ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses specific, situated instances of the several early albums which are part of what may be termed the propagandistic phase of the Adventures, where cuisine, eating, drinking, and food production are mobilized by L. T. Hergenhan to overtly ideological ends. Mikhail Bakhtin's readings of Rabelais have provided a starting point, for many critics, in the exhumation of the body in critical theory. The key text for Bakhtin's identification of the genre of grotesque realism, Rabelais' mid-sixteenth-century La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel/The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, has been read as a response to works such as Plato's Symposium, with its dichotomizing of the ideal spiritual/intellectual existence versus sexual/digestive needs. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the specificities of comics as media which combine written and visual languages, thus arguably allowing a materiality of representation not possible in purely literary texts, with implications for future food-in-comics criticism.
