ABSTRACT
Why analyze comic books (including comics, graphic novels, and graphic short stories) in relation to September 11, 2001? Of course such narratives, with their own distinctive representational strategies and aesthetic forms, are worth examining as a “response” in their own right, but in the case of 9/11 other issues make comic books a compelling case for study: for instance, the uncanny resemblance between the starkly rendered political landscape of the “war on terror” and the moral universe of the mainstream comic book. The Bush administration's depiction of a Manichean post-9/11 world of heroes and villains has sounded at times like a classic comic book scenario. Indeed, if superhero comics are replete with the logic of the vigilante, this same logic also came to mark the way the U.S. administration would govern after the attacks on the World Trade Center. 1 In this sense the generally conservative morality underpinning the comic book universe was echoed in the 9/11 public rhetoric raising the question: would comic books post-9/11 continue to operate in the same way? Given the degree of self-reflexivity that the genre had developed, especially since the 1980s, how would comic books react to a world that seemed increasingly to resemble its own fantasized constructions? The introduction of an extra-diegetic event into the world of the comic book also entails the convergence of mythological and historical worlds. Generally, serialized comic books (and superhero comics especially) are predicated upon the exclusion of history in the sense that characters cannot directly intervene in history. 2 As Umberto Eco observes with respect to Superman, if the genre incorporates historical events, the narrative risks exhausting itself due to the limitations imposed by the unchangeable events (123). For comics to include directly events such as 9/11 involves a shift where the comic universe is linked to a non-diegetic historical progression that stretches the compatibility of historical and mythological environments. In a genre predicated upon heroes who consistently save cities from disaster, how might comics respond to a situation where such heroes failed or were absent?
