Download Style Sheet 1
(pdf)

Download Style Sheet 2
(pdf)

Session 8: Comics and the Uncanny
Chair: Kirsten Miller

Reinterpretation of Myths in Comics
Marie Manuelle Costa Silva
Departamento de Estudos Franceses, Universidade do Minho, Portugal

The recent phenomenon of the multiple adaptations of literary works (in theatre, cinema, television and comics) is reckoned to be a historical consequence of the alterations happening in the artistic and cultural fields. The apparition of the new narrative arts, like cinema or comics as well as the new diffusion channels, favourite the prevalence of stories and lead to reinitiate an old issue, which is the speciality of arts.
Roman graphics, literature or narration with images is the way comics impose themselves in literature and serve as a model of the 9th art, which is considered as a minor art, bastard par excellence, because of the encounter of the visual and the verbal. Literature functions also as a support or a base to fiction since intrigues (as well as codes and discourses) between two different modes of expressions could reincarnate in another literary work.
The present study will explore certain questions related to the literary adaptation of comics. The purpose will be to contextualize the corpus, describe some technical operations from comics realized in the process of adaptation, and analyse the singularity of the work adapted as variations in the theme which is common between the “adapter” and the “adapted”.

It came from Four-Colour Fiction: The Effects of Comic Books on the Fiction of Stephen King
David Kingsley
Bowling Green State University, USA

No abstract is presently available

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: What’s the Most Uncanny of them All?
Natalya Androsova
Joint Programme in Communication and Culture, Ryerson University and York University Toronto, Canada

Norval Morrisseau, a celebrated shaman artist of the Ojibway tribe, has become almost a mythical figure in contemporary Canadian Art. Creatures and monsters from other worlds, animal and bird spirits, the Earth and the Water Manitous (Ojibway spiritual beings) inhabit the world of Morrisseau. His paintings communicate his dreams, visions, shamanic out of body experiences and voyages to other worlds, but more importantly, they create an unmistakable sense of the uncanny in the viewer, which, according to Freud, refers to “the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread” and to “what was once well known and had long been familiar.” How is this effect created? It is the structure of this experience of the uncanny that will be explored in this study.
Morrisseau’s deployment of such themes as the double, possession, flight, death, resurrection, and human-animal metamorphoses, is partly responsible for representing the uncanny in his artwork. We are first intrigued by the themes of Morrisseau’s art, then baffled by the ethos of the artist, and on top of that confused and frightened by the artistic form of his work, but the uncanniest of all experiences emerges when the uncanny leaves the canvas and crawls into our mind making us lose certainty about our own self.
When looking at Morrisseau’s art, we are susceptible to a moment of paralysis and an unconscious shift when, as if by magic, all of his monsters become us, and we are parts of them. I think this unconscious transference of identity becomes possible because the unfamiliar monsters are, in fact, familiar to our psyche. They take us back to our very own but disowned fears, terrors, and horrors. But to come to this realization is nothing less of the uncanny because it means acknowledging the unfamiliar inside the most familiar – ourselves.

Download Conference Paper -

© Wickedness.Net 2007