Abstract
Recent calls for “undisciplining” Victorian studies have urged scholars to reflect on how our own intellectual endeavours remain entangled with the nineteenth century’s legacies of colonialism, racism, and violence. This chapter argues that the ways neo-Victorian graphic fictions position readers in relation to Victorian worlds can help us recognise the masterful pleasures that are all too easy to overlook in our scholarly forays into the archives. Jones provides an overview of neo-Victorian graphic texts and of the body of scholarship on that genre, considering in particular Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000–21), Frank Beddor and Liz Cavalier’s Hatter M (2008–14), and Ninomiya Ai and Katagiri Ikumi’s Are You Alice? (2010–15). Reading these examples as representative of larger phenomena, the essay argues that, whereas some modes of neo-Victorianism produce a masterful pleasure modelled on imperial conquest—inviting the reader to plunder the literary, visual, and material artefacts of the Victorian past—others invite a much less self-assured engagement with that archive, eliciting an approach that Julietta Singh in Unthinking Mastery (2018) has called “vulnerable reading.” Fostering this practice of vulnerable reading can aid the ongoing project of undisciplining Victorian and neo-Victorian studies.
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Notes
- 1.
H. P. Lovecraft was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
- 2.
This trope of revealing hidden histories is not exclusive to supernatural neo-Victorian graphic novels; many texts have undertaken to “give voice” to silent or largely absent figures. Eisner’s Fagin the Jew, for example, makes Dickens’ one-dimensional villain into a fully realised and sympathetic protagonist.
- 3.
In the “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (1924), a woman who seems to have developed a vampiric bloodlust and to be preying on her infant son is discovered to have been sucking poison from wounds inflicted by his jealous stepbrother.
- 4.
See Jones (2013) for a more detailed discussion of the manga’s treatment of Victorian tropes of child endangerment.
- 5.
Nakamura’s and Toboso’s visual aesthetics evoke the work of fin-de-siècle artists like Aubrey Beardsley. Of course, Beardsley and Art Nouveau artists like Alphonse Mucha, both of whom manga artists not infrequently cite as influences, were themselves heavily influenced by Japanese aesthetics, so it is unsurprising that there should be similarities.
- 6.
Annette Fantasia reads Fun Home as a “Paterian Bildungsroman,” after Walter Pater’s “The Child in the House” (1878), in which the “the childhood home is figured as a primary force in the development of the child’s aesthetic awareness” (Fantasia 2011, 83).
- 7.
Rebecca N. Mitchell’s and my 2017 co-edited collection, Drawing on the Victorians, is, to my knowledge, the only book-length study.
- 8.
- 9.
Hergé is the pen name for Georges Prosper Remi.
- 10.
For further discussion of Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland see Jones and Mitchell (2017).
- 11.
Lorraine Janzen-Kooistra’s foundational Artist as Critic (1995) provides a detailed account of the different ways illustrations interact with their texts; Scott McCloud’s classic Understanding Comics (1994) still offers one of the best descriptions of different kinds of image-textual relationships in comics.
- 12.
The manga’s premise is that Holmes has been miniaturised in a supernatural altercation; while the rest of the world thinks he is dead, he continues in secret to solve mysteries with Watson.
- 13.
In a scene in which the characters discuss Holmes’ ostensible death, O’Neill’s artwork reproduces the images from Paget’s illustrations for “The Final Problem” (1893) in which Holmes and his nemesis Moriarty grapple on the precipice of Reichenbach Falls.
- 14.
- 15.
I don’t mean to suggest that Moore’s work is only read by British and American audiences, but it was first published by DC Comics and its subsidiaries in the United States and United Kingdom.
- 16.
The scene in question is a sexual assault of a girl in a boarding school by the Invisible Man.
- 17.
All English translations are by Alexis Eckerman for the Yen Press editions. I include here the original Japanese text, converted to Romanised script. Ore no namae wa nanda…?
- 18.
The manga, catering to a josei (young-adult female) readership, has turned most of the characters in Carroll’s Wonderland into attractive masculine types familiar to manga readers. Our hero’s slightly dissipated good looks suggest the appearance of a host, which is to say someone who earns money in a host club by being charming to female patrons. Japanese manga markets are categorised by age and gender, with josei marketed to young-adult women, as opposed to shōjo (girls), shōnen (boys), and seinen (men). The English edition of Are You Alice? is designated OT for “Older Teen.”
- 19.
Monogatari ni yotte ikasareteiru kamikuzu.
- 20.
Ushiro wa amari furikaeranai hō ga ii. Fushigi no Kuni de wa tokuni ne kako ni shūchaku suru orokana ningen hodo minikui miren o yobiyoseru.
- 21.
Inku to chi de mechakucha ni sareteite na.
- 22.
Jibun dake no namae ga hoshikunatte subete o ubatteshimatta “namae no kaketa dare ga” soshite ore wa … Fushigi no Kuni ni kite jibun ga shiawase ni ikite iketara sore de manzoku suru yō ni natte “Fushigi no Kuni no Arisu” sura ubaou toshita. … seiaku da yo na …hontō.
- 23.
Bōshi morai ni kita.
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Jones, A.M. (2024). Neo-Victorian Graphic Novels: Learning to Unmaster the Archive. In: Ayres, B., Maier, S.E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32160-3_16
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