This chapter scrutinizes two genres that seem closer to the world of comic books than to graphic novels, but that have nevertheless proven extremely influential in the development of the latter. It opens with a definition of both science fiction and fantasy, contrasted genres yet with many shared tropes, and it acknowledges the difficulties of summarizing the specific features of each category. The chapter addresses the most important forerunners of both genres, such as Little Nemo in Slumberland, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, or Prince Valiant, whose relevance for the graphic novel is now fully recognized. It aptly analyzes the birth of Action Comics in 1938 as a turning point and the start of the superhero genre with the Superman character, in whom science fiction and fantasy converge (although later forms of both genres also bear the strong influence of crime comics). The chapter also compares the Marvel and DC production and examines the development of franchises, which prove perfectly compatible with the creation of author-oriented graphic novels. Examples of such affinity are The Swamp Thing, The Sandman, Saga, and The Walking Dead.

This chapter deals with a genre that, at first sight, clashes with both the major themes and the publication format of the graphic novel: superhero comics. However, the history of the graphic novel demonstrates that it cannot be completely separated from superhero comics. Some important forerunners of the graphic novelists have had long careers in producing superhero comics, and some of their works went far beyond the standards of comics publication in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, when the graphic novel gradually consolidated, comics publishers such as Marvel began to adopt the format and to use the direct market system as a response to the decline of comic book distribution. The chapter offers a close analysis of two graphic novels that had superheroes at their core: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Miller) and Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons). It gives an overview of the imitations and continuations of these books, with a special look at Eddie Campbell’s “Graphic Novel Manifesto” (2004). It concludes with a case study of the Batman universe.

Wonder is a key emotion to Shakespeare’s work as a whole, from first to last. Three principal sites of the evocation of wonder are discussed: in narrative, in character, and in language. Discussion of the first focuses on Shakespeare’s career-long interest in romance narratives of marvel, drawing on both ancient and popular traditions. These traditions inform Shakespeare’s writing from The Comedy of Errors through the last plays. In them marvellous events – especially involving recoveries and reunions – reveal a world unexpected in its amplitude, larger than human knowledge can easily understand. Audiences are encouraged to share this perception of the world-opening possibilities of poetry. Wonder experienced by characters provides an opportunity for audiences to examine closely the mechanics of the affect, and the attempts of persons to negotiate and emerge from it into knowledge. Wonder in language touches on Shakespeare’s characteristic extremity of rhetorical style, particularly his use of figures such as paradox, hyperbole, and catachresis. Altogether, this commitment to wonder reveals Shakespeare as a poet of an unclosed universe – one ever rich in possibility and the unexpected.

A productive way of approaching Chaucer’s sustained, innovative, often enigmatic engagement with romance can be to entertain the proposition that for him romance was as much a received literary form, predicated on its protagonists’ engagement with adventure and marvel, as it was a model for authorial adventurousness that invited him to compose new and counterintuitive literary marvels. In this, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale shares something of the Gawain-poet’s grave subversion of and experimentation with existing romance form. However, Chaucer’s knowledge of the scholastic impossibilium (as articulated, for instance, through the Franklin and the Wife of Bath), points to a further experimental underpinning, such that we see in his romances the marvel of the marvel-made-empirical.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.