The Devil Is a Myth: the Dynamic Uses of the Folkloresque Within Hellboy and Fables
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The Devil is a Myth: The Dynamic Uses of the Folkloresque within Hellboy and Fables By Amy Richardson A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Folklore Memorial University of Newfoundland October 2019 St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador Abstract This thesis engages with the theoretical concept of the folkloresque, which considers the way in which folklore, folkloric tropes, motifs, and fuzzy allusion are integrated into popular culture materials to differing ends. Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Bill Willingham’s Fables are considered in the vein of the folkloresque. As comics as a medium has different attributes form prose or other folkloresque products, this thesis considers the content, characters, prose, and artwork within the two series. Hellboy uses the folkloresque categories of integration and portrayal. The series uses legends and folktales to different ends in a number of different narrative arcs. Fables plays with the folkloresque category of parody to expand upon readers’ preconceived ideas of folktale characters. Intertextuality plays heavily into folkloresque texts, adding differing dimensions depending on the reader’s already-known knowledge of folklore and this dynamic influence is examined. 2 Acknowledgements My advisor, Daniel Peretti, has been an immense help throughout writing my thesis; his insight, encouragement, and helpful advice has helped to make this thesis coherent. After the “Aha!” moment I had in one of my first courses, Holly Everett assured me that I could, in fact, write about comics and folklore. My graduate cohort was always supportive and willing to listen to any issues that arose with ideas or syntax. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 List of Figures 6 Chapter 1 Introduction 7 1.1. Method 14 Chapter 2 Legend and Conspiracy: the Folkloresque within Mike Mignola’s Hellboy 20 2.1. About Hellboy 21 2.2. Folkloresque Meanings 22 2.3. Folkloresque Integration 30 2.4. Hellboy the Character 38 2.5. One-Shots 45 Chapter 3 Parodic Folkloresque, Intertextuality, and Character in Fables 50 3.1. Bluebeard 53 3.2. Snow White 58 3.3. The Big Bad Wolf 65 3.4. Little Red Riding Hood and Baba Yaga 67 3.5. Survey Response 72 Chapter 4 The Dynamics of Comics Artwork: How Visual Contribute to the Tone of the Folkloresque 76 4.1. The Artwork of Hellboy 77 4.2. Hellboy’s Covers 87 4 4.3. Fables & its Artwork 99 4.4. Artwork Conclusion 124 Chapter 5 Summary and Conclusion 129 5.1. Contributions to Folkloresque 129 5.2. Further Scholarship 131 5.3. Potential Criticism for this Thesis 132 5.4. Final Thoughts 132 Appendix 140 5 List of Figures Figure 3.1 Panel of Snow White 61 Figure 4.1 Hellboy Character Design 78 Figure 4.2 Hellboy in Hell panels 83 Figure 4.3 Hellboy in Hell panels 85 Figure 4.4 Fables page layout 101 Figure 4.5 Fables two-page spread 107 Figure 5.1 Hellboy in Hell panels 136 6 1. Introduction and Overview “I enjoy Hellboy and Fables, because they take the stories and themes we know and love and are comfortable with and shift our paradigm. Heroes are flawed, villains are misunderstood, how would someone like x be interpreted through today's notions of good and bad” (Anonymous Survey Respondent 2018, 1.26.). Michael Foster defines the folkloresque as “popular culture’s own (emic) perception and performance of folklore. That is, the term refers to creative, often commercial products or texts that give the impression to the consumer that they derive directly from existing folkloric traditions” (Foster 2016, 5). He then describes the three meanings of the folkloresque: “(1) that an item (or element of an item) is in the ‘style’ of folklore; (2) that it is connected to something beyond/before itself, to some tradition or folkloric source existing outside the popular culture context; (3) that the product itself is potentially of folkloric value, connected in some way with processes of folklore creation and transmission” (Foster 2016, 5-6). Comics as a medium has a long history of censorship, enacted by North American comics publishers to avoid state censorship, beginning with the Comics Code Authority of 1954. The Comics Code was inspired by the backlash resulting from the argument that reading comics was harmful to children put forward by Frederic Wertham in his book Seduction of the Innocent. This perception of comics as a “low art” held firm from the middle of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries; the medium retains a tarnished reputation in the eyes of some elitist critics. It has taken comics a long time to finally overcome that undeserved stigma. 7 As Henry John Pratt writes, “the creators of comics have tended to come from backgrounds of low social and economic status. Many of the pioneers in comics were immigrants to the United States or children of immigrants, and often Jewish (at a time when this put one at significant disadvantage). Others were women, homosexuals, or African Americans… the lack of respect typically afford to comics artists has also provided job opportunities for talented by marginalized individuals” (Pratt 2009, 100). Comics have a storied history in giving voices to different groups of people while affording them connections to people like them. This thesis interrogates the ways that contemporary comics are able to use character, whether they are unique or originate in oral tradition, to create works of different types of the folkloresque. Both Hellboy, created by Mike Mignola, and Fables, created by Bill Willingham, exhibit unique properties of the various categories of the folkloresque: integration, portrayal, and parody. These two series were chosen because of their high status in the comics community. The goal of this thesis is to expand on the ways that the folkloresque can be used in different media, in this case, comic books. The unique nature of comic books, with the mixture of prose and art, creates folkloresque products different from film or pure prose. The exclusive qualities of comics, especially in the rising acceptance of the medium through the proliferation of superhero films and continuing success of e-book and physical texts, grants folklorists many avenues to take when considering the folkloresque. As with folklore, the medium of comics has a long history of many storytellers telling and retelling stories of the same characters, especially within Hellboy and 8 Fables—writers must understand what a character stands for and is known for, but they are able to rethink the characters’ experiences and put them into situations that they (the writers) want to explore. This storytelling process allows for treading new ground and giving readers new and interesting content, but with so many differing story lines and alternate universes, it can make the superhero genre medium hard to approach for new readers, especially considering the complicated nature of superhero comics and their many different arcs and universes. Comics studies is a newer, dynamic field, with its scholarship building day by day. Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (1985) and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (2008) along with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1994) and Making Comics (2006) form the bedrock of my academic understanding of comics. Although these two authors’ texts are cited frequently as the foundational texts of comics studies and both men are/were comics creators themselves, the scholarship in comics studies is being influenced by many different disciplines, such as Jungian theory, English literature, art theory, and many others. Charles Hatfield writes, “Despite the important differences among its participating disciplines, comics studies constitute a field of shared activity. Comics scholars from disparate fields do share a sense that they have something in common” (Hatfield 2010, 3). He adds: Despite their disciplinary differences, comics scholars in the academy, at least in today’s North American context, share what is widely perceived to be a common set of “circumstances.” These circumstances include comics’ improving yet still disputed (or at least still unsure) intellectual status; the growth of cultural studies and interdisciplinary work in academia in general, which have 9 provided a supportive context; and a desire for comics scholars scattered across disciplines to recognize and commune with each other (Hatfield 2010, 4). The interdisciplinary nature of the comics studies field aligns with folkloristics’ history of picking and choosing scholarship from other disciplines to help develop our own. My particular focus within comics studies hinges on form—I am most interested in the characteristics particular to comics—like the gutter, panels, art style, color use, panel borders, page layout, etc., and how they exhibit or contribute to a folkloresque tone. In the first issue of the journal Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, the roundtable discussion “Comics Professionals on Comics Studies” (McGurk 2017) illustrates the varying opinions on theory, the relationship between comics artists and scholars, and the need to move forward with current scholarship. One professional, Whitney Taylor, says, “I think it’s easy for scholars to assign intention to artists’ work, but this can be inaccurate or overblown. I’ve had meaning assigned to work I’ve done that has assumed that I put deep intellectual thought and planning into something, when really it was an intuitive, emotional act that lead to that result” (McGurk 2017, 105). This roundtable discussion shows that the theorizing of comics must be taken on a case by case basis, utilizing a clear theoretical framework to avoid the “Death of the Author” concept, but also to understand that in some cases comics are personal and should be regarded as such.