This chapter shows how graphic novels have not only become more colorful over the last two decades but also more visually complex. The chapter surveys discussions of the graphic novel’s literary complexity, from Richard Corben’s early Bloodstar to Alan Moore’s Watchmen. This reappropriation of a modernist strategy models itself on the rise of the novel but also reacts to a long-term audience decline for comics. Section 4.2 builds on recent uptakes of complexity in digital literary and digital film studies to advance computational measurements that combine image and text recognition. The final pages return to Moore and Alison Bechdel to assess the relevance of complexity for the popular success and cultural prestige of individual comic books.

This chapter traces the emergence of a new kind of official masculinity which was not rooted in the household. In the mid-seventeenth century, some lawyers attempted unsuccessfully to exclude women from officeholding entirely by arguing that gender trumped householder status as a qualification for office. Also in the mid-seventeenth century, the new system of indirect excise taxation produced a new kind of officer: young, unmarried, and always male. Excisemen were derided for lacking the independence of traditional householder officers and their wives (if they did marry) were prohibited from taking part in official business. This complete separation of office and household began to be mirrored by London constables and watchmen in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Householders chosen to hold these offices increasingly hired deputies to serve for them, and deputies tended to be poorer than their principals. Many were either younger or older than middle-age and often unmarried. In the course of working and socialising together year after year, these deputies developed a culture of fraternal masculinity based on solidarity, drinking, misogyny, and violence.