FINDING COMICS FOR MEDIEVALIST RESEARCH AND TEACHING

QUESTIONING SIGNIFIERS OF AUTHENTICITY IN MEDIEVAL COMICS FOR PEDAGOGICAL USE

​

ELIZABETH ALLYN WOOCK

PALACKY UNIVERSITY�

What are we actually reading in comics?

• The strategy of “documentary evidence” is an authentication strategy used by documentary or journalistic comics (Weber and Rall 2017: 389)
• Objects of authenticity: museum artefacts, real archaeological or historical sites
• Signifiers of authenticity: typical presumptions of the ‘real’ Middle Ages as dirty, violent, and backwards.
• Object of authenticity or more abstract signifiers of authenticity are staged around very modern ideals to legitimate them as a historic fact.
• The legitimation of certain notions (rugged individualism, ‘fridged’ women, private property, ‘blood and soil’ nationalism) is anchored in association with the signifiers of authenticity.

Northlanders Issue 4, “Sven the Returned:” 11.

Objects of authenticity

Signifiers of authenticity

A better way: staging, not signifiers

• Consider the mise-en-scene and the staging of the narrative, rather than getting distracted by signifiers of authenticity (or the close adaptation of a medieval text) alone.
• This can lead to a conversation about historiography and medievalisms, rather than assuming pure medieval history.
• “We’ve arrived at a moment where we must assess the nature of academic and public desire, and, where necessary, launch a re-education of desire” (Heng in Whose Middle Ages 2019: 276) pointing to a need for “a more ethically responsible, and intersubjective relationship with the past,” and a quest for the “kinds of desire, and intersubjective practices, that addresses the multifariousness of the archived and do it justice in non-appropriative ways” (Heng 2019, 278).

LIST OF SIGNIFIERS OF AUTHENTICITY

• Costume / hair
• Weapons and method of wearing or holding weapons
• Fighting style and choreography
• Body language when speaking
• Depictions of death
• Depictions of identities
• Architecture and interior decoration
• Landscape or natural spaces

MODIFIED RUBRIC

To locate ideological subtext in staging ‘historic’ scenes in medieval(ist) comics:

1. Do I imagine myself in the same situations as the main character?
2. Does the comic emphasize realism either through paratext or illustration style?
3. What is implied to be ‘authentic’ (objects or actions or beliefs)?
4. Does the panel or page elicit an emotional response?
5. Which emotions are connected to which scenarios?
6. How are those emotional reactions to scenarios validated through proximity to “signifiers of authenticity” (in the objects)?

​

If there is a strong emotional response to the staging of certain ‘authentic’ scenarios, I suggest that it is a good indicator that one ought to set down the comic and pause to think about the desires satisfied by the narrative; 7) “How does this relate to beliefs about the present?” If an ideology is identified, it is reasonable to proceed to read that comic as an ideological narrative, rather than a statement of historical record.

​

FRAMEWORK FOR ENGAGING STUDENTS

• Scavenger hunt for OBJECTS of authenticity
• Discuss SIGNIFIERS (if you’re brave, also simulacra) of authenticity, and have students hunt for those
• Explain the mise-en-scene and the staging of AFFECT/EMOTION
• Ask students to look the mise-en-scene on one or pages and use the rubric to locate modern ideologies staged with historicity
• Share results
• Discuss what ‘facts’ are being communicated about the Middle Ages through this staging, and how they compare with known facts about the era or the text. What is the comic telling us about modern ideologies?

Let’s get in touch!

• Elizabeth Allyn Woock
• Eallynwoock.com
• Elizabethallyn.woock@upol.cz

• Upcoming book:

Medieval Spaces in Comics: Affect and Ideology

(Palgrave Macmillan, Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels Series)