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17 - World Building and Metafiction in Contemporary Comic Books: Metalepsis and Figurative Process of Graphic Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2021

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Abstract

Since Alan Moore's The Watchmen (1987), the process of world building within fictional worlds seems to be openly represented in a large number of comics. Developed in highly complex games of inclusion and metalepsis (Genette, 2004) and far from being a repellent detachment set-up, this exposure of narrativity and fictionality represents a strong appeal for readers. Highly reflexive and metafictional comics have developed today into a wide practice of “metacomics” (Baurin, 2012) that shapes the stories, the graphic identity of characters or specific worlds, and the reading itself. It's not only postmodern patterns that are at stake (irony, self-consciousness, fictional ontology, awareness among the superheroes, quotations, or hyper-referentiality), but the use of comics’ visual discourses to build a graphic motionless way of world building. It will be necessary to examine this topic not only within the scope of comics, but in the relationship that comics have with other media (literary fictions, films and video games) within a culture of convergence (Jenkins, 2008), or of “maillage intermédial” (Gaudreault, 2008).

Keywords: Metafiction, Metalepsis, Reflexivity, The Unwritten, Deadpool, City of Glass

In his recent book Cinéma, machine à mondes, Alain Boillat develops a world-building approach to cinema stressing, especially in science-fiction, post-apocalyptic fictions or metacinema, the importance of worlds and world-building. The particular attraction and pleasure of this type of films would be based upon the representations themselves of these plural worlds. The visual actualization and the conflicts in interpretation between those worlds would form the basis of their fiction rather than strictly narrative dynamics, plotting and characters (Boillat 2014). This last formula should be used cautiously, because it does not mean that there are no narrative, dramatic events nor action in movies like The Matrix, Dark City, Pleasantville, or Truman Show. There occurs a change in proportion in which worlds cease to be considered as the background for narrative actions and transformations. The mundane paradigm implies that this cinematic dimension of plotting and actions is drawn out of the presentation of worlds (at least two worlds: what Boillat calls “bimundane”), probing the ontological differences between them and, obviously, in the predominant dystopical and dysphorical structures of their narratives, dramatizing the mere conflict or antagonism between them.

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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2017

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