Chapter 5 - The Social Imagination of Graphic Narrative

Summary

This chapter examines social representation and class in the graphic novel. The turn towards book-length comics since the 1970s has often meant a replacement of the sprawling character networks of serial comics and an intense focus on individual protagonists. Section 5.2 explains the need for manual annotation of visual character in comics and looks at fourteen social networks of the most popular and prestigious graphic novels in the entire corpus. While superhero narratives like Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns retain elements of the more expansive social representation of popular comics, literary graphic novels often focus on individual protagonists within middle-class families. Section 5.3 adapts the empirical class analysis pioneered by Erik Olin Wright and discusses how this framework can be made to include an intersectional focus on gender and race.