The Road to Vertigo : The Suppression and Eventual Rise of Mature Comics and Their Readers

The legacy of Vertigo recalls the very idea of comics finally being allowed to mature; letting people swear, drink, openly take drugs for recreation, and bringing in some serious ambiguity as to what it means to be a good person. Titles such as Preacher, Transmetropolitan, Hellblazer, and Sandman cannot be separate from the very spirit of Vertigo. A new age of freedom and expression within the medium. However, to truly understand why this was so significant and praised, we need to look back at the reasons why these things were suppressed in the first place. As well as the attempts before this to allow the medium to grow up

Breaking Panels, Breaking Time : Examples of the Connection Between Panel Construction and Narrative Time

In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, he makes the comment, “To kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths”. An incredibly evocative piece of language, and very poetic in itself. But what McCloud is referring to is how time works in the comic book medium. The space between panels and how we perceive time working within that space. How the space between panels does not have a fixed time frame. A panel can be separated by something as small as milliseconds, all the way up to thousands of years and beyond. Depending on the story being depicted, panels could even take place at the same time

Beyond Time and Freedom: Darkseid, the Anti-Life Equation and 4th Dimensional Perspective

Jack Kirby’s creation of the New Gods mythology introduced a number of elements that have lived on through the DC Universe. However, Darkseid and the New God’s perception of reality and how this relates to reading a comic through a 4th dimensional perspective that perhaps gives Darkseid’s mission and abilities a more terrifying implication. The comics looked at primarily would be Jack Kirby’s original New Gods run and Mister Miracle. Walter Simonson’s Orion series, as well as other titles such as Final Crisis, The Great Darkness Saga and DC Legends. Theoretical framework will draw from Burelbach’s essay Look! Up in the Sky! It’s What’s His Name!, the work of Hayman and Pratt, as well as Proctor’s work on continuity. The final goal is to tie Darkseid’s desire for the Anti-Life Equation back to a 4th dimensional reading of comics. A view in which all of time is happening at once. The way in which Darkseid, and the rest of the New Gods have been elevated and tied into the DC mythos has created a truly terrifying villain. The work of Charles Huber and his essay Darkseid’s Ring: Images of Anti-Life in Kirby and Tolkein, as well as others will help to ground Darkseid’s level of tyranny and malic before applying it to world/universe view. The final goal of the proposed contribution is to show how truly horrifying Darkseid’s goals are when you consider his place in the DC pantheon and how that relates to the 4th dimension.Non peer reviewe