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Hellboy, Mike Mignolas famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboy's Worldshowshow our engagement with Hellboy's worldisa highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality. Scott Bukatmans dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened adventure of reading in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the readers imagination to inhabit. Drawing upon other media - including childrens books, sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and illuminated manuscripts - Bukatman reveals the mechanics of creating a world on the page. He also demonstrates the pleasurable and multiple complexities of the readers experience, invoking the riotous colors of comics that elude rationality and control and delving into shared fictional universes and occult detection, the horror genre and the evocation of the sublime, and the place of abstraction in Mignolas art.
About the author
Scott Bukatman is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of many books, including Terminal Identity and, most recently, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the Twentieth Century.
Summary
Hellboy, Mike Mignola’s famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboy's World shows how our engagement with Hellboy's world is a highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality. Scott Bukatman’s dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened “adventure of reading” in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader’s imagination to inhabit. Drawing upon other media—including children’s books, sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and illuminated manuscripts—Bukatman reveals the mechanics of creating a world on the page. He also demonstrates the pleasurable and multiple complexities of the reader’s experience, invoking the riotous colors of comics that elude rationality and control and delving into shared fictional universes and occult detection, the horror genre and the evocation of the sublime, and the place of abstraction in Mignola’s art. Monsters populate the world of Hellboy comics, but Bukatman argues that comics are themselves little monsters, unruly sites of sensory and cognitive pleasures that exist, happily, on the margins. The book is not only a treat for Hellboy fans, but it will entice anyone interested in the medium of comics and the art of reading.
Additional text
"Multitasking among such a broad range of texts and media sounds daunting, but Bukatman meets the challenge with energy and grace. . . [he] takes mainstream comics like Hellboy on their own terms for the complex and elusive creatures they are."
