyptic scenario is less idyllic when applied to earlier eras of science fiction and horror in literature and film. As Michael Cart and others have noted, apocalypse in the earlier decades of American science fiction centered on a speculative future.5 Though Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), for example, was largely the end-result of the socio-political problems of Huxley’s time as he saw them, the unseen dystopic event or shift happens far in the reader’s future, preserving an element of hopefulness. In the contemporary