ABSTRACT
For the Russian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), the fundamental object of analysis is the “utterance,” which is in effect an embodied, performed, and therefore thoroughly social act of expression. This essay’s methodology employs key Bakhtinian theoretical ideas, including both better-known terms like dialogism and heteroglossia and less-utilized concepts like embodiment and unfinalizability, to delineate the various discourses (both verbal and pictorial) active in The Vision, written by Tom King and drawn by Gabriel Hernandez Walta (2015–2016). The essay suggests how by incorporating these discourses, these multiple “voices,” The Vision series becomes “an active participant in [the] social dialogue” out of which it takes shape (Bakhtin 1981).
