ABSTRACT
Nate Powell’s graphic novel Any Empire (2011) examines the normalisation of organised violence in post-9/11 America to create a generalised state of warfare. It deploys the formal elements of comics to explore American identity—and especially masculinity—as it is shaped by and mediated through violence across multiple spatial and temporal scales, from childhood fantasies of heroic exploits, to the casual brutalities of American suburban adolescence, to the experience of military personnel in distant theatres of war.
Of particular interest is the way in which the narrative uses the comic image to do violence to narrative structure itself, as it moves beyond the juxtaposition of scales and kinds of violence to their forced superimposition. By the end of Any Empire, we witness the collapse of local and global scales of violence; of romanticised warfare in comics, and nostalgia and its lived reality; of global American policing and local militarised law enforcement; of adolescent and adult relationships with violence; of domestic comforts and the distant unseen traumas that enable them; and of the narrative’s present and its alternative possible pasts and futures.
Any Empire suggests that if comics helped to shape contemporary American romantic myths of masculinity and nation that are nightmarish when realised, then comics can also be a source for the revision of these myths. One way to understand this narrative capacity to influence cultural change is to consider the organised violence of the narrative’s military and paramilitary groups in contrast with the adoption of themes of violence applied to narrative structure itself through, for example, the punk aesthetic Nate Powell practices in other mediums and works. If anything, these themes have only become more urgent since the publication of Any Empire, with Powell’s contribution to the March trilogy that chronicles American congressman John Lewis’s role in the American Civil Rights movement, the rise of Black Lives Matter and the white militarist nationalism of the Trump presidency.
