Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Estor, 189–207, Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” In Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, edited by R. This further relates to a renegotiation of authorship and ownership – of comics as well as their characters – and the elements that are mobilised to assert them.
#Uncanny 303 mycomics series
First published in 2016, Mickey’s Craziest Adventures poses as a reissue of a long-lost series from the late 1960s, using aspects like paper quality, printing technology, traces of usage and lost issues to assemble the characteristics of comics from a bygone era. Using Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas’s Mickey’s Craziest Adventures as an example, I will show how nostalgia as an emotional orientation towards the past (Ahmed 2004) informs how artists and readers, but also non-human actors, are defined by their respective agency to shape the medium of comics in the present. Critically reviewing these notions, this paper will show how nostalgia is involved in transformations of comics’ mediality: I will argue that the changing status of comics as a medium is affected by the past in ways that can neither be confined to identical repetition nor perpetual reflection. The perils of these politics, Svetlana Boym argues, can only be avoided once nostalgia is relegated to a ‘reflective’ role and acknowledges that what it longs for must remain perpetually irretrievable (Boym 2006). However, nostalgia itself is not devoid of agency its relevance to restorative agendas trying to reinstate an ideal lost home or past has repeatedly been discussed (Davis 1979 Hutcheon 2000). Such critiques resonate with oft-cited accounts of postmodern nostalgia and its alleged lack of ‘genuine historicity’, i.e., failure to identify the actual agents of historical change (Jameson 1991). In this view, phenomena like facsimile reprints, stylistic references or narratives focussing on obscure or lost works are all symptomatic of a nostalgic longing – which provides us with a commodified, selective view of the past, and thus defies a ‘true’ sense for the history of comics. The turn towards the medium’s past in contemporary comics and graphic novel production has been critically assessed as an instance of a broader ‘nostalgia’ or ‘retro culture’ (Baetens/Frey 2015).
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