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The Legal Surrealism Of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Ian Dahlman
The Legal Surrealism Of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Ian Dahlman
Law Text Culture
In 1947, three years after George Herriman’s death ended Krazy Kat’s thirty-one year run, the prominent legal realist and theorist Karl Llewellyn published a brief but effervescent review of a Krazy Kat collection in the Columbia Law Review. The page count of the new collection was playfully listed as ‘unnumbered; many, but not enough’ (Llewellyn 1947: 337), subtly indicating that neither the review, nor the material it addressed was typical law journal fodder. In that era, it was rare for the world of comics and mass culture to surface in the annals of a law review. The article’s placement between …
‘Come A Day There Won’T Be Room For Naughty Men Like Us To Slip About At All’: The Multi-Media Outlaws Of Serenity And The Possibilities Of Post-Literate Justice, Kieran Tranter
Law Text Culture
If legal theory has only recently become aware of the pain and problems of law’s textual medium what is to be made of a culture where information exchange through reading and writing becomes displaced by the visual and physical acts of icon manipulation? How is justice to be achieved in a coming post-literate age of quasi-hieroglyphics; that is the emerging media of graphic user interfaces on touchscreens? In a ‘software-sorted society’ (Murakami Wood and Graham 2006) can there be something external to the code that can be justice? Further, can this justice be more than just a refugee of earlier …
The Punisher And The Politics Of Retributive Justice, Kent Worcester
The Punisher And The Politics Of Retributive Justice, Kent Worcester
Law Text Culture
The archetypal character of the retributive antihero – one who makes his own rules and follows his own conscience – is a familiar figure in mass culture, appearing in film, television, video games, and comics. This character represents the frustrations of millions of people who feel powerless and who fantasize about striking back at their enemies, be they real or imagined. This essay looks at one of the most prominent vigilantes in contemporary pop culture, the Punisher, and explores the relationship between Punisher comics, and vigilante entertainment more generally, to time-honored debates over justice, morality, and the law. In this …
'What Had Been Many Became One': Continuity, The Common Law, And Crisis On Infinite Earths, Benjamin Authers
'What Had Been Many Became One': Continuity, The Common Law, And Crisis On Infinite Earths, Benjamin Authers
Law Text Culture
We don’t usually think that lawyers and comic book readers have much in common. Certainly, unflattering representations and stereotypes of each abound. Less obviously, perhaps, each also has a disciplinary veneration of the accumulation of textual knowledge and of often obscure narrative detail. For the contemporary comic book reader, there are voluminous collections of past stories, reprinted in hardcover, paperback, and digitally. Taken together, these offer a rich body of fictional work to be consumed for its own sake, as well as to enhance the enjoyment of new stories printed in hundreds of monthly titles. For lawyers, the corpus of …
'Sakaarson The World Breaker': Violence And Différance In The Political And Legal Theory Of Marvel's Sovereign, Chris Lloyd
'Sakaarson The World Breaker': Violence And Différance In The Political And Legal Theory Of Marvel's Sovereign, Chris Lloyd
Law Text Culture
The graphic novels Planet Hulk and World War Hulk feature the green goliath of the Marvel Universe, The Incredible Hulk (Hulk, or the Hulk, hereafter) as the protagonist in two tales both which deal with gladiatorial violence and sovereignty. The novels feature classic archetypal comic narratives such as violence leading to retribution, law leading to justice and sovereignty leading to rule. However the novels feature pervasive critiques which imbue these homogenous narratives, leading to their subversion. These normalising narratives of le politique are thus warped into alternate manifestations, wherein violence breeds total annihilation, law succumbs to mutation and sovereignty implodes …
Justice In The Gutter: Representing Everyday Trauma In The Graphic Novels Of Art Spiegelman, Karen Crawley, Honni Van Rijswijk
Justice In The Gutter: Representing Everyday Trauma In The Graphic Novels Of Art Spiegelman, Karen Crawley, Honni Van Rijswijk
Law Text Culture
Trauma studies has had a long relationship with legal studies. Shoshana Felman argues that ‘trauma – individual as well as social – is the basic underlying reality of the law’ (2002: 172). The law has made available certain forms for the representation and adjudication of traumatic experience. Among others, testimony and the trial are legal forms that offer the potential for justice for traumatic events, at the same time that they delimit the ways in which trauma can be understood (Felman 2002; Sarat et al 2007). The means by which trauma is represented determines which experiences are privileged and recognized …
Noir Justice: Law, Crime And Morality In Díaz Canales And Guarnido’S Blacksad: Somewhere Within The Shadows And Arctic-Nation, Jane Hanley
Law Text Culture
Comics have a long history of engagement with concepts of justice. Mainstream comics in English have commonly focused on crime, crime prevention, and punishment as part of their broader preoccupation with themes of power, abuse of power, and responsibility. This engagement is perhaps most obvious in the traditional superhero genre, in which ostensibly ‘good’ heroes are charged to protect the innocent and right wrongs perpetrated by ‘bad’ villains. Analysing the stories of the two iconic heroes Superman and Batman, Reyns and Henson identify a ‘crime control’ model of justice focused on preventing and repressing crime (2010). In this model, the …
Contents, Acknowledgements And Contributors, Luis Gomez Romero, Ian Dahlman
Contents, Acknowledgements And Contributors, Luis Gomez Romero, Ian Dahlman
Law Text Culture
Anyone who has enjoyed the experience (largely gratifying but also, at certain moments, downright exhausting) of participating in an editorial project knows that the final product reflects not only the work of those who are credited in it, but also a crowd of invisible contributions that aided its coming into the world. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to Enrique Torralba, who generously designed the cover of this volume. We would also like to thank the Law Students’ Association and the Faculty of Law’s Dean at McGill University, who each provided us with funds for the copyright clearances …
Introduction - Justice Framed: Law In Comics And Graphic Novels, Luis Gomez Romero, Ian Dahlman
Introduction - Justice Framed: Law In Comics And Graphic Novels, Luis Gomez Romero, Ian Dahlman
Law Text Culture
Justice Framed is born of the passionate and rich – though not always peaceful or courteous – nexus between two long-time companions: comics and law. Comics are utterly gripped by issues of legality, order and justice, but their theoretical and ideological partnership has been conspicuously neglected in legal scholarship. Even in the emerging field of law and the visual, or in the firmly established disciplines of criminal justice studies or law and popular culture, jurisprudential and sociopolitical texts addressing law’s manifestations in, around, and through the comic frame are still an odd rarity – with a few remarkable exceptions. While …
Chewing In The Name Of Justice: The Taste Of Law In Action, Anita Lam
Chewing In The Name Of Justice: The Taste Of Law In Action, Anita Lam
Law Text Culture
The first issue of John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew was released in June 2009 by Image Comics at a time when the American comic book market was so dominated by stories written within the superhero genre that ‘comic books and superheroes [had] almost become synonyms’ (Rhodes 2008: 6). Within this superhero market, Chew was remarkably not a comic book about a superhero. Instead, Chew is a New York Times bestselling, Eisner award-winning series about Tony Chu, a Chinese- American cibopath. As a neologism created by the comic’s authors, cibopathy describes the ability to receive psychic impressions from whatever one …
The Story Of Bohemia Or, Why There Is Nothing To Rebel Against Anymore, John Hanamy
The Story Of Bohemia Or, Why There Is Nothing To Rebel Against Anymore, John Hanamy
Law Text Culture
[Description: cartoon images with initial text "A long time ago the rich and the poor did much the same things in their leisure time...They both drank a lot...Had sex at the drop of a hat..."]
Krazy Kat (Review), K N. Llewellyn
Krazy Kat (Review), K N. Llewellyn
Law Text Culture
Artists have from time to time over the years found the sure knowledge that law and lawyers are an essential part of human life. But mostly they have worked without understanding. Thus, Daumier and Rowland and Hogarth bite, and when we grow stale or slow on our great tasks it is good, though unpleasant, to get such strong teeth sunk into our legs. Dickens bit, too, and bit with effect. Dreiser bit deeper, but he bit with less skill and so with less effect. And there was a French dramatist who I read when I was young who used inexorable …
Magic And Modernity In Tintin Au Congo (1930) And The Sierra Leone Special Court, René Provost
Magic And Modernity In Tintin Au Congo (1930) And The Sierra Leone Special Court, René Provost
Law Text Culture
Much ink has been spilled over the years on the portrayal of Africa and Africans in the second album on the adventures of Tintin, Tintin au Congo. Written by Hergé in the early 1930s, the book was revised many times in an effort to respond to critiques that is was an apology of colonialism.2 Tintin au Congo tells the story of the encounter between a young, white European and Africa, as imagined by a Belgian artist living in Brussels in the inter-war period; as such, we can understand Tintin as a depiction by its author of a particular vision of …
Spider-Man, The Question And The Meta-Zone: Exception, Objectivism And The Comics Of Steve Ditko, Jason Bainbridge
Spider-Man, The Question And The Meta-Zone: Exception, Objectivism And The Comics Of Steve Ditko, Jason Bainbridge
Law Text Culture
The idea of the superhero as justice figure has been well rehearsed in the literature around the intersections between superheroes and the law. This relationship has also informed superhero comics themselves – going all the way back to Superman’s debut in Action Comics 1 (June 1938). As DC President Paul Levitz says of the development of the superhero: ‘There was an enormous desire to see social justice, a rectifying of corruption. Superman was a fulfillment of a pent-up passion for the heroic solution’ (quoted in Poniewozik 2002: 57).
The Aesthetics Of Supervillainy, Jack Fennell
The Aesthetics Of Supervillainy, Jack Fennell
Law Text Culture
When they first appeared during the ‘Golden Age of Comics’ (1938 to 1954), ‘supervillains’ were little more than eccentric gangsters. Criminals with clear motives, they were distinguished from the norm by their use of technological gimmicks or weird costumes rather than special powers. Genuinely ‘monstrous’ supervillains such as the Joker, Two-Face and the undead Solomon Grundy were in the minority. As Mark Edward DiPaolo says, the ‘Golden Age’ Joker was a ‘sane, Moriarty figure’ (DiPaolo 2009: 205). However, the self-regulation of the American comics industry from 1954, under the auspices of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), created conditions that caused …
‘Riddle Me This…?’ Would The World Need Superheroes If The Law Could Actually Deliver ‘Justice’?, Cassandra Sharp
‘Riddle Me This…?’ Would The World Need Superheroes If The Law Could Actually Deliver ‘Justice’?, Cassandra Sharp
Law Text Culture
As an entertainment and cultural icon, the costumed superhero pervades our culture, and superhero imagery (in both literary and visual forms) is ubiquitous (Morris and Morris 2005: ix).1 Superhero stories present and explore many important and pressing concerns such as ethics, justice, crime, punishment and social responsibility. Originating in the visually stimulating form of comic books, superheroes have transitioned well into other forms of popular culture – ranging from children’s animated television series (such as Superhero Squad or Spectacular Spiderman) through to the slick special-effects laden Hollywood productions (such as Iron Man 2008, Fantastic Four 2005, The Avengers 2012) and …
Comic Book Mythology: Shyamalan’S Unbreakable And The Grounding Of Good In Evil, Timothy D. Peters
Comic Book Mythology: Shyamalan’S Unbreakable And The Grounding Of Good In Evil, Timothy D. Peters
Law Text Culture
‘It’s a classic depiction of Good versus Evil’ Elijah Price tells the potential buyer of a piece of art. This ‘piece of art’ is an early sketch of a battle between two characters in a comic book and is on display at Price’s art gallery, Limited Edition, in the world of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable. Popular culture is replete with such dualities of Good and Evil – the good hero invariably battling the evil villain. One of the clearest spaces where this battle is given visual and bodily form is in the comic book superhero genre that Shyamalan …