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.
Scott Bukatman is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He is author of Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century; Blade Runner, BFI Modern Classics; Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction; and The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit.
“A revelation . . . as complex, challenging, and ‘monstrous’ as the comics the book explores. Whether he’s talking virtual subjects, Blade Runner, or Hellboy, Scott Bukatman is savagely brilliant and utterly indispensable.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of This Is How You Lose Her
“In Bukatman’s capable hands, we find ample demonstration of the special wondrousness that books can possess for us as we try to possess them (and not just comic books). They are objects wonderful to behold, wonderful to hold and enter into. And Bukatman’s own tome is in this respect a splendid thing: a beautifully produced work that lovingly offers insights that radiate from every page to invoke the enduring and inevitable bookishness inhering within our visual culture. A sublime investigation of comic books as sites/sights of essential world-building.”—Dana Polan, author of Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film
“Hellboy’s World is a smart, provocative book that showcases Bukatman’s lucid and sparkling writing throughout. It’s a pleasure to read such a lively academic book—and it is lively not just because of its subject matter, a superhero comic of sorts, but also because of Bukatman’s energy and dedication to his subject.”—Hillary L. Chute, author of Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form
280 pp.5.5 x 8.25Illus: 71color images
9780520288041$24.95|£21.00Paper
Apr 2016