Comicbooks As Cultural Archeology: Gender Representation in Captain America During WWII

lhs (print) issn 1742–2906 lhs (online) issn 1743–1662 Article Comicbooks as cultural archeology: Gender representation in Captain America during WWII Francisco O. D. Veloso Abstract The aim of this article is to discuss how comicbooks, as complex multimodal artifacts, discursively interpret and evaluate events during World War II. More specifically, I examine how women are represented in an archive of 69 Captain America stories published by Marvel Comics between March 1941 and March 1943, drawing on theoretical developments within the area of social semiotics (Halliday, 1978; Hodge and Kress, 1988). An important argument within social semiotics and multimodal studies is that texts are a combination of semiotic resources that are used for production and consumption of meanings, in specific contexts (Hodge and Kress, 1988). As a consequence, by examining these semiotic resources one can develop a better understanding of social meanings that circulate in society and how these meanings are structurally organized. By examining forms of discourse for social analysis we may identify ways of addressing particular issues at the level of representation. Keywords: comicbooks; gender representation; social semiotics; women 1. Comicbooks as historical documents The use of the term comicbook in this article is motivated by the transforma- tions of the medium across time. Historically, the medium, in its materiality as it circulates today, originated from the newspapers’ ‘funnies’ (Inge, 1990), what is referred to as comic strips, nowadays. A first collection of reprints of previously published funnies was bound together as a giveaway for a Proc- tor and Gamble product, and the successful campaign suggested the medium Affiliation Department of Modern Languages, LIteratures, and Cultures (LILEC), University of Bologna, Italy. email: [email protected] lhs vol 11.2-3 2015 284–299 https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.34737 ©2018, equinox publishing Francisco O. D. Veloso 285 had potential to be commercialized on its own. Commercial success paved the way to the creation of original characters and publications. A key point is that the funnies were first developed for publication in newspapers, where they had spatial constraints considering the newspaper page layout. As the funnies moved to their own medium, space constraints were not removed but certainly extended insofar as artists then could work with an entire blank page. The changes in terms of mode are not the focus on discussion but helps us understand how the page historically became the entry point, the initial space where artists work and operationalize different semiotic modes to create meanings connected to the context of production. The term funnies was perhaps accurate at first, as they were initially used to reflect the social purpose of the new, emerging medium: to produce amuse- ment and laughs through witty stories. However, as the medium expanded into a marketing product of its own, and more content was produced, it found the space and social context appropriate for narratives beyond humor. The 1930s, following the economic crash in 1929, precipitated an environment for stories of adventure and escapism (Reynolds, 1992) that would flourish and led to the publication of Action Comics #1 in June, 1938, with a story that intro- duced the character Superman to the world. The publication was successful enough to originate a specific comicbook genre: that of the super-hero, establishing the medium as a legitimate form of entertainment, although confined to a teenage audience. There are various reasons for that but the prestige of writing over pictures in contemporary society (cf Olson, 1994) is certainly an important aspect to be considered when trying to understand why comicbooks have been relegated to a marginal role in the pop culture landscape. The further development of the medium starting with the popularization of super-hero comics in the 1940s, during World War II, led to deep transfor- mations and expansion in thematic repertoire. Berninger et al. (2010: 2–3), for instance, state that comicbooks (…) have, despite their name, been used to tell very serious stories about the frag- mented experience of revolution, war, and terrorism, but have also been employed to capture the very mundane fragmentation of autobiographical memory. As such, comicbooks have been facing the challenges and perhaps limita- tions labeling brings upon them. If funnies has long been dropped, comic book seems not to suffice any longer, especially when the general public might still be keen to associate the term comics with humorous stories. At the third International Comics Conference (2012) in Bournemouth, UK, for instance, the artist David Lloyd delivered a keynote talk where he raised similar issues, suggesting that a new label that embraces a variety of cultural tra- ditions, styles and themes might be necessary. We either create a new label 286 Comicbooks as cultural archeology or take the challenge of modifying the very perception of the term. The creation of the term graphic novel and its later adoption by publishers already indicated the difficulty with the terminology in terms of marketing, as more mature stories had to find a way to its target readership and its way to book- shops. Although this is not a central theme here, distribution in comicbooks is a powerful semiotic resource that ascribes meanings, and legitimacy, to the medium. I suggest that using the term comicbook, as a single noun, erases the funny component from its origins but still evokes the sequential art form that has become so ubiquitous in contemporary society. An important element in the creation of meanings in a text is that, other than being coherent in itself, it has also to be coherent with its context of situ- ation (Halliday and Hasan, 1985), which is related to its context of production and consumption. As such, comicbooks, as texts, become important documents to understand not only formal aspects of language (cf. Bramlett, 2012), but also the role of comicbooks as discourse in a dialectical relationship with society, reflecting and reproducing social values but also reinforcing them. As such, it is expected that comicbooks produced during a period of strong tension such as World War II, when disputes took place in battlefields perhaps long after a discourse of conflict and identification of enemies was estab- lished (Culbert, 1990; Koppes and Black, 1990; Honey, 1985) may function as a form of cultural archaeological artefacts, telling us of social values and discourse strategies enacted. These texts, as historical documents, may inform on semiotic properties deployed on the construction of characters and, more specifically, the representation of women in popular culture. For this reason, we will focus on examining a particular aspect in the data described in the next section, which is the role of women in Captain America stories. This objective is the result of larger process of annotation of the same data, where we initially focused on identifying who were the enemies in those narratives in terms of doing and being, covering both linguistic and pictorial aspects. There are scholars examining comicbooks as cultural archeological artifacts. Dittmer (2007), for instance, explores the construction of identity in comicbooks in the context of World War II. As the author examines the first ten issues of Captain America, he suggests the character functions as a resca- ling icon that links together collective and individual identities. The author discusses comicbooks as a facet of geopolitics, as they process through discourse what it means to be good, and evil, and establishing an identity to good and evil through the narrative. Results, however, are limited as the study is in smaller scale, including only ten issues, and does not focus specifically on gender representation. Concerns over gender representation in popular culture have covered different areas such as TV ads and film (Ganahl et al., 2003; Smith et al., 2010: Francisco O. D. Veloso 287 775) but comicbooks are still uncharted territory requiring further inves- tigation. Comicbooks play a role in the process of circulation of meanings in society, reproducing ideas that circulate in other media, that operate in tandem to promote political initiatives such as the participation of the USA in World War II and, more recently, shaping the war on terror and post 9/11 actions and policies (cf. Holland, 2013; Veloso and Bateman, 2013; Smith and Hung, 2010). Examining the development of comicbooks in the United States of Amer- ica, for instance, reveals how all the actors involved were men (Harvey, 1996), which corroborates to a widespread notion that men dominate comicbooks as creative industry and that they produce stories about strong and smart men, conveying a message that women have not much of a role to play in this diegetic universe. However, empirical analysis that actually shows that this is the case and how this functions is almost nonexistent. 2. Comicbooks as social-semiotic artifacts Comicbooks, as texts, create meanings through the articulation of an array of semiotic resources that, combined, produce information and knowledge that require specific multiliteracy skills, such as the decoding of language and pictorial elements. The entry point for the organization of modes and production of meanings is the page which, as a blank canvas, works as what Groensteen (2007) has termed the ‘hyperframe’. The organization of hyper- frames has recently received detailed attention and a systematic annotation scheme to support empirical analysis is motivated in Bateman et al. (2017). Panels are placed on a page as a blank canvas, shaping the macro structure and providing space for pictures and language. There are pictorial resources of different kinds, such as drawings that will construe embodiment of characters, organization of information at panel level that might contribute to the narrative. Panel framing properties and color might also play a specific function within a story.

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