ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical and historical overview of European and American cyberpunk comic books, ranging from the importance of Jean “Moebius” Giraud’s visual influence in Métal Hurlant (i.e., Dan O’Bannon’s “The Long Tomorrow”) to later comics such as Enki Bilal’s The Nikopol Trilogy, Frank Miller’s Ronin, Alan C. Martin and Jamie Hewlett’s Tank Girl, Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s Hard Boiled, Lewis Shiner’s The Hacker Files, Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitian, Paul Pope’s Heavy Liquid, and Rick Remender and Sean Murphy’s Tokyo Ghost. The chapter explores what Carl Freedman describes as the tension between “deflationary” noir sensibilities and punk’s “inflationary” attitude within cyberpunk comics, and it analyzes the ways that the mode reflects the changing economic conditions characteristic of neoliberal globalization since the 1970s. In addition, this chapter examines the tendencies toward cultural appropriation and pervasive misogyny often found in early cyberpunk comics, and it traces key transformations in attitudes concerning race and gender as authors and artists grow increasingly diverse during the early decades of the 21st century.
