Reframing the Perpetrator in Contemporary Comics : On the Importance of the Strange

This book foregrounds the figure of the perpetrator in a selection of British, American, and Canadian comics and explores questions related to remembrance, justice, and historical debt. Its primary focus is on works that deliberately estrange the figure of the perpetrator through fantasy, absurdism, formal ambiguity, or provocative rewriting and thus allow readers to engage anew with the history of genocide, mass murder, and sexual violence. This book is particularly interested in the ethical space such an engagement calls into being: in its ability to allow us to ponder the privilege many of us now enjoy, the gross historical injustices that have secured it, and the debt we owe to people long dead. Dragos Manea is a Lecturer in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where he teaches contemporary American literature, media studies, cultural memory studies, and perpetrator studies Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: Perpetration, Estrangement, and Historical Debt Implicatedness and the Ethics of Discomfort The Marketable Perpetrator Chapter Overview References Chapter 2: “Nothing was spared”: Monstrosity and the Sympathetic Perpetrator in Manifest Destiny (Chris Dingess and Matthew Roberts, 2013–) References Chapter 3: “Divine the future, but beware of ghosts”: Romanticism, Satire, and Perpetration in The New Adventures of Hitler (Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, 1989) References Chapter 4: “May they never get their hands on a monster like that”: Perpetration and Moral Ambiguity in Kieron Gillen’s Über (2013–) References Chapter 5: Who are you crying for?: Perpetration and Punishment in Nina Bunjevac’s Bezimena (2019) References Chapter 6: “Unable to protect anyone”: Terrorism, Salvation, and Cultural Intelligibility in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints (2013) Cultural Memory, Intelligibility, and Narrative Ethics Perpetration, Boxer Ideology, and the YA Love Plot References Chapter 7: Conclusion References Index